The attempts to make moral and evolution compatible have assimilated moral capacity either with complex self-control in favour of one’s own goals or with spontaneous altruism. Those attempts face an easy problem, since those two senses of moral are adaptively advantageous resources. But let us focus on the decisions made in favour of another person which the subject, when making them, feels are contrary to his own goals: Could a base for this capacity arise in evolution, however poor and weak? (...) I propose that such base, while it is not an adaptive advantage but quite the opposite, arises from the convergence between two abilities which in their respective origins were adaptively very advantageous: the advanced mode of ‘theory-of-mind’ (ToM) and inner speech. (shrink)

Self-reference suffices to define performative sentences. “I say that” is communicatively functional. By it, speaker shows he is aware of how he is being seen by hearers. Therefore “I order” and “I do not order” are equally performative, though the latter does not perform any activity. This is our first proposal. In the subdivision, “I do not permit” isactive. Our second proposal explains that anomaly attending to synonymy between “I do not permit” and “I forbid”, but without using it as (...) a premature escape. (shrink)

The gap between the prelinguistic and the linguistic levels cannot be bridged as easily as Lakoff's cognitive linguistics suggests. Lakoff's event structure metaphor is reviewed here. Compared with physical movement, the bringing together of separated elements which occurs in predication would not be metaphorical only because it departs from concrete physical experience, but, more significantly, because it relies on elements artificially separated by means of language. However, if we do not overlook this fundamental leap, the event structure metaphor is a (...) good tool to understand how predication takes place, and its application is even wider than Lakoff suggests. (shrink)