This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition into an evolutionary context. Implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently of awareness of either the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. Characterized this way, implicit learning theory can be viewed as an attempt to come to grips with the classic (...) epistemological issues of knowledge acquisition, representation and use. The argument is made that the process, despite its seeming cognitive sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and that it antedates awareness and the capacity for conscious control of mentation. Various classic heuristics from evolutionary biology are used to substantiate this claim and several specific entailments of this line of argument are outlined. (shrink)

There is today much interest in research of neuronal substrata in metaphor processing. It has been suggested that the right hemisphere yields a key role in the comprehension of figurative language and, particularly, in metaphors. Figurative language is included in pragmatics, a branch of linguistics that researches the use of language, in opposition to the study of the system of language. There lingers, though, an open debate in respect to the identification of the specific aspects concerning semantics, as opposed to (...) those dominated by pragmatics. Can studies from neuronal correlates clarify questions that relate to semantics/pragmatics representation? I shall analyze neuroscientific developments about implicit language to attempt to understand, in section 2, scientific techniques available and more suitable to the phenomenology of the act of understanding an implicit, figurative or implicated message in a certain language game. To do so, I shall start by reviewing the studies in philosophy of language, and accommodate the development of the research in pragmatics underlying metaphor, particularly, in Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. Finally, I discuss the possibility of interpretative capabilities being socioculturally grounded. I expect this methodological analysis to contribute to the enlightenment of the problem of phenomenology of intersubjective pragmatics, and to its future experimental paradigms. (shrink)