Many animals can be trained to perform novel tasks. People, too, can be trained, but sometime in early childhood people transition from being trainable to something qualitatively more powerful—being programmable. We argue that such programmability constitutes a leap in the way that organisms learn, interact, and transmit knowledge, and that what facilitates or enables this programmability is the learning and use of language. We then examine how language programs the mind and argue that it does so through the manipulation of (...) embodied, sensorimotor representations. The role language plays in controlling mental representations offers important insights for understanding its origin and evolution. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to show that McGinn’s argument from analogy for the possibility of human cognitive closure survives the critique raised on separate occasions by Dennett and Kriegel. I will distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive closure and argue that the analogy argument from animal non-linguistic cognitive closure goes untouched by the objection Dennett and Kriegel raises.

The paper discusses the lingual genesis of consciousness. The author reconstructs Daniel C. Dennett’s naturalization strategy, showing how, according to Dennett, language enables the emergence of consciousness in the evolution of humankind. This naturalization assumes a behavioristic view according to which consciousness is a covert verbal behavior. The author shows that Dennett adopts and transforms Mead’s, Skinner’s, and Jaynes’s original behavioristic approaches inscribing them into a course of human evolution. This inscription leads to specific problems discussed in the final part (...) of the paper: There are actually two definitions of consciousness in Dennett’s philosophy—first says that consciousness is a kind of verbal behavior, second says that it is a virtual memetic machine. There is no explanation of the execution rule that could show how given mind content becomes conscious; Dennett introduces the competition metaphor instead. Some contentful events in the brain (mind contents) simply win with others. Inscription of the possible scenario of consciousness development in the evolutionary landscape does not mean that one can testify the theory yet. (shrink)

Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might private verbalization yield comparable facilitation? Participants in three referential conditions learned to classify imaginary creatures according to combinations of functional features—nutritive and destructive—that implicitly defined four categories. Remote partners communicated in the Dialogue condition. (...) In the Monologue condition, participants recorded audio descriptions for their own later use. Controls worked silently. Dialogue yielded better category learning, with wider distribution of attention. Monologue offered no benefits over working silently. We conclude that negotiating reference compels collaborators to find communicable structure in their shared activity; this social-pragmatic constraint accelerates category learning and likely provides much of the benefit recently ascribed to learning labeled categories. (shrink)