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  1. Nothing is Hidden: Contextualism and the Grammar‐Meaning Interface.Wolfram Hinzen - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (3):259-291.
    A defining assumption in the debate on contextual influences on truth-conditional content is that such content is often incompletely determined by what is specified in linguistic form. The debate then turns on whether this is evidence for positing a more richly articulated logical form or else a pragmatic process of free enrichment that posits truly unarticulated constituents that are unspecified in linguistic form. Questioning this focus on semantics and pragmatics, this article focuses on the independent grammatical dimensions of the problem. (...)
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  • The grammar of the essential indexical.T. Martin & W. Hinzen - unknown
    Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be 'essentially indexical' in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology of (...)
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  • Grammar, Ontology, and the Unity of Meaning.Ulrich Reichard - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Durham
    Words have meaning. Sentences also have meaning, but their meaning is different in kind from any collection of the meanings of the words they contain. I discuss two puzzles related to this difference. The first is how the meanings of the parts of a sentence combine to give rise to a unified sentential meaning, as opposed to a mere collection of disparate meanings (UP1). The second is why the formal ontology of linguistic meaning changes when grammatical structure is built up (...)
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  • Individuating Cognitive Characters: Lessons from Praying Mantises and Plants.Carrie Figdor - 2024 - Philosophy of Science:1-20.
    This paper advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into (...)
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  • Black Boxes or Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behaviour.Cameron Buckner - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):681-712.
    The last 5 years have seen a series of remarkable achievements in deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence research, and some modellers have argued that their performance compares favourably to human cognition. Critics, however, have argued that processing in deep neural networks is unlike human cognition for four reasons: they are (i) data-hungry, (ii) brittle, and (iii) inscrutable black boxes that merely (iv) reward-hack rather than learn real solutions to problems. This article rebuts these criticisms by exposing comparative bias within them, in the (...)
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  • Can Animals Refer? Meta-Positioning Studies of Animal Semantics.Sigmund Ongstad - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (2):433-457.
    This meta-study applies a socio-semiotic framework combining five basic communicational aspects, form, content, act, time, and space, developed to help answering the questionCan animals refer?It further operates with four levels, sign, utterance, genre, and lifeworld, studying relations between utterance and genre in particular. Semantic key terms found in an excerpted ‘resource collection’ consisting of three anthologies, two academic journals, and a monography, studying content in animal communication, are inspected, and discussed, especially information, functional reference, and reference. Since a temporary inspection (...)
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  • The Hypothesis of a Genetic Protolanguage: an Epistemological Investigation. [REVIEW]Gregory Katz - 2008 - Biosemiotics 1 (1):57-73.
    Progress in molecular biology has revealed profound relations between linguistic and genomic sciences, mainly through advances in bioinformatics. The structural symmetries between biochemical and verbal syntaxes raise the question of their origins: did they emerge independently, or did one arise from the other? Does the genetic code contain the traces of a protolanguage, a universal grammar whose gradual evolution and successive mutations progressively led to the polymorphism of natural languages? To explore this question, we review the isomorphism of the genetic (...)
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  • Sexual selection for syntax and Kin selection for semantics: Problems and prospects.Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (4):453-470.
    The evolution of human language, and the kind of thought the communication of which requires it, raises considerable explanatory challenges. These systems of representation constitute a radical discontinuity in the natural world. Even species closely related to our own appear incapable of either thought or talk with the recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality that characterize human talk and the thought it expresses. W. Tecumseh Fitch’s proposal (2004, in press) that human language is descended from a sexually selected, prosodic (...)
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  • The Biological Roots of Music and Dance.Edward H. Hagen - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (3):261-279.
    After they diverged from panins, hominins evolved an increasingly committed terrestrial lifestyle in open habitats that exposed them to increased predation pressure from Africa’s formidable predator guild. In the Pleistocene, _Homo_ transitioned to a more carnivorous lifestyle that would have further increased predation pressure. An effective defense against predators would have required a high degree of cooperation by the smaller and slower hominins. It is in the interest of predator and potential prey to avoid encounters that will be costly for (...)
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  • Introduction: Origin and Evolution of Language—An Interdisciplinary Perspective.Francesco Ferretti, Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera, Erica Cosentino & Serena Nicchiarelli - 2018 - Topoi 37 (2):219-234.
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  • How to create a human communication system.Casey J. Lister & Nicolas Fay - 2017 - Interaction Studies 18 (3):314-329.
    Following a synthesis of naturalistic and experimental studies of language creation, we propose a theoretical model that describes the process through which human communication systems might arise and evolve. Three key processes are proposed that give rise to effective, efficient and shared human communication systems: motivated signs that directly resemble their meaning facilitate cognitive alignment, improving communication success; behavioral alignment onto an inventory of shared sign-to-meaning mappings bolsters cognitive alignment between interacting partners; sign refinement, through interactive feedback, enhances the efficiency (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it? [REVIEW]Ray Jackendoff, Fred Lerdahl, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Moises Betancort, Manuel Carreiras & Carlos Acun A.-Farin - 2006 - Cognition 100 (1):33-72.
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  • The Evolution of Food Calls: Vocal Behaviour of Sooty Mangabeys in the Presence of Food.Fredy Quintero, Sonia Touitou, Martina Magris & Klaus Zuberbühler - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    The two main theories of food-associated calls in animals propose functions either in cooperative recruitment or competitive spacing. However, not all social animals produce food calls and it is largely unclear under what circumstances this call type evolves. Sooty mangabeys do not have food calls, but they frequently produce grunts during foraging, their most common vocalisation. We found that grunt rates were significantly higher when subjects were foraging in the group’s periphery and with small audiences, in line with the cooperative (...)
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  • Method and Evidence: Gesture and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language.Elizabeth Irvine - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (2):221-247.
    The aim of this article is to mount a challenge to gesture-first hypotheses about the evolution of language by identifying constraints on the emergence of symbol use. Current debates focus on a range of pre-conditions for the emergence of language, including co-operation and related mentalising capacities, imitation and tool use, episodic memory, and vocal physiology, but little specifically on the ability to learn and understand symbols. It is argued here that such a focus raises new questions about the plausibility of (...)
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  • (1 other version)G.H. Mead's Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research.Timothy J. Gallagher - 2012 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42 (1):40-62.
    The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as “Tinbergen's Four Questions,” developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research (...)
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  • Co-evolution of phylogeny and glossogeny: There is no “logical problem of language evolution”.W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5):521-522.
    Historical language change (), like evolution itself, is a fact; and its implications for the biological evolution of the human capacity for language acquisition () have been ably explored by many contemporary theorists. However, Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) revolutionary call for a replacement of phylogenetic models with glossogenetic cultural models is based on an inadequate understanding of either. The solution to their lies before their eyes, but they mistakenly reject it due to a supposed Gene/;culture co-evolution poses a series of (...)
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  • Complex vocal learning and three-dimensional mating environments.Jan Verpooten - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-31.
    Complex vocal learning, the capacity to imitate new sounds, underpins the evolution of animal vocal cultures and song dialects and is a key prerequisite for human speech and song. Due to its relevance for the understanding of cultural evolution and the biology and evolution of language and music, the trait has gained much scholarly attention. However, while we have seen tremendous progress with respect to our understanding of its morphological, neurological and genetic aspects, its peculiar phylogenetic distribution has remained elusive. (...)
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  • More than one way to see it: Individual heuristics in avian visual computation.Andrea Ravignani, Gesche Westphal-Fitch, Ulrike Aust, Martin M. Schlumpp & W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2015 - Cognition 143 (C):13-24.
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  • Thoughts and oughts.Mason Cash - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (2):93 – 119.
    Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (...)
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  • Integrative and Separationist Perspectives: Understanding the Causal Role of Cultural Transmission in Human Language Evolution.Francesco Suman - 2018 - Biological Theory 13 (4):246-260.
    Biological evolution and cultural evolution are distinct evolutionary processes; they are apparent also in human language, where both processes contributed in shaping its evolution. However, the nature of the interaction between these two processes is still debated today. It is often claimed that the emergence of modern language was preceded by the evolution of a language-ready brain: the latter is usually intended as a product of biological evolution, while the former is believed to be the consequence of cultural processes. I (...)
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  • Evidence for Teaching in an Australian Songbird.Hollis Taylor - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:593532.
    Song in oscine birds (as in human speech and song) relies upon the rare capacity of vocal learning. Transmission can be vertical, horizontal, or oblique. As a rule, memorization and production by a naïve bird are not simultaneous: the long-term storage of song phrases precedes their first vocal rehearsal by months. While a wealth of detail regarding songbird enculturation has been uncovered by focusing on the apprentice, whether observational learning can fully account for the ontogeny of birdsong, or whether there (...)
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  • Vocal Parameters of Speech and Singing Covary and Are Related to Vocal Attractiveness, Body Measures, and Sociosexuality: A Cross-Cultural Study.Jaroslava Varella Valentova, Petr Tureček, Marco Antonio Corrêa Varella, Pavel Šebesta, Francisco Dyonisio C. Mendes, Kamila Janaina Pereira, Lydie Kubicová, Petra Stolařová & Jan Havlíček - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Brains, genes, and language evolution: A new synthesis.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5):537-558.
    Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman (...)
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  • From sharing food to sharing information.Judith Burkart, Eloisa Guerreiro Martins, Fabia Miss & Yvonne Zürcher - 2018 - Interaction Studies 19 (1-2):136-150.
    Language is a cognitively demanding human trait, but it is also a fundamentally cooperative enterprise that rests on the motivation to share information. Great apes possess many of the cognitive prerequisites for language, but largely lack the motivation to share information. Callitrichids (including marmosets and tamarins) are highly vocal monkeys that are more distantly related to humans than great apes are, but like humans, they are cooperative breeders and all group members help raising offspring. Among primates, this rearing system is (...)
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  • The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective.W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2006 - Cognition 100 (1):173-215.
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  • Self domestication and the evolution of language.James Thomas & Simon Kirby - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2):9.
    We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of (...)
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  • Biology, Culture and Coevolution: Religion and Language as Case Studies.Francesco Ferretti & Ines Adornetti - 2014 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 14 (3-4):305-330.
    The main intent of this paper is to give an account of the relationship between bio-cognition and culture in terms of coevolution, analysing religious beliefs and language evolution as case studies. The established view in cognitive studies is that bio-cognitive systems constitute a constraint for the shaping and the transmission of religious beliefs and linguistic structures. From this point of view, religion and language are by-products or exaptations of processing systems originally selected for other cognitive functions. We criticize such a (...)
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  • Editorial: Relationship of language and music, ten years after: Neural organization, cross-domain transfer and evolutionary origins.Chao-Yang Lee, Caicai Zhang, William Shi-Yuan Wang & Mary Miu Yee Waye - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
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  • Nothing but Mammals? Review of Tim Clutton-Brock’s Mammal Societies.Adrian V. Jaeggi - 2017 - Human Nature 28 (3):355-360.
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  • Languages as evolving organisms – the solution to the logical problem of language evolution?Christina Behme - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5):512-513.
    Christiansen & Chater (C&C) argue persuasively that Universal Grammar (UG) could not have arisen through evolutionary processes. I provide additional suggestions to strengthen the argument against UG evolution. Further, I suggest that C&C's solution to the logical problem of language evolution faces several problems. Widening the focus to mechanisms of general cognition and inclusion of animal communication research might overcome these problems.
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