This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, exemplified by gestures, are similar to utterances which generate the communicator's what is said and/or conversational implicatures, together with their different subtypes and manifestations. Both of these objectives necessitate a critical overview (...) of Grice's work on the focal aspects of meaning and communication, also on the strength of neo-Gricean research. (shrink)

This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to the era of artificial intelligence, and presents an original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form. In the emergence of modern human culture, Donald proposes, there were three radical transitions. During the first, our bipedal but still (...) apelike ancestors acquired "mimetic" skill—the ability to represent knowledge through voluntary motor acts—which made Homo erectus successful for over a million years. The second transition—to "mythic" culture —coincided with the development of spoken language. Speech allowed the large-brained Homo sapiens to evolve a complex preliterate culture that survives in many parts of the world today. In the third transition, when humans constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages and mathematics, human biological memory became an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing our collective knowledge. The modern mind is thus a hybrid structure built from vestiges of earlier biological stages as well as new external symbolic memory devices that have radically altered its organization. According to Donald, we are symbol-using creatures, more complex than any that went before us, and we may have not yet witnessed the final modular arrangement of the human mind. (shrink)

This paper pursues the idea that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (imperative) gestures and their meanings. We investigate gestures that are multifunctional, in that they have different effects in different contexts, focusing on non-human ape gestures that communicate “Stop that” in some contexts, and “Move away” in others. What may superficially appear to be lexical ambiguity can be derived from a single abstract lexical entry, “Not X!”, concluded to be a candidate for a universal (...) building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes, reflections of which may also be found in the pragmatic gestures in humans. (shrink)

Classical cognitivist and connectionist models posit a Cartesian disembodiment of mind assuming that brain events can adequately explain thought and related notions such as intellect. Instead, we argue for the bodily basis of thought and its continuity beyond the sensorimotor stage. Indeed, there are no eternally fixed representations of the external world in the "motor system," rather, it is under the guidance of both internal and external factors with important linkages to frontal, parietal, cerebellar, basal ganglionic, and cingulate gyrus areas (...) that subserve cognitive and motivational activities. Indeed, the motor system, including related structures, is a self-organizing dynamical system contextualized among musculoskeletal, environmental (e.g., gravity), and social forces. We do not simply inhabit our bodies; we literally use them to think with. (shrink)

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is pointed out that the BerlinA- KayA universal partial ordering of colours and the frequency of (...) traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary throughout to use real numbers as opposed to bi-valent quantities; and also that the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of unconditional truth, but rather several real-valued quantities associated with visual communication. The implication of real-valued truth quantities is that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped, because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycho-linguistic speech production models. (shrink)

A common method of making a theory more understandable is to compare it to another theory that has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory that attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation is treated as another time-dependent theory and compared to the time-dependent theory of biological evolution. The main reason for doing this is to find the nature of the time dependence; producing analogs between the two theories is a necessary prerequisite to this and brings up (...) many problems. When the nature of the time dependence is better known it might allow the underlying mechanism to be uncovered. Several similarities and differences are uncovered, and there appear to be more differences than similarities. (shrink)

A review of "Reinterpreting Gesture as Language. Language 'in Action'".

Language is commonly held to be unique to humans, and to have emerged suddenly in a single “great leap forward” within the past 100,000 years. The view is profoundly anti-Darwinian, and I propose instead a framework for understanding how language might have evolved incrementally from our primate heritage. One major proposition is that language evolved from manual action, with vocalization emerging as the dominant mode late in hominin evolution. The second proposition has to do with the role of language as (...) a means of communicating about events displaced in space and time from the present. Some have argued that mental time travel itself is unique to human, which might explain why language itself is uniquely human. I argue instead that mental time travel has ancient evolutionary origins, and gradually assumed narrative-like properties during the Pleistocene, when language itself began to take shape. (shrink)