Is the ability to speak a language an acquired skill? Leading proponents of the generative approach to human language—notably Chomsky (2000) and Pinker (2003)—have argued that the thesis that language capacities are skills is hopelessly confused and at odds with a range of empirical evidence, which suggests that human language capacities are grounded in a biologically inherited set of language instincts or a Universal Grammar (UG). In this paper, we argue that resistance to the claim that human language capacities are (...) skills has been fostered by naïve and implausible conceptions of the nature of skilled action. Correcting these misconceptions about the nature of skilled action breathes new life into the old idea that human language competences are particular kinds of skills and does so in a way that is fully consistent with appeals to the central importance of UG, broadly construed. More generally, we argue that by taking human language capacities to be skills, we capture what is right about the generative program while at the same time avoiding its most serious pitfalls. (shrink)

Current conceptions of human language include a gestural component in the communicative event. However, determining how the linguistic and gestural signals are distinguished, how each is structured, and how they interact still poses a challenge for the construction of a comprehensive model of language. This study attempts to advance our understanding of these issues with evidence from sign language. The study adopts McNeill's criteria for distinguishing gestures from the linguistically organized signal, and provides a brief description of the linguistic organization (...) of sign languages. Focusing on the subcategory of iconic gestures, the paper shows that signers create iconic gestures with the mouth, an articulator that acts symbiotically with the hands to complement the linguistic description of objects and events. A new distinction between the mimetic replica and the iconic symbol accounts for the nature and distribution of iconic mouth gestures and distinguishes them from mimetic uses of the mouth. Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth is a salient feature of human language, regardless of whether the primary linguistic modality is oral or manual. Speakers gesture with their hands, and signers gesture with their mouths. (shrink)

Human moral behaviour ranges from vicious cruelty to deep compassion, and any explanation of morality must address how our species is capable of such a range. Darwin argued that any social animal, with sufficient intellectual capacity, would develop morality. In agreement, I argue that human morality is unique in the animal kingdom not because of any particular moral capacity, but because some very abstract cognitive abilities that are unique to our species are layered on top of phylogenetically older emotional instincts (...) for aggression and for empathy. I review research on several components of empathy, intersubjectivity and theory of mind, detailing which of these capacities is uniquely human, and highlighting relevant neuroanatomy for each ability. Finally, I describe our abstract cognitive abilities for recursion and metarepresentation, and argue that these are uniquely human. When these abilities interact with our older social abilities (empathy, intersubjectivity) we are able to reason abstractly about others' mental states and how to affect them. Thus, it is these abstract cognitive capacities that give us the ability to be both cruel and compassionate, but it is our ancient ability for empathy that keeps us moral. Morality is, in a very real sense, a gift from our ancestors. (shrink)

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally to (...) possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

Human societies are extraordinarily cooperative compared to those of most other animals. In the vast majority of species, individuals live solitary lives, meeting to only to mate and, sometimes, raise their young. In social species, cooperation is limited to relatives and (maybe) small groups of reciprocators. After a brief period of maternal support, individuals acquire virtually all of the food that they eat. There is little division of labor, no trade, and no large scale conflict. Communication is limited to a (...) small repertoire of self-verifying signals. No one cares for the sick, or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties. Amend Hobbes to account for nepotism, and his picture of the state of nature is not so far off for most other animals. In contrast, people in even the simplest human societies regularly cooperate with many unrelated individuals. Human language allows low-cost honest communication of virtually unlimited complexity. The sick are cared for, and sharing leads to substantial flows of food from the middle aged to the young and old. Division of labor and trade are prominent features of every historically known human society, and archaeology indicates that they have a long history. Violent conflict among sizable groups is common. In every human society, social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that specify the rights and duties of individuals enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions. (shrink)

Language research is currently in a state of flux. The phenomenon of language is not merely the topic of investigation in linguistics, it is examined by a multitude of scholars with different scientific backgrounds. In order to examine how these various disciplines approach language, a think-tank was founded in 2002, called DITO, Dynamisch Inter(-en trans)disciplinair onderzoek, or Dynamic Inter- (and trans)disciplinary Research. The think-tank is located at the Belgian Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). This book provides short introductory (...) articles to the language research conducted by some of the think-tank’s most important members, from within the point of view of the following 5 disciplines: philosophy of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sign language research and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a perspective on language and its development by starting from two approaches. The first is the ecological-enactive approach to cognition. In opposition to the widespread idea that cognition is information-processing in the brain, the ecological-enactive approach explains human cognition in relational terms, as skilful interactions with a sociomaterial environment shaped by practices. The second is the metalinguistic approach to language, which holds that reflexive or metalinguistic language use – talking about talking – is crucial for understanding language (...) and its development. In particular, I defend two theses: 1. A child’s initial communicative behaviour can be explained in terms of attentional actions: social actions that function by directing someone else’s attention. 2. In order for the child’s communicative behaviour to be sensitive to key properties of language, such as semantic content and normativity, she needs to learn metalinguistic skills. The development of this ecological-enactive perspective on language serves two functions. First, the ecological-enactive approach started by considering basic behaviour, such as locomotion and grasping. An approach in the cognitive sciences, however, should be able to account for the full gamut of human cognition. If the perspective developed in this thesis is viable, this is a contribution to extending the ecological-enactive approach to typically human forms of cognition. Second, this perspective throws new light on philosophical problems concerning language. In the different chapters, I deal with questions concerning the nature of linguistic knowledge, explanations of communicative behaviour, and the origins of semantic content and linguistic normativity. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in (...) syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

In recent years, many scholars have suggested that the Baldwin effect may play an important role in the evolution of language. However, the Baldwin effect is a multifaceted and controversial process and the assessment of its connection with language is difficult without a formal model. This paper provides a first step in this direction. We examine a game-theoretic model of the interaction between plasticity and evolution in the context of a simple language game. Additionally, we describe three distinct aspects of (...) the Baldwin effect: the Simpson– Baldwin effect, the Baldwin expediting effect and the Baldwin optimizing effect. We find that a simple model of the evolution of language lends theoretical plausibility to the existence of the Simpson– Baldwin and the Baldwin optimizing effects in this arena, but not the Baldwin expediting effect. (shrink)

Sexual selection provides an adequate partial explanation for the difference in means between the distributions, but fails to explain the difference in variance, that is, the overrepresentation of both boys with outstanding mathematical reasoning ability and boys with mental retardation. Other genetic factors are probably at work. While spatial ability is correlated with OMRA, so are other cognitive abilities. OMRA is not reducible to spatial ability; hence selection for navigational skill is unlikely to be the only mechanism by which males (...) have gained an advantage in OMRA. (shrink)

This article addresses a classical question: Can a machine use language meaningfully and if so, how can this be achieved? The first part of the paper is mainly philosophical. Since meaning implies intentionality on the part of the language user, artificial systems which obviously lack intentionality will be `meaningless'. There is, however, no good reason to assume that intentionality is an exclusively biological property and thus a robot with bodily structures, interaction patterns and development similar to those of human beings (...) would constitute a system possibly capable of meaning – a conjecture supported through a Wittgenstein-inspired thought experiment. The second part of the paper focuses on the empirical and constructive questions. Departing from the principle of epigenesis stating that during every state of development new structure arises on the basis of existing structure plus various sorts of interaction, a model of human cognitive and linguistic development is proposed according to which physical, social and linguistic interactions between the individual and the environment have their respective peaks in three consecutive stages of development: episodic, mimetic and symbolic. The transitions between these stages are qualitative, and bear a similarity to the stages in phylogenesis proposed by Donald and Deacon. Following the principle of epigenetic development, robotogenesis could possibly recapitulate ontogenesis, leading to the emergence of intentionality, consciousness and meaning. (shrink)

This paper will defend scientific study of the social by scrutinizing Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology, and evolutionary psychologists' criticism of it. I shall critically examine Geertz's identification of anthropology with literary criticism, his assumption that a science of society is possible only on a positivist model, his view of the relation between culture and mind, and his anti anti-relativism. Then I shall discuss evolutionary psychologists' criticism of Geertz's view as an exemplar of the so-called "Standard Social Science Model." Finally, I (...) shall claim that both Geertz and evolutionary psychologists misunderstand the aim of the social sciences, which is to explain the unintended consequences of human actions in institutional contexts. Key Words: Clifford Geertz • evolutionary psychology • interpretive anthropology • positivism • Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). (shrink)

From the perspective of evolutionary theory, we believe it makes more sense to view the sex differences in spatial cognition as being an evolutionary by-product of selection for optimal rates of fetal development. Geary does not convince us that his proposed selective factors operated with “sufficient precision, economy, and efficiency.” Moreover, the archaeological evidence does not support his proposed evolutionary scenario.

Toolmaking requires motor skills that in turn require handedness, so that there is no competition between the two sides of the brain. Thus, handedness is not necessarily linked to vocalization but to the origin of causal beliefs required for making complex tools. Language may have evolved from these processes.

This paper investigates the roles that abstraction and representation have in activities associated with language. Activities such as associative learning and counting require both the abilities to abstract from and accurately represent the environment. These activities are successfully carried out among vocal learners aside from humans, thereby suggesting that nonhuman animals share something like our capacity for abstraction and representation. The identification of these capabilities in other species provides additional insights into the development of language.

This response clarifies the nature of reappropriation and the definition of language. It explicates the relationship between neural systems and language and between homology and evolutionary gradualism. Through a review of ape capacities in the realms of language and tool use, it distinguishes human language acquisition from nonhuman learning. Finally, it suggests the appropriate sorts of evidence on which to base further evolutionary arguments relevant to the origins of language.

This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arises from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery, and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary control (...) over amplitude is incomplete, and observers can better detect pain that the individual attempts to suppress rather than amplify or simulate. In many clinical and experimental settings, the facial expression of pain is incorporated with verbal and nonverbal vocal activity, posture, and movement in an overall category of pain behaviour. This is assumed by clinicians to be under operant control of social contingencies such as sympathy, caregiving, and practical help; thus, strong facial expression is presumed to constitute an attempt to manipulate these contingencies by amplification of the normal expression. Operant formulations support skepticism about the presence or extent of pain, judgments of malingering, and sometimes the withholding of caregiving and help. To the extent that pain expression is influenced by environmental contingencies, however, could equally plausibly constitute the release of suppression according to evolved contingent propensities that guide behaviour. Pain has been largely neglected in the evolutionary literature and the literature on expression of emotion, but an evolutionary account can generate improved assessment of pain and reactions to it. (shrink)

This target article presents a plausible evolutionary scenario for the emergence of the neural preconditions for language in the hominid lineage. In pleistocene primate lineages there was a paired evolutionary expansion of frontal and parietal neocortex (through certain well-documented adaptive changes associated with manipulative behaviors) resulting, in ancestral hominids, in an incipient Broca's region and in a configurationally unique junction of the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes of the brain (the POT). On our view, the development of the POT in (...) our ancestors resulted in the neuroanatomical substrate consistent with the ability for representations in modality-neutral association cortex and, as a result of structure-imposing interaction with Broca's area, the hierarchically structured Evidence from paleoneurology and comparative primate neuroanatomy is used to argue that Homo habilis (2.5–2 million years ago) was the first hominid to have the appropriate gross neuroanatomical configuration to support conceptual structure. We thus suggest that the neural preconditions for language are met in H. habilis. Finally, we advocate a theory of language acquisition that uses conceptual structure as input to the learning procedures, thus bridging the gap between it and language. (shrink)

Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono's presentation of the principal approaches to UG access in L2 acquisition is misleading; they have neglected the possibility that the L1 grammar forms the learner's initial representation of the L2, with subsequent modifications constrained by UG. Furthermore, their experimental data are open to several interpretations and are consistent with a number of different positions in the field.

This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...) is untenable. The tension in Carnap’s semantics together with Quine’s exposure of the severe limits of radical empiricism illuminate central features of Sellars’s philosophy: the fully general form of the myth of givenness, together with Sellars’s alternative Kantian characterisation of understanding; the full significance of Carnap’s distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, and its important methodological implications; the specifically pragmatic character of Sellars’s realism; and Sellars’s methodological reasons for holding that philosophy must be systematic and that systematic philosophy must be deeply historically and textually informed. This paper thus re-examines this recent episode of philosophical history for its philosophical benefits and systematic insights. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 279-301.

In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical vocabularies, so that their accounts are written in mutually incompatible languages. In recent years social, cognitive and cultural evolutionary theories, building on a growing body of archaeological evidence, (...) have made substantial sense of the social and cultural evolution of the genus Homo. However, specialists in this field of studies have found it difficult to extend their kind of analysis into the Holocene human world. Within southwest Asia the three or four millennia of the Neolithic period at the beginning of the Holocene represents a pivotal point, which saw the transformation of human society in the emergence of the first large-scale, permanent communities, the domestication of plants and animals, and the establishment of effective farming economies. Following the Neolithic, the pace of human social, economic and cultural evolution continued to increase. By 5000 years ago, in parts of southwest Asia and northeast Africa there were very large-scale urban societies, and the first large-scale states. An extension of cultural niche construction theory enables us to extend the evolutionary narrative of the Pleistocene into the Holocene, opening the way to developing a single, long-term, evolutionary account of human history. (shrink)

an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be largely the product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. The author argues that on the contrary, his sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities, taking causal cognition as his example. Whether and to what extent there are such innate capacities is a question for research in the cognitive neurosciences. The extent to which these innate capacities can then (...) be explained by natural selection remains an open question for empirical investigation. Key Words: categories • causality • cognition • Durkheim • evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

One can disagree with Müller that it is neurobiologically questionable to suppose that human language is innate, specialized, and species-specific, yet agree that the precise brain mechanisms controlling language in any individual will be influenced by epigenesis and genetic variability, and that the interplay between inherited and acquired aspects of linguistic capacity deserves to be investigated.

Wilkins & Wakefield are clearly right to separate linguistic capacity from communicative ability, if only because other animal species have one without the other. But I question the abruptness of the demarcation they make between a period when hominids evolved enriched conceptual representation for other reasons entirely, and a subsequent later stage when language use became an adaptation.

Why is language unique? How did language come about? When did this happen? These questions, although quite emblematic of the Western intellectual tradition since its ancient beginnings, so far have not found satisfying answers. Indeed, many still question the very possibility of addressing these basic problems of the origins of language with proper scientific rigor. However, an emerging consensus is that current research in the field of language evolution is in fact bearing fruit, making it at least possible to judge (...) in an informed manner which of these competing scenarios are far more or less probable. In what follows, I guide the reader through some of this research and some of these scenarios; for more details, I refer the reader to a recent book, which is the first monograph that presents this developing field of language evolution research to the Polish reader. (shrink)

This paper proposes a social account for the origin of the truth value and the emergence of the first declarative sentence. Such a proposal is based on two assumptions. The first is known as the social intelligence hypothesis: that the cognitive evolution of humans is first and foremost an adaptation to social demands. The second is the function-first approach to explaining the evolution of traits: before a prototype of a new trait develops and the adaptation process begins, something already existing (...) is used for a new purpose. Applied to the emergence of declarative sentences (statements), this suggests something already existing––natural signs (such as indexical objects)––was used for the declarative function and thereby integrated into communication. I show that index display (such as the display of hunting trophies) can imply a conceptual structure similar to that informing the syntax of sentences. The view developed in this paper is broadly consistent with the argumentative theory of Mercier and Sperber, which suggests that reasoning is less adapted to decision making than to social purposes such as winning disputes. In this paper I extend this view to the evaluation of propositions expressed in declarative sentences. According to my proposal, the first declarative sentence emerged as the negation of the (implicit) negation of an implicit statement. Thereby, I suggest that the binary structure of the truth value underlying any declarative sentence is founded on disagreements based on conflicts of interests. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from developmental psychology and anthropology points out that the human mind is predisposed to conceptualize the world in particular, species-specific ways. These cognitive predispositions lead to universal human commonsense views, often referred to as folk theories. Nevertheless, humans can transgress these views – i.e. they can contradict them with alternative descriptions, they perceive as more accurate – as exemplified in modern sciences. In this paper, I enquire about the cognitive faculties underlying such transgressions. I claim that there are (...) three faculties enabling us to part with these universal commonsense views of the world imposed by our nature. The first is our ability to represent representations – i.e. to form metarepresentations. The second is our ability to produce alternative representations both by explaining a familiar subject matter in terms of the principles governing different conceptual domains than the one that we are predisposed to apply to the subject matter and by directing our mind to new subject matters (for which we have no predisposed conceptual grasp), understanding them in terms of familiar domains. The third, finally, is our ability to give these representations an epistemic orientation. Key words: Human cognition, Domain-specific knowledge systems, Cognitive predispositions, Folk theories, Cognitive flexibility, Human – nonhuman distinction. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between language and thought, focusing on the question of whether language can be a vehicle of thought, as, for example, Peter Carruthers has claimed. We develop and examine a powerful argument—the "argument from explicitness"—against this cognitive role of language. The premises of the argument are just two: (1) the vehicle of thought has to be explicit, and (2) natural languages are not explicit. We explain what these simple premises mean and why we should believe (...) they are true. Finally, we argue that even though the argument from explicitness shows that natural language cannot be a vehicle of thought, there is a cognitive function for language. (shrink)

According to the thesis of semantic underdetermination, most sentences of a natural language lack a definite semantic interpretation. This thesis supports an argument against the use of natural language as an instrument of thought, based on the premise that cognition requires a semantically precise and compositional instrument. In this paper we examine several ways to construe this argument, as well as possible ways out for the cognitive view of natural language in the introspectivist version defended by Carruthers. Finally, we sketch (...) a view of the role of language in thought as a specialized tool, showing how it avoids the consequences of semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

What is common to all languages is notation, so Universal Grammar can be understood as a system of notational types. Given that infants acquire language, it can be assumed to arise from some a priori mental structure. Viewing language as having the two layers of calculus and protocol, we can set aside the communicative habits of speakers. Accordingly, an analysis of notation results in the three types of Identifier, Modifier and Connective. Modifiers are further interpreted as Quantifiers and Qualifiers. The (...) resulting four notational types constitute the categories of Universal Grammar. Its ontology is argued to consist in the underlying cognitive schema of Essence, Quantity, Quality and Relation. The four categories of Universal Grammar are structured as polysemous fields and are each constituted as a radial network centred on some root concept which, however, need not be lexicalized. The branches spread out along troponymic vectors and together map out all possible lexemes. The notational typology of Universal Grammar is applied in a linguistic analysis of the ‘parts of speech’ using the English language. The analysis constitutes a ‘proof of concept’ in (1) showing how the schema of Universal Grammar is capable of classifying the so-called ‘parts of speech’, (2) presenting a coherent analysis of the verb, and (3) showing how the underlying cognitive schema allows for a sub-classification of the auxiliaries. (shrink)

Our results support the idea that adults have access to the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar (UG), contrary to Epstein et al.'s misrepresentation of our work as involvingpartial access toUG. For both LI and L2 acquisition, functional projections appear to develop in a gradual fashion, but in L2 acquisition there ispartial transferin that the lowest projection (VP) is transferred from the speaker's LI.

I selectively and critically review the state of knowledge about human evolution and the place of humans vis-à-vis living apes, with emphasis on bipedal posture and locomotion, expansion of the brain and associated cognitive capacities, speech, tool behavior, culture, and society. I end with a personal perspective on God and Heaven.

Sprachen (langues) sind heute vielfach politischem Druck zur Erneuerung ausgesetzt. Unwillkommenes Altes soll aus ihnen verschwinden. Diese Erneuerungswut verdankt sich einer Sicht auf die Sprachen, die vor Jahrhunderten neu war: nämlich der großen neuzeitlichen Entdeckung, dass Wörter nicht nur – wie Aristoteles dachte – verschiedene Laute sind, sondern dass sie – ungenaues und partikulares – „Denken“ enthalten. Die philosophische Kritik dieser Entdeckung übertreibt die Abhängigkeit des Denkens von der (unwillkommenen) Semantik der Sprachen und verfehlt damit die positive – und immer (...) noch neue – Einschätzung ihrer Verschiedenheit als „wunderbare Vielfalt des Geistes“ (Leibniz). Unbeantwortet bleibt die Frage, ob die aktuellen neuen Formen der Kommunikation eine neue Sprache (langage) und einen neuen Menschen schaffen. (shrink)

This target article is mostly a presentation of experimental research devoted to the larger issue of the role of Universal Grammar in second language learning. Deliberately excluding the aspects of human cognition that makes second language (L2) so variant, Epstein et al. focus on what the learners may know and how they come to know it. This is the aspect of Epstein et al.'s work which is more limiting, and potentially more interesting.

In the multidisciplinary field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, statistical associations between levels of description play an increasingly important role. One example of such associations is the observation of correlations between relatively common gene variants and individual differences in behavior. It is perhaps surprising that such associations can be detected despite the remoteness of these levels of description, and the fact that behavior is the outcome of an extended developmental process involving interaction of the whole organism with a variable environment. Given (...) that they have been detected, how do such associations inform cognitive-level theories? To investigate this question, we employed a multiscale computational model of development, using a sample domain drawn from the field of language acquisition. The model comprised an artificial neural network model of past-tense acquisition trained using the backpropagation learning algorithm, extended to incorporate population modeling and genetic algorithms. It included five levels of description—four internal: genetic, network, neurocomputation, behavior; and one external: environment. Since the mechanistic assumptions of the model were known and its operation was relatively transparent, we could evaluate whether cross-level associations gave an accurate picture of causal processes. We established that associations could be detected between artificial genes and behavioral variation, even under polygenic assumptions of a many-to-one relationship between genes and neurocomputational parameters, and when an experience-dependent developmental process interceded between the action of genes and the emergence of behavior. We evaluated these associations with respect to their specificity, to their developmental stability, and to their replicability, as well as considering issues of missing heritability and gene–environment interactions. We argue that gene–behavior associations can inform cognitive theory with respect to effect size, specificity, and timing. The model demonstrates a means by which researchers can undertake multiscale modeling with respect to cognition and develop highly specific and complex hypotheses across multiple levels of description. (shrink)

This commentary addresses two pervasive misconceptions which emerge in Epstein et al.'s target article: (1) that study of second language acquisition (SLA) began in the mid-twentieth century; (2) that SLA has only recently become able to contribute to linguistic theory. There is abundant historical counterevidence; I argue that (1) and (2) obscure the legitimacy of Epstein et al.'s “full access” hypothesis.

The central problem in Geary's theory is how differences are conceptualized. Recent research has shown that between-sex differences on certain tasks are a consequence of averaging within sex differences. A mixture distribution models between-sex differences on several tasks well and does not appear congenial to a sexual-selection perspective.

I have provided evidence that Geary's model does not explain male dominance in spatial abilities by sexual selection. The current literature concerning the relations of nonverbal IQ to testosterone, hand preference, and right- and left-hand skill, as well as the organizing effects of testosterone on cerebral lateralization during the perinatal period, does not support Geary's arguments.