evolutionist epistemology

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Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 – Congress Booklet

Copyright: Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science – Centre Leo Apostel – Vrije Universiteit Brussel

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Invited speaker, Chaired by Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Franz Wuketits

Evolutionary Epistemology : The Nonadaptationist Approach

[email protected] for Philosophy of Sciene – University of Vienna - Austria

Earlier versions of evolutionary epistemology, e. g., Lorenz (1941), were based on - or at leaststrongly influenced by - the adaptationist paradigm. It is for this reason that Lewontin (1982, p. 169)critically remarked: "The fundamental error of evolutionary epistemologies as they now exist is theirfailure to understand how much of what is 'out there' is the product of what is 'in here'." Evolutionistsadvocating the view that any organism - including all its characters at the anatomical as well asthe behavioral level - is to be explained in terms of adaptation, have indeed neglected the(somehow trivial) fact that living beings are active systems that do not entirely depend on theirrespective environment(s). Meanwhile, however, a systems-theoretical approach to understandingorganisms and their evolution has made clear that (1) organisms and their environment(s) have notevolved independent of each other; (2)any living system and its environment are linked togetherby a feedback principle; (3) the ability of adaptation (adaptability) is defined not by the

environment but by the organism itself. Hence, we have to assume internal constraints in theevolutionary development of living beings.

In this contribution I present a version of evolutionary epistemology that is based on the systemsview of evolution. It is a nonadaptationist view of cognition grounded in, at least, the followingtheses (see also Wuketits 1990):

* Cognition is a function of active systems that actively interact with their environments.* Cognitive capacities - in humans and animals - are the result of complex interactions betweenorganisms and their environments, and these interactions have a long (evolutionary) history.* Cognition is a process that cannot be sufficiently described – and explained - as a series ofadaptations, but resembles rather a "spiral process".

The philosophical implications of such a view will be briefly discussed. The main focus will be theproblem of realism.

References

Lewontin, R. C., "Organism and Environment", in H. C. Plotkin (ed.): Learning, Development, and Culture: Essays inEvolutionary Epistemology. Wiley, Chichester 1982, pp. 151-170.Lorenz, K., "Kants Lehre vom Apriorischen im Lichte gegenwärtiger Biologie", Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 15 (1941): 94-125. English translation reprinted in H. C. Plotkin, ibid.)Wuketits, F. M., Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Implications for Humankind. SUNY Press, Albany, N. Y. 1990.





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Session 1, Chaired by Erik Myin

Alexander Riegler

Like Cats and Dogs: Radical Constructivism and Evolutionary Epistemology

Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, [email protected]

Both evolutionary epistemology (EE) and radical constructivism (RC) set out to provide anaturalized account for cognition, and both refer to biology as the starting point of theirconsideration.

Foerster for example, doped his laboratory in the States the ‘Biological Computing Lab,’ whileanother proponent of RC, Maturana, not only made a carrier in neurophysiology but also explicitlyrefers to his theoretical framework as ‘Biology of Cognition.’ In the EE camp, Lorenz was a famousethologist, Riedl a zoologist whose 1979 book carries the name ‘Biology of Knowledge.’ It isinteresting that both positions can be traced back to Kant. Lorenz (Kants Lehre vom Apriorischen imLichte gegenwärtiger Biologie, 1941) naturalized Kant’s a prioris of space and time, which arenecessary to understand raw sensory experience, and re-interpreted them as phylogenetically

acquired categories. For RC, Kant’s Copernican Turn, according to which “objects must conform toour knowledge” (rather than the other way around), radically dismisses the idea that cognition ofthe individual is determined by a mind-independent reality.

This is expressed in the organizational closure of autopoietic systems of Maturana and Varela(Autopoiesis and Cognition, 1980) and Foerster’s (Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors, 1976)concept of eigen-behavior.

Sadly though, despite their identical starting points and goals EE and RC do not go well together.Glasersfeld (Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit und des Begriffs der Objektivität, 1985) for example pointsout that one of EE’s central notion ‘adaptation’ is meaningless. For him, Popper’s rejection ofinstrumentalism (a cornerstone of RC) on the basis of its inability “to account for the pure scientist’s

interest in truth and falsity” is unacceptable polemics. Riedl, on the other hand, is eager to dismissRC as solipsistic school. In his favorite thought experiment the sudden appearance of a rhino at acongress of constructivists teaches them that reality does exist. His aversion to the constructivistworldview springs from his Lorenz’ motto “To believe plain nonsense is a privilege of the humanbeing” (quoted in Riedl 1979). It expresses the conviction that organisms that do not ‘believe’ in amind-independent reality will be eradicated by natural selection (Wuketits, Adaptation,representation, construction: An issue in evolutionary epistemology, 1992).

In this paper I argue that one of the major obstacles to overcome the (often polemic) controversiesbetween EE and RC is the former’s clinging to hypothetical realism. Despite proponents of EE admitthat “realism involves presumptions going beyond the data” (Campbell Evolutionary epistemology,1974), they cannot help but claim that it not only exists but that it can also be known. Lorenz’

famous statement—the horse’s hoof is a representation of the steppe and the body form of thedolphin is the incarnation of knowledge about laws of aerodynamics in water, etc.—substantiatesthis belief.

This paper will review ways of how to refute the idea of hypothetical realism. In the end, however,the mutual rejection in spite of common grounds might turn out a paradigmatic example ofMitterer’s (Die Flucht aus der Beliebigkeit, 2001) thesis: The dualistic method of searching for truth isbut an argumentative technique which can turn any arbitrary opinion either true or false.





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Albert F. H. Naccache

Steps towards a history of the emergence and accretion of human language

Keywords: Cultural evolution, language emergence, accumulation, social mechanisms.

[email protected]

I would take advantage of the critical audience of the EELC congress to present my attempt tobuild, along the lines of the EEM program, a coherent descriptive sketch of the broad articulationsof the emergence and accretion of human language.

Encouraged by Popper’s differentiation between “passive” and “active” Darwinism (1981), the firststep undertaken was to erect a model embodying the concept of multiple Darwinian evolutions.The inspiration for this effort was the confluence of ideas from Developmental Biology, SystemTheory, Self-organization, Emergence and of course EE.

The resulting “framework of Modes of Evolution” spans non-reductively between Biology andCulture, its backbone a pattern of seven hierarchically nested elaborations of the mechanisms ofparental involvement in the growth of offspring phenotype, a pattern discernible in the lineageleading from bacteria to human societies (Naccache, 1999). This pattern identifies, on a formal-logical basis, successive elaborations of the basic life cycle setup of the “classical” Neo-DarwinianMode of Evolution. The first three such elaborations correlate tightly with milestones in naturalhistory: oviparity, viviparity and the neocortex. The next three, characterized as social, thenphysical and finally symbolic extensions of the phenotype, seem to identify the main stages ofelaboration of the mechanisms of cultural transmission and accretion that participated in theDarwinian production of Homo sapiens.

Fleshing up the description of these mechanisms, and of the Modes of Evolution they subtend, ledto a deep and densely structured historical context conducive to the study of the evolution oflanguage, from our last common ancestors (LCA) with the Panids up to and including the“historical” period. In the proposed talk, I would highlight the main (and as yet unpublished, but

see Naccache, forth.) results sketched thus far, while pointing out some of the positive aspects andthe difficulties encountered while using the framework.

The main results are the tentative identifications of, first, three major stages in the evolution of thepotential for linguistic behavior leading from the LCA to the species-wide shared potential forlanguage –potential that must have characterized anatomically modern humans (in either theOoA or MRE scenarios); and second, four main landmarks along the path of the socio-culturalaccretion of language, from Paleolithic to early ‘Historic’ times.

The positive aspects of using the framework derive, independently of the epistemologicalsoundness of this last, from the fact that it forces its user to keep in mind both “the forest and thetrees,” the global picture as well as the mosaic of incremental steps along the path. It thus

provides a good safeguard against the temptation of single-factor “explanations.”

As for the difficulties, practical as well as epistemological, they naturally stem from the dauntingchallenge of having to integrate, in an arguably coherent scenario, large chunks of data fromArchaeology, Cognitive Psychology, Ethology, Genetics, Life History, Linguistics, Neurosciences,Paleoanthropology, Philology, etc.

References

Naccache, A. F., 1999: “A Brief History of Evolution,” History and Theory, 38:4, p. 10-32.Naccache, A. F., forth: “Accumulation and Emergence in Cultural Evolution: the Case of the Neolithic ‘Revolution’,” inProceedings of the 3ICAANE. Eisenbrauns. 2004.Popper, K., 1981, The Place of Mind in Nature. St Peter.





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Session 2, Chaired by Tony Belpaeme

Adrianna WOZNIAK

Is the real world something more than our experience? Relation between neodarwinian logic,transcendental philosophy and cognitive sciences.

Keywords: Synthetic Theory of Evolution; Biological Evolutionary Epistemology; Ontological Status ofUniversals, Mathematics and Logical Rules, Evolution of Animal and Human Cognition; Naturalismand Materialist Realism; Transcendental Philosophy

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Lyon III, France, Institute for Cognitive Sciences, CNRS, [email protected]

The Synthetic Theory of Evolution gives us an understanding of the living world, its dynamism andnature. To live means to interact and to interact means to know (some kind knowledge iscontained in the organic structure). I would like to show that there are connections between theway that we consider the nature of evolution and the nature of knowledge, between SyntheticTheory of Evolution and Biological Evolutionary Epistemology.

For instance, evolution has no goal and it is only the pressure of natural selection which determinesthe direction of evolution. Nevertheless, the pressure of natural selection applies only locally itimplies that knowledge is valid only locally a priori knowledge is not valid absolutely, universally,as Kant wanted, but the a priori knowledge is only relative to particular ecological niche, i.e. aparticular part of the world then a priori knowledge is partial.

Rules of reason evolved through natural selection and have a lot to do with fitness: in other wordsthey must have had selective value for our foreparents. This is, for instance, the case for basic rulesof logic (inductive - deductive reasoning, classical – nonclassical logical reasoning etc.). We havethe tools to review the old question of the ontological status of universals, mathematics and logic.To some extend they evolved commonly during the evolution of animal as well as humancognition. In my work I would like to emphasize the explanations of the neodarwninian logic, for

example why we think causally: “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a patheticbut praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducting their kind” W.V.Quine (1969b, p. 126)

We believe in the objective necessity of causal connection because our ancestors who associatedsnake with danger survived end reproduced. Lets recapitulate: the ontogenetic a priori is aphylogenetic acquired knowledge. thus a priori truths are not purely analytic but full of empiricalsignifiance. We also know the evolutionary origin of universals, we know their nature (as a nonabsolute, non necessary local optimizations) and extension (in res = in human and animal brains).Taking this into consideration, can we overcome the probleme of transcendence? After all, ourbeliefs, i.e. the belief in the objective necessity of causal connection, go beyond the experienceand what we can prove!

We distinguish between a real world and our knowledge (innate or acquired) and this knowledge issupposed to be true or at least partially correspondent to some part of the real world. Nevertheless“the real world is nothing but the world of our experience” (Gerhard Vollmer), our knowledge of itand all we can know about the world is what our cognitive system knows. Moreover, our cognitivesystem is explained precisely as a product of evolutionary process. Therefore, there arise thequestions reffering to circularity and tautology of neodarwinism, self-reference and the GödelianTheorem. I will deal with a matter of the relation between Synthetic Theory of Evolution, BiologicalEvolutionary Epistemology and Transcendental Philosophy.





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Hugo Mercier

Some Ideas to Study the Evolution of Mathematics

Keywords : Evolutionary basis of mathematics, evolutionary psychology, modularity,metarepresentations, cultural evolution.

Reasoning, development and pragmatic team; Institute for Cognitive Science, Lyon, France

[email protected]

The theory of evolution has been used to gain a better understanding of the human mind andbehaviour in at least five different ways. Of those five main streams, two remain very theoretical(memetics and gene-culture coevolution). On the other hand, sociobiology and its two heirs(human behavioural ecology, HBE and evolutionary psychology, EP) produced a lot of empiricalknowledge to back up their theories. Even if some researchers blur the distinction between HBE andEP, there still exist theoretical and methodological differences that make EP more suitable to studythe evolution of mathematics. HBE being only interested in reproductive success, which does notseem to correlate well with scientific achievement, does not fit the job. Two features of EP make itmore appropriate: (i) the stress put on cognitive mechanisms underlying our behaviour and (ii) itsappreciation of behaviour as often being not adaptive anymore.

A good example might be mathematics. Indeed it is not clear how our ability to manipulatecomplex numbers could increase our fitness. But it is possible to find a lot of different modules whichcould form a basis for our mathematical knowledge. Each of those modules could have beenuseful for our ancestors, cultural evolution playing its role later. Another advantage of EP is its abilityto draw upon a lot of different resources. First primatology can help to determine what capabilitiesour cousins share, because it is a likely basis for our evolution. There is also evidence in childdevelopment that infants are extremely smart. Anthropologists might point to some universals in theway people use numbers all over the world. Modules can be investigated using experimentalpsychology. The cheater detection module of Leda Cosmides computes costs and benefits, GergGigerenzer postulates special adaptations to deal with frequency, both of them being talents thatare useful for mathematics.

But all of these are quite basic skills. At a higher level, at least two features mainly developed inhumans seem quite indispensable : metarepresentations and language. For example,metarepresentations allow us a “decoupling” from the immediate context and the use of negation.As for language its obvious utility is to give us a tool to share our findings and confront our ideas.Besides, if we follow Jean-Louis Dessalles’ ideas about the function of language, we could envisionour quest for scientific knowledge as a pursuit of more and more relevance in the information wedeliver. Linking both domains, Dan Sperber postulates a metarepresentational module specificallydedicated to a logical analysis of the content of utterances.

So we have capabilities devoted to basic mathematical computations, and higher order cognitiveskills a priori unconnected to mathematics. In the framework of cultural evolution developed by

Dan Sperber, we can imagine that the domains (i.e. kind of input) of those high order skills becamelarger as cultural change fed different kinds of inputs into them. Writing, extensive training,universities, to name but a few relevant cultural innovations, can explain the admittedly hugedifference between a professional mathematician and a layman. But the point is that thosedifferences are only quantitative: both of them were given the same endowment by evolution,they just did not made the same use of it.

All those considerations can be useful to bring forward new arguments to philosophical debatesaround mathematics (e.g. between platonicists an constructivists), and may even help tounderstand the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” (Eugene Wigner).

References

Dehaene, S. (1999). The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.Sperber, D. (Ed.). (2000). Metarepresentations: a Multidisciplinary Perspective.





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Invited speaker, Chaired by Luc Steels

Bart de Boer

Computer Modelling as a tool for understanding language evolution

Department of Artificial Intelligence – University of Groningen – The [email protected]

Language has traditionally been investigated from two different perspectives: language as thebehaviour of an individual (which de Saussure called "parole") and language as a populationphenomenon (which de Saussure called "langue"). Examples of the former perspective arepsycholinguistics, the study of speech errors and the sutudy of language acquisition. Examples ofthe latter include most of historical and general linguistics.

Of course, all linguistics are aware that these two perspectives are linked. Individual behaviours areat the basis of the idealised language of a population, while the norms and conventions of thelanguage in a population influence individuals' behaviour, both in acquisition and performance.As has originally been stated by Steels, language can therefore be considered a complex dynamicsystem. This perspective is especially important when investigating language evolution. However,

the behaviour of complex dynamic systems is extremely hard to predict. Therefore it becomesalmost essential to use computer models when studying them. This has been done for manyaspects of language: syntax, semantics, phonology and language change among others. Thispresentation will address issues in modelling language evolution and will focus especially onmodelling phonology and phonetics.





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Session 3, Chaired by Franz Wuketits

Michael Peeters (Mixel)1 and Erik Myin²

The primacy of context

Keywords: Situated Activity; Mediation; Developmental Systems; Evolution; Cognition

1 www.mixel.be; ² Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium1 [email protected]; ² [email protected]

In this paper we describe a simulated agent/environment system, developed by the first author. Inparticular, the agent has a number of goals and capacities to act and is situated in anenvironment in which various objects stand in objective relations to these goals and capacities. Thetotality of these relations we call the 'ontology' of the simulation. The agent acts in the environment,and by its actions the environment changes. The agent has a flexible epistemic structure (this wecall the agents 'knowledge'), which contains hypotheses about how the world is and how theagents actions affect it. The agent is driven to adapt its epistemic structure by observing theenvironment or, in case the enviroment changes drastically, by performing experiments. In thelatter case, by experimenting and observing the effects thereof, the agent tries to adapt both the

world and its own epistemic structures so as to make behavior adaptive again. After describing theimplementation in some detail, we consider it from a broader philosophical point of view. Inparticular, we argue that it vividly illustates what is known in current philosophy as 'externalism': theidea that knowledge about the world 'just aint in the head'. Concretely, this is manifest in theimplementation because there is no epistemic adaptation without the agent actually carrying outexperiments and observing its (unpredictable) effects.

Moreover, such experimenting brings about novel changes in the world, which might require furtheradaptation. Speaking more generally, the ontology of the environment is independent from theagent's epistemic structure, while the latter is fully dependent upon the ontology. In concluding, weplea for a what we call a 'capacity conception of knowledge'. That is, knowledge should be seenas the acquisition and development of capacities to adapt to an in principle open-ended

envoriment, rather than as the storage of an internal image or description of the world. Only thecapacity conception, so we claim, can account for fact that knowledge spreads out into theworld in the way we have attempted to illustrate.





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Ruben Gómez-Sorianoand Rubén1 and Humberto Vianna2

Mediation and Developmental Systems: a Non-Representational Approach to Cognition andEvolution.

1 Departamento de Psicología Básica de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.2 Programa de Pós-graduacão em Lingüística, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

1 [email protected]; 2 [email protected]

The present proposal is the result of the confluence of two doctoral projects held in the Programade Estudos Linguisticos, UFMG and the Dpto de Psicología Básica, UAM. Both studies aim theinteractive processes among P. troglodytes populations and share a non-representationalapproach. In recent years, many models of cognition have challenged traditional CognitiveScience, which proposes the study of an organism’s “syntax” divorced from the contingencies of its“performance” in a species-typical environment (Hendriks-Jansen, 1996). Following thosealternative approches, we claim that we lose both descriptive and explanatory power: a)abstracting from an organism’s situated activities when addressing its cognition; and b) dismissingthe role played by an organism’s history of relations during development.

We assume that distinct but intersecting levels of genetic processes (philo, onto and microgenesis)

play a role in the constitution of cognition, which thus pertains to the domain of historical processes(Blanco, 2002). The changes observed in an organism and its activities during the course of timepertain to distinct, not intersecting domains, which then will constitute the systems to be studied.Thus, at the physiological level, the internal changes an organism passes through its ontogeny arestructurally determined, althought, as a whole, it will change in congruence with its interactionalactivities as a conservation of its way of living (Maturana et al, 1998). The organism’s activitiespertain to a domain not reducible to its physiology, althought the kinds of interactions depend onits physiology at each moment. It seems to us, assuming both the historical and the interactionalperspective above mentioned, that it is irrelevant speaking of the organism as representing theenvironment it interacts with. Even though, as observers (describing the correspondences betweenorganism and medium), we can make reference to a mediation that “objectivizes” a world, aprocess that goes from the operational to the social domain and applies to every genetic level

(Blanco, 2003). Mediation, thus, must be understood not as an epistemic intermediary between theorganism and the world. In the case of our studies on chimpanzee communities, thecorrespondences between these organisms and their activities have to do with our“objectivization” of such relations, as observers. An evolutionary approach to cognition mustaddress the issues above mentioned. That is the case of DST (Oyama et al, 2001), which makesreference to a system of context-dependent causations in evolutionary and developmentalchanges, and the theory of evolution by natural drift, where cognition is the conservation of aparticular ontogenic phenotype/ontogenic niche relation (Maturana & Mpodozis, 2000).

References

Blanco, F. (2002). El Cultivo de la Mente. Madrid: Antonio Machado.Blanco, F. (2003). Comunicación presentada al II Symposium de Psicología y Estética. Madrid, 30 de octubre-2 denoviembre.Hendriks-Jansen, Horst. (1996). Catching ourselves in the act. Cambridge: MIT Press.Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco. (1998). The tree of knowledge: biological roots of human understanding. Boston:Shambala.Maturana, H. & Mpodozis, J. (2000). "The origin of species by means of natural drift". In: Revista Chilena de Historia Natural,73:261-310.Oyama, Susan, Griffiths, Paul E. & Gray, Russell D. (2001). Cycles of contingency: developmental systems and evolution.Cambridge: MIT Press.





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Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf

The self-organization of dynamic systems: modularity under scrutiny

Keywords: self-organization, dynamic systems, modularity, neural organization, languagedevelopment

Department of Language Development, Graz University

[email protected]

The languages of the world are the result of a many-layered netting under a variety of biologicaland environmental conditions. How babies learn language has been the subject of intensiveinvestigation over the past 40 years (using increasingly high-tech equipment). The existence ofspecific biological support for language is beyond doubt. Arguments come from the nature ofstructural properties common to all languages, restrictions on the degree to which languages varyand linguistic knowledge not attributable to the environment. Recent findings suggest thatmaturational factors and experience play complementary roles in forming specialized systems, whichdisplay different degrees of experience dependent modification and operate at different time scales.The framework of self-organization we draw upon allows for the spotting of system-specific growth

curves each of them depending on the interplay of the given neural infrastructure and the inputprovided. It is both selective and dynamic minding the caveat of evolutionary biologists thatnatural selection as viewed by Darwin is a sieve, and not a sculptor. The complex nature ofcognitive systems does not permit a direct exchange of findings, but there are organizationalprinciples which can serve as mainstays for models of language development and change. Primecandidates are the processes involved in scene-segmentation (= selection) and the ensuingdynamics of pattern formation (= sculpturing), with the respective system determining andenlarging the basis for the further selection and organization of information. The processes active inthese changes are self-organizing and irreversible. Irreversible processes do not only lead toincreasing complexity but also to successive bifurcations, i.e. modularity (view Prigogine).Arguments are running high that modularity (as an accompaniment to a system’s strife for stability)pervades all natural organization, right up to what Darwin called ‘the citadel itself’, human

cognition. As a logical consequence this hallmark of natural systems is also to be stipulated forlanguage. The modularity debate as instigated by Gall in 1805 was refuelled by Fodor in 1983 andhas ever since been kept simmering in generative linguistics and the cognitive sciences. A decisionin this towering debate is yet to follow. One of the issues at stake is the neural organization offunctionally autonomous and yet interlinked systems, another the temporal asynchrony of systemdevelopment. A very attractive answer to the first problem is the temporal coding of neuralresponses (Singer & Gray 1995ff.). Answerable for the second problem are the developmentalcognitive neurosciences. So far they have been quite successful in explaining the dissociation ofcognitive functions in William Syndrome and are now put to test in a multicultural setting. The focusis on bilingual development in immigrant children (N = 106; age 6-10) featuring the combinations ofeither Turkish & German or Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian & German. The data-pool collected over fouryears provides ample evidence for a changing sensitivity to language cues at different times

making way for asynchrony in system development. Of particular importance is the notion thatlanguage development does not take a linear path but rather comes in phases of system-specificintermittent turbulence, fluctuations and stability apt to swap linguistic borders in mid-stream – inbrief: language development has no room for encapsulated, hard-wired and innately specifiedmodules.

Notes

The data were collected in the course of a research project funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Research andCulture





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Session 4, Chaired by Frank Brisard

Joachim De Beule

Simulating the origins and evolution of temporal semantics

Keywords: evolution of language, semantics, time

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Belgium [email protected]

Many models for the evolution of language focus on the syntactic (lexical or grammatical) aspectsof language. The semantic models considered are most of the time very simple and not subject toevolution themselves. Part of the explanation is that many linguists consider meaning not veryimportant. Language is treated as a sterile formal symbol manipulation system, which is for a largepart fixed or even genetically predetermined, and learning a language is seen as an individualproblem of determining the right set of rules. In this view the purpose of language, communication,is largely ignored.

But language has a purpose and meaning is crucial for it. In addition, the meaningsexpressed, i.e. the things in the world talked about, are constantly subject to evolution itself. Thus,we find it better to see a language as an emergent system where a changing world and the goalof communication drives a constant co-evolution of its syntax and semantics. A language is thedynamic solution to a collective problem and cannot exist without its purpose or be treatedseparately from meaning.

It is indeed known that, although the semantics of language is for a large part dictated by theworld, some part of it is determined by conventions in the community of language users. There canbe important differences between the conventions of different language communities, eventhough they cover the same semantic domain. One such well investigated domain is time. Despitethe many commonalities between the tense and aspect systems of different languages, a richvariety of them exists. There are even indications that two native speakers of the same languagecan disagree on the precise meaning of temporal constructions.

This is in line with our view on language. We are implementing a computer model to investigatewhat temporal categories and conventions could emerge in a population of agents playinglanguage games. As in other language games a number of agents populate an environmentabout which they have to talk. Care is taken that the environment generates events containingtemporal information. The speaker in a game selects a topic to talk about and constructs asemantic description for it, for example stating that it is a pick-up event which took place in thepast. Such a description is considered good when it can be used to distinguish the topic from theother events in the environment.

Sometimes the creation of new temporal categories is needed to accomplish this goal and newdescriptions, specifying the temporal properties of the topic or temporally relating it to other events,

are invented. Next, the semantic description is transformed into an utterance by making use oflexical and grammatical rules which themselves might need to be invented when a new categoryis to be lexicalized. The receiver of the utterance tries to guess what the topic was, learning newwords and creating new temporal categories itself when necessary.

This setup allows us to investigate the co-evolution of syntax and semantics of temporalconstructions in emergent artificial languages. We gained already many insights about for examplethe prerequisites for a tense-like grammar to emerge, or about the semantics of time, but manynew interesting problems arise and still need to be solved. First experiments have resulted in thecreation of temporal categories of which some get grammaticalized, corresponding for exampleto a past tense form, while others are explicated by pure lexical means, corresponding more totemporal relation and adverb constructions.





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Jean-Philippe Magué

From Changes in the World to Changes in the Words: Multi-Agent Simulations

Keywords: semantic changes, cultural evolution, self-organisation, conceptual spaces.

Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage – Université Lyon 2 [email protected]

Languages change. Natural selection is not involved in this kind of evolution, which is hencecultural. But, at least for a part of them, those changes are nevertheless driven by adaptiveconstraints: Speakers of a given language live in an environment which is itself changing. Inparticular, their culture, e.g. artefacts, is not static. Innovation is universal, and since one of the mostfundamental raison d’être of language is probably the possibility it offers us to communicate aboutour environment, languages we use have been subject to changes induced by innovations. Giventhat those changes concern the way we refer to the world, they are changes in the lexicon andmore specifically, semantic changes. Here, in the line of cognitive semantics, we assume thatwords get their meaning through concepts, i.e. mental representations that stand for objects of theworld, gathering them into categories.

Languages may respond differently to environmental changes. For example, vehicles have beensubjects to drastic transformations since the invention of engine. While in the 17 th century, theFrench word “char” and the English one “carre” (now “car”) were translations of each other, anddenoted vehicles (Cotgrave, 1611), those transformations have led to a situation where English“car” now stands for automobiles, while French “char” stands for military tanks. Many factors, suchas the dynamics of the transformation of the objects, the fact that the new form completelyreplace the old one or not, or synonymy in the lexicon, may influence whether a change in theworld is followed by a change in the lexicon.

Multi-agents models, in which agents with idealized cognitive capacities communicate about theworld they live in, are especially well suited for investigations into this kind of processes (Cangelosi &Parisi, 2002). The underlying assumption of those models, that language is cultural entity arising in

the population through self-organisation, fits in perfectly with our hypothesis that the changes wefocus on are cultural changes. We have design a model were agents are endowed with acognitive structure, by the mean of which they can represent and categorize objects of a worldthey are placed into. This structure is an elaborate version of Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces(Gärdenfors, 2000). Agents’ conceptual spaces are multidimensional geometrical spaces, wheredimensions correspond to the different ways objects may perceptually be judged similar. Objectsare represented as points in those spaces, and categories are fuzzy subspaces, allowing prototypeeffects in agents’ categorization processes. Each concept is tagged with a word, and since theymay overlap, synonymy is allowed. A single word may tag several concepts, thus allowingpolysemy. Linguistic interactions take place between two agents. One of them chooses an objectof the world and asks the other to name it. According to the agreement between them, theyretroactively modify their conceptual structure either to reinforce it or to adapt it.

Our model is operational and allows a lexicon to emerge in a population where agents developconceptual structures to represent their environment. We are currently running simulations andanalysing the result that we aim to present.

References

Cangelosi, A., & Parisi, D. (2002). Computer simulation: A new scientific approach to the study of language evolution. In A.Cangelosi & D. Parisi (Eds.), Simulating the Evolution of Language (pp. 3-28): Springer Verlag.Cotgrave, R. (1611). A dictionary of the french and the english tongues. London: Adam Iflip.Gärdenfors, P. (2000). Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. The MIT press.





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Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Semantics and Its Foundational Status

Keywords: Evolutionary game theory, semantic/pragmatic change, language game, pragmatism

Department of Philosophy, University of [email protected]

Most of the current theories on language evolution on the market are structural and functionalrather than strategic in nature, and are built upon the presupposition that it is possible to model ourinnate linguistic endownment and then correlate these models with some neo-Darwinianevolutionary theory. In the present paper, I argue that alternatively, complex meaning relationsbetween assertions and the world emerge from evolutionary semantic games played on a finitedomain of discourse (the resource) by the Population of Utterers and the Population of Interpreters(or the Environment), sampled from a large, diamorphic population of agents. The fitness representsthe expected frequency of true or false interpretations given in agents' final interpretants. Theseevolutionary semantic games provide a realistic application of Game-Theoretic Semantics (gts, seeHintikka & Sandu 1997) to evolutionary situations (egts).

Among the fallouts of egts are the following five points.

(a) Given a potentially infinite period of time, repeated transmission of information from individualsets of plays in semantic games to further sets of plays represents a process by which one comes toknow (or believe) the content of linguistic assertions. There is no a priori notion of knowledge inevolutionary games, even though there are the notions of factual and conceptual information.Ignorance (partial interpretation) falls from the fact that the two players, say, the Inhabitant andthe Late-Comer, both withdraw from the resource.(b) Semantic change is attained through evolutionary games. Such a change does not pertain tothe evolutionary emergence of rule systems (which is not our concern here, as the game rules arefixed and immutable, cf. e.g. Nowak, Plotkin & Krakauer 1999 instead), but to the evolution ofstrategies that propagate in repeated dynamic games.

(c) In strict relation to (b), we get an explication of Wittgenstein's notion of change in a languagegame through time that he presented in On Certainty (1969). Strategies governing languagechange are strategies governing human behaviour. That some meanings get endorsed inpopulations is due to the existence of semantically stable strategies (sss) in egts, in other wordsthose that do well against themselves and against mutant meanings (cf. Maynard Smith 1982). Themore stable a strategy is, the less context or collateral information shared by the players is neededin interpreting assertions. A sss is the evolutionary counterpart to the logical truth and logical falsityof assertions.(d) We also get an explanation of features in the evolution of pragmatic aspects of language.For instance, interpreting anaphora is the matter of a relative accessibility of the informationconcerning either the choices of individuals or the use of strategies, in which the accessibility ofinformation pertains either to earlier parts of the same semantic game, or to the histories of earlier

plays of games (trans-structural pragmatics), both in the sense of the extensive forms of egts thatbring out the full subgame structure. To coin a slogan, pragmatics is `egts minus equilibria'.(e) Notions such as seeking and finding of suitable individuals (Hintikka 1973), when performed tosatisfy a predicate term, are evolutionary activities guided partly by reason and partly by habitualresponses to environmental signals. Accordingly, in place of strategies, the rules that guide actionare better termed agents' habits, to follow the practice of pragmatist philosophy. Pace Lewis(1969), the non-cooperative evolution of semantics is not an instance of the evolution ofconventions but of the habit-change in individuals. Parts of strategies from parental games areprojaculated to offspring to detain that change (thus both inheritation and imitation are covered).In conclusion, egts differs from other evolutionary arguments in the key sense of not focussing onhow different rule systems might evolve, but on how stable meanings evolve and transpire amongpopulations of agents. It puts strategic aspects of semantic and pragmatic change into a

systematic perspective and improves both upon pragmatists' evolutionary epistemology andWittgenstein's language games and his diachronic pragmatics.





13

Invited speaker, Chaired by Liane Gabora

Marek Czachor

Do we think in quantum ways ? Latent semantic analysis and symbolic AI as seen by a quantumphysicist

[email protected]

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is based on vector representations of words (belonging to the so-called semantic space). Similarity of meaning is related to scalar products between word-vectors.An analogous situation is found in other modern models of semantic analysis. For a quantumphysicist these structures are strikingly close to those one finds in quantum information theory (QIT).LSA has problems with the issue of ordering and treats texts as "bags of words". But in QIT theordering problem is well understood and is based on tensor products. Surprisingly, tensor productsare also employed in distributed representations of concepts in symbolic AI, but in a way which isnot very natural for people trained on QIT (eg. what is a conjunction (AND) for AI people looks likean alternative (OR) from the viewpoint of QIT). The fact that these three fields were developingcompletely independently, have their own intuitions and tricks, but still arrived at similarmathematical structures, creates an interesting possibility of interdisciplinary research.

I will first try to explain certain quantum intuitions and then, from this perspective, take a closer lookat LSA and distributed representations.





14

Session 5, Chaired by Marek Czachor

Liane Gabora

Evolution of Worldviews through Context-driven Actualization of Potential

Keywords: acquired characteristics, evolution, idea, replicator, worldview

Center Leo Apostel, Free University of Brussels and Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, [email protected]

In (Gabora 2001, 2004) it is argued that the cultural replicator is not an idea but an associatively-structured network of them that together form an internal model of the world, or worldview. Anidea is not a replicator because it does not consist of coded self-assembly instructions. It may retainstructure as it passes from one individual to another, but does not replicate it. A worldview is aprimitive, uncoded replicator, like the autocatalytic sets of polymers widely believed to be theearliest form of life. Primitive replicators generate self-similar structure, but because the processhappens in a piecemeal manner, through bottom-up interactions rather than a top-down code,they replicate with low fidelity, and acquired characteristics are inherited. Just as polymers catalyze

reactions that generate other polymers, the retrieval of an item from memory can in turn triggerother items, thus cross-linking memories, ideas, and concepts into an integrated conceptualstructure. Worldviews evolve idea by idea, largely through social exchange. An idea participates inthe evolution of culture by revealing certain aspects of the worldview that generated it, therebyaffecting the worldviews of those exposed to it. If an idea influences seemingly unrelated fields thisdoes not mean that separate cultural lineages are contaminating one another, because it isworldviews, not ideas, that are the basic unit of cultural evolution. Moreoever, it is argued thatworldviews do not evolve through a Darwinian natural selection process (Gabora and Aerts, inpress). Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition,each thought or cognitive state changes the selection pressure against which the next isevaluated; they are not simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter ofhoning in a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations of it from different real or

imagined perspectives; in other words, actualizing potential through exposure to different contexts.It has been proven that the mathematical description of contextual change of state introduces anon-Kolmogorovian probability distribution, and a classical formalism such as selection theorycannot be used. Thus it is argued that creative thought evolves not through a Darwinian process,but through context-driven actualization of potential.

References

Gabora (2001) Cognitive mechanisms underlying the origin and evolution of culture. Doctoral thesis, Free University ofBrussels.Gabora, L. (2004) Ideas are not replicators but minds are. Biology and Philosophy 19(1): 127-143.Gabora, L. & Aerts, D. (in press) Creative thought as a non-Darwinian evolutionary process. Accepted in Journal of CreativeBehavior.





15

Thomas Durt

Decoherence, entanglement, complementarity and the classical limit.

Keywords: quantum mechanics, classical limit, complementarity.

Physics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, [email protected]

Presently, it is still an open question to know whether quantum mechanics is necessary in order todescribe the way that our brain functions.

Nevertheless, quantum mechanics is astonishingly adequate if we want to describe the materialworld in which we live. It is therefore natural to assume that the way we think has something to dowith quantum mechanics. After all, if our reflection reflects the external world, it ought to reflectalso its internal properties at the deepest level! Zurek and coworkers developped in the frameworkof the decoherence approach the idea that maybe, if we think classically, this is because duringthe evolution, our brain selected in the external (supposedly quantum) world the islands of stabilitythat correspond to the maximal quantum (Shannon-von Neumann) information.

These classical islands would correspond to the structures that our brain naturally recognizes andidentifies, and this is why the way we think is classical. We shall apply the criterion of maximalinformation to the simple situation during which two quantum particles interact through a position-dependent potential, in the non-relativistic regime and show that the classical islands are in one toone correspondence with the three classical paradigms elaborated by physicists before quantummechanics existed; these are the droplet or diluted model, the test-particle and the material pointapproximations. We also show that it is entanglement that marks the departure from classicalconceptions. Beside, we present a new formulation of the principle of complementarity thatemerged in the decoherence approach. It sheds a new light on the idea of complementarity,which is not only one the oldest and most universal philosophical principles, but also one of themost powerful ones, at the core of dialectics and relativity.

Funnily, in this approach, it is possible to “explain” why we have ten fingers, an unexpected resultfrom the study of entanglement in discrete Hilbert spaces, a surprising conclusion!





16

Session 6, Chaired by Myriam Vermeerbergen

Kathleen Coessens

Cultural creativity and evolutionary flexibility

Keywords: creativity, flexibility, exaptation, ratchet effect, world openness

Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Vrije Universitet Brussel, [email protected]

This proposal develops the philosophical idea that the cultural creativity and evolution of thehuman being are dependent on some kind of evolutionary flexibility. This thesis will be defended inthree steps: starting from a short phenomenological analysis of the possibilities of the human beingand its body (1), I will then examine theories and explanations of evolutionary flexibility (2) andfinally explore how this contains the possibilities for cultural creativity and evolution (3). Theconclusion will be that the diversity and evolution of human culture awakens the dormant potentialof this flexibility.

1. The astonishing human being

Michel Serres describes the astonishing possibilities of the human being. As the only mammal thathas spread all over the world, it confronts all meteorological and geographical conditions. But atthe same time it disposes of an immense reservoir of metamorphoses: it is a clown and a pianist, anacrobat and a novelist, …. Finally, it is a creator of a world out of the natural earth: as a subject, itcreates objects as well as fantasy.

2. Evolutionary flexibility

Evolutionary flexibility implies that there are developments in evolution that defy strict adaptationallaws. Three theories will be examined. Firstly, Gould’s concept ‘exaptation’ offers an explanation forfeatures and possibilities that go beyond the purely adaptive and functional. Secondly, nature

contains what Gibson calls ‘affordances’: ‘whatever a physical system can do in response to somehuman requirement’. These features of natural organisms go beyond the purely adaptive andfunctional: they are useful for other living beings. Thirdly, Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991)propose two principles for a less ‘selectionistic’ and a more ‘creative’ evolution: natural selectioneliminates only what is not compatible with survival and, moreover, it accepts viable solutions inevolution, not exclusively optimal ones. These three theories open up the possibility for ‘creative’,unexpected features to emerge or to be realised later on, depending on the natural or culturalenvironment.

3. Cultural creativity

This evolutionary flexibility manifests itself in the development of human culture, in the diversity of life

forms, in the possibilities of adaptation of the newborn to the human world. Three elements will bedeveloped here: the ratchet effect and cultural transmission, the exosomatic development andthe world openness of the human being. This world openness, which is sustained by neurologisttheories such as Edelman’s, illuminates some of the mysteries of our cultural creativity.

Ultimately, culture seems to be the unfolding of the flexibility of features and mechanisms acquiredin the course of evolution. The next question to be raised is whether culture in its turn is notinfluencing nature and further evolution. Some examples will be given.





17

Jean Lachapelle1, Luc Faucher² and Pierre Poirier³

Cultural Evolution, the Baldwin Effect, and Social Norms

1 Department of Philosophy — Université du Québec à Montréal and Champlain Regional College ; ² Department ofPhilosophy — Université du Québec à Montréal;

³ Department of Philosophy — Université du Québec à Montréal1 [email protected]; ² [email protected]; ³ [email protected]

In recent years, a number of evolutionary theorists have been instrumental in the renewed interestfor the so-called Baldwin effect, most notably Terrence Deacon (1997) and Dan Dennett (1995). Wewould like to demonstrate that the Baldwin effect plays a fundamental role in cultural evolution.

More specifically, we intend to analyze its role in the evolution of social norms (e.g., religious beliefsand food preferences). Drawing on the works of people like Christopher Boehm (1999) and ShaunNichols (2002), we would like to suggest that the Baldwin effect is a mechanism which facilitatesthe implementation and transmission of social norms.

Our contention is that a comprehensive theory of cultural evolution should include the Baldwineffect as one of its principal mechanisms, while at the same time paying attention to the cognitive

architecture of the human mind and the different modes of transmission involved in culturalevolution (à la Boyd and Richerson, 1985).

References

Boehm, Christopher (1999), Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson (1985), Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Deacon, Terrence (1997), The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton.Dennett, Daniel (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster.Nichols, Shaun (2002), “On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution.” Philosophy ofScience, 69, 2, pp. 234-255.





18

Invited speaker, Chaired by Francis Heylighen

Olaf Diettrich

The Boundary Conditions of Cognitive Evolution

Keywords: Organic and cognitive phenotypes; organic and cognitive selection pressure; world

views; cognitive operators; human specific natural laws; Kurt Gödel and Emmy Noether.

Centre Leo Apostel, Vrije Universitet Brussel, [email protected]

The key topos of evolution is adaptation. Organic evolution has to meet the phaysical habitat,cognitive evolution has to recognise the laws of nature in order to develop acting strategies. As toorganic evolution, the selection pressure on a organism depends on both the structure of thehabitat and the structure of the previously acquired organic phenotype. So, a given habitat alonedoes not determine the result of organic evolution which, therefore does not converge towards aunique and definitive focus (the “pride of creation”). Similar applies to cognitive evolution. It canbe shown that the laws of nature cannot be derived alone from the experiences made. Theydepend as well from the previously acquired cognitive phenotype. So they are human specific

artefacts (Example: the law of conservation of energy can be derived from the homogeneity oftime. But what homogeneous means depends on how our internal clock - which is part of ourcognitive phenotype - is constructed). As an example: it is shown that seeing the world in 2dimensions could provide as with competent survival strategies as well as our 3D world view does,though the physics we see and the theories comprised would be entirely different. Generallyspoken, the world can be mastered successfully by as many different cognitive phenotypes (eachone having a different set of natural laws) as by different organic phenotypes (each one havingdifferent acting tools).The consequence is shown in physics that the set of natural laws can neverbe completed (no theory of everything) and in mathematics that the set of axioms can never becompleted (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem). This is in contrast to Campbell’s ‘natural selectionepistemology’ saying that the fit between our theories on nature and the external nature itself is amatter of trial and selection.

Under these circumstances boundary conditions of cognitive evolution have to be found which donot refer to the properties of an external world. Two major conditions have to be met by anycognitive phenotype. 1. The way we describe what we see must not depend on what we do. Theearliest and most important way of doing is locomotion. What we derive from our perceptions,therefore, must be invariant under locomotion - or, in physical terms, invariant under the Galilei-transformation or the Lorenz-transformation respectively (the construct of 3D geometrical objectsdo so). As we derive from our perceptions also the laws of nature, these as well have to be Galilei-invariant. The decision of cognitive evolution to base our world view on locomotion may be due tothe fact that it happened at early times of organic evolution when moving was nearly the onlypossible way of doing. 2. The way we describe what we see must allow simple predictions. Thismeans that our world view has to be based on variables which are cyclic, i.e. which are a linear

functions of time. Then their time derivatives are constant, i.e. they represent a law of conservation.Emmy Noether has shown, that to every invariance of the form of a physical laws under ageneralized transformation there corresponds a conservation law of a physical quantity and viceversa. In case of the 10-parametric Galilei-transformation we will get the 10 conservation laws ofclassical mechanics.

So, the decision of cognitive evolution to describe the world in (3+1)Galielei-invariant termsprovides us with both the concept of space and the conservation laws we need to master theworld by means of classical mechanics.





19

Session 7, Chaired by Olaf Diettrich

Luc Steels

The Cultural Evolution of Language

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, Artificial Intelligence [email protected]

We report on recent progress in our efforts to model the cultural evolution of language and to testthese models in computer simulations and experiments with physical robots. Current theorising onthe origins and evolution of language is divided into three camps: (1) those who assume – in arationalist tradition - a genetic origins of language (cf. Pinker), (2) those who assume an empiricistposition, in which language and its underlying concepts are acquired through observationallearning (cf connectionism), and (3) those who argue for a cultural evolution. In cultural evolution,language is negotiated in peer-to-peer interactions so that language can continuously adapt tothe needs of language users. Meanings are not innate nor statistically derived from clusteringsensori-motor data, but constructed and imposed on sensori-motor streams to make discriminationnecessary for survival (including cultural survival). Meanings co-evolve with language and arecoordinated through language or other forms of representation-mediated interaction. We will

defend the latter position by criticising genetic and empiricist approaches and by showing aconcrete model how it might work. Various versions of this model have already been implementedand tested in large-scale experiments. Each agent has a set of mechanisms for playing the role ofspeaker or hearer in a language game. The language game takes place in a concrete setting sothat the real world and the shared situation constrain the set of possible meanings. The games wehave studied so far all center around joint attention or reference. The speaker attempts to draw theattention of the hearer to an object or event in the shared situation. It is also assumed that this jointattention can also be reached through other means such as pointing, eye gaze following, etc. butlanguage is a way to optimise success in joint attention and decontextualise agent interaction.Agents take turns being speaker or hearer in the game. The mechanisms required by the agents toplay the role of speaker in a game include a way to perceive reality through a sensori-motorembodiment, to categorise and conceptualise reality in order to find distinctive features of the

topic against the other objects in the context based on a repertoire of feature extractors,categorisers, and conceptualisation strategies, and to verbalise the chosen conceptualisationbased on his own lexicon and grammar. To play the role of hearer, the agent must have ways toperceive reality, parse expressions according to his own lexicon and grammar, and use his ownrepertoire of grounded concepts to interpret the expressions in terms of the shared situation.In addition, the agents need ways to create new feature extractors, new categorisations, newconceptualisations, and they need the ability to invent new words and associate them with newlyinvented meanings or invent new grammatical constructions to increase communicative successand expressive power. We argue that these mechanisms are triggered when the speaker fails toconceptualise or express what is needed, and so they solve a specific problem. Moreover, theagents need ways to guess meaning of words and expressions they do not know (through jointattention) and then make hypotheses about the possible meaning of unknown constructs. They

also need to create new feature extractors, new categories, or new conceptualisation strategies iftheir existing repertoire is inadequate. We next show that if a population of agents has theseabilities and is closely coupled in the sense that they constantly adapt their distinctions and form-meaning pairs to be successful in the game, a global coherence both in the language and in theunderlying meaning repertoires results. Moreover both undergo constant evolution because newmeanings are created when new situations come up and new expressions are formed andpropagate in the population.

References

Steels, L. (2003) Intelligence With Representation. Transactions A Royal Society. London. October 2003 361(1811) p.2381-2395.Steels, L. (2003) Language-reentrance and the 'Inner Voice'. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol 10, Issue 4-5.Steels, L. (2003) Evolving grounded communication for robots. Trends in Cognitive Science, June 2003.Steels, L. (2003) Creating a Robot Culture IEEE Intelligent Systems. May/June 2003. Steels, L. and J-C Baillie (2002) Shared

Grounding of Event Descriptions by Autonomous Robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Vol 43, 1-2 (2002) pp. 163-173Steels, L. and F. Kaplan (2002) AIBO's First words. Evolution of Communication. Vol 4(1).





20

Tony Belpaeme

The cultural origins of colour categories

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, [email protected]

Until the appearance of Berlin and Kay’s influential monograph (Berlin and Kay, 1969), it was

generally accepted that each culture divided the colour continuum in its own specific way. Berlinand Kay however, with their results from colour naming studies, radically changed that view. Theyobserved how languages over the world each have colour terms that denote colours which areextraordinarily similar across all cultures. Even more, they observed how colour lexicalisation followsa clear evolutionary sequence: languages having two colour terms will have one for dark/coolcolours and one for light/warm colours. When having three colour terms, a term for red will beadded, then a term for green or yellow and so on. These worldwide regularities have led toconclusion that colour categories are genetically determined, a view which has remained widelyaccepted up till this day (e.g. Kay and Regier, 2003).

Indeed the similarity between different culture’s colour categories (and other perceptualcategories) is remarkable, but different mechanisms than just genetic expression of innately

specified categories might be responsible for this. One theory explains colour categories as beingthe result of an individual learning process. The structure of the environment from which categoriesare learnt where some colours appear more than others is translated into colour categories.Proponents claim that the environment contains enough structure to explain the similaritiesbetween colour categories across different cultures.

We however wish to argue for linguistic relativism, which considers colour categorisation to primarilybe a cultural process. Colour categories are not encoded in the genotype nor are they learnt bythe individual, instead they are the result of a cultural agreement among a group of individuals.Language plays a crucial role in this all. When assuming colour categories to plastic and taking intoaccount that colour categories can be lexicalised, linguistic communication drives the categoriesof individuals to resemble each other. If not, successful communication would not be possible.

Colour categorisation is thus a self-organising process in a population of language users, with theneed to communicate effectively serving as selective pressure.

We wish to present a novel approach using computer simulations, which complements researchfrom anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. With this approach, the conditions of the differentstances in the colour category debate are modelled and run in a simulation. The results from thesesimulations show us how linguistic relativism is a valuable alternative to the conventional universalistexplanation for colour categories.

References

Berlin, B. and Kay, P. (1969) Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.Kay, P. and Regier, T. (2003) Resolving the question of color naming universals. PNAS, 100(15):9085–9089.





21

Konrad Talmont-Kaminski

The development of truth-seeking and other epistemic norms in evolved cognitive agents

Keywords: normativity, truth-seeking, epistemic agent

Marie Curie-Sklodowska [email protected]

One thing that apriorist approaches have traditionally been thought to be better at thannaturalised epistemology is explaining normativity in general and truth-seeking as a norm inparticular. I will argue, however, that it is EE that is fruitful in this respect whereas traditionalepistemology turns out to fail.

My approach will be based upon a characterisation of epistemic agents (and cognitive agents asa sub-set) which is closely aligned with the regulatory systems approach pursued by Hooker andCollier and, in particular, the concept of autonomy they have developed in that context. The traitsof epistemic agents that will play the biggest role will be their ability to affect their environment,their capacity for being affected by that environment and, most importantly, their goal-orientedbehaviour (all three being aspects of autonomy).

As I will show, traditional attempts to provide for normativity run into two problems: motivating thechoice of norms and explaining their relevance. Both questions can be dealt with once anevolutionary epistemological position is taken up, however. The relevance of the norms will bebased upon their adaptive value, while their actual make-up will depend upon the actualrelationship between the agent and it environment.

What is particularly interesting is the way EE can provide for truth-seeking as an explicit norm. Truth-seeking has been traditionally specified as a motivating norm for epistemic inquiry. There, it sharesin the difficulties that the apriorist approach has with normativity as well as leading tocounterintuitive results. The counterintuitive results can be avoided once truth-seeking is seen aspart of a regulatory control hierarchy where its force is limited by its relation to other norms such as

promptness, relevance, etc. In that context its relevance can be properly understood – while aninaccurate representation of the environment may be adequate to choose the optimal course ofaction where the wrong action is taken for an epistemic reason this will be because of aninaccurate or an inadequate representation, either of which would have been avoided given abetter representation. Because of its relevance to any epistemic agent that fits the generalcharacterisation that was given, the appearance of truth-seeking as a broadly applied andpossessed norm is unsurprising.





22

Session 8, Chaired by Kathleen Coessens

Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea

A complex and non linear approach to cognitive evolution/development: sociality, experienceand knowledge

Keywords: Cognition, Experience, Sociality, AutopoiesisDpt. Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNED, Madrid. Spain and Dpt. Social Anthropology/ Pembroke College. U.

Cambridge (UK)[email protected]

The aim of this paper is to provide an integrated account of human cognition as a biosocioculturalphenomena embedded within evolutionary and developmental processes. Relying on theepistemological frame provided by the theories of dynamic systems (autopoiesis, complexity,criticality and chaos) and non linear approaches to time, evolution and social action, emergentproperties of systems, unpredictibility and irreversibility are analysed together with attractors,structuration, recursivity and reorganization.

Culture is envisaged as the building and re-constructing process of sociality, cognition andexperience as mutually constituted, thanks to evolved capacities and precursors brought forthlocally, historically and developmentally.

A critical revision is made of genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology and memetics, theircartesianism, objective realism and disembodiment that unable them to account for thecomplexity of becoming (a) human as species, as a person and as a member of groups. Emphasisis given to ontogeny, experience (practices and meaning) and environment, as shown in neuralepigenesis, neurophysiology, perception/representation, socialisation and social action. Brainmodularity, domain-specificity and neural architecture are reviewed from developmental research.Special attention is given to crossmodality, heterocrony, exaptions and piggybackings in respect tohominid evolution.

At last but not least, some considerations are made in respect to externalisation and objectivisationof knowledge (communication, institutions, social relationships, technology) as recursivemediaters/amplifiers for further cognitive evolution.





23

Robert K. Logan

The Extended Mind: The Origin of Language and Culture

Dept. of Physics - University of [email protected]

One of the difficulties in understanding the origin of language is the lack of empirical data. The

thesis that will be developed in this paper is that historic data relating to the evolution of languageafter the advent of speech and beginning with the emergence of writing can shed light on theorigin and evolution of human language. In The Sixth Language (Logan, Toronto: Stoddart, 2000a)language is assumed to be both a medium of communication and an informatics tool to show thatspeech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain oflanguages. Each new form of language emerged as a bifurcation and a new level of order to dealwith the chaos and information overload that the previous forms of language could not handle.Exploiting this approach the origins of speech and the human mind are shown to have emergedsimultaneously as the bifurcation from percepts to concepts and a response to the chaosassociated with the information overload that resulted from the increased complexity in hominidlife. Our ancestors developed toolmaking, controlled fire, and hence, developed manual praxicarticulation. They lived in larger social groups which resulted in the development of social

organization. And they engaged in large scale co-ordinated hunting which required mimeticcommunication. As a result of these developments their minds could no longer cope with therichness of life solely on the basis of its perceptual sensorium and as a result a new level of orderemerged in the form of conceptualization and speech. Speech arose primarily as a way to controlinformation and then was used as a tool for communication. Thought is not silent speech but ratherspeech is vocalized thought.The mechanism that allowed the transition from percept to concept was the emergence ofspeech. The words of spoken language are the actual medium or mechanism by which conceptsare expressed or represented. Word are both metaphors and strange attractors uniting manyperceptual experiences in terms of a single concept. Spoken language and abstract conceptualthinking emerged together at exactly the same point of time as a bifurcation from alingualcommunication skills and the concrete percept-based thinking of pre-lingual hominids. (Logan

2000b).The transition from percept-based thinking to concept-based thinking represented a majordiscontinuity in human thought. Language extended the brain which hitherto served as a perceptprocessor into the human mind capable of conceptualization and planning (mind = brain +language). We use our dynamic systems model of the mind to understand the connectionsbetween technology, commerce, artistic expression, narrative and science and to generate whatwe have playfully called the Grand Unification Theory of Human Thought. Manual praxicarticulation evolves into technology, social intelligence into commerce and mimeticcommunication into artistic expression.A synthesis of the Extended Mind model with the work of Christiansen (1994), Deacon (1997) andDonald (1991) is made showing an overlap of these four approaches in which a parallel is drawnrespectively between conceptualization, sequential learning and processing, symbolic

representation and mimetic culture as a pre-adaptations for spoken language.Christiansen's notion of treating language as an organism is generalized to the consideration ofculture as an organism also with the result that a notion of Universal Culture emerges in parallel withthe notion of Universal Grammar.

References

Christiansen, Morten. 1994. Infinite languages finite minds: Connectionism, learning and linguistic structure. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Edinburgh UK.Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of the Brain and Language. New York: W.W.Norton&Co.Donald, Merlin. 1991. The Origin of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press.Logan, Robert K. 2000a. The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing.Logan, Robert K. 2000b. The extended mind: understanding language and thought in terms of complexity and chaos theory.In Lance Strate (ed), 2000 Communication and Speech Annual Vol. 14.





24

Tinneke Beeckman

Reflections on destiny within a non-reductionist naturalist anthropology

Keywords: anthropology, cultural philosophy

Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, [email protected]

Human beings are genealogically related to each other and have common ancestors with otherspecies. However, we are also clearly distinct from (other) animals, for instance in the fact that wehave culture, or that we suffer from a large variety of psychopathologies. But how can we think thisdifference? What is culture? Or, what is the specificity of the human being? It is very tempting – likeDawkins when he introduced ‘memetics’ - to think culture as different units that are geneanalogues. Cultural evolution thus becomes analogous to natural selection. This ‘move’ allowsscientists to remain within the existing and successful paradigm of the natural sciences. However,many criticisms have been formulated and to name just a few: unlike genes, memes do not havean syntactic and semantic identity, meme-mutations are directed, convergent evolution make agenealogical reconstruction difficult and thoughts (or culture) cannot be divided in units (seeDennett 1995, Midgley 2001, Wimsatt, 1992). Gould claims that cultural evolution occurs according

to different mechanisms all together. This ‘memetic’ approach is hereby often opposed to literature(Midgley). Rejecting the explanatory power of ‘memes’ has a far-reaching effect. It impliesconsidering the need for a different kind of explanation when it comes to what is specifically andexclusively human. Two phenomena are interesting and maybe related: culture andpsychopathology (to certain degrees). Involving psychopathology is not the same project as tryingto understand pathology merely within the framework of natural selection and adaptation. It isnamely problematic how evolutionary theory could serve as the general theoretical framework forexplaining and treating mental disorders (in spite of Troisi & McGuire1998), although it is undeniablytrue that our minds were shaped by natural selection. In itself, an integration of psychiatry andevolutionary theory seems desirable. But what is the difficulty (and the challenge)? It is not clearhow an evolutionary theory could clarify an important asp0ect of both culture (e.g. literature) and(mild) psychopathology, namely the reflections on how humans perceive their destiny. The problem

of destiny as a subjective experience, is at the heart of religion, philosophy, literature andpsychopathology. It constitutes what philosophers sometimes call ‘singularity’(as it is used in thehuman sciences, not in the meaning of the exact sciences). That we are capable of reflecting onour destiny is not only the result of our evolution, but it strongly influences our cultural productionsand psychopathological experiences. How narrow the link between culture and psychopathologyreally is, becomes clear when one considers the fact that different cultural surroundings implydifferent pathologies. According to Nesse (in Cosmides & Tooby 1992), there are several reasons tobelieve that repression and other psychodynamic traits may be mental mechanisms shaped bynatural selection. Although the scientific acceptability of psychodynamics is highly questionable,there is some agreement that people, for instance, admit to an underlying ‘selfishness’ in altruisticbehaviour. Deception and ultimately self-deception can be expected strategies when individuals‘act on behalf of their genes’. (Nesse 1990, Dawkins 1982). The general capacity for keeping things

unconscious can have selective advantages and current benefits. This may be convincing in itself,but is it sufficient to understand psychopathology? In analysing specific psychodynamic traits asspecialised strategies for deceiving others, psychopathology is mainly seen as a reaction to socialbehaviour. But ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ are not the same. Maybe cultural effects imply a sort of ‘extra’(non-reducible) operation that can not be accounted for by merely considering the aspect ofbenefit in relation to others. In my paper, I would like to explore some possibilities and difficulties ofan alternative which is at the same time indebted to evolutionary theory and capable of thinkingculture and psychopathology as testimonies to the experience of the singularity of human life.





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Invited speaker, Chaired by Hendrik Pinxten

Tim Ingold

Beyond genes and memes: a relational approach to the evolution of language and culture

Department of Anthropology - University of [email protected]

Neo-Darwinian theorists typically regard culture as comprising a body of rules and representationsthat are transmitted across the generations by non-genetic means. Such a view entails theassumptions: (i) that the informational content or ‘meanings’ of transmitted culture can be read offfrom its manifest components (such as words, gestures, artefacts and designs) through decodingrules that are given independently of the social and environmental contexts of transmission; and (ii)that the process by which culture is acquired – classically known as ‘social learning’, and involvingsome combination of observation and imitation – is separable from the process by which acquiredknowledge is applied, in practice, within the lifetime of each individual.

I argue that both assumptions are untenable. As regards the first, I show that there is no ‘reading’ of

words, gestures, etc. that is not part of the novice’s practical orientation towards his or herenvironment. Thus they do not carry meaning into contexts of interaction, as the neo-Darwinianmodel of information transmission requires, but rather gather their meanings from the contexts ofthe activities and relationships in which they are in play. As regards the second, I argue thatlearning is not a matter of acquiring mental templates, in the form of rules and representations forthe production of appropriate behaviour, prior to running off exemplars of the behaviour from thetemplates. Rather, novices learn by being placed in practical situations where, through therepeated performance of certain tasks, they can develop and fine-tune their own skills ofawareness and response. In this process, each generation contributes to the next not by handingon a corpus of representations, or information in the strict sense, but by introducing novices intocontexts that afford selected opportunities for perception and action, and by providing thescaffolding that enables them to make use of these affordances.

A crucial implication of this argument is that variations of skill that we are inclined to call culturalare, in reality, developmentally embodied properties of the organism, and in that sense fullybiological. If, by evolution, we mean differentiation and change over time in the forms and capacitiesof organisms, then we must admit that such skills have evolved. We cannot, however, attribute thisevolution to changing gene frequencies. Skills are no more the operations of a mind impregnated byculture than they are of a body designed by natural selection. They are rather achievements of thewhole organism, at once body and mind, positioned within an environment. And to account for theseachievements, we need nothing less than a new approach to evolution, one that sets out to explorenot the variation and selection of intergenerationally transmitted attributes (whether genes or memes),but the self-organising dynamics and form-generating potentials of relational fields.





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Session 9, Chaired by Tim Ingold

Derek Turner

Universal Darwinism and Process Essentialism

Keywords: Essentialism, Dawkins, Dennett, Hull, Universal Darwinism

Department of Philosophy, Connecticut College, New London, [email protected]

According to conventional wisdom, the Darwinian revolution was a revolution against Aristotelianessentialism. Philosophers and biologists continue to disagree with respect to a number ofquestions about biological species: Are they sets or metaphysical individuals? Does it matter?Which species concepts are appropriate for which scientific purposes? What is the point of ataxononomic system? And so on. Virtually no one today, however, thinks that species are naturalkinds, or that there are any such truths as that all and only humans are rational animals.In this paper, I argue that many contemporary Darwinists are nevertheless closet essentialists. Whilethey deny essentialism about species, they remain committed to a view that I call processessentialism. This process essentialism is most explicit in the work of “universal Darwinists” such as

Dawkins, Dennett, David Hull, and other proponents of Darwinian accounts of mind and culture.What these theorists have in common is a commitment to the idea that biologists should beinterested in a certain natural kind of historical process—call it a Darwinian evolutionary process—that can be characterized in the following way:

All and only processes having such-and-such features are Darwinian evolutionary processes.

This process essentialism is explicit in Dennett’s claim that evolution is a substrate neutral algorithmicprocess, and in Hull’s abstract characterization of Darwinian evolution in terms of the sub-processesof replication, interaction, and selection. After showing that Dawkins, Dennett, and Hull are indeedcommitted to process essentialism, I will go on to show that their evolutionary accounts of mind,culture, and science actually depend on this process essentialism.

I then show that one does not need to be a process essentialist in order to be a Darwinist. Processessentialism is optional. A reasonable alternative is to think of Darwinian evolutionary processes inmuch the same way that Wittgenstein thought of games. We can identify a number of familyresemblances of Darwinian evolutionary processes, without supposing that we can give a set ofnecessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a Darwinian evolutionary process. Iconclude by arguing that this anti-essentialist view is more loyal to the spirit of Darwinism than theprocess essentialism of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hull.





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Sverker Johansson

The individual and the species in the cultural evolution of language

Keywords: cultural evolution, coevolution, idiolect, species

School of Education & Communication, University of Jönköping, [email protected]

Language is an evolving entity of its own, the cultural evolution of which has almost certainlyplayed a major role in the biological evolution and success of Homo sapiens. But what are the unitsof selection in the evolution of language, and what levels of selection may be relevant? To whatextent may biological analogies be fruitful, and when should they be avoided? Are there linguisticequivalents of genes, organisms, and species? There are several linguistic entities on different levelsthat may be candidates for evolutionary considerations:

• Meme level. Reductionistically, one might adopt the equivalent of the “gene’s eyes view” ofDawkins (1976), which would be the smallest linguistic units that can be coherently replicated, thememes of language. Memes are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in many cultural contexts, butpossible linguistic meme candidates might include individual words or individual grammatical rules

(or parameter settings in a Universal-Grammar framework). This might be a useful level of analysisfor the study of contemporary language change, on a rather short time scale, linguistic micro-evolution, but is unlikely to be helpful in the study of the roots of language as a system.

• “Organism” level. The organism level in biology may be regarded as a coherent set of genesworking together as a team, forming a common interactor. Individual genes of a human being donot do anything useful on their own — they are meaningful evolutionary units only in the context ofall the other genes of our genome. Similarly, individual words or rules in language are notmeaningful in isolation, only as parts of a coherent system. The lowest-level entity in which all theselow-level pieces are gathered together in a coherent whole would be the idiolect of an individuallanguage-user. In biology, the lowest-level entity in which all human genes are working together

as a coherent whole is an individual human being, as a biological organism. I will regard an idiolectas a “linguistic organism” in the same sense. It is quite accidental that the organism levels ofbiology and linguistics very nearly coincide, and perhaps unfortunate, as it may invite confusion aswell as over-extension of biological analogies; this will have to be kept in mind.This organism level may be the most fruitful for the study of the origin of the human languagecapacity. Very little interaction can be expected between individual language memes and indi-vidual human genes, so the meme/gene level is less likely to yield interesting insights into this issue.Direct interaction, and possible co-evolution, may instead be expected at the system level,between the human being as a system, with emergent properties beyond the sum of the genes,and the idiolect as a system of, but similarly beyond the sum of, language memes. An importantaspect here, with implications for the innateness and modularity debates, is the interplay betweenbiological selection for language acquisition capability, and cultural selection between idiolects for

learnability.

• “Species” level. In biology, a species can be regarded as a set of organisms that are mutuallyreproductively compatible. Alternatively, from a gene perspective, a species is a gene pool withinwhich genes can flow freely. A linguistic analogy of the species concept would then be either apopulation of mutually compatible idiolects, or a “meme pool” within which language memes canflow freely. With either perspective, a linguistic species concept is indicated that is quite close toour everyday notion of a language. This level of analysis is relevant for the study of the historicaldevelopment of languages and language families, but hardly for the ultimate origins of language.





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Nathalie Gontier

Evolutionary Epistemology and the Origin and Evolution of Language and Culture – TakingSymbiogenesis Seriously

Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science – Vrije Universiteit Brussel, [email protected]

Within the last 20 years there has been a renewed interest in the origin and evolution of language.The study of language is not only of philosophical or linguistic import, it begs for a biological interestas well, the idea being that language is first and foremost a biological adaptation (Hurford,Studdert-Kennedy, Knight: 1998; Knight, Studdert-Kennedy, Hurford: 2000). The Neodarwinianparadigm, founded on a functionalistic approach surely has its merits, and highlights new andinteresting perspectives, but what is lacking within the field is a critical evaluation and reflexivityabout the pros and cons of Neodarwinian theory. There’s no question about the fact whetherlanguage needs to be comprehended as a biological phenomenon, the question I want to raise iswhether there are also other evolutionary mechanisms, besides Darwinian mechanisms, which canhelp in the scientific study of the origin and evolution of language.Therefore it is necessary that we look into the field of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE). EE is an

interdisciplinary field that evolved out of science and philosophy of science that investigates (1) ourspecific human capacities from within evolutionary biology (2) how we can put the evolutionarymechanisms to use in other fields such as science in general, economics, culture and linguistics. EEhas as its main theme of interest, the search for a universal evolutionary mechanism, which can beused as a normative framework from wherein we can understand the evolution of all our cognitivecapacities, including language. There are, however, numerous accounts already given of whatexactly this universal mechanism is. There’s the ‘blind variation and selective retention’-scheme ofCampbell (1987), 'Universal Darwinism' put forward by Dawkins (1983), 'Universal Selectionism'(Czicko: 1995), the ‘generate-test-regenerate’-scheme of Plotkin (1995), and the ‘replication-variation-environmental interaction'-scheme, introduced by Hull, Langmann and Glenn (2001). Allthese universal evolutionary mechanisms plead for a functionalistic approach, which means,applied to language, that we must search for the function and the adaptive value of the evolution

of our capacity of language. Because of this, researchers in the field are urged to developevolutionary ‘just so’-stories, which try to explain the evolutionary benefit of our languagedevelopment, a development which all too often gets reduced to the evolution of syntax andsemantics, grammar and words. A question concerning the function automatically poses aquestion which addresses itself to the future (what is the goal of language: answers given being forexample, communication, gossip, rites, social bonding, …). This is quite a paradox, because,studying the origin and evolution of language one should pose questions which are directed to thepast, instead of the future.My suggestion will be that we have to consider the possibilities a systems theoretical point of viewmight bring for the study of the origin and evolution of language. Neodarwinians use a verticalconcept of evolution, to explain how individual variation and speciation came about. Althoughthis is very fruitful, we should also investigate the possibility of applying a horizontal evolution

concept for the origin and evolution of language. Croft (2000), for example, already emphasizedthat the evolution of language, language contact and perhaps even the origin of individual andgroupsspecific language variation takes on the form of hybridization, typical of the evolution ofplants. I would like to push Croft’s idea a little further: contrary to other species, humans don’tnecessarily have to pass on their genes to the next generation to be able to introduce novelty:humans have a capacity to learn, by imitating or simply observing each others behaviour. Thislearning can be understood as a form of horizontal evolution and therefore I am investigating howwe can use the idea of Universal Symbiogenesis to understand the origin and evolution oflanguage. Symbiogenesis (Margulis: 1999; Margulis and Sagan: 2000) is a theory of horizontalevolution which explains the origin of the eukaryotic cell. Within EE however, Dyson, has developeda universal theory of Symbiogenesis, being: “the reattachment of two structures, after they havebeen detached from each other and have evolved along separate paths for a long time, so as to

form a combined structure with behaviour not seen in the separate components" (Dyson,1998:121). Ideas like “conceptual blending” (Turner and Fauconnier, 2002) fit well into this generalframework and can also be applied to the study of the origin and evolution of language.





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Session 10, Chaired by Piet Van de Craen

Mario Alinei

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory of Language Evolution

Keywords: Paleolithic, prehistory, language innatism and language evolution

University of Utrecht (emeritus) - [email protected]

At least five different disciplines, in recent times, have addressed the problem of the origin oflanguage and languages, reaching conclusions that show a remarkable convergence: (1) Ingeneral linguistics, Noam Chomsky’s theory on the psychological and formal foundations oflanguage is centered upon the claim that language is innate. Until recently, this claim formed amajor obstacle for the integration of his theory in a Darwinian, evolutionary framework. A majorbreakthrough, however, independently made by scholars specialized in different sciences (see thefollowing points), has provided an unexpected solution to this problem. (2) In paleoanthropology,the last discoveries have brought Ph. V. Tobias, one of the world leading specialists, to concludethat the question now is no longer whether Homo habilis spoke (which is considered a factualcertainty), but whether the capacity for language was already optionally present in someAustralopithecus, to become obligatory in Homo, as one of his unique traits (Tobias 1996). (3) On

independent evidence, a similar conclusion has been reached also in the field of cognitivesciences, by Steven Pinker: "a form of language could first have emerged [...] after the branchleading to humans split off from the one leading to chimpanzees. The result would be languagelesschimps and approximately five to seven million years in which language could have graduallyevolved" (Pinker 1994, 345). (4) In genetics, the school founded and led by Luca Cavalli Sforza hasmade fundamental discoveries about the relationship between genetics and linguistics, such as:(A) the areal distribution of genetic markers largely corresponds to that of the world languages; (B)language differentiation must have proceeded step by step with the dispersal of humans (probablyHomo sapiens sapiens) out of Africa. More over, the latest outcome of DNA genetic research is thatthat 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans goes back to Paleolithic (e.g. Sykes 2001, 240 ff). (5) Inthe last three decades, archaeology has made quite a few revolutionary advances, among whichthe most well-known is the much higher chronologies of European prehistory, obtained by

radiocarbon and other innovative dating techniques. But the most relevant conclusion for our topicis that also in Europe there is overwhelming evidence for demic and cultural continuity, from thefinal Paleolithic to the Metal Ages. To these advances can also be added the so called UralicContinuity Theory, currently accepted by both archaeologists and linguists of the Uralic area (Finno-Ugric plus Samoyed languages). This theory claims that the Uralic people settled in their presentarea after the deglaciation of Northern Euarasia, and thus they must have present – as groups ofHomo sapiens sapiens - in glacial Eurasia in Paleolithic times. On the basis of these convergingconclusions, a general Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) of language origin and evolution hasbeen proposed (Alinei 1996-2000), the main lines of which are: (I) Language in general andlanguages in particular are much more ancient than traditionally thought. (II) Consequently, theinternal differentiation of the world’s various proto-languages reconstructed by comparativelinguistics (Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Semitic etc.), as well as that of their

differentiated branches (Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Greek etc., Finno-Ugric, Samoyedetc.), must have followed an extremely slow process, associated with the varying episodes of theoriginal migration from Africa, and with the varying cultural stages reached by ethno-linguisticgroups in the different settlement areas, and well-studied by archaeology. (III) Similarly, theemerging and gradual development of the different grammatical and semantic structures of theworld language families – including Indo-European - must now be seen as representing theawakening and the slow development of human conscience in all of its forms in alreadydifferentiated groups of Homo sapiens. (IV) While traditional linguistics, by reifying language, hadmade linguistic change into a sort of biological, organic law of language development, the new,long chronologies of language origins and language development impose a reversal of thisconception: conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception,being caused by language contacts and hybridization, in concomitance with the major

ecological, socio-economic and cultural events that have shaped each area of the globe.With different emphases the PCT has been independently advanced by both archaeologists (e.g.Otte 1994, Häusler 1996) and linguists (e.g. Costa 1998, Poghirc 1992), and is now shared by agrowing number of linguists (e.g. Ballester 2000, Benozzo 2002, Cavazza 2001, Le Du 2002).





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Junichi Toyota

Kaleidoscopic grammar: the emergence of the verb

Keywords: language evolution, verb, cognition, binary

University of Freiburg [email protected]

In this paper, the emergence of the verb in the evolution of language is discussed. It is generallyagreed that language initially had only nouns, probably along with some motion verbs. Variousprevious approaches to the origin and the evolution of language assume that the use of languagewas advantageous to our ancestors for some reasons and the emergence of nouns benefited thespeakers and such pieces of information were duplicated (or imitated) from generation togeneration. The historical change happens, when the information was not properly duplicated. Theproblem of such approaches is the emergence of the verb: the noun is used to refer to an object,which is inherently stative and the verb, to express dynamic event and it helped to form apredicate. If earlier verbs were all used to denote state, the transition from noun to verb can beviewed a gradual one and the change is much easier to understand. However, the earlier verbcan express action, and the copula, an inherently stative verb and frequently used in a predicate

with complement, did not exist at an earlier stage in, say, Proto-Indo-European (cf. Gamkrelidzeand Ivanov 1995). So, the emergence of the verb seems to be an abrupt one, which is notcommon in the historical change of languages in general, and it certainly does not fit in theevolutionary view of the language change.

Facing this problem, I focus on a particular feature of ancient languages, i.e. binary system. Thegrammatical structure of ancient reconstructed languages such as Proto-Indo-European isorganised with the binary opposition, such as stative-dynamic aspectual distinction. The oppositefeatures in the language are complementing each other and thus, stabilising the expressibility. Thisis what I call kaleidoscopic grammar. The binary system can be found not only in human language,but also elsewhere: in most animals, ranging from a single cell microbes to higher life forms such asmammals, the body structure is normally symmetrical, therefore, it is a type of binary construction.

This indicates that the mutation in evolution happened in two places simultaneously. Consideringthe fact that asymmetrical features are far rarer in creatures, some evolutionary biologists such asDawkins (1997: 204-235) claim that symmetry can be a great advantage in evolution (in his term,‘evolution of evolutionability’). The importance of binary or symmetry system does not seem to berestricted to the evolution of animals alone, and some pieces of such evidence can be found inthe history of human civilisation or cognition, such as various trances of symmetrical artefacts (cf.Wynn 2000).

The human cognition generally prefers the time-durable (i.e. stative) expression (cf. Hopper andThompson 1984; Bloom et al. 1980; Shirai and Andersen 1995) and this can be shown in thelanguage acquisition too (e.g. recapitulationist hypothesis. Cf. Lamendella 1976, Givón 1979,Bickerton 1990). Based on the non-linguistic evidence such as artefacts, the binary system can also

be added to this preference of human cognition: the presence of noun at the earlier stage of thelanguage was due to the stativity, but at the same time, our cognition requires a binary oppositionin order to balance the expression. So this can be considered why the verb emerged in language,to play an opposition role to the noun. This does not involve the generally assumed biologicalaccount of language development, and the cognition is given more prominence in this case.




Jim Scoggins

A Study to demonstrate the use of signed language in medieval and renaissance paintings andsculpture

Registered, American Inst. of Architects, Interpreter for [email protected]

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND PURPOSE

This study was designed to validate the discovery of signed language in paintings and sculpture ofthe Medieval and Renaissance periods.The purpose of this study was to focus on the recent discovery of signed language in severalhundred paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. This was achieved by:(1) identifying and reporting examples of signed language in specific paintings and sculpture of theMedieval and Renaissance periods; (2) determining the feasibility of validating the findings of theStudy; (3) executing a validation system that will show the existence of signed language inpaintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, if feasible; (4) delineate findingsand make recommendations for further study in this field.

PROCEDURES

This study utilized historical review, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. Thequantitative research utilized a survey to identify specific examples of signed language used insamples of paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Experts in signlanguage for the deaf were utilized for this survey. The qualitative research involved a study oftwenty-five (25) samples of paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods thatwere identified in the quantitative research as exhibiting signed language utilizing those thatresponded to the survey. A criterion was developed to choose 25 from 640 examples. A panel ofexperts was used to validate the research instruments and recommendations proposed in thestudy. A bibliography of seventy-five scientific journals was utilized for reference.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This discovery of signed language in paintings and sculptures of the Medieval and Renaissanceperiods is both an original and heretofore unknown step in the development of communicationsystems by mankind. Some efforts were visualized to make this the universal language of man. ArtHistorians will now find it necessary to reevaluate paintings and sculpture of this period by thisadditional standard.

evolutionist epistemology

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