from month 06/2015

Cats, tacs and kunvenshuns

First of all, thanks to Thom for his excellent book. I agree completely that pragmatics has been under-represented in discussions of the evolution of language (with the notable exceptions you mention). I was, I recall, the only pragmaticist speaking at Evolang in Paris in 2001. I recall also that I ...

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Natural language and the language of thought

I found Thom’s book extremely illuminating, insightful and enjoyable. I learned a great deal from it, and look forward to this online discussion, from which I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more. One point where I was left feeling rather frustrated was in the brief discussion of Chomsky’s views ...

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One explanation to rule them all?

The field of language evolution, it seems to me, is a microcosm of the evolutionary behavioral sciences more generally, in the following sense: you can maintain more or less any position you want, even in the face of data. Is there a Universal Grammar? Some are convinced there is and others are ...

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Inferential communication and information theory

Speaking Our Minds is a timely book that very effectively frames many of the current important problems facing researchers interested in the nature of language and communication. Too few scholars today are worried simultaneously about evolutionary psychology and pragmatics, and ever since my ...

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Intending to speak our mind, and speaking our mind

Thom Scott-Phillips' contribution consists in further grounding Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson’s Relevance Theory into an evolutionary and cognitive framework for the advent of human language. I take it that the central thesis of Scott-Phillips’ book is that language is not an organ. Rather, it ...

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Alignments across disciplines

By Ira Noveck & Tiffany Morisseau *** This book left a very positive impression on us both. It is practically a manifesto for clear thinking about doing proper Gricean analyses in applied areas of communication. Speaking our minds (SOM), which describes and reshapes the theoretical landscape ...

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Combinatoriality and codes

I read this book as part of an interdisciplinary reading group at Cardiff. As we found, there’s a lot to agree with in the book, but the commentary below focuses on two points that we found confusing. Combinatorial communication Chapter 2 claims to be about the impressive expressive power of ...

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Enjoyable, but doesn’t solve the mystery

I have read Thom Scott-Philips’ book with great pleasure, but also with a very critical eye. It is extremely well written— I have read most of it during long train rides and had no difficulties concentrating on it. For someone who is as easily distracted as myself that says quite something. I ...

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Communication, culture, and biology in the evolution of language

Speaking Our Minds is an enjoyable book, providing an excellent survey of some of the perennial and current issues in the field of language evolution, as well as providing a clear summary of Thom’s position on the central role of ostensive-inferential communication in language origins. I hope ...

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No communication without reputation, no reputation without communication

I chose to organise an ICCI book club around Speaking Our Minds because it is an exceptional book in more than one way. It ties together two research traditions¬—the pragmatic approach to linguistics and the Darwinian legacy in biology—, that lie at the heart of our field. It does so in a ...

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Cultural attraction, “standard” cultural evolution, and language

Speaking Our Minds (SOM) was a great pleasure to read. This slim book provides even a non expert like myself with an accessible but, at the same time, in-depth treatment of language evolution. Scott-Phillips proposes us a coherent and, according to him, exhaustive, picture of the origins and ...

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Key notions in the study of communication

I am enthusiastic about Thom Scott-Phillips’ book. It integrates cutting-edge research in several fields, from biology to pragmatics, relevant to the study of the evolution of human communication and it redirects the whole enterprise in a new, much more promising direction. This, however, is not ...

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A few comments on ‘Speaking Our Minds’

By Paulo Sousa and Karolina Prochownik *** We would like first to thank the ICCI team for the invitation to participate in the book club around Thom Scott-Phillips’ Speaking Our Minds, where a new theory of the evolution of human language and communication is put forward. This is a fantastic ...

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Why do children but not apes acquire language?

In his introduction to Thom Scott-Phillips’s Speaking Our Minds, Olivier Morin mentioned my review of the book in the TLS. For reasons of length I could not include more substantive objections to chapters 3 and 4 of Thom’s book in that review. However, since the gaps in his argument undermine ...

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A précis of ‘Speaking Our Minds’

Communication and language have always been key topics for research at the interface of cognition and culture. Rightly so, given the central role that linguistic communication plays in human social and cultural life. In fact, communication and language are doubly important, since they occupy both ...

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‘Speaking Our Minds’ Book Club

We are thrilled to open our second book club, devoted to Thom Scott-Phillips’ book Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different [1], and how language evolved to make it special. The book has received positive reviews in various media, including the Times Literary Supplement (read ...

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An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching

A new article or obvious cognition-and-culture relevance by Michelle Ann Kline on "How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals" in BBS (2015) 38, with commentaries by, among others, Mikołaj Hernik and György Gergely,Laurie ...

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Mind-Body Dualism as Applied to Supernatural Agents: The (Dead) Emperor’s New Mind or Chicken Little

I recently had an animated discussion with one of my colleagues about the wide spread application of mind-body dualism and its many variants in the cognitive science and psychology of religion. My interlocutor asked me why, if I was so right that psychologists who claim the folk intuitively ...

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Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics

A Special Issue on "Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics" of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Volume 129, July 2015) Edited by Michael Morris, Ying-yi Hong and Chi-Yue Chiu. For the Table of content, Normology: Integrating insights about social norms to understand cultural ...

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Social Anthropology meets “the cognitive challenge”

Social Anthropology devotes an exciting special issue to "taking up the cognitive challenge", edited by Rita Astuti and Denis Regnier, with contributions by (among others) Tamara Hale, Charles Stépanoff, Laurence Kaufmann, and Fabrice Clément, along with a debate on Maurice Bloch's (no less ...

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