An evolutionary account of the condition humaine is inevitably confronted with a crucial issue, which has occupied philosophical thinking since antiquity. Any research on the essentials of human existence and the development of mankind draws on complex theoretical devices of research. Furthermore, the objects of research are defined by properties which are obviously significant to the very theories which bring those objects into the limelight. Anything known or know-able to humans about the origins and forms of their being therefore presupposes a well-established realm of meaning, which links the researcher with the objects he is examining. For that matter, a common designator of man has been the term
‘animal rationale’: Man is that particular animal that is rational to himself. He is subject as well as object of the complex investigative endeavors which aim at the clarification of the condition humaine. And although he has been very successful at this enterprise so far, the required clarification comes with a blind spot. Since the realm of meaning constitutes the background of human self-investigation, it is very hard to see how this background may itself become the object of research that strives to understand its origins and the way it came into being.
How is a reasonable narrative about the lineage of symbolic competence possible? An evolutionary account of the condition humaine needs to find an answer to this question. It could easily enough rely on theories of meaning as they have been proposed in the Hobbes-Locke-tradition of language thought, reducing symbolic competence to instrumentally successful signification (Locke [1700] 2008, 257). According to this type of language theory symbolic compe-tence consists of connecting words with ideas, which represent a previously per-ceived world. The words establish an order within the multitude of perper-ceived objects, which allows cognition and orientation. Lines of filiation run from Locke’s locus classicus to the stimulus-response connections of classical behav-iorism on the one hand and to the representationalist theories of meaning in the philosophy of mind, on the other, encouraging a twofold-reduction of human symbolic competence (Taylor 2016, 3 ff., 103 ff.). They suggest reducing human symbolic competence either to a gradually more complex variant of a type of sign-use, which is attested among the higher mammals in animal kingdom, or to a form of information-processing disconnected from the lifeworldly entan-glement of the particular individual organism actualizing this competence. The essays gathered in this section of this book reject both types of reductionism, the behaviorist and the representationalist, thereby defending the embodied
evolu-tion of a specifically human symbolic competence. Let me roughly highlight this double rejection:
If we take human symbolic competence to be a faculty of direct reference mapping between signifiers and significates, we miss the point of specifically human language: its capacity of indirect reference (reference via an inferential network of signs), which presupposes the use of propositions with singular terms (Tugendhat 2003, 13 ff.). And if we take human symbolic competence to be instantiating an information-processing device, we will not become aware of the expressive dimension of language. Johann Gottfried Herder was one of the first prominent philosophers in modern thought to emphasize languages’ acquire-ments of indirectly referring to perceived objects (whereby each word’s and each sentence’s reference presupposes a holistic web of meaning) and of expressing or articulating the speaker’s attitude to those objects (Herder [1771] 1953). Charles Taylor has stressed the tradition of a “constitutive view” on language that bridges two hundred years from Herder and Humboldt to proponents of the main philosophical schools in the 20th century – like pragmatist George Herbert Mead, analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein or phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Taylor 2016, 16). And the current discourse on embodied and enacted cognition is well aware of its philosophical antecedents in the aforesaid philosophies with their romantic predecessors such as Herder (Gallagher 2008).
What Taylor has coined the “constitutive view” of language is a type of theory that considers language’s formative impact on what counts as criteria of its right-ness: “Being constitutive means that language makes possible its own content, in a sense, or opens us to the domain it encodes” (ibid., 40).
Following the constitutive view, language is enmeshed in man’s volitional, emotional and cognitive states. It also mediates these states in the ongoing inter-action with a recalcitrant world. Therefore, language is essential to the way humans enact the world in which they exist. The constitutive view fits into the conceptual framework of situated or embodied cognition according to which – to use Hilary Putnam’s illustrative phrase that he borrowed from Ecclesiastes 4, 12 – cognition consists in a “threefold cord of mind, body, and world” (Putnam 2001). The particular symbolic competence of humans, which we may refer to as their linguistic competence, has to be conceptualized within the triangular structure, which relates mind, body and world. It may then be understood in terms of enacting already established correlations of body, mind, and world in a novel way that reshapes the interrelated entities. In their introduction to this volume, Gregor Etzelmüller and Christian Tewes emphasize that “an evolution-ary approach must explain how natural evolutionevolution-ary processes could bring forth human beings who interact with and are responsive to the ‘space of reasons’
within the socio-cultural realm.” An account of the evolution of symbolic com-petence has to deliver a reasonable theory about how natural evolutionary pro-cesses induced conditions of human co-existence under which established forms of presymbolic sign-use passed the threshold to the symbolic realm.
If the constitutive view of language is appropriate, only an account that builds on the paradigm of embodied cognition will be a promising candidate to
under-stand the evolution of symbolic competence. The following contributions by Thomas Fuchs, Terrence Deacon, Jordan Zlatev, and Matthias Jung are substan-tial contributions to this enterprise.
Thomas Fuchs, Karl-Jaspers-Professor for the Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychopathology at the University of Heidelberg, is entitled to the first contribution to this section because his essay mainly focuses on the onto-genetic transmission from presymbolic to symbolic sign-use in early childhood, whereas the following three essays explore the far distant regions of phylogene-sis. Fuchs’ argumentation starts by correlating the enactivist thesis, according to which cognition is considered to be a form of interaction between organism and environment, with the linguistic thesis of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their seminal book Metaphors We Live By (1980), that bodily experience has had an immense impact on the formation of body-related verbal metaphors. Accord-ing to Fuchs, research suggests, that the semantic-syntactic structure of language imitates the operative intentionality of our body. Speech enacts meaning in a way that may be retranslated by the potential addressees in embodied understanding.
According to Fuchs, the enactive account of language is backed up by neuro-biological findings, which show that the understanding of words activates the same sensorimotor brain areas as the practical engagement those words refer to.
The discovered correlation between language and bodily action serves Fuchs as a path to understanding the development of symbolic language. The second half of his essay deals with the embedding of language acquisition in the relationships of primary and secondary intersubjectivity, highlighting the dynamic between the successively verbalized (or rather ‘linguistified’) intersubjectivity on the one hand and its neurobiological effects due to the plasticity of the infant’s brain on the other.
The newborn, Fuchs points out, perceives her mother not merely as a ‘pic-ture’ or counterpart, but mimetically, by imitating her movements and expres-sions and feeling them from within. Fuchs follows the traits of the infant’s social-ization starting from the “protoconversations” between mother and child. The emergence of the first pointing gestures at the age of nine months transform the dyad of primary intersubjectivity between mother and child into the triadic situation of secondary intersubjectivity, where the actors reciprocally acknowl-edge each other’s intentional orientation toward objects in the immediate envi-ronment. Subsequently, the child can take off to capture the world via bodily co-presence and cooperation. Fuchs sees the vocal gesture originally embedded in an intercorporeal mutual practice that is oriented towards a shared environ-ment, then, during the further course of language developenviron-ment, separating the sign from the physical movement and transporting it into the invisible medium of sound. Via the communication of the mirror neuron system, the voice was able to call up the idea of the intended actions and objects in both speaker and listener. The brain functions become the matrix of language. On the other hand, correlates of semantic meaning are functionally and morphologically inscribed on the brain as neuronal patterns in the course of interaction. Language therefore is not just embodied in our bodily interaction with each other and the world but
via brain functions incorporated into our bodies – the brain is a cultural organ, the affairs of our social life are organic events.
Fuchs’ essay refutes the classical dichotomy between nature and nurture in favor of an irresolvable entanglement of both sides, each affecting and shaping the other. This idea is also picked up by Terrence Deacon in his essay entitled
“On Human (Symbolic) Nature: How the Word Became Flesh”. Deacon, Pro-fessor for Biological Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, complements Fuchs’ ontogenetic approach to the correlation of sociality, lan-guage and brain by the phylogenetic perspective. As beavers have bodies adapted to the aquatic niche that beavers create, symbolic communication, according to Deacon, became an artificial niche to which hominid brains had to adapt. The main focus of Deacon’s essay is the specific cognitive efficiency of symbol use, which led to the mutual exertion of selection pressure from brain functions on language for special learning and production demands and from language struc-tures on brain functions for learnability and ease of use.
Deacon offers an evolutionary theory of signs that is based in Peircean semi-otics. According to his approach semiotic properties are not intrinsic. Anything can be taken as a sign for anything else in any respect (e. g. either icon, index or symbol) so long as an appropriate interpretant process is generated. Icons, characterized by similarity in form, constitute the basis of conceptually grasping indexical correlations, whose context-bound interrelatedness, again, feeds into the conceptualization of symbols as forms of inferential or indirect decontextua-lized reference. For Deacon, symbolic competence is therefore like cracking a code: One not only needs information about what refers to what, but also needs to understand the system of indices, which constitutes the matrix of symbols.
Therefore “symbols are understood as higher-order semiotic relations embed-ded in a context of indexical and iconic modes of reference.” It is obvious, that according to Deacon’s semiotic approach, the development of pointing and joint attention becomes a key stage in the process of hominization. The sophistication with indexicality developed prior to speech and was transferred into the use of words via the vocal gesture, as Deacons argumentation complements the onto-genetic approach in Thomas Fuchs’ essay.
One of the major innovations in the hominization process, Deacon empha-sizes, was the evolution of procedural and episodic memory. Whereas the front-al-striatal-cerebellar circuit creates memory traces for skilled action by constant repetition and fine tuning, the sensory-hippocampal circuit creates memory traces for singular experiences by correlations between features. Both become essential for the emergence of narrative memory with its syntactical as well as semantic structure. Whereas articulatory and syntactical combinatorial skills are acquired procedurally, semantic relationships are acquired episodically. On the basis of narrative memory, icons can be juxtaposed to point to each other in a third iconism, which creates an index. Incongruous juxtapositions can convey abstract symbolic content behind the indexical ‘surface’ of the sign. Even more so, emotions linked to signs may by their correlation be combined in novel ways.
Specifically, human emotions such as nostalgia, awe, humor, irony, derived from
combinatory sign use, are evoked in the process of semiosis. Essential to Dea-con’s evolutionary theory of human sign use is the insight that symbolic refer-ence emerges from and depends upon lower-order indexical and iconic forms of reference. Symbolic reference, which refers to the world only via indices, is thereby anchored in the sensual experiences of bodily creatures interacting with their environment.
Jordan Zlatev, Professor for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University in Swe-den, focuses in his essay “Preconditions in Human Embodiment for the Evo-lution of Symbolic Communication” on the cognitive-semiotic prerequisites for the emergence of symbolic communication in the process of hominization.
Zlatev puts a strong emphasis on the development of human symbolic compe-tence in a prolonged process of adaptation to the challenges of transformed social living conditions. His essay thus puts emphasis on bodily mimesis as a “missing link” to the further development of the ‘symbolic species’ (Terrence Deacon).
Bodily mimesis, according to Zlatev, granted to human cognition and commu-nication pre-linguistic features in five domains: Firstly, it allowed for system-atic rehearsal of motor patterns necessary for the fine-tuning of complex skills;
secondly, it founds highly demanding forms of imitation, in which a novel act is observed, modeled and eventually added to behavioral repertoire; it prepares, thirdly, the ground for episodic memory, bringing the re-enactment of an event through bodily motion under voluntary control; fourthly it provides the basis for the formation of rituals and ritual-mediated group mentality; and finally, through ritually-bound sequences of mime and gesture, bodily mimesis enables intentional communication. Zlatev’s essay suggests answers to the questions of how bodily mimesis could evolve and which consequences it had for the devel-opment of full-fledged symbol use. The answer to the first question is “allopar-enting”, the answer to the second the “multimodal” character of communication.
As to the “alloparenting hypothesis” Zlatev argues in line with Sarah Blaf-fer-Hrdy (2009) that the nurturing attitudes of mothers were extended from their infants to other members of the group, allowing food and childcare to be more equally distributed. The tightening of social bonding, precipitated by the tran-sition of social group organization to alloparenting, prepared the grounds for bodily mimesis. While bodily mimesis, according to Zlatev, opens the way to a representational relation between sign and object, the multimodality of com-munication allowed a gradual shift from predominantly bodily to predomi-nantly vocal modes of expression. Since the vocal medium has less potential for iconic representation, it was prepared to overtake non-iconic representational tasks. Here the specific function of the vocal gesture comes to the fore: the vocal modality, while being grounded in the iconically based bodily gestures, could become increasingly instrumental for higher forms of representation.
For Matthias Jung, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Koblenz, the feature of symbolic – respectively indirect – reference, namely its dependence upon lower-order indexical and iconic forms of reference, is the main reason for conceptualizing the development of language as “Stages of Embodied Articula-tion”. The depth of human experience, as he points out with explicit reference to
Deacon’s works, “is internally connected with our ability to handle linguistic and other symbols.” Supplementing Deacon’s view on the organic basis of language in the development of narrative memory, Jung introduces the concept of artic-ulation “as the embodied alternative to representationalist views of language”.
According to Jung, articulation is “the process of making explicit what the felt meaningfulness of action-associated qualities actually means, where its personal significance lies and to which entities in the world it refers.” It is thereby embod-ied in two distinct aspects: On the one hand, the complex relation of semantic composition and syntactic ordering of meaning requires sensory-motor perfor-mances of the body; on the other hand, the enactment of meaning in speech depends upon bodily qualities and their felt change during the articulation pro-cess. Entangling hermeneutical accounts of experience with those of the prag-matist tradition, Jung argues for the creativity of language, which transforms the “underlying pervasive quality” of situations, in which man interacts with his environment, into meaning. Since subjective: emotional, sensual, qualita-tive aspects of the linguistic event of meaning-formation are enmeshed with the objective aspects of reference, truth-conditional theories of meaning fall short of the formative capacities of embodied language.
But Jung’s argumentation points into yet another direction. Language, he says, is deeply embedded in our bodily practices and states of being, but it also has the potential to transcend its embedding. Referring to Deacon’s semiotic account of the symbolic species, Jung locates the potential of languages to tran-scend the immediacy of context-bound interaction with the environment in their devices for symbolic reference. Symbolic reference, according to Jung, submits
“second-order capabilities” of reflecting on qualitative states of being and action via a network of inferential semantics. Equipped with Deacon’s semiotic differ-entiations, Jung finally ventures a synopsis of Robert Brandom’s logical hierar-chy of semantic explicitness in his seminal book Making it explicit (1994) with Merlin Donald’s narrative about the co-development of human cognition in the cultural process (Donald 1991).
In a first step, adding insights from Brandom’s neopragmatist entanglement of normative pragmatics with inferential semantics to his Deacon-based theory of signs, Jung conceptualizes “a ladder of articulation having three rungs – indexi-cal, symbolical and symbolical-reflexive sign usage . . . grounded in iconic refer-ence” and thereby irresolvably embedded in the qualities of bodily interaction of the human organism with his environment. In a second step, he refers the afore-said rungs in his ladder of articulation to Merlin Donald’s phylogenetic stages in the development of linguistically impregnated human cultures. The point of this endeavor is to formulate a hypothesis about the successive emergence of linguistic characteristics which are specific to what Donald calls the episodic, mimetic, mythic and theoretic stages of human culture. According to this his-torical typology, full-fledged propositional language is thereby restricted to the evolvement of what Donald calls theoretical culture during the 1000-year period of the so-called Axial Age marked by the appearance of monotheistic religions and rationalist philosophies.
The essays collected in this section formulate different strands of a research program which are interlinked but also develop into different directions. The challenge of conceptualizing the symbolic competence of the human species as essentially embodied in organic and social structures calls for the interdisciplin-ary coordination of perspectives, which encompass the child’s first steps into her linguistic socialization as much as the formation of cultural frameworks, in
The essays collected in this section formulate different strands of a research program which are interlinked but also develop into different directions. The challenge of conceptualizing the symbolic competence of the human species as essentially embodied in organic and social structures calls for the interdisciplin-ary coordination of perspectives, which encompass the child’s first steps into her linguistic socialization as much as the formation of cultural frameworks, in