Six Candidates for What Makes Human Cognition Uniquely Human

One of the key candidates for what makes human cognition unique is of course language and symbolic thought. We are “the articulate Mammal” (Aitchison 1998) and an “animal symbolicum” (Cassirer 2006: 31). And if one defining feature truly fits our nature, it is that we are the “symbolic species” (Deacon 1998). But as evolutionary anthropologists Michael Tomasello and his colleagues argue, “saying that only humans have language is like saying that only humans build skyscrapers, when the fact is that only humans (among primates) build freestanding shelters at all” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 690).

Language and Social Cognition

According to them and many other researchers, language and symbolic behaviour, although they certainly are crucial features of human cognition, are derived from human beings’ unique capacities in the social domain. As Willard van Orman Quine pointed out, language is essential a “social art” (Quine 1960: ix). Specifically, it builds on the foundations of infants’ capacities for joint attention, intention-reading, and cultural learning (Tomasello 2003: 58). Linguistic communication, in this view, is essentially a form of joint action rooted in common ground between speaker and hearer (Clark 1996: 3 & 12), in which they make “mutually manifest” relevant changes in their cognitive environment (Sperber & Wilson 1995). This is the precondition for the establishment and (co-)construction of symbolic spaces of meaning and shared perspectives (Graumann 2002, Verhagen 2007: 53f.). These abilities, then, had to evolve prior to language, however great language’s effect on cognition may be in general (Carruthers 2002), and if we look for the origins and defining features of human uniqueness we should probably look in the social domain first.

Corroborating evidence for this view comes from comparisons of brain size among primates. Firstly, there are significant positive correlations between group size and primate neocortex size (Dunbar & Shultz 2007). Secondly, there is also a positive correlation between technological innovation and tool use – which are both facilitated by social learning – on the one hand and brain size on the other (Reader and Laland 2002). Our brain, it seems, is essential a “social brain” that evolved to cope with the affordances of a primate social world that frequently got more complex (Dunbar & Shultz 2007, Lewin 2005: 220f.). Thus, “although innovation, tool use, and technological invention may have played a crucial role in the evolution of ape and human brains, these skills were probably built upon mental computations that had their origins and foundations in social interactions” (Cheney & Seyfarth 2007: 283).

Language, Mental Representations, and Symbolic Thought

But this of course does not mean that we expect all other unique aspects of human cognition to be derivative of social cognition. The development of higher social cognition only presented the enabling context and cognitive starting point for other human mental capacities to evolve. To pick up the example again, language, for instance, does not only have an interactive function but also a symbolic one. It creates ‘symbolic assemblies’ that function as form-meaning pairings (Evans & Green 2006: 6f.). But the ability to acquire arbitrary symbolic units itself does not appear to be uniquely human, as it has been demonstrated in great apes, parrots, dolphins and dogs (see Tomasello 2008: 254ff.). But there are two essential differences between the symbolic abilities of humans and other animals: First, even with lexigram- or sign language-trained apes there appears to be nothing that even comes close to the production and joint engagement skills possessed by human children (production) or even pre-verbal infants (joint engagement) (Tomasello 2008: 109ff.).

Secondly, human symbols and concepts function as ‘decoupled representations’ which are not directly bound to a reaction pattern as in most other animal species, including symbol-trained animals, and enable significant “response breadth” and planning (Sterelny 2003: 29f.). In addition, symbolic thought and linguistic usage does not only rely on the comprehension and production of arbitrary signs, but essentially depends on our capacity for abstract, relational, analogical, higher-order, hierarchical and role-governed compositional thought. (Deacon 1998, Jackendoff 2007, Penn et al. 2008).

We now have two tentative candidates for what makes us special:

(1) The capacity to develop a shared point of view or “we-perspective” (Tuomela 2007: 46f.) and jointly engage in and attend to shared goals, plans and intentions in a cooperative collaborative activity within a joint attentional frame and a shared frame of reference (Tomasello et al. 2005).

(2) A conceptual system that is able to reinterpret and re-describe sensory as well as cognitive data and store them in an abstract, decoupled format that can be used for symbolic, relational and analogical reasoning (Penn et al. 2008).

We can now imagine a step in evolution where these two capacities were further integrated, yielding the analogical realization that others are “like me” (the capacity developed to

(3) actively attribute mental states to others in the same sense as one experience mental events and states oneself, that is to, have a “theory of mind” (Premack & Woodruff 1978).

Further, an integration of these capacities, and continuing collaborations and mutual engagements in social and other activities, would lead to the emergence of

(4) shared, intersubjectively overlapping frames of references or coordinate systems into which abstract and non-abstract conceptual representations could be integrated and imported in a systematic fashion, and within which shared percepts and concepts could be blended, unified, and related to each other in a role-governed fashion. (Bühler 1934, Fauconnier & Turner 2002).

In short, the first species in the hominin line who developed this capacity would not only have shared a perceptual world with his or her conspecifics, but they would inhabit a shared mental world. In this collective “we-perspective” and shared frame of reference mediated by joint engagement, they would then be able to create a shared “symbolic niche” in which meaningful cultural practices and shared symbolic constructs, such as institutions, could be co-created and which would ‘come alive’ and have actual real-world significance (Harder fc, Tuomela 2007). By jointly attending to and attaching meaning to cultural artefacts and practices homo gave them intersubjective value and reality and created ‘institutional realities’ (Searle 1995, Moll & Tomasello 2007). It is probable that from the dawn of human culture cognition accelerated in a spiralling and cumulative cognition-culture feedback loop

Additionally, when we are able to project ourselves and others into the same frame of reference, and can also project more abstract symbolic units into this coordinate system, it follows that along and co-evolving with these other changes a capacity

(5) for projecting ourselves and others backwards or forwards into past and future situations is probable to have evolved, that is, a capacity for mental time travel, including the ability to retrieve and re-live episodic memories of past autobiographical events (Tulving 2005) as well as prospective foresight enabling the planning of future actions and events (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007).

Finally, these changes were certainly accompanied co-evolutionary by a means of externalising shared proto-concepts and communicatively coordinating cooperative activities in a flexible manner via the vocal and gestural level. (Hurford 2007, Tomasello 2008). At some time, concepts became public, that is “they became the sorts of things that lots of people can, and do, share” (Fodor 1998: 28).

It is conceivable that “building upon pre-existing representational schemes in animals” (Hurford 2007: 140), and a general perceptual and cognitive machinery that scaffolded them (Jackendoff 2007: 388), ever increasing linguistic abilities and concepts evolved step by step. They probably did evolve from the proto-concepts we can see in the higher mammals of today into the pre-linguistic concepts that are argued to exist in some of the other great apes (especially those individuals who are enculturated and symbol-trained) and then into some form of proto-language (Bickerton 2009). At some time, this proto-language with already quite sophisticated conceptual representations then evolved into the fully human language we know today.

In summary, a truly human language faculty evolved, which is

(6) a collection of unique mental structures – phonology (externalisation) and syntax (merging constituents (A + B = [AB] and creating blended new ‘mental building blocks’ which can be merged with other constituents recursively [AB] + C = [ABC]) – and the interfaces between these mental structures and the conceptual system. These “specific unique building blocks for phonology, syntax, and their connection to concepts” are what makes language and language acquisition possible (Jackendoff 2007: 388f.).

This account of course has not mentioned important ecological factors (e.g. navigation, foraging, predator avoidance) that will have contributed to these developments and constructed niches in which these factors could develop further and faster. In the case of language, for example both “fast processing and mapping from hierarchical structure to temporal ordering,” which are two fundamentally important features of human language, “can be attributed to progresses in the timing of actions necessary for producing and using hand axes, [as well as throwing] that is, to sensomotoric skills that could have been adapted for language” (Wunderlich 2006). Support for this thesis comes from the fact that PET scans have shown a that there is neural circuitry supporting and involved in both language production and early stone age tool-making (Stout et al. 2008, see also here).

It also fits with our general model that there is mounting evidence “that much temporally sequenced hierarchical structure is constructed by the same part of the brain […] whether the material being assembled is language, dance, hand movements, or music (Jackendoff 2007: 388). Additional work on mirror neurons, motor neurons that activate both when an action is performed and observed (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004), points in the direction that they are involved in understanding the goal-related actions of others in a social context. The evolution of a Mirror Neuron System for understanding actions and intentions may have been a crucial part of the cognitive development that made human thinking possible.

This is also supported by the fact that the human conceptual system has two distinctive properties: One the one hand it enables abstract, relational, role-governed, symbolic thinking (Penn et al. 2008). But at the same time human concepts are still deeply rooted in, based on, and grounded in embodied sensori-motor experience (Barsalou 1999, Gallese & Lakoff 2005). This holds even for linguistic concepts and metaphors, which have been shown to be partly grounded in embodied cognition (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). To get back to language, a final indicator of the connectedness of social interaction and parts of higher-order cognition comes from proposals that “neural circuits doing computations to control the hierarchy of goal-related actions were ‘exploited’ to serve the newly acquired function of language syntax” (Gallese 2007: 666).

Now that we have some theoretical proposals on crucial aspects of human uniqueness (although this list is far from being definitive and exclusive), we can see in how far they are borne out by the comparative and developmental data that is available.

References:

Aitchison, Jean. 1998. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London / New York: Routledge.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” Behavioral and Brain Scienes 22.4: 577–609.

Bickerton, Derek (2009): Adams Tongue: How Humans Made Language. How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bühler, Karl (1934): Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Fischer.

Carruthers, Peter (2002), The cognitive functions of language, in: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (6),

657–726

Cassirer, Ernst (2006): An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Hrsg. v. Maureen Lukay. Hamburg: Meiner (Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Band 23).

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. (2007) Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clark, Herbert (1996): Use of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deacon, Terrence William (1997). The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Dunbar, R. I. M. and Susanne Shultz. (2007)“Evolution in the Social Brain” Science 317: 1344-1347

Evans, Vyvyan and Melanie Green (2006): Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Fodor, Jerry A. (1998) Concepts. Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford Congitive Science Series. Oxford: Clarendon.

Gallese, Vittorio (2007). Before and below 'theory of mind': Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 362 (1480):659-669

Gallese Vittorio, Lakoff George (2005) The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Reason and Language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, , 22:455-479

Graumann, Carl F. (2002): Explicit and Implicit Perspectivity. In: Carl F. Graumann und Werner Kallmeyer (Eds): Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 25-40.

Harder, Peter (fc) Conceptual construal and social construction .

Hurford, James M. (2007): The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jackendoff, Ray (2007): Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The State of the Art, The Linguistic Review 24, 347-401.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Lewin, Roger (2005): Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moll, Henrike, & Michael Tomasello. (2007) Co-operation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 362: 639-648.

Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak. and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2): 109-130.

Premack, David und Guy Woodruff (1978): Does the Chimpanzee have a

Theory of Mind? In: Behavioral and Bran Sciences 1: 515-526.

Reader, S.M. and K.N. Laland. 2002. “Social Intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates” PNAS 99: 4436-4441.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192.

Searle, John R. (1995): The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free

Press.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre, Wilson (1995): Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Second Edition. Malden et al.: Blackwell.

Suddendorf, Thomas & Michael C. Corballis. (2007) The Evolution of Foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3: 219-313.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden u.a.: Blackwell.

Stout D., N. Toth , K. Schick, and T. Chaminade (2008): Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Proclamations of the Royal Society of London B: Biological. Sciences 363(1499):1939-49.

Tomasello, Michael (2003): Constructing A Language. A Usage-Based Approach. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, Michael (2008): The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll (2005): Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:5, 675–691

Tuomela, Raimo (2007): The Philosophy of Sociality: From A Shared Point of View.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tulving, E. 2005. Episodic memory and autonoesis: Uniquely human? In H. S. Terrace, & J. Metcalfe (Eds.), The Missing Link in Cognition (pp. 4-56). NewYork, NY: Oxford University Press.

Quine, Willard van Orman (1960): Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Verhagen, Arie (2007): Construal and Perspectivization. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wunderlich, Dieter (2006): “What forced syntax to emerge?” In H.-M. Gärtner et al. (eds.) Between 40 and 60 puzzles for Krifka. ZAS Berlin

Perspectives on "Perspective" – Part II

This post continues my fragmentary list of disciplines in which the phenomenon of “perspective” plays a crucial role. So far, I’ve discussed the importance of perspective from a developmental/ ontogenetic point of view, an evolutionary/ comparative point of view and, more generally, from a cognitive point of view.

In this post I’ll write a bit about some aspects of perspective from a philosophical point of view as well as from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

4. Perspective from a philosophical point of view

Perspective also plays an important role in all conscious processes, as

“consciousnesses can be defined as being conscious of perspectivally selected aspects of some phenomenon.” (Allwood 2006).

This perspectival nature of consciousness can largely be attributed to our embodiment, as discussed in the previous post.

On the other hand, we have to be careful in equating all the interesting properties of consciousness with embodiment. There are quite radical theories out there that pose that consciousness is only a function of our embodied and situated interaction with the world. Consciousness in this way is not only an essential part of, but is in fact constituted by the interaction of mind, body, and world.

The “cognition is for action”-hypothesis seems to be more plausible in this respect. It poses that consciousness is a precondition for being in and navigating our everyday world. (Prinz in press). A central function of consciousness is that it is part of a system that “decouples” representations from their direct linkage to action chains, processes and analyzes these representations, generalizes them to schemas, and makes these newly formed multifaceted representations available to various action systems.

A conscious intentional system able to pre-select among various options by analyzing decoupled representations thereby extends the response breadth of an organism. (Sterelny 2003). Consciousness is thus fundamentally linked to our bodies and the world, but not necessarily constituted by it (Prinz in press).

What this tells us is that is useful to look at the phenomenon of perspective from a functional point of view, i.e. what it means for cognition and mental processes to be perspectival, body based and action-oriented. One application of this form of inquiry would be to ask what we actually need information for:

“Viewpoint-specific information is needed to determine how your goal can best be realized: it’s information that provides a means to the end.” (Prinz in press).

We should of course also consider that all information we acquire is perspectivally mediated, either through our embodiment, or through the perspectival nature of the medium itself. This holds for the many potential perspectives intrinsic to language (Köller 2004) as well as for “the media” in a broader sense, which make accessible to us information that we otherwise never would’ve known about.

The structure and organization of our knowledge is thus always deeply rooted in and influenced by the perspectival nature of the information transmitters. Metaphorically we could almost go as far as saying that we form an integrated circuitry, an interface with our environment, including electronic devices (Jean Baudrillard 1988). Tools and artifacts, including information transmission devices such as book, the internet, TV, etc. can in general be seen as “the extensions of man” (McLuhan 1964), with which we interface with basically from birth, thus creating some kind of feedback loop

“where we shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us” (McLuhan 1964)

making us “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003). This creates

“the problem of understanding how human thought and reason is born out of looping interactions between material brains, material bodies, and complex cultural and technological environments. We create these supportive environments, but they create us too. We exist, as the thinking things we are, only thanks to a baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural and technological scaffolding. Understanding this evolutionarily novel arrangement is crucial for our science, our morals, and our self-image both as persons and as a species.” (Clark 2003)

Although this all may sound a bit esoteric and we should definitely remember Jesse Prinz’s caveat, what seems clear is that perspective is a phenomenon born out of

1.the development of perspectival mental representations during childhood which arose from the interaction with others and through the integration of perspectival concepts and perspectives mediated by language (Tomasello 1999, Clark 1997)

2. The perspectival sense of selfhood that came out of shared attention and intentions, cooperative interactions, and the unification and evaluation of conflicting perspectives on self and others, enabling the child to integrate various perspectives and life episodes into a single, unified concept of self (Moll 2007)

3. The fact that not only our own view of the world is linked to a certain point of view, but that the same holds true for the information we get from all kinds of sources, which thus creates a kind of dialogue between our own perspective and the various perspectives embodied in the information coming from the outside world.

5. Perspective from a linguistic perspective

There are a lot of linguists, especially cognitive linguists who treat the phenomenon of perspective as central to language. On this view, language can be seen as inherently embodying the manifold perspectives of all language users of the past who used it to allocate attention, and ‘perspectivize’ certain salient and relevant features of a situation or event (for such a view, see e.g. Köller 2004, Tomasello 1999).

Cognitive linguists assume that language reflects “at least partially, the nature and organisation of the conceptual system” (Evans & Wood 2006: 170), thus giving us important insights into how the mind works. If linguistic organization is partially illustrative of the way we conceptualize things, it follows that if perspective is an important aspect of linguistic structure, it is also a fundamental property of cognition:

“The perspectival nature of linguistic meaning implies that the world is not objectively reflected in the language: the categorization function of the language imposes a structure on the world rather than just mirroring objective reality (Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007: 5).”

To make this clearer, consider the following examples (taken from Evans & Wood 2006: 41ff.):

a. The boy kicks over the vase.

b. The vase is kicked over.

c. The vase smashes into bits.

d. The vase is in bits.

In each of this sentences another aspect of the scene is made salient.

(a) can be seen as the unmarked case in which the event as a whole is represented, and is thus the main focus of the description.

In (b) the main focus lies on the action itself and its PATIENT (i.e. the receiving end of the action), whereas the AGENT, is only weakly represented, i.e. in the background.

In (c) the action chain of the object, its internal change and the resulting state (b = in bits) are ‘profiled’, i.e. made the center of attention.

(d), on the other hand focuses on the end state of the object.

We can thus say that each sentence embodies a different perspective on the state of events.

This observation is a major hallmark of cognitive linguistics and the notion of “perspective” or something related to it can thus be found in the terminology of many cognitive linguists. This holds, for example, for the domain of metaphor, where “a recurrent characteristic determining the nature of metaphor has been that it presents its target from a particular point of view.” (Dirven et al. 2007: 1226). Max Black (1993) explicitly calls this phenomenon “perspective”, whereas Lakoff & Johnson (1980) call it ”highlighting and hiding” (see Dirven et al. 2007: 1226).

Ronald Langacker (e.g. 2007) also describes perspective, i.e. “the linguistic manifestations of the position from which a situation is viewed” (see Verhagen 2007: 53) as a central dimension of the construal operations that we employ when using and comprehending language. This phenomenon is also deeply intertwined with the phenomenon of “profiling”, where one aspect of a scene appears salient and constitutes the figure which is positioned against a background. In Rubin’s famous face/vase-figure, for example, you can see either the face as figure and the vase as ground, or vice versa:

Leonard Talmy (2000) also proposes that the “Perspectival System” is one of the four schematic systems that structure scenes expressed by language. In his view this system:

“includes schematic categories that relate to the spatial or temporal perspective point from which a scene is viewed, the distance of the perspective point from the entity viewed, the change of perspective point over time and so on” (Evans & Wood 2006: 194).

Consider the following two examples where the main difference between the sentences is the ‘perspective point’:

(Talmy 2000: 69, see also Evans & Wood 2006: 197):

The door slowly opened and two men walked in. (Interior perspective point)

Exterior perspective point (Two men slowly opened the door and walked in.)

A perspective point seems to be exactly the same as what Karl Bühler (1934) called an origo point located on a ‘coordinate system of subjective orientation’, and I prefer Bühler’s terminology over that of Talmy. Still Talmy’s work seems to very insightful and fundamental and I will try to write a bit more about it in a subsequent post.

Similary, and as I described in an earlier post, Brian MacWhinney argues that perspective taking is a fundamental cognitive process that enables language to bind together the five imagery subsystems of direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, social roles, and mental acts (MacWhinney 2005). MacWhinney also makes the observation that the expression and recognition of the deictic center of an utterance and/or a mental representation is an important linguistic and cognitive operation, and, just as Talmy, doesn’t refer to Bühler. Following Duchan et al. (1995) MacWhinney differentiates between three deictic frameworks: egocentric, allocentric and geocentric.:

“Egocentric deixis directly encodes the perspective of the speaker. The spatial position of the speaker becomes the deictic center or “here.”” (MacWhinney 2005: 203). This would be what following Bühler is called the Here-Now-I-Origo.

The allocentric frame projects

“the deictic center onto an external object”, and makes us assume “the perspective of another object and then [judge] locations from the viewpoint of that object”(MacWhinney 2005: 203).

One example would be “the pool in front of the house,” where the pool’s position is defined relative to the location of the house. Other, more mundane examples of the allocentric frame are “under the table”, “behind the desk”, “next to the zombie” etc.

The geocentric frame

"enforces a perspective based on fixed external landmarks, such as the position of a mountain range, the sun, the North Star, the North Pole, or a river.” (MacWhinney 2005: 203).

According to MacWhinney there are languages that make excessive use of this kind of perspective taking:

In Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language, for example, “rather than asking someone to “move back from the table,” one might say, “move a bit to the mountain.” (MacWhinney 2005: 203)

MacWhinney argues that linguistic perspective taking is based on the construction of a “full-blown Cartesian coordinate system” and that it involves the construction of “a temporary Cartesian grid” based on the conceptual construal of a given linguistic event and the dominant integrated propositional objects therein (MacWhinney 2005: 203f.)

This proposal seems perfectly congruent with Karl Bühler’s description and of mental representations involving a “coordinate system of subjective orientation”. It also squares well with my own clumsy extrapolation of this system following Wilhlem Köller’s (2004) notion of a ‘systemic space’/’coordinate system’ into which propositional objects and concepts can be transferred, imported, which then can be blended and manipulated.

I really find it exciting that MacWhinney’s approach is so similar to that taken by Karl Bühler, and more generally, that a lot of approaches to perspective and cognition converge on the metaphor of a coordinate system. This metaphor may prove to have great integrative power in the cognitive sciences and I’m looking forward what will come of it.

That’s it for now. In the future I will try to address some of the proposals outlined here in more detail. For the time being, I hope to have shown that studying the various forms of perspective can be a rewarding and cool enterprise.

Somewhere in the distant future, the phenomenon of perspective may prove an important aspect of many inquiries into all cognitive phenomena, and studying the perspectivity intrinsic to cognitive systems and their various emanations and expressions may be a useful overarching paradigm able to combine and integrate various areas of research.

References:

Allwood, Jens (2006): 'Consciousness, Thought and Language' In K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, 44-53.

Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.

Clark, Andy (2003): Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and. the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford: Oxoford University Press-

Clark, Eve V. (1997): Conceptual Perspective and Lexical Choice in Acquisition. In: Cognition 64:1–37.

Dirven, René, Frank Polzenhagen, and Hans-Georg Wolf Cognitive Linguistics, Ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duchan, J. F., Bruder, G. A., & Hewitt, L. E. (1995). Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Evans, Vyvyan and Rachel Wood (2006): Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Geeraerts, Dirk and Herbert Cuyckens (2007): Introducing Cognitive Linguistics. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2007): Cognitive Grammar. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980): Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kannetzky, Frank (2007): Weder Bewußtseinsimmanenz noch Schnittpunktexistenz. Überlegungen zum Begriff der Person. In: F. Kannetzky/H. Tegtmeyer (Hrsg.): Personalität. Leipzig: Universitätsverlag

Köller, Wilhelm (2004): Perspektivität und Sprache. Zur Struktur von Objektivierungsformen in Bildern, im Denken und in der Sprache. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter.

MacWhinney, Brian (2005): The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective. In: Diane Pecher und Rolf A. Zwaan (Eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199-223.

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall (1964): Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Moll, Henrike (2007). Person und Perspektivität – Kooperation und soziale Kognition beim Menschen. In F. Kannetzky & H. Tegtmeyer (Eds.), Leipziger Schriften zur Philosophie. Personalität – Studien zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Philosophie, 37-56. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden: Blackwell.

Talmy, Leonard (2000) Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2 vols). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tomasello, Michael (1999): The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press

Verhagen, Arie (2007): Construal and Perspectivization. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perspectives on “Perspective” – Part I

Since in my previous posts on the phenomenon of perspective - i.e. the fact that we tend to view and (re)present thoughts and states of facts in the world in highly specifiy, perspectival ways, - I have mainly focused on the work of German linguist Wilhelm Köller and his (2004) book “Perspektivität und Sprache” (Perspectivity and Language) and how his thoughts relate to those of other linguists, developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists, etc., I wanted to represent more fully the work of some scholars whose work also focuses on the notion of perspective.

Scholars who make important contributions under the heading of perspective or perspectivity include, for example.:

- developmental and comparative psychologists Michael Tomasello and Henrike Moll from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,

- psychologist Carl F. Graumann, former Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, who died in 2007

- linguist Brian MacWhinney, Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

- developmental psychologist Josef Perner of the University of Salzburg, Austria

- cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.

- cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York

But in order to get a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon of perspective in general, let’s first untangle the various forms of inquiry into the whole range of phenomena that can be subsumed under the heading of perspective.

Basically, we can look at perspective from various points of views, which of course, have to be integrated for a full grasp of the notion of perspective. For example:

1. Perspective from a developmental/ontogenetic point of view

From a developmental perspective we can ask when and how children come to be able to take the viewpoint of another person, first visually (Level 1, perspective taking, e.g. Flavell 1988, Moll & Tomasello 2006), then on a mental level of “putting oneself in the cognitive shoes of someone else” (Tomasello 1999). More generally we can ask, how Children become able to grasp not only that an object looks different from a different point of view, but also how the object might look like from a certain perspective (Level 2, perspective-taking, Flavell 1988).

In this regard it’s of special interest that perspective taking is a social-cognitive skill, and thus to look at children’s perspective taking and setting in cooperative and interactive situations. On a later stage of development, it’s a major research issue how children come to construe a “Theory of Mind” which allows them to attribute mental states to others, and to include these attributions in their predictions and thus also their interactions with other people.

This ability may reflect a full understanding of the concept of perspective, allowing children to compare differing perspectives on a phenomenon and to select amongst competing perspectives (Perner et al. 2002).

It is also likely that the development of an concept of self crucially depends on our interactions with others (Mead 1934), and especially on the child’s developing ability to understand perspectives. This allows her to contrast various views of the world and to understand herself by adopting other people’s perspective on herself, thus learning to see herself through the eyes of others. She also learns to see herself from different temporal perspectives and episodes, and to integrate these different perspectives into a unified view of herself as a person (Moll 2007)

2. Perspective from an Evolutionary/Comparative point of view

From an evolutionary perspective, we can look at how the ability to take and set perspective arose in the phylogenetic history of our species, and on which evolutionary foundations this ability was built. We can thus pose the same questions we asked in regard to children for the role-taking abilities of chimpanzees and other non-human primates (for a review see Tomasello et al. 2005).

Another key issue is the question which role cooperative behaviors with shared goals and intentions, which essentially depend on the notion of perspective, played in the cultural as well as evolutionary history .

Blending this area of research with the former one, we can also assess whether the unique perspectival qualities of human cognition and human interaction lead to special forms of perspectival cognitive representation in ontogenetic development (Moll & Tomasello 2007)

This is of course deeply related to the question how our lineage came to display this diverse set of modern human behaviors, symbolic and otherwise, such as language and especially the ability to understand others as intentional mental agents, which is the foundation of “cumulative” cultural evolution, innovation and shared artifacts, symbols, and institutions (Tomasello et al. 2005, Sterelny 2003). Tomasello et al.(2005) propose that it is the evolution of “shared intentionality”, i.e. the ability to jointly attend to a situation and to

"participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions.” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 675),

was the major stepping stone in the evolution of behaviorally modern humans.

In accordance with th Tomasello et al’s (2005) and Moll & Tomasello’s (2007) hypothesis that this ability is linked to the evolution of uniquely human forms of perspectival mental representations, Benoît Dubreuil (2008) also challenges the role of language as being the driving force behind behavioral modernity, and instead proposes that the key “

"cognitive mechanism behind modern sapiens behavior is one of the general mechanisms underlying the higher form of ToM: the ability to hold in mind a stable representation of conflicting perspectives on objects”

and that this change is especially salient in human evolution by 85,000BP. His main argument is that there is no evidence that the production of the archaeological artefacts that appear around that time, for example, engraved ochres or marine shell beads, presupposes any symbolic abilities of their producers.This is because

"from an archaeological perspective, there is no real way to tell aesthetic and symbolic functions apart.“

But what they definitely entail is that their makers knew that the object they are making looks good from various viewpoints, and especially, in the case of self-decoration, that it makes the wearer look good from someone else’s perspective.

3. Perspective from a cognitive point of view

Perspective is implicated in all forms of cognition in various ways. For starters, there is the fact of embodiment, i.e. the fact that “minds have bodies that are situated in environments” (Poirier et al. 2005: 741). This means, that all perception is essentially of a perspectival nature dependent on how our minds are ‘grounded’ in various kinds of interactions with other physical processes (e.g. Barsalou 2008). Perspective thus refers to the way we categorize and represent the world. All cognition is therefore point of view dependent, or to be more precise, dependent on the frame of reference in which we transport “the parts of an object or the elements of a complex state of affairs and their interrelations” (Graumann 2002: 25). We can thus unify diverging perspectives, construe various perspectives simultaneously, and mentally manipulate them in the domain of our frame of reference, or cognitive coordinate system (see for example Bischof-Köhler & Köhler 2007) We can thus “project” ourselves into various frames of reference. Essentially these perspectives can also be “decoupled” (Sterelny 2003) from our immediate surroundings, and we can mentally travel through time and imagine ourselves in past, future, and hypothetical situations.

Interestingly, neuroscientific evidence points toward the assumption that Thinking about the future, episodic remembering, conceiving the perspective of others (theory of mind) and navigation” engage the same cortical network, “which suggests that they share similar reliance on internal modes of cognition and on brain systems that enable perception of alternative vantage points.” (Buckner & Carrol 2007). Although the authors of this study prefer the term ‘self-projection’, we could also construe these abilities as drawing on the core principle of understanding and taking perspectives.

These observations lend support to the idea that to understand perspectives, we make use of a single representational format, namely a basic frame of reference, as systemic space or coordinate system in which we construe and into which we transport conceptual representations. This idea is further supported by the neuroscientific evidence that

“simulated actions in the first and in the third person perspectives share common representations” (Anquetil & Jeannerod 2007)

i.e. that they work on the same representation, which can be used from different perspectives via a changing Origo- or Viewpoint (Bühler 1934) within the frame of reference.

Another question is the nature of the concepts employed in categorizing and cognizing the world around us. There are indicators that concepts, just like linguistic symbols, are of an essentially perspectival nature, with a specific ‘highlighting-and-hiding pattern’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). If we take Lawrence W. Barsalou’s view of concepts as internally simulated perceptual traces, with abstract concepts “grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. (Barsalou 1999), perspective also plays a central role in the constitution and online activation of concepts and, as we will see, also the interpretation of complex events via metaphorical mappings.

That’s it for now. In my next post I will write a bit about perspective from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics and philosophy.

On a related note, the latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth is out. Go have a look!

References:

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1999): Perceptual Symbol Systems. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22.4, 577-609.

Barsalou, Lawrence W (2008): Grounded Cognition. In: Annual Review of Psychology 59, 617-645.

Bischof-Köhler, Doris & [My paper]Norbert Bischof (2007): Is mental time travel a frame-of-reference issue? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (3):316-7

Buckner, RL & DC Carroll (2007): Self-projection and the brain. In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11.2Bühler, Karl (1934): Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.

Dubreuil, Benoît (2008): What do modern behaviours in Homo sapiens imply for the evolution of language, in A. D. M. Smith, K. Smith, and R. Ferrer i Cancho (eds.), The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference (Evolang 7), World Scientific, 99-106.

Flavell, John H. (1988): The Development of Children’s Knowledge about the Mind: From Cognitive Connections to Mental Representations. In: Janet W. Astington, Paul L. Harris und David R. Olson (eds.): Developing Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141-172.

Graumann, Carl F. (2002): Explicit and Implicit Perspectivity. In: Carl F. Graumann und Werner Kallmeyer (Eds): Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 25-40.

Köller, Wilhelm. 2004. Perspektivität und Sprache. Zur Struktur von Objektivierungsformen in Bildern, im Denken und in der Sprache. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mead, George Herbert. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Moll, Henrike (2007): Person und Perspektivität – Kooperation und soziale Kognition beim Menschen. In F. Kannetzky & H. Tegtmeyer (Eds.), Leipziger Schriften zur Philosophie. Personalität – Studien zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Philosophie, 37-56. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.

Moll, Henrike und Michael Tomasello (2006): Level 1 Perspective-Taking at 24 Months of Age. In: British Journal of Developmental Psychology 24, 603-613.

Moll, Henrike, & Michael Tomasello. 2007. Co-operation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 362: 639-648.

Perner, J., Stummer, S., Sprung, M., & Doherty, M. (2002). Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: Why alternative naming comes with understanding belief. Cognitive Development, 17, 1451-1472.

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale.2005. “Embodied Categorization.” In: Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden: Blackwell.

Tomasello, Michael (1999): The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675– 735.

Perspective, Language Evolution & Genes

As I wrote in my last post, according to Edmund Blair Bolles, evolang08 can be seen as an all-out attack on the Chomskian paradigm. Whereas Bolles’ thinks that the downfall of the Chomskian paradigm is near, I am more skeptical. Of course, many of the talks at evolang08 seem to have dealt severe blows to general conceptions of Chomskyan linguistics, but given that the field of language evolution studies was opposed to many of Chomsky’s ideas from the start, this seems a natural development.

So will the Chomskyan Paradigm simply go extinct in the sense of Kuhn’s (1962) “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”? Clearly in this field people like Juan Uriagereka are in the minority, and this speaks for the diminishing influence of some Chomskian ideas, especially ‘syntactocentrism’, i.e. the idea that "that it is 'as if syntax carved the path interpretation must blindly follow.'" (Chomsky 2007: 24) in general, but on the whole I think that the Chomskyan research paradigm is alive and well, speaking in terms of ‘believers’, as Derek Bickerton (2008) puts it, in the generative enterprise.

EBB himself writes that: “It is only the odd ones among them who are interested enough in the evolution of language to even think of attending such a conference, but the absence of all the leaders of the effort to understand the evolution of generative grammar—Steven Pinker, Marc Hauser, Tecumseh Fitch, Ray Jackendoff, and Paul Bloom — cannot be entirely a coincidence.”

An example of biologically informed research in linguistics – Biolinguistics – in the Chomskyan tradition is the open access journal with the same title which was inaugurated in 2007 and whose second issue appeared this week. The second issue features two very cool papers.

The first, by Boban Arsenijević (2008), of whom I must admit I’d never heard before, is about how we got “From Spatial Cognition to Language.” Arsenijević argues that cognitive mechanisms for spatial computation switched from domain-specific to a domain-general non-spatial use, enabling the production of generative conceptual structures, i.e. complex kinds of displaced concepts which could be located in some kind of ‘cognitive map’ which weren’t inextricably bound to a spatial situation anymore, but instead became a ‘decoupled representation’ (Sterelny 2003).

This cool proposal is also consistent with Brian MacWhinney’s “Perspective Hypothesis”, which argues that: Perspective taking is an essential property of human communication and higher-level cognition, and that

"1. Perspective taking operates online using images created in five systems: direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, social roles, and mental acts.

2. Language uses perspective taking to bind together these five imagery subsystems.

3. Grammar emerges from conversation as a method for supporting accurate tracking and switching of perspective.

4. By tracing perspective shifts in language, children are able to learn the cognitive pathways and mental models sanctioned by their culture.“ (Macwhinney 2005: 198)

I would argue that we can visualize this new representational perspectival format with Bühler’s (1934) ‘coordinate system of subjective orientation’, i.e. as a systemic space (Köller 2004) which through communication is made available to both interlocutors, becomes a shared, ‘mutually manifest’ (Eilan 2005) representation.

Similarly, in a paper for evolang 08, Benôit Dubreuil argues that the key shift to modern human behavior, such as language and other shared symbolic artifacts, was a “domain-general cognitive change”, namely “the capacity to fully represent the point of view of other, what psychologists call ‘level-2 perspective-taking’” (see, e.g., Flavell 1988).

There is another really cool paper in this issue of Biolinguistics called “Languages and Genes: Reflections on Biolinguistics and the Nature–Nurture Question” by D. Robert Ladd, Dan Dediu & Anna R. Kinsella of Edinburgh University. Ladd & Dediu published a really cool paper in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences in 2007 (Dediu & Ladd 2007), in which they described their two genes related to brain growth and development, ASPM and Microcephalin, which show signs of relatively recent natural selection and exist in a more recent (ASPM -D; about 5,800 years old, and MCPH-D, about 37,000 years old) and an older form (ASPM, MCPH).
It turns out that the geographical distribution of these genes is highly correlated with whether people speak tonal languages (like Chinese) or non-tonal languages (like English). In general, populations speaking tonal languages possess the older forms, and populations speaking non-tonal languages have the D (for derived)-versions of the genes, though there of course are exceptions and cases of contamination. In their present paper Ladd et al. (2008) discuss the importance of genetic findings for the linguistic theory. They clarify that they

“are not proposing any sort of deterministic relation between genes and language, only a very indirect and probabilistic one; we certainly are not suggesting that there are 'genes for Chinese'. But we believe that the broad outlines of an explanation based on the interaction of bias and cultural transmission are very plausible indeed“ (Ladd et al. 2008: 118).

They also argue against the notion that the linguistic effects of ASPM-D and MCPH-D were the driving forces of the genes’ natural selection, but rather see them as selectively neutral side-effects, as there are no obvious differences between tonal and non-tonal languages in regards to biological fitness, as both are equally suited to support and scaffold all sorts of varieties of complex human behaviors. (Ladd et al. 2008: 120)
To take an example, in the time of early skyscraper-building in America, a lot of the construction workers were Mohawks, because they were free from giddiness. And although the modern urban environment was completely different from that of their own homes, as were the affordances of steel construction work, they constantly used their native language to communicate about their work, had absolutely no problem to adapt their linguistic output to this new world, and even taught some of their co-workers their language to facilitate communication.

In all, Ladd et al. (2008) propose to move beyond dualistic nature or nature-view and take seriously the fact that

"there is a fundamentally complex and irreducible interaction between one’s genes and one’s language and culture — between nature and nurture” (Ladd et al. 2008: 120).

As an example they cite the recent finding that breastfeeding can indeed have positive effects on a baby’s IQ, but only if she possesses a certain variant of the FADS2 gene (Caspi et al. 2007, Ladd et al. 2008: 120f.).

In their view this also raises problems with static generativist views of language capacities as a perfect system, because from an evolutionary point of view, it makes much more sense to treat language competency as a complex dynamic system, which instead is “diverse and dynamic” and constantly changing on the timeline of both cultural transmission as well as individual development (Ladd et al. 2008: 121).

Ladd et al. see their results on the genetic influences “on typological linguistic features” as being in favor of the claim that there are innate linguistic ‘biases’, “deep cognitive, and ultimately genetic, causes” (Ladd et al. 2008: 121) of some properties of language, thus supporting the Chomskyan research paradigm in some ways. However, they also remark that

“Linguistic theorizing in general, and biolinguistics in particular, must take into account and integrate the idea that human linguistic capacities are variable and probably still evolving" (Ladd et al. 2008: 121).

Moreover, they are also opposed to Chomsky’s stance on the evolution of language, which he renewed in the first issue of Biolinguistics (Chomsky 2007), in which he wrote that:

"The core principle of language, unbounded Merge, must have arisen from some rewiring of the brain, presumably the effect of some small mutation” (Chomsky 2007: 22).

And that this property yielded

“a language of thought, later externalized and used in many ways” (Chomsky 2007: 24).

In contrast, Ladd et al. hold that

“language has evolved through the standard mechanisms of evolutionary biology, in a gradual manner, and that it continues to do so” (Ladd et al. 2008: 122).

In my next post I’ll come back to Chomsky’s position on these issues and some neuroscientific evidence that argues against it.

References:

Arsenijević, Boban (2008): From Spatial Cognition to Language Biolinguistics 2.1, 3–23.

Bickerton, Derek (2008): Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages. New York: Hill and Wang

Bühler, Karl (1934): Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Fischer.

Caspi, Avshalom, Benjamin Williams, Julia Kim–Cohen, Ian W. Craig, Barry J. Milne, Richie Poulton, Leonard C. Schalkwyk, Alan Taylor, Helen Werts & Terrie E. Moffitt. (2007) Moderation of breastfeeding effects on the IQ by genetic variation in fatty acid metabolism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104, 18860-18865.

Chomsky, Noam (2007): Of Minds and Language. In: Biolinguistics 1, 9-27.

Dediu, Dan & D. Robert Ladd. (2007) Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104, 10944-10949.

Eilan, Naomi (2005): Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind. In: Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack und Johannes Roessler (Eds.): Joint Attention: Communicationd and Other Minds. Oxford: Clarendon Press (Issues in Philosophy and Psychology), 1-33.

Flavell, John H. (1988): The Development of Children’s Knowledge about the Mind: From Cognitive Connections to Mental Representations. In: Janet W. Astington, Paul L. Harris und David R. Olson (Eds..): Developing Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141-172.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ladd, D.Robert, Dan Dediu & Anna R. Kinsella (2008): Languages and Genes: Reflections on Biolinguistics and the Nature–Nurture Question. In: Biolinguistics 2.1, 114–126

MacWhinney, Brian (2005): The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective. In: Diane Pecher und Rolf A. Zwaan (Eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199-223.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden: Blackwell.