Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

We do not know how in fact language evolved, and in the absence of fossil evidence we may never know exactly how it evolved, but we do know that it did evolve, and we ought at least to be able to answer the question, What are the logical, conceptual relations between prelinguistic forms of consciousness and intentionality and the evolved linguistic forms?

And what sorts of cognitive capacities did they have beforehand on which language could have evolved?

When I ask the question, “How could language have evolved?” I mean something quite different from empirical researchers who ask a different question using the same sentence.

We need to show how prelinguistic forms of intentionality could have evolved into human social and institutional reality.

Such reflections about the distinction between natural ways of conveying intentional states, and evolved conventional ways, will I think force us to distinguish representation from expression.

In following the common sense idea that language could have evolved, and may in fact have evolved, out of prelinguistic forms of intentionality we found that language so evolved provides something not present in pre linguistic intentionality, the public assumption of commitments.

We know from historical linguistics that it would have evolved into different dialects, all of which would be conventional.

In a sense the Roman Empire gave its subjects a common language, but over John R. Searle WhatisLanguageforLandauFNLSavas Page 33 6 November, 2006 two thousand years they evolved into contemporary, mutually incomprehensible, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romantsch, etc. So even assuming one biologically determined language, the free will of language speakers would have evolved the Ursprache into any number of conventional dialects, where “conventional” implies both arbitrariness and normativity.

The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

In contrast, we suggest that FLN—the computational mechanism of recursion—is recently evolved and unique to our species” (p. 1573).