Agree that the role of language in the framing of thought is overplayed – but then the people who do this are usually those in the media, who “think verbally” and are poor at other forms of thinking.

For instance ideas or theories about ancient admixture events and migrations come to me easily, because I dream in maps. I’m a cartophile and much of my thinking is in the visuo-spatial range. I will literally wake up sometimes and find myself looking over a vast map of peoples and places…

People think differently about the role of language – in part because of how they perceive their own thinking.

From when I was a child, I have always been confused by the emphasis on the role of language, since all of my more compelling thoughts seem to develop outside of it, and I often struggle finding language to express them. There are to-me-clear concepts and relations but they may not correspond to immediately obvious words or linguistic ideas/expressions (but perhaps to related ones in other fields – which would explain a lot of internal borrowing in linguistics, like using musical terms for engineering, etc.).

So, from my (admittedly rather naive) vantage point, complex language evolved to be able to express preexisting complex, personally understood concepts, relations, and processes – not the other way ’round.

In fact, I like “known concepts,” because to me they are real-existing things/thoughts that other people put the work into to label and describe them so now they have a word.

Of course, in a highly evolved society, these things tend to back-feed and work hand-in-hand. Expressed differently, to me, language is the cart, preexisting thoughts and ideas are the horse/oxen.

Well the “first fully conscious individual” – as defined by Jaynes – lived much later than the invention of writing, and in a sense Schizophrenics behave like they are NOT fully conscious. Indeed I would extend the analogy and say that anyone whose life is “guided” by a God like voice offering advice/rebuke in not fully conscious.

@44, T,

Don’t believe everything you hear on NPR – I know 2 broadcasters there, who are well meaning, but have imbibed too much left-liberal koolaid and not enough science for them to have opinions worthy of being broadcast, especially in the realm of science.
As regards skulls becamming smaller and less robust, IMO, after cooking with fire was available, as huge jaws/mandibles and their muscles attached to the head were no longer necessary, and the bones became smaller and less thick, and the shape changed.
As regards smaller brains; first large brains – think Neanderthal and possibly Denisovan – were, based on a recent paper, a result of hominins living in Northern latitudes, with low light levels and hunting, where more visual cortex for signal processing is required to process images of animals. This is not the case at more tropical locations, where light is good year round. So brains becomming smaller, IMO, could be the result of 2 processes:
1. Colonization by peoples evolved at lower latitudes – who possessed smaller brains
2. Evolution of more executive function in the human brain, with a corresponding division of labor between the hemispheres – so you get localized specialization and a better optimization of command and control in the brain – therefore needing less brain volume to accomplish the same tasks.

Probably not. If slaves had counted as full persons for purposes of representation, they’d have had to count as full persons for tax purposes too.

No, but I do think it’s likely that the H. heidelbergensis LCA for Moderns, Neanderthals and Denisovans was cognitively advanced enough to warrant the label of person.

I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to be that first fully conscious individual. It must have been a bizarre and lonely experience.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/02/132591244/our-brains-are-shrinking-are-we-getting-dumber

quote: “A smaller brain is the signature of selection against aggression,”

I think that “the event” was that humans became domesticated (by each other). People got better at following commands of the leaders, and spent less time fighting for leadership. Less in-group fighting = more out-group conquering. So rather than something glorious like discovering the secret of language, I think that it was something like becoming the first domesticated humanoid.

since you’re a fan of philosophy, shouldn’t you be saying he avoids a strict reductionist perspective? clarify please.

this is bizarre. you think people need some deep philosophical reason to engage in the things that you fear? people have been killing people of other tribes even when they share the same religion.

I think I’ll side with the philosophers on this one!

do you mean this more than rhetorically? if so, that’s awful stupid sounding to me. singer is a philosopher, and in fact i i suspect that the average non-christian philosopher might be more open to various things which you might find disturbing.

And once these ideas have cultural acceptance, they can be horribly abused during times of social upheaval to apply those with a different skin color or who belong to a different tribe.

I think I’ll side with the philosophers on this one!

Ha. Noamy would of course agree about the human larynx but disagree about the ability to mentally construct sentences.

Like I said, I’m no Chomskyite, and I’m bringing this up as a devil’s advocate: as far as I can see, though, if you take away any level of the lexicogrammar, you simply don’t have human language. So how does language “come into being” from those smaller parts?

An obvious point: the vocal tract is much more than a larynx. The evolution of language would need to involve, not just a dropped larynx, but the ability to manipulate the vocal tract to produce discrete phonetic sounds; and the ability to put those sounds into discrete phonemes; and the ability to pattern those phonemes in meaningful ways . . . But what is the adaptive value of any of these abilities, on their own, divorced from a full linguistic ability? Minus a ‘language gene’, what would be the adaptive pressure for, say, morphemic production?

Again, I’m not asking because I disagree with the argument in the original post; I’m asking because these are, in a simplified form, the kind of questions the true-believing Chomskyites in my department would ask . . .

So, I think we have to look for non-biological causes for this. There are some astonishingly old finds of modern-looking tools at sporadic locations in Africa, but the technology seems to pop up and then disappear, being reinvented elsewhere. It may be that a critical mass of people lived somewhere, sometime, that was persistent enough to spread.

Of course, if the slave-owners had had their way, slaves would have counted as a full-person for calculating representation in Congress; the three fifths rule was actually an anti-slavery measure.

No book recommendations, as I haven’t written any yet

My opinions are based on my powers of observation and applied rationality…