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Social cognition, stag Hunts, and the evolution of language
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Moore, Richard (2017) Social cognition, stag Hunts, and the evolution of language. Biology & Philosophy, 32 . pp. 797-818. doi:10.1007/s10539-017-9598-7 ISSN 0169-3867.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9598-7
Abstract
According to the socio-cognitive revolution (SCR) hypothesis, humans but not other great apes acquire language because only we possess the socio-cognitive abilities required for Gricean communication, which is a pre-requisite of language development. On this view, language emerged only following a socio-cognitive revolution in the hominin lineage that took place after the split of the Pan-Homo clade. In this paper, I argue that the SCR hypothesis is wrong. The driving forces in language evolution were not sweeping biologically driven changes to hominin social cognition. Our LCA with non-human great apes was likely already a Gricean communicator, and what came with evolution was not a raft of new socio-cognitive abilities, but subtle tweaks to existing ones. It was these tweaks, operating in conjunction with more dramatic ecological changes and a significant increase in general processing power, that set our ancestors on the road to language.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Biology & Philosophy | ||||||||
Publisher: | Springer | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0169-3867 | ||||||||
Official Date: | December 2017 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 32 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 797-818 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1007/s10539-017-9598-7 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
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