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Title: Language and Human Behavior (The Jessie and John Danz Lectures) by Derek Bickerton ISBN: 0-295-97458-3 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: July, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Human Cognition Came Out of Syntax
Comment: If you like Dennett's books, I urge you to read this one, "Language and Human Bahavior", by Bickerton. The whole book, which is not long, developes a single argument clearly and cogently. It is Vytgotsky's argument (see "Thought and Language" written in 1934), but updated and expanded. In Bickerton's own words: "human cognition came out of language" (page 160), though the title of this review is more exact. So Vygotsky from psychology and Bickerton from linguistics reach the same heretical conclusion. I believe very deeply that they are right.
Summary: The book is very interesting and very well written; it was easy reading for me. It deserves the best score and I strongly recommend it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Intelligence came from language, not vice versa
Comment: It is easy to suspect that we humans can talk because we have smart brains. Bickerton instead argues that as our brains developed the capacity for speech we thereby became smart. Like other animals we have "on-line" thinking to help us survive. This consists of sensory('objective') knowledge of the world and ('subjective') inner states of consciousness. These latter are sometimes automatic responses to sensory knowledge --when you see a lion slinking, run! Sometimes they are awareness of inner states such as pain or body position. On-line thinking is automatic, either instinctual or a kind of learned stimulus-response process. But humans also have "off-line" consciousness. This consists of mental representations of the world and of ourselves, but even of events that are not really occuring. We can think about things not present to us, far away or in the past or in possible futures. So we can evaluate possibilities and make choices in our head; we can plan ahead. Bickerton uses his expertise in pidgin and creole languages to compare different kinds of thought. By this he shows that full "online" thinking is much more than koko, washoe, and kanzi, the sign-using primates (and two-year old children for that matter) are able to do. How he gets from pidgin and creoles to his conclusions is a major aspect of the book. He does it clearly and elegantly. Overall, he argues that as the mind developed capacity for full language, it was also developing the capacity to formulate, hold on to, and manipulate concepts and the relations among them. This language skill is also skill at thinking. So as the human brain developed the structures and connections to make language possible, this created the possibility of offline thought--the power to manipulate ideas well beyond the limits of ordinary "online" sensory experience and flash responses to those experiences.
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Title: Language & Species by Derek Bickerton ISBN: 0226046117 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Evolutionary Emergence of Language : Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form by Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, James Hurford ISBN: 0521786967 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 20 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature by Ray Jackendoff ISBN: 0465054625 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain by William H. Calvin, Derek Bickerton ISBN: 0262531984 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition by Ellen Bialystok, Kenji Hakuta ISBN: 0465032818 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: December, 1995 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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