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Prehistoric cognition by description: a Russellian approach to the upper paleolithic

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Abstract

A cultural change occurred roughly 40,000 years ago. For the first time, there was evidence of belief in unseen agents and an afterlife. Before this time, humans did not show widespread evidence of being able to think about objects, persons, and other agents that they had not been in close contact with. I argue that one can explain this transition by appealing to a population increase resulting in greater exoteric (inter-group) communication. The increase in exoteric communication triggered the actualization of a dormant potential for greater syntactic computational power; specifically it triggered syntactic movement. Syntactic movement, in turn, made possible variable binding, which crucially figures into cognition by description, a naturalistic analogue of Russell’s knowledge by description. Cognition by description made possible the ability to conceive of things one had never experienced, such as mythological beings, places only visited by the dead, and so forth. The Amazonian Pirahã provide some corroboration for this hypothesis, since they exhibit the combination of traits here attributed to Middle Paleolithic individuals, namely exclusively esoteric (intra-group) communication, evident lack of syntactic movement, and a limitation to knowledge (cognition) by acquaintance.

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Notes

  1. I do not attempt a rigorous definition of immediate experience. In the example described in the text, there is a natural and intuitive sense in which I immediately perceive the arrowhead but do not immediately perceive its maker. Since the aim here is not to arrive at an account of perception but to explain a striking difference between human and simian (including prehuman) cognition, any attempt to further tighten up immediately perceive does not seem necessary.

  2. Russell would analyze the claim even further to get rid of precisely one (1919; 1998b). But there is evidence of an innate number sense, which gives us the concept precisely one as a primitive (Dehaene 1997), so I will not pursue Russell’s full analysis but leave it at this.

  3. There are other criticisms of Gentner et al.’s interpretation as well. See Mark Liberman’s [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/003076.html] and also [http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/04/a_little_bird_t.html] by anonymous. Note that a connectionist network can act in agreement with the rule a n b n, for some finite n, even without counters (Wiles and Elman 1995), and connectionist networks are finite-state, not recursive.

  4. The ability of internal Merge to explain what would otherwise appear to be independent phenomena saves it from the potential objection that it might just be an “as if” explanation, i.e. nothing more than a mathematical model of some linguistic phenomenon that does not capture any actual computational process in the brain. “A good or fruitful theoretical structure does not serve simply to provide a model for the particular phenomenon it was designed to explain; rather, in conjunction with other pieces of theoretical structure, it plays a role in the explanation of many other phenomena as well” (Friedman 1981: 7).

  5. There is a trend for linguists to explain long-distance dependencies by appeal to internal Merge with some cases of pronominal binding being possible exceptions (Hornstein 2000; Aoun et al. 2001).

  6. In all fairness to Wray, she does not suggest that any known natural language is entirely holistic.

  7. Everett speaks of the Pirahã having a “religion,” but it is not the sort of religion which would require cognition by description (2005a, c). There is spirit possession during certain public gatherings dictated by lunar phase, but this is plausibly hallucinatory, as will be discussed below, and hence not religious in the sense of involving belief in unperceived entities.

  8. Stone Age is often used to refer to Africa, and Paleolithic to refer to Europe or Europe plus Australia. But using that terminology would unnecessarily complicate the paper. Here, I follow Stiner et al. (1999) in using Paleolithic as a more general term to include Africa as well.

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Acknowledgments

Versions of this paper were presented to audiences in the philosophy departments of the University of Cincinnati, Boğaziçi University, and Middle East Technical University, as well as in Bilkent University’s Special Interest Group in ARTificial intelligence (SIGART), and the humanities faculty of Istanbul Technical University. I thank these audiences for their valuable feedback. I also thank Kim Sterelny and an anonymous referee for this journal for useful comments. In addition, I must thank those who corresponded with me by email on issues closely related to this paper, including: Alison Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Everett, Tecumseh Fitch, George Grace, Norbert Hornstein, James McGilvray, Anna Parker, Juan Uriagereka, and Rosemary Varley. I have communicated with so many people regarding the issues addressed in the paper that I must apologize if I have inadvertently forgotten to mention anyone.

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    John Bolender

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Bolender, J. Prehistoric cognition by description: a Russellian approach to the upper paleolithic. Biol Philos 22, 383–399 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-006-9058-2

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