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The Emergent Constructive Approach to Evolinguistics: Considering Hierarchy and Intention Sharing in Linguistic Communication

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Abstract

Evolinguistics is an attempt to clarify the origins and evolution of language and communication, thereby deepening our understanding of humans from an evolutionary perspective. The origins of language is characterized by the biological evolution of abilities related to language and communication, and the evolution of language by the structuralization and complexification of language knowledge as well as communication systems through cultural evolution. In Evolinguistics, two idiosyncrasies of human linguistic communication are the primary focus, namely, using hierarchically organized symbol sequences in language and sharing intentions in communication. We believe that the integration of these two characteristics made humans co-creative and smart, and in particular gave us knowledge co-creation capacity. The emergent constructive approach plays an important role in this research, which is a methodology to analyze complex systems by constructing and operating the evolutionary and emergent process of complex phenomena. Two studies taking this approach are introduced in this paper. One is a language evolution experiment in a laboratory to consider the process, mechanisms, and neural basis of symbolic communication systems. The other is an evolutionary simulation of recursive combination, which is thought of as the essential ability to form hierarchical structures. A hypothesis integrating intention sharing and recursive combination is discussed as an abductive reasoning mechanism for understanding others intentions.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Kazuo Okanoya, Koji Fujita, Yasuo Ihara, and Harumi Kobayashi for their in-depth discussions of the Evolinguistics project; to Takeshi Konno, Junya Morita, Jiro Okuda, Guanhong Li, Masayuki Fujiwara, and Kazuyuki Samejima for collaboration in the study of the formation of symbolic communication systems; and to Genta Toya and Rie Asano for collaboration in the study of the evolution of recursive combination. The author expresses his thanks to anonymous reviewers for their help to improve the quality of the paper. Works in this paper are supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research Grant-in-aid Grant Numbers JP21120011, JP26240037, JP17H06383, 20H04256.

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  1. School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Nomi, 923-1292, Japan

    Takashi Hashimoto

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  1. Takashi Hashimoto
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Correspondence to Takashi Hashimoto.

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Takashi Hashimoto is a professor at the School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), located at Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1996 from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He studies the origins and evolution of language, the dynamics of communication, and the design of social institutions from the viewpoint of complex systems, and pursues establishing a scientific field called “knowledge science” for creation, sharing, and utilization of knowledge. He is an associate editor of Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science and Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. He is a board member of Human Behavior and Evolution Society Japan and Japan Society for Evolutionary Economics and is belonging to the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association, Japanese Cognitive Science Society, Society of Evolutionary Studies, Japan, and The Association for Natural Language Processing.

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Hashimoto, T. The Emergent Constructive Approach to Evolinguistics: Considering Hierarchy and Intention Sharing in Linguistic Communication. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 29, 675–696 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-020-5469-x

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