Abstract
We generally think of conceptual structures (and their mathematical representations: conceptual graphs) as a technical framework providing a sound basis for research and design work in knowledge representation and related areas of computer science. In this article, I suggest that conceptual structure predates computer science by some three-million years. In particular, I argue that the human brain (or rather, the brain of our hominid ancestors) acquired conceptual structure long before it acquired language, and that the acquisition of conceptual structure was the key cognitive development that led to the emergence of contemporary humans. Moreover, human language was the result of the addition of grammatical structure to an already developed conceptual structure.
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Devlin, K. (2000). The Role of Conceptual Structure in Human Evolution. In: Ganter, B., Mineau, G.W. (eds) Conceptual Structures: Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues. ICCS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1867. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10722280_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10722280_1
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