Evolution of human behaviour and societies

Early in their book A story of us, the evolutionary psychologists Leslie Newson and Peter Richerson remark of very early hominins that “we can't know what it is like to experience life with a brain so very different from our own” (p. 34). These words neatly encapsulate an unfortunate reality that confronts anyone who tries to understand or reconstruct the evolution of human cognition: we humans are so completely imprisoned within our own cognitive style as to be incapable of fully imagining what was going on in the minds of extinct hominins who were behaviourally highly sophisticated, but who nonetheless did not think like us—which basically includes all of them. The reason for this difficulty is that we modern Homo sapiens are entirely unique in the living world in the way in which we manipulate information about our exterior and internal worlds. We do this symbolically, which is to say that we deconstruct those worlds into vocabularies of mental symbols that we can then combine and recombine in our minds, according to rules, to make statements not only about the world as it is, but as it might be. And evidence in the archaeological record for the routinely symbolic behaviours that are our best proxies for the apprehension of the world in this fashion is at best very sparse indeed prior—and even for some time subsequent—to the initial appearance of Homo sapiens.

A timeline for the acquisition of symbolic cognition in the human lineage

Human beings are symbolic in the sense that they—uniquely—partition the world into a vocabulary of mental symbols that can be recombined to make statements not only about things as they are, but as they might be. An appraisal of the archaeological and fossil records shows that this unusual way of manipulating information was a recent acquisition, and one that occurred within the tenure of Homo sapiens on the planet. Almost certainly, the necessary neural underpinnings were exaptively acquired along with the distinctive skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, although the new potential was only subsequently released by a necessarily cultural stimulus. This stimulus was most likely the spontaneous and sudden invention of language, the quintessential symbolic activity. That the algorithmic change in brain function involved was more frugal metabolically than its intuitive predecessor is strongly supported by the observed 12.7 percent diminution in average human brain volumes since the late Pleistocene.

Concept as a Linguacultural Unit in Cognitive Linguistics: Conceptual Framework Ғailә (Family) in the Bashkir Language

This article considers the concept as a linguacultural unit in cognitive linguistics. The research objective was to identify cultural and linguistic universals in the Bashkir language, as well as to reveal its national specificity. The paper gives a review of Russian and Bashkir publications about concepts in the language: definitions, classification, keywords as mental symbols, etc. Bashkir cognitive linguistics studies concepts on the basis of their linguistic and cultural features. The author used the methods of analysis and description in their linguistic and cultural aspects. Studies of the Bashkir national linguistic world view can reveal the national character and ancient linguistic values that are passed from generation to generation. The Bashkir linguistic world view is diverse and rich: the legends, traditions, proverbs, tales, epics, songs, poetry, and fiction reflect the moral, aesthetic, and national features that remain relevant to this day. The research featured the conceptual framework of Ғailә (Family) in works by Mustai Karim. It included such concepts as Әсә (Mother), Inәy (Aunt), Өlәsәy (Grandmother), Atai (Father), Ul (Son), Olatai (Uncle), Aғai (Brother), etc. They reflect such concepts as loyalty, love, mutual respect, mutual understanding and care, kindness, and spiritual kinship, which reveals the versatility and complexity of this content.

Introducing concepts

Concepts are here considered to be composable mental symbols that can be used to think about things. But an animal may have various languages of thought whose symbols exhibit multiple formats, in ways that keep the animal from combining its mental symbols systematically and productively. This chapter argues that lexicalization is often a process of using available concepts to introduce concepts that exhibit a distinctive format that promotes systematic productive composition. More specifically, the introduced atomic concepts are predicative (monadic) or minimally relational (dyadic); and the new complex concepts are predicative and conjunctive, in ways that would have been familiar to Aristotle and medieval logicians. Much of the chapter is devoted to the relevant notion of a predicate—which contrasts with the modern notion of a function from entities to truth values—and the relevant forms of conjunction, which do not presuppose variables.

Concepts and theoretical unification

Concepts are mental symbols that have semantic structure and processing structure. This approach (1) allows for different disciplines to converge on a common subject matter; (2) it promotes theoretical unification; and (3) it accommodates the varied processes that preoccupy Machery. It also avoids problems that go with his eliminativism, including the explanation of how fundamentally different types of concepts can be co-referential.