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Perceptual Theories of Knowledge and the Question of Language Origins
Semester I 2004
(Education Room 108, 7 June 2004, 12 noon)
Abstract
The way in which we characterize the mind, and how heavily we
emphasize the role of language in our thinking is critical in determining
the difficulty of explaining how a creature with animal-like cognition, and
an animal-like communication system, could ever have invented
language and become us.
The ever-growing body of evidence for things like problem-solving,
memory and social learning - not just in higher primates or dolphins - but
also amongst simpler creatures (e.g., birds, fish, insects) suggests that it
is pointless to deny the existence of some form of internal representation
in the absence of language.
A recent resurgence of interest in the question of mental imagery - above
and beyond the now lengthy analogue/propositional debate in
psychology - has resulted in the publication of a couple of interesting
arguments that the stuff of perception (i.e., sights, sounds, sensations) is
also the stuff of cognition (i.e., what is re-deployed in thinking about the
perceived world).
These are the perceptual explanations of knowledge (Barsalou 1999 and
Thomas 1999) that I will outline in my seminar - with the purpose of
exploring their capacity to bridge the gap between animal and human
cognition, and to explain how an animal-like mind could have taken the
first steps on the road to language as we now know it.
