丸善のおすすめ度
More than Nature Needs:Language, Mind, and Evolution '14
Bickerton, Derek
著
在庫状況
お取り寄せ
お届け予定日
20日間
価格
\10,985(税込)
発行年月
2014年01月
出版社/提供元
Harvard University Press
出版国
アメリカ合衆国
言語
英語
媒体
冊子
装丁
hardcover
ページ数/巻数
336 p., 1 line illustration, 3 tables
ジャンル
洋書/人文科学/認知科学/認知心理学
ISBN
9780674724907
商品コード
1013018472
新刊案内掲載月
2014年01月
書評掲載誌
Language 2015/06, Choice 2014/06, Science 2014/06
商品URL
https://kw.maruzen.co.jp/ims/itemDetail.html?itmCd=1013018472
内容
The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans as “divine exceptions” to natural selection. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but his hypothesis remained an intriguing guess?until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking about language evolution, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that both biology and the cognitive sciences have hitherto ignored or evaded.
What evolved first was neither language nor intelligence?merely normal animal communication plus displacement. That was enough to break restrictions on both thought and communication that bound all other animals. The brain self-organized to store and automatically process its new input, words. But words, which are inextricably linked to the concepts they represent, had to be accessible to consciousness. The inevitable consequence was a cognitive engine able to voluntarily merge both thoughts and words into meaningful combinations. Only in a third phase could language emerge, as humans began to tinker with a medium that, when used for communication, was adequate for speakers but suboptimal for hearers.
Starting from humankind’s remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary synthesis?one that instead of merely repeating “nature and nurture” clich?s shows specifically and in a principled manner how and why the synthesis came about.