Evolutionist Epistemology

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet
Invited speaker, Chaired by Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Franz Wuketits
Evolutionary Epistemology : The Nonadaptationist Approach
Franz.Wuketits@univie.ac.at
Institute for Philosophy of Sciene University of Vienna - Austria
Earlier versions of evolutionary epistemology, e. g., Lorenz (1941), were based on - or at least
strongly influenced by - the adaptationist paradigm. It is for this reason that Lewontin (1982, p. 169)
critically remarked: "The fundamental error of evolutionary epistemologies as they now exist is their
failure to understand how much of what is 'out there' is the product of what is 'in here'." Evolutionists
advocating the view that any organism - including all its characters at the anatomical as well as
the behavioral level - is to be explained in terms of adaptation, have indeed neglected the
(somehow trivial) fact that living beings are active systems that do not entirely depend on their
respective environment(s). Meanwhile, however, a systems-theoretical approach to understanding
organisms and their evolution has made clear that (1) organisms and their environment(s) have not
evolved independent of each other; (2)any living system and its environment are linked together
by a feedback principle; (3) the ability of adaptation (adaptability) is defined not by the
environment but by the organism itself. Hence, we have to assume internal constraints in the
evolutionary development of living beings.
In this contribution I present a version of evolutionary epistemology that is based on the systems
view of evolution. It is a nonadaptationist view of cognition grounded in, at least, the following
theses (see also Wuketits 1990):
* Cognition is a function of active systems that actively interact with their environments.
* Cognitive capacities - in humans and animals - are the result of complex interactions between
organisms and their environments, and these interactions have a long (evolutionary) history.
* Cognition is a process that cannot be sufficiently described and explained - as a series of
adaptations, but resembles rather a "spiral process".
The philosophical implications of such a view will be briefly discussed. The main focus will be the
problem of realism.
References
Lewontin, R. C., "Organism and Environment", in H. C. Plotkin (ed.): Learning, Development, and Culture: Essays in
Evolutionary Epistemology. Wiley, Chichester 1982, pp. 151-170.
Lorenz, K., "Kants Lehre vom Apriorischen im Lichte gegenwrtiger Biologie", Bltter fr Deutsche Philosophie 15 (1941): 94125. English translation reprinted in H. C. Plotkin, ibid.)
Wuketits, F. M., Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Implications for Humankind. SUNY Press, Albany, N. Y. 1990.
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Copyright: Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science Centre Leo Apostel Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Session 1, Chaired by Erik Myin

Alexander Riegler
Like Cats and Dogs: Radical Constructivism and Evolutionary Epistemology
Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
ariegler@vub.ac.be
Both evolutionary epistemology (EE) and radical constructivism (RC) set out to provide a
naturalized account for cognition, and both refer to biology as the starting point of their
consideration.
Foerster for example, doped his laboratory in the States the Biological Computing Lab, while
another proponent of RC, Maturana, not only made a carrier in neurophysiology but also explicitly
refers to his theoretical framework as Biology of Cognition. In the EE camp, Lorenz was a famous
ethologist, Riedl a zoologist whose 1979 book carries the name Biology of Knowledge. It is
interesting that both positions can be traced back to Kant. Lorenz (Kants Lehre vom Apriorischen im
Lichte gegenwrtiger Biologie, 1941) naturalized Kants a prioris of space and time, which are
necessary to understand raw sensory experience, and re-interpreted them as phylogenetically
acquired categories. For RC, Kants Copernican Turn, according to which objects must conform to
our knowledge (rather than the other way around), radically dismisses the idea that cognition of
the individual is determined by a mind-independent reality.
This is expressed in the organizational closure of autopoietic systems of Maturana and Varela
(Autopoiesis and Cognition, 1980) and Foersters (Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors, 1976)
concept of eigen-behavior.
Sadly though, despite their identical starting points and goals EE and RC do not go well together.
Glasersfeld (Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit und des Begriffs der Objektivitt, 1985) for example points
out that one of EEs central notion adaptation is meaningless. For him, Poppers rejection of
instrumentalism (a cornerstone of RC) on the basis of its inability to account for the pure scientists
interest in truth and falsity is unacceptable polemics. Riedl, on the other hand, is eager to dismiss
RC as solipsistic school. In his favorite thought experiment the sudden appearance of a rhino at a
congress of constructivists teaches them that reality does exist. His aversion to the constructivist
worldview springs from his Lorenz motto To believe plain nonsense is a privilege of the human
being (quoted in Riedl 1979). It expresses the conviction that organisms that do not believe in a
mind-independent reality will be eradicated by natural selection (Wuketits, Adaptation,
representation, construction: An issue in evolutionary epistemology, 1992).
In this paper I argue that one of the major obstacles to overcome the (often polemic) controversies
between EE and RC is the formers clinging to hypothetical realism. Despite proponents of EE admit
that realism involves presumptions going beyond the data (Campbell Evolutionary epistemology,
1974), they cannot help but claim that it not only exists but that it can also be known. Lorenz
famous statementthe horses hoof is a representation of the steppe and the body form of the
dolphin is the incarnation of knowledge about laws of aerodynamics in water, etc.substantiates
this belief.
This paper will review ways of how to refute the idea of hypothetical realism. In the end, however,
the mutual rejection in spite of common grounds might turn out a paradigmatic example of
Mitterers (Die Flucht aus der Beliebigkeit, 2001) thesis: The dualistic method of searching for truth is
but an argumentative technique which can turn any arbitrary opinion either true or false.
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Albert F. H. Naccache
Steps towards a history of the emergence and accretion of human language
Keywords: Cultural evolution, language emergence, accumulation, social mechanisms.
anaccash@nidal.com
I would take advantage of the critical audience of the EELC congress to present my attempt to
build, along the lines of the EEM program, a coherent descriptive sketch of the broad articulations
of the emergence and accretion of human language.
Encouraged by Poppers differentiation between passive and active Darwinism (1981), the first
step undertaken was to erect a model embodying the concept of multiple Darwinian evolutions.
The inspiration for this effort was the confluence of ideas from Developmental Biology, System
Theory, Self-organization, Emergence and of course EE.
The resulting framework of Modes of Evolution spans non-reductively between Biology and
Culture, its backbone a pattern of seven hierarchically nested elaborations of the mechanisms of
parental involvement in the growth of offspring phenotype, a pattern discernible in the lineage
leading from bacteria to human societies (Naccache, 1999). This pattern identifies, on a formallogical basis, successive elaborations of the basic life cycle setup of the classical Neo-Darwinian
Mode of Evolution. The first three such elaborations correlate tightly with milestones in natural
history: oviparity, viviparity and the neocortex. The next three, characterized as social, then
physical and finally symbolic extensions of the phenotype, seem to identify the main stages of
elaboration of the mechanisms of cultural transmission and accretion that participated in the
Darwinian production of Homo sapiens.
Fleshing up the description of these mechanisms, and of the Modes of Evolution they subtend, led
to a deep and densely structured historical context conducive to the study of the evolution of
language, from our last common ancestors (LCA) with the Panids up to and including the
historical period. In the proposed talk, I would highlight the main (and as yet unpublished, but
see Naccache, forth.) results sketched thus far, while pointing out some of the positive aspects and
the difficulties encountered while using the framework.
The main results are the tentative identifications of, first, three major stages in the evolution of the
potential for linguistic behavior leading from the LCA to the species-wide shared potential for
language potential that must have characterized anatomically modern humans (in either the
OoA or MRE scenarios); and second, four main landmarks along the path of the socio-cultural
accretion of language, from Paleolithic to early Historic times.
The positive aspects of using the framework derive, independently of the epistemological
soundness of this last, from the fact that it forces its user to keep in mind both the forest and the
trees, the global picture as well as the mosaic of incremental steps along the path. It thus
provides a good safeguard against the temptation of single-factor explanations.
As for the difficulties, practical as well as epistemological, they naturally stem from the daunting
challenge of having to integrate, in an arguably coherent scenario, large chunks of data from
Archaeology, Cognitive Psychology, Ethology, Genetics, Life History, Linguistics, Neurosciences,
Paleoanthropology, Philology, etc.
References
Naccache, A. F., 1999: A Brief History of Evolution, History and Theory, 38:4, p. 10-32.
Naccache, A. F., forth: Accumulation and Emergence in Cultural Evolution: the Case of the Neolithic Revolution, in
Proceedings of the 3ICAANE. Eisenbrauns. 2004.
Popper, K., 1981, The Place of Mind in Nature. St Peter.
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Session 2, Chaired by Tony Belpaeme

Adrianna WOZNIAK
Is the real world something more than our experience? Relation between neodarwinian logic,
transcendental philosophy and cognitive sciences.
Keywords: Synthetic Theory of Evolution; Biological Evolutionary Epistemology; Ontological Status of
Universals, Mathematics and Logical Rules, Evolution of Animal and Human Cognition; Naturalism
and Materialist Realism; Transcendental Philosophy
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Lyon III, France, Institute for Cognitive Sciences, CNRS, France
wozniak@isc.cnrs.fr
The Synthetic Theory of Evolution gives us an understanding of the living world, its dynamism and
nature. To live means to interact and to interact means to know (some kind knowledge is
contained in the organic structure). I would like to show that there are connections between the
way that we consider the nature of evolution and the nature of knowledge, between Synthetic
Theory of Evolution and Biological Evolutionary Epistemology.
For instance, evolution has no goal and it is only the pressure of natural selection which determines
the direction of evolution. Nevertheless, the pressure of natural selection applies only locally
it
implies that knowledge is valid only locally
a priori knowledge is not valid absolutely, universally,
as Kant wanted, but the a priori knowledge is only relative to particular ecological niche, i.e. a
particular part of the world
then a priori knowledge is partial.
Rules of reason evolved through natural selection and have a lot to do with fitness: in other words
they must have had selective value for our foreparents. This is, for instance, the case for basic rules
of logic (inductive - deductive reasoning, classical nonclassical logical reasoning etc.). We have
the tools to review the old question of the ontological status of universals, mathematics and logic.
To some extend they evolved commonly during the evolution of animal as well as human
cognition. In my work I would like to emphasize the explanations of the neodarwninian logic, for
example why we think causally: Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic
but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducting their kind W.V.Quine (1969b, p. 126)
We believe in the objective necessity of causal connection because our ancestors who associated
snake with danger survived end reproduced. Lets recapitulate: the ontogenetic a priori is a
phylogenetic acquired knowledge.
thus a priori truths are not purely analytic but full of empirical
signifiance. We also know the evolutionary origin of universals, we know their nature (as a non
absolute, non necessary local optimizations) and extension (in res = in human and animal brains).
Taking this into consideration, can we overcome the probleme of transcendence? After all, our
beliefs, i.e. the belief in the objective necessity of causal connection, go beyond the experience
and what we can prove!
We distinguish between a real world and our knowledge (innate or acquired) and this knowledge is
supposed to be true or at least partially correspondent to some part of the real world. Nevertheless
the real world is nothing but the world of our experience (Gerhard Vollmer), our knowledge of it
and all we can know about the world is what our cognitive system knows. Moreover, our cognitive
system is explained precisely as a product of evolutionary process. Therefore, there arise the
questions reffering to circularity and tautology of neodarwinism, self-reference and the Gdelian
Theorem. I will deal with a matter of the relation between Synthetic Theory of Evolution, Biological
Evolutionary Epistemology and Transcendental Philosophy.
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Hugo Mercier
Some Ideas to Study the Evolution of Mathematics
Keywords : Evolutionary basis of mathematics, evolutionary psychology, modularity,
metarepresentations, cultural evolution.
Reasoning, development and pragmatic team; Institute for Cognitive Science, Lyon, France
hmercier@isc.cnrs.fr
The theory of evolution has been used to gain a better understanding of the human mind and
behaviour in at least five different ways. Of those five main streams, two remain very theoretical
(memetics and gene-culture coevolution). On the other hand, sociobiology and its two heirs
(human behavioural ecology, HBE and evolutionary psychology, EP) produced a lot of empirical
knowledge to back up their theories. Even if some researchers blur the distinction between HBE and
EP, there still exist theoretical and methodological differences that make EP more suitable to study
the evolution of mathematics. HBE being only interested in reproductive success, which does not
seem to correlate well with scientific achievement, does not fit the job. Two features of EP make it
more appropriate: (i) the stress put on cognitive mechanisms underlying our behaviour and (ii) its
appreciation of behaviour as often being not adaptive anymore.
A good example might be mathematics. Indeed it is not clear how our ability to manipulate
complex numbers could increase our fitness. But it is possible to find a lot of different modules which
could form a basis for our mathematical knowledge. Each of those modules could have been
useful for our ancestors, cultural evolution playing its role later. Another advantage of EP is its ability
to draw upon a lot of different resources. First primatology can help to determine what capabilities
our cousins share, because it is a likely basis for our evolution. There is also evidence in child
development that infants are extremely smart. Anthropologists might point to some universals in the
way people use numbers all over the world. Modules can be investigated using experimental
psychology. The cheater detection module of Leda Cosmides computes costs and benefits, Gerg
Gigerenzer postulates special adaptations to deal with frequency, both of them being talents that
are useful for mathematics.
But all of these are quite basic skills. At a higher level, at least two features mainly developed in
humans seem quite indispensable : metarepresentations and language. For example,
metarepresentations allow us a decoupling from the immediate context and the use of negation.
As for language its obvious utility is to give us a tool to share our findings and confront our ideas.
Besides, if we follow Jean-Louis Dessalles ideas about the function of language, we could envision
our quest for scientific knowledge as a pursuit of more and more relevance in the information we
deliver. Linking both domains, Dan Sperber postulates a metarepresentational module specifically
dedicated to a logical analysis of the content of utterances.
So we have capabilities devoted to basic mathematical computations, and higher order cognitive
skills a priori unconnected to mathematics. In the framework of cultural evolution developed by
Dan Sperber, we can imagine that the domains (i.e. kind of input) of those high order skills became
larger as cultural change fed different kinds of inputs into them. Writing, extensive training,
universities, to name but a few relevant cultural innovations, can explain the admittedly huge
difference between a professional mathematician and a layman. But the point is that those
differences are only quantitative: both of them were given the same endowment by evolution,
they just did not made the same use of it.
All those considerations can be useful to bring forward new arguments to philosophical debates
around mathematics (e.g. between platonicists an constructivists), and may even help to
understand the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Eugene Wigner).
References
Dehaene, S. (1999). The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.
Sperber, D. (Ed.). (2000). Metarepresentations: a Multidisciplinary Perspective.
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Invited speaker, Chaired by Luc Steels

Bart de Boer
Computer Modelling as a tool for understanding language evolution
Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Groningen The Netherlands
B.de.Boer@ai.rug.nl
Language has traditionally been investigated from two different perspectives: language as the
behaviour of an individual (which de Saussure called "parole") and language as a population
phenomenon (which de Saussure called "langue"). Examples of the former perspective are
psycholinguistics, the study of speech errors and the sutudy of language acquisition. Examples of
the latter include most of historical and general linguistics.
Of course, all linguistics are aware that these two perspectives are linked. Individual behaviours are
at the basis of the idealised language of a population, while the norms and conventions of the
language in a population influence individuals' behaviour, both in acquisition and performance.
As has originally been stated by Steels, language can therefore be considered a complex dynamic
system. This perspective is especially important when investigating language evolution. However,
the behaviour of complex dynamic systems is extremely hard to predict. Therefore it becomes
almost essential to use computer models when studying them. This has been done for many
aspects of language: syntax, semantics, phonology and language change among others. This
presentation will address issues in modelling language evolution and will focus especially on
modelling phonology and phonetics.
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Session 3, Chaired by Franz Wuketits

Michael Peeters (Mixel)1 and Erik Myin
The primacy of context
Keywords: Situated Activity; Mediation; Developmental Systems; Evolution; Cognition
1
www.mixel.be; Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
1 info@mixel.be; emyin@vub.ac.be
In this paper we describe a simulated agent/environment system, developed by the first author. In
particular, the agent has a number of goals and capacities to act and is situated in an
environment in which various objects stand in objective relations to these goals and capacities. The
totality of these relations we call the 'ontology' of the simulation. The agent acts in the environment,
and by its actions the environment changes. The agent has a flexible epistemic structure (this we
call the agents 'knowledge'), which contains hypotheses about how the world is and how the
agents actions affect it. The agent is driven to adapt its epistemic structure by observing the
environment or, in case the enviroment changes drastically, by performing experiments. In the
latter case, by experimenting and observing the effects thereof, the agent tries to adapt both the
world and its own epistemic structures so as to make behavior adaptive again. After describing the
implementation in some detail, we consider it from a broader philosophical point of view. In
particular, we argue that it vividly illustates what is known in current philosophy as 'externalism': the
idea that knowledge about the world 'just aint in the head'. Concretely, this is manifest in the
implementation because there is no epistemic adaptation without the agent actually carrying out
experiments and observing its (unpredictable) effects.
Moreover, such experimenting brings about novel changes in the world, which might require further
adaptation. Speaking more generally, the ontology of the environment is independent from the
agent's epistemic structure, while the latter is fully dependent upon the ontology. In concluding, we
plea for a what we call a 'capacity conception of knowledge'. That is, knowledge should be seen
as the acquisition and development of capacities to adapt to an in principle open-ended
envoriment, rather than as the storage of an internal image or description of the world. Only the
capacity conception, so we claim, can account for fact that knowledge spreads out into the
world in the way we have attempted to illustrate.
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Ruben Gmez-Sorianoand Rubn1 and Humberto Vianna2

Mediation and Developmental Systems: a Non-Representational Approach to Cognition and
Evolution.
1 Departamento
2 Programa
de Psicologa Bsica de la Universidad Autnoma de Madrid.

de Ps-graduaco em Lingstica, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
1 ruben.gomez@uam.es; 2 btvianna@zaz.com.br
The present proposal is the result of the confluence of two doctoral projects held in the Programa
de Estudos Linguisticos, UFMG and the Dpto de Psicologa Bsica, UAM. Both studies aim the
interactive processes among P. troglodytes populations and share a non-representational
approach. In recent years, many models of cognition have challenged traditional Cognitive
Science, which proposes the study of an organisms syntax divorced from the contingencies of its
performance in a species-typical environment (Hendriks-Jansen, 1996). Following those
alternative approches, we claim that we lose both descriptive and explanatory power: a)
abstracting from an organisms situated activities when addressing its cognition; and b) dismissing
the role played by an organisms history of relations during development.
We assume that distinct but intersecting levels of genetic processes (philo, onto and microgenesis)
play a role in the constitution of cognition, which thus pertains to the domain of historical processes
(Blanco, 2002). The changes observed in an organism and its activities during the course of time
pertain to distinct, not intersecting domains, which then will constitute the systems to be studied.
Thus, at the physiological level, the internal changes an organism passes through its ontogeny are
structurally determined, althought, as a whole, it will change in congruence with its interactional
activities as a conservation of its way of living (Maturana et al, 1998). The organisms activities
pertain to a domain not reducible to its physiology, althought the kinds of interactions depend on
its physiology at each moment. It seems to us, assuming both the historical and the interactional
perspective above mentioned, that it is irrelevant speaking of the organism as representing the
environment it interacts with. Even though, as observers (describing the correspondences between
organism and medium), we can make reference to a mediation that objectivizes a world, a
process that goes from the operational to the social domain and applies to every genetic level
(Blanco, 2003). Mediation, thus, must be understood not as an epistemic intermediary between the
organism and the world. In the case of our studies on chimpanzee communities, the
correspondences between these organisms and their activities have to do with our
objectivization of such relations, as observers. An evolutionary approach to cognition must
address the issues above mentioned. That is the case of DST (Oyama et al, 2001), which makes
reference to a system of context-dependent causations in evolutionary and developmental
changes, and the theory of evolution by natural drift, where cognition is the conservation of a
particular ontogenic phenotype/ontogenic niche relation (Maturana & Mpodozis, 2000).
References
Blanco, F. (2002). El Cultivo de la Mente. Madrid: Antonio Machado.
Blanco, F. (2003). Comunicacin presentada al II Symposium de Psicologa y Esttica. Madrid, 30 de octubre-2 de
noviembre.
Hendriks-Jansen, Horst. (1996). Catching ourselves in the act. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco. (1998). The tree of knowledge: biological roots of human understanding. Boston:
Shambala.
Maturana, H. & Mpodozis, J. (2000). "The origin of species by means of natural drift". In: Revista Chilena de Historia Natural,
73:261-310.
Oyama, Susan, Griffiths, Paul E. & Gray, Russell D. (2001). Cycles of contingency: developmental systems and evolution.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf
The self-organization of dynamic systems: modularity under scrutiny
Keywords: self-organization, dynamic systems, modularity, neural organization, language
development
Department of Language Development, Graz University
annemarie.peltzer@uni-graz.at
The languages of the world are the result of a many-layered netting under a variety of biological
and environmental conditions. How babies learn language has been the subject of intensive
investigation over the past 40 years (using increasingly high-tech equipment). The existence of
specific biological support for language is beyond doubt. Arguments come from the nature of
structural properties common to all languages, restrictions on the degree to which languages vary
and linguistic knowledge not attributable to the environment. Recent findings suggest that
maturational factors and experience play complementary roles in forming specialized systems, which
display different degrees of experience dependent modification and operate at different time scales.
The framework of self-organization we draw upon allows for the spotting of system-specific growth
curves each of them depending on the interplay of the given neural infrastructure and the input
provided. It is both selective and dynamic minding the caveat of evolutionary biologists that
natural selection as viewed by Darwin is a sieve, and not a sculptor. The complex nature of
cognitive systems does not permit a direct exchange of findings, but there are organizational
principles which can serve as mainstays for models of language development and change. Prime
candidates are the processes involved in scene-segmentation (= selection) and the ensuing
dynamics of pattern formation (= sculpturing), with the respective system determining and
enlarging the basis for the further selection and organization of information. The processes active in
these changes are self-organizing and irreversible. Irreversible processes do not only lead to
increasing complexity but also to successive bifurcations, i.e. modularity (view Prigogine).
Arguments are running high that modularity (as an accompaniment to a systems strife for stability)
pervades all natural organization, right up to what Darwin called the citadel itself, human
cognition. As a logical consequence this hallmark of natural systems is also to be stipulated for
language. The modularity debate as instigated by Gall in 1805 was refuelled by Fodor in 1983 and
has ever since been kept simmering in generative linguistics and the cognitive sciences. A decision
in this towering debate is yet to follow. One of the issues at stake is the neural organization of
functionally autonomous and yet interlinked systems, another the temporal asynchrony of system
development. A very attractive answer to the first problem is the temporal coding of neural
responses (Singer & Gray 1995ff.). Answerable for the second problem are the developmental
cognitive neurosciences. So far they have been quite successful in explaining the dissociation of
cognitive functions in William Syndrome and are now put to test in a multicultural setting. The focus
is on bilingual development in immigrant children (N = 106; age 6-10) featuring the combinations of
either Turkish & German or Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian & German. The data-pool collected over four
years provides ample evidence for a changing sensitivity to language cues at different times
making way for asynchrony in system development. Of particular importance is the notion that
language development does not take a linear path but rather comes in phases of system-specific
intermittent turbulence, fluctuations and stability apt to swap linguistic borders in mid-stream in
brief: language development has no room for encapsulated, hard-wired and innately specified
modules.
Notes
The data were collected in the course of a research project funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Research and
Culture
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Session 4, Chaired by Frank Brisard

Joachim De Beule
Simulating the origins and evolution of temporal semantics
Keywords: evolution of language, semantics, time
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Belgium
joachim@arti.vub.ac.be
Many models for the evolution of language focus on the syntactic (lexical or grammatical) aspects
of language. The semantic models considered are most of the time very simple and not subject to
evolution themselves. Part of the explanation is that many linguists consider meaning not very
important. Language is treated as a sterile formal symbol manipulation system, which is for a large
part fixed or even genetically predetermined, and learning a language is seen as an individual
problem of determining the right set of rules. In this view the purpose of language, communication,
is largely ignored.
But language has a purpose and meaning is crucial for it. In addition, the meanings
expressed, i.e. the things in the world talked about, are constantly subject to evolution itself. Thus,
we find it better to see a language as an emergent system where a changing world and the goal
of communication drives a constant co-evolution of its syntax and semantics. A language is the
dynamic solution to a collective problem and cannot exist without its purpose or be treated
separately from meaning.
It is indeed known that, although the semantics of language is for a large part dictated by the
world, some part of it is determined by conventions in the community of language users. There can
be important differences between the conventions of different language communities, even
though they cover the same semantic domain. One such well investigated domain is time. Despite
the many commonalities between the tense and aspect systems of different languages, a rich
variety of them exists. There are even indications that two native speakers of the same language
can disagree on the precise meaning of temporal constructions.
This is in line with our view on language. We are implementing a computer model to investigate
what temporal categories and conventions could emerge in a population of agents playing
language games. As in other language games a number of agents populate an environment
about which they have to talk. Care is taken that the environment generates events containing
temporal information. The speaker in a game selects a topic to talk about and constructs a
semantic description for it, for example stating that it is a pick-up event which took place in the
past. Such a description is considered good when it can be used to distinguish the topic from the
other events in the environment.
Sometimes the creation of new temporal categories is needed to accomplish this goal and new
descriptions, specifying the temporal properties of the topic or temporally relating it to other events,
are invented. Next, the semantic description is transformed into an utterance by making use of
lexical and grammatical rules which themselves might need to be invented when a new category
is to be lexicalized. The receiver of the utterance tries to guess what the topic was, learning new
words and creating new temporal categories itself when necessary.
This setup allows us to investigate the co-evolution of syntax and semantics of temporal
constructions in emergent artificial languages. We gained already many insights about for example
the prerequisites for a tense-like grammar to emerge, or about the semantics of time, but many
new interesting problems arise and still need to be solved. First experiments have resulted in the
creation of temporal categories of which some get grammaticalized, corresponding for example
to a past tense form, while others are explicated by pure lexical means, corresponding more to
temporal relation and adverb constructions.
10
Jean-Philippe Magu
From Changes in the World to Changes in the Words: Multi-Agent Simulations
Keywords: semantic changes, cultural evolution, self-organisation, conceptual spaces.
Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage Universit Lyon 2
jean-philippe.mague@etu.univ-lyon2.fr
Languages change. Natural selection is not involved in this kind of evolution, which is hence
cultural. But, at least for a part of them, those changes are nevertheless driven by adaptive
constraints: Speakers of a given language live in an environment which is itself changing. In
particular, their culture, e.g. artefacts, is not static. Innovation is universal, and since one of the most
fundamental raison dtre of language is probably the possibility it offers us to communicate about
our environment, languages we use have been subject to changes induced by innovations. Given
that those changes concern the way we refer to the world, they are changes in the lexicon and
more specifically, semantic changes. Here, in the line of cognitive semantics, we assume that
words get their meaning through concepts, i.e. mental representations that stand for objects of the
world, gathering them into categories.
Languages may respond differently to environmental changes. For example, vehicles have been
subjects to drastic transformations since the invention of engine. While in the 17th century, the
French word char and the English one carre (now car) were translations of each other, and
denoted vehicles (Cotgrave, 1611), those transformations have led to a situation where English
car now stands for automobiles, while French char stands for military tanks. Many factors, such
as the dynamics of the transformation of the objects, the fact that the new form completely
replace the old one or not, or synonymy in the lexicon, may influence whether a change in the
world is followed by a change in the lexicon.
Multi-agents models, in which agents with idealized cognitive capacities communicate about the
world they live in, are especially well suited for investigations into this kind of processes (Cangelosi &
Parisi, 2002). The underlying assumption of those models, that language is cultural entity arising in
the population through self-organisation, fits in perfectly with our hypothesis that the changes we
focus on are cultural changes. We have design a model were agents are endowed with a
cognitive structure, by the mean of which they can represent and categorize objects of a world
they are placed into. This structure is an elaborate version of Grdenfors conceptual spaces
(Grdenfors, 2000). Agents conceptual spaces are multidimensional geometrical spaces, where
dimensions correspond to the different ways objects may perceptually be judged similar. Objects
are represented as points in those spaces, and categories are fuzzy subspaces, allowing prototype
effects in agents categorization processes. Each concept is tagged with a word, and since they
may overlap, synonymy is allowed. A single word may tag several concepts, thus allowing
polysemy. Linguistic interactions take place between two agents. One of them chooses an object
of the world and asks the other to name it. According to the agreement between them, they
retroactively modify their conceptual structure either to reinforce it or to adapt it.
Our model is operational and allows a lexicon to emerge in a population where agents develop
conceptual structures to represent their environment. We are currently running simulations and
analysing the result that we aim to present.
References
Cangelosi, A., & Parisi, D. (2002). Computer simulation: A new scientific approach to the study of language evolution. In A.
Cangelosi & D. Parisi (Eds.), Simulating the Evolution of Language (pp. 3-28): Springer Verlag.
Cotgrave, R. (1611). A dictionary of the french and the english tongues. London: Adam Iflip.
Grdenfors, P. (2000). Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. The MIT press.
11
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Semantics and Its Foundational Status
Keywords: Evolutionary game theory, semantic/pragmatic change, language game, pragmatism
Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki
pietarin@cc.helsinki.fi
Most of the current theories on language evolution on the market are structural and functional
rather than strategic in nature, and are built upon the presupposition that it is possible to model our
innate linguistic endownment and then correlate these models with some neo-Darwinian
evolutionary theory. In the present paper, I argue that alternatively, complex meaning relations
between assertions and the world emerge from evolutionary semantic games played on a finite
domain of discourse (the resource) by the Population of Utterers and the Population of Interpreters
(or the Environment), sampled from a large, diamorphic population of agents. The fitness represents
the expected frequency of true or false interpretations given in agents' final interpretants. These
evolutionary semantic games provide a realistic application of Game-Theoretic Semantics (gts, see
Hintikka & Sandu 1997) to evolutionary situations (egts).
Among the fallouts of egts are the following five points.
(a) Given a potentially infinite period of time, repeated transmission of information from individual
sets of plays in semantic games to further sets of plays represents a process by which one comes to
know (or believe) the content of linguistic assertions. There is no a priori notion of knowledge in
evolutionary games, even though there are the notions of factual and conceptual information.
Ignorance (partial interpretation) falls from the fact that the two players, say, the Inhabitant and
the Late-Comer, both withdraw from the resource.
(b) Semantic change is attained through evolutionary games. Such a change does not pertain to
the evolutionary emergence of rule systems (which is not our concern here, as the game rules are
fixed and immutable, cf. e.g. Nowak, Plotkin & Krakauer 1999 instead), but to the evolution of
strategies that propagate in repeated dynamic games.
(c) In strict relation to (b), we get an explication of Wittgenstein's notion of change in a language
game through time that he presented in On Certainty (1969). Strategies governing language
change are strategies governing human behaviour. That some meanings get endorsed in
populations is due to the existence of semantically stable strategies (sss) in egts, in other words
those that do well against themselves and against mutant meanings (cf. Maynard Smith 1982). The
more stable a strategy is, the less context or collateral information shared by the players is needed
in interpreting assertions. A sss is the evolutionary counterpart to the logical truth and logical falsity
of assertions.
(d) We also get an explanation of features in the evolution of pragmatic aspects of language.
For instance, interpreting anaphora is the matter of a relative accessibility of the information
concerning either the choices of individuals or the use of strategies, in which the accessibility of
information pertains either to earlier parts of the same semantic game, or to the histories of earlier
plays of games (trans-structural pragmatics), both in the sense of the extensive forms of egts that
bring out the full subgame structure. To coin a slogan, pragmatics is `egts minus equilibria'.
(e) Notions such as seeking and finding of suitable individuals (Hintikka 1973), when performed to
satisfy a predicate term, are evolutionary activities guided partly by reason and partly by habitual
responses to environmental signals. Accordingly, in place of strategies, the rules that guide action
are better termed agents' habits, to follow the practice of pragmatist philosophy. Pace Lewis
(1969), the non-cooperative evolution of semantics is not an instance of the evolution of
conventions but of the habit-change in individuals. Parts of strategies from parental games are
projaculated to offspring to detain that change (thus both inheritation and imitation are covered).
In conclusion, egts differs from other evolutionary arguments in the key sense of not focussing on
how different rule systems might evolve, but on how stable meanings evolve and transpire among
populations of agents. It puts strategic aspects of semantic and pragmatic change into a
systematic perspective and improves both upon pragmatists' evolutionary epistemology and
Wittgenstein's language games and his diachronic pragmatics.
12
Invited speaker, Chaired by Liane Gabora

Marek Czachor
Do we think in quantum ways ? Latent semantic analysis and symbolic AI as seen by a quantum
physicist
mczachor@pg.gda.pl
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is based on vector representations of words (belonging to the socalled semantic space). Similarity of meaning is related to scalar products between word-vectors.
An analogous situation is found in other modern models of semantic analysis. For a quantum
physicist these structures are strikingly close to those one finds in quantum information theory (QIT).
LSA has problems with the issue of ordering and treats texts as "bags of words". But in QIT the
ordering problem is well understood and is based on tensor products. Surprisingly, tensor products
are also employed in distributed representations of concepts in symbolic AI, but in a way which is
not very natural for people trained on QIT (eg. what is a conjunction (AND) for AI people looks like
an alternative (OR) from the viewpoint of QIT). The fact that these three fields were developing
completely independently, have their own intuitions and tricks, but still arrived at similar
mathematical structures, creates an interesting possibility of interdisciplinary research.
I will first try to explain certain quantum intuitions and then, from this perspective, take a closer look
at LSA and distributed representations.
13
Session 5, Chaired by Marek Czachor

Liane Gabora
Evolution of Worldviews through Context-driven Actualization of Potential
Keywords: acquired characteristics, evolution, idea, replicator, worldview
Center Leo Apostel, Free University of Brussels and Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA
liane@berkeley.edu
In (Gabora 2001, 2004) it is argued that the cultural replicator is not an idea but an associativelystructured network of them that together form an internal model of the world, or worldview. An
idea is not a replicator because it does not consist of coded self-assembly instructions. It may retain
structure as it passes from one individual to another, but does not replicate it. A worldview is a
primitive, uncoded replicator, like the autocatalytic sets of polymers widely believed to be the
earliest form of life. Primitive replicators generate self-similar structure, but because the process
happens in a piecemeal manner, through bottom-up interactions rather than a top-down code,
they replicate with low fidelity, and acquired characteristics are inherited. Just as polymers catalyze
reactions that generate other polymers, the retrieval of an item from memory can in turn trigger
other items, thus cross-linking memories, ideas, and concepts into an integrated conceptual
structure. Worldviews evolve idea by idea, largely through social exchange. An idea participates in
the evolution of culture by revealing certain aspects of the worldview that generated it, thereby
affecting the worldviews of those exposed to it. If an idea influences seemingly unrelated fields this
does not mean that separate cultural lineages are contaminating one another, because it is
worldviews, not ideas, that are the basic unit of cultural evolution. Moreoever, it is argued that
worldviews do not evolve through a Darwinian natural selection process (Gabora and Aerts, in
press). Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition,
each thought or cognitive state changes the selection pressure against which the next is
evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter of
honing in a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations of it from different real or
imagined perspectives; in other words, actualizing potential through exposure to different contexts.
It has been proven that the mathematical description of contextual change of state introduces a
non-Kolmogorovian probability distribution, and a classical formalism such as selection theory
cannot be used. Thus it is argued that creative thought evolves not through a Darwinian process,
but through context-driven actualization of potential.
References
Gabora (2001) Cognitive mechanisms underlying the origin and evolution of culture. Doctoral thesis, Free University of
Brussels.
Gabora, L. (2004) Ideas are not replicators but minds are. Biology and Philosophy 19(1): 127-143.
Gabora, L. & Aerts, D. (in press) Creative thought as a non-Darwinian evolutionary process. Accepted in Journal of Creative
Behavior.
14
Thomas Durt
Decoherence, entanglement, complementarity and the classical limit.
Keywords: quantum mechanics, classical limit, complementarity.
Physics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
thomdurt@vub.ac.be
Presently, it is still an open question to know whether quantum mechanics is necessary in order to
describe the way that our brain functions.
Nevertheless, quantum mechanics is astonishingly adequate if we want to describe the material
world in which we live. It is therefore natural to assume that the way we think has something to do
with quantum mechanics. After all, if our reflection reflects the external world, it ought to reflect
also its internal properties at the deepest level! Zurek and coworkers developped in the framework
of the decoherence approach the idea that maybe, if we think classically, this is because during
the evolution, our brain selected in the external (supposedly quantum) world the islands of stability
that correspond to the maximal quantum (Shannon-von Neumann) information.
These classical islands would correspond to the structures that our brain naturally recognizes and
identifies, and this is why the way we think is classical. We shall apply the criterion of maximal
information to the simple situation during which two quantum particles interact through a positiondependent potential, in the non-relativistic regime and show that the classical islands are in one to
one correspondence with the three classical paradigms elaborated by physicists before quantum
mechanics existed; these are the droplet or diluted model, the test-particle and the material point
approximations. We also show that it is entanglement that marks the departure from classical
conceptions. Beside, we present a new formulation of the principle of complementarity that
emerged in the decoherence approach. It sheds a new light on the idea of complementarity,
which is not only one the oldest and most universal philosophical principles, but also one of the
most powerful ones, at the core of dialectics and relativity.
Funnily, in this approach, it is possible to explain why we have ten fingers, an unexpected result
from the study of entanglement in discrete Hilbert spaces, a surprising conclusion!
15
Session 6, Chaired by Myriam Vermeerbergen

Kathleen Coessens
Cultural creativity and evolutionary flexibility
Keywords: creativity, flexibility, exaptation, ratchet effect, world openness
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Vrije Universitet Brussel, Belgium
kcoessen@vub.ac.be
This proposal develops the philosophical idea that the cultural creativity and evolution of the
human being are dependent on some kind of evolutionary flexibility. This thesis will be defended in
three steps: starting from a short phenomenological analysis of the possibilities of the human being
and its body (1), I will then examine theories and explanations of evolutionary flexibility (2) and
finally explore how this contains the possibilities for cultural creativity and evolution (3). The
conclusion will be that the diversity and evolution of human culture awakens the dormant potential
of this flexibility.
1. The astonishing human being
Michel Serres describes the astonishing possibilities of the human being. As the only mammal that
has spread all over the world, it confronts all meteorological and geographical conditions. But at
the same time it disposes of an immense reservoir of metamorphoses: it is a clown and a pianist, an
acrobat and a novelist, . Finally, it is a creator of a world out of the natural earth: as a subject, it
creates objects as well as fantasy.
2. Evolutionary flexibility
Evolutionary flexibility implies that there are developments in evolution that defy strict adaptational
laws. Three theories will be examined. Firstly, Goulds concept exaptation offers an explanation for
features and possibilities that go beyond the purely adaptive and functional. Secondly, nature
contains what Gibson calls affordances: whatever a physical system can do in response to some
human requirement. These features of natural organisms go beyond the purely adaptive and
functional: they are useful for other living beings. Thirdly, Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991)
propose two principles for a less selectionistic and a more creative evolution: natural selection
eliminates only what is not compatible with survival and, moreover, it accepts viable solutions in
evolution, not exclusively optimal ones. These three theories open up the possibility for creative,
unexpected features to emerge or to be realised later on, depending on the natural or cultural
environment.
3. Cultural creativity
This evolutionary flexibility manifests itself in the development of human culture, in the diversity of life
forms, in the possibilities of adaptation of the newborn to the human world. Three elements will be
developed here: the ratchet effect and cultural transmission, the exosomatic development and
the world openness of the human being. This world openness, which is sustained by neurologist
theories such as Edelmans, illuminates some of the mysteries of our cultural creativity.
Ultimately, culture seems to be the unfolding of the flexibility of features and mechanisms acquired
in the course of evolution. The next question to be raised is whether culture in its turn is not
influencing nature and further evolution. Some examples will be given.
16
Jean Lachapelle1, Luc Faucher and Pierre Poirier

Cultural Evolution, the Baldwin Effect, and Social Norms
1
Department of Philosophy Universit du Qubec Montral and Champlain Regional College ; Department of
Philosophy Universit du Qubec Montral;
Department of Philosophy Universit du Qubec Montral
1 jlachape@globetrotter.net; faucher.luc@uqam.ca; poirier.pierre@uqam.ca
In recent years, a number of evolutionary theorists have been instrumental in the renewed interest
for the so-called Baldwin effect, most notably Terrence Deacon (1997) and Dan Dennett (1995). We
would like to demonstrate that the Baldwin effect plays a fundamental role in cultural evolution.
More specifically, we intend to analyze its role in the evolution of social norms (e.g., religious beliefs
and food preferences). Drawing on the works of people like Christopher Boehm (1999) and Shaun
Nichols (2002), we would like to suggest that the Baldwin effect is a mechanism which facilitates
the implementation and transmission of social norms.
Our contention is that a comprehensive theory of cultural evolution should include the Baldwin
effect as one of its principal mechanisms, while at the same time paying attention to the cognitive
architecture of the human mind and the different modes of transmission involved in cultural
evolution ( la Boyd and Richerson, 1985).
References
Boehm, Christopher (1999), Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson (1985), Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Deacon, Terrence (1997), The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton.
Dennett, Daniel (1995), Darwins Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Nichols, Shaun (2002), On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution. Philosophy of
Science, 69, 2, pp. 234-255.
17
Invited speaker, Chaired by Francis Heylighen

Olaf Diettrich
The Boundary Conditions of Cognitive Evolution
Keywords: Organic and cognitive phenotypes; organic and cognitive selection pressure; world
views; cognitive operators; human specific natural laws; Kurt Gdel and Emmy Noether.
Centre Leo Apostel, Vrije Universitet Brussel, Belgium
olaf.diettrich@skynet.be
The key topos of evolution is adaptation. Organic evolution has to meet the phaysical habitat,
cognitive evolution has to recognise the laws of nature in order to develop acting strategies. As to
organic evolution, the selection pressure on a organism depends on both the structure of the
habitat and the structure of the previously acquired organic phenotype. So, a given habitat alone
does not determine the result of organic evolution which, therefore does not converge towards a
unique and definitive focus (the pride of creation). Similar applies to cognitive evolution. It can
be shown that the laws of nature cannot be derived alone from the experiences made. They
depend as well from the previously acquired cognitive phenotype. So they are human specific
artefacts (Example: the law of conservation of energy can be derived from the homogeneity of
time. But what homogeneous means depends on how our internal clock - which is part of our
cognitive phenotype - is constructed). As an example: it is shown that seeing the world in 2
dimensions could provide as with competent survival strategies as well as our 3D world view does,
though the physics we see and the theories comprised would be entirely different. Generally
spoken, the world can be mastered successfully by as many different cognitive phenotypes (each
one having a different set of natural laws) as by different organic phenotypes (each one having
different acting tools).The consequence is shown in physics that the set of natural laws can never
be completed (no theory of everything) and in mathematics that the set of axioms can never be
completed (Gdels incompleteness theorem). This is in contrast to Campbells natural selection
epistemology saying that the fit between our theories on nature and the external nature itself is a
matter of trial and selection.
Under these circumstances boundary conditions of cognitive evolution have to be found which do
not refer to the properties of an external world. Two major conditions have to be met by any
cognitive phenotype. 1. The way we describe what we see must not depend on what we do. The
earliest and most important way of doing is locomotion. What we derive from our perceptions,
therefore, must be invariant under locomotion - or, in physical terms, invariant under the Galileitransformation or the Lorenz-transformation respectively (the construct of 3D geometrical objects
do so). As we derive from our perceptions also the laws of nature, these as well have to be Galileiinvariant. The decision of cognitive evolution to base our world view on locomotion may be due to
the fact that it happened at early times of organic evolution when moving was nearly the only
possible way of doing. 2. The way we describe what we see must allow simple predictions. This
means that our world view has to be based on variables which are cyclic, i.e. which are a linear
functions of time. Then their time derivatives are constant, i.e. they represent a law of conservation.
Emmy Noether has shown, that to every invariance of the form of a physical laws under a
generalized transformation there corresponds a conservation law of a physical quantity and vice
versa. In case of the 10-parametric Galilei-transformation we will get the 10 conservation laws of
classical mechanics.
So, the decision of cognitive evolution to describe the world in (3+1)Galielei-invariant terms
provides us with both the concept of space and the conservation laws we need to master the
world by means of classical mechanics.
18
Session 7, Chaired by Olaf Diettrich

Luc Steels
The Cultural Evolution of Language
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, Artificial Intelligence Lab
steels@arti.vub.ac.be
We report on recent progress in our efforts to model the cultural evolution of language and to test
these models in computer simulations and experiments with physical robots. Current theorising on
the origins and evolution of language is divided into three camps: (1) those who assume in a
rationalist tradition - a genetic origins of language (cf. Pinker), (2) those who assume an empiricist
position, in which language and its underlying concepts are acquired through observational
learning (cf connectionism), and (3) those who argue for a cultural evolution. In cultural evolution,
language is negotiated in peer-to-peer interactions so that language can continuously adapt to
the needs of language users. Meanings are not innate nor statistically derived from clustering
sensori-motor data, but constructed and imposed on sensori-motor streams to make discrimination
necessary for survival (including cultural survival). Meanings co-evolve with language and are
coordinated through language or other forms of representation-mediated interaction. We will
defend the latter position by criticising genetic and empiricist approaches and by showing a
concrete model how it might work. Various versions of this model have already been implemented
and tested in large-scale experiments. Each agent has a set of mechanisms for playing the role of
speaker or hearer in a language game. The language game takes place in a concrete setting so
that the real world and the shared situation constrain the set of possible meanings. The games we
have studied so far all center around joint attention or reference. The speaker attempts to draw the
attention of the hearer to an object or event in the shared situation. It is also assumed that this joint
attention can also be reached through other means such as pointing, eye gaze following, etc. but
language is a way to optimise success in joint attention and decontextualise agent interaction.
Agents take turns being speaker or hearer in the game. The mechanisms required by the agents to
play the role of speaker in a game include a way to perceive reality through a sensori-motor
embodiment, to categorise and conceptualise reality in order to find distinctive features of the
topic against the other objects in the context based on a repertoire of feature extractors,
categorisers, and conceptualisation strategies, and to verbalise the chosen conceptualisation
based on his own lexicon and grammar. To play the role of hearer, the agent must have ways to
perceive reality, parse expressions according to his own lexicon and grammar, and use his own
repertoire of grounded concepts to interpret the expressions in terms of the shared situation.
In addition, the agents need ways to create new feature extractors, new categorisations, new
conceptualisations, and they need the ability to invent new words and associate them with newly
invented meanings or invent new grammatical constructions to increase communicative success
and expressive power. We argue that these mechanisms are triggered when the speaker fails to
conceptualise or express what is needed, and so they solve a specific problem. Moreover, the
agents need ways to guess meaning of words and expressions they do not know (through joint
attention) and then make hypotheses about the possible meaning of unknown constructs. They
also need to create new feature extractors, new categories, or new conceptualisation strategies if
their existing repertoire is inadequate. We next show that if a population of agents has these
abilities and is closely coupled in the sense that they constantly adapt their distinctions and formmeaning pairs to be successful in the game, a global coherence both in the language and in the
underlying meaning repertoires results. Moreover both undergo constant evolution because new
meanings are created when new situations come up and new expressions are formed and
propagate in the population.
References
Steels, L. (2003) Intelligence With Representation. Transactions A Royal Society. London. October 2003 361(1811) p.2381-2395.
Steels, L. (2003) Language-reentrance and the 'Inner Voice'. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol 10, Issue 4-5.
Steels, L. (2003) Evolving grounded communication for robots. Trends in Cognitive Science, June 2003.
Steels, L. (2003) Creating a Robot Culture IEEE Intelligent Systems. May/June 2003. Steels, L. and J-C Baillie (2002) Shared
Grounding of Event Descriptions by Autonomous Robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Vol 43, 1-2 (2002) pp. 163-173
Steels, L. and F. Kaplan (2002) AIBO's First words. Evolution of Communication. Vol 4(1).
19
Tony Belpaeme
The cultural origins of colour categories
Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
tony@arti.vub.ac.be
Until the appearance of Berlin and Kays influential monograph (Berlin and Kay, 1969), it was
generally accepted that each culture divided the colour continuum in its own specific way. Berlin
and Kay however, with their results from colour naming studies, radically changed that view. They
observed how languages over the world each have colour terms that denote colours which are
extraordinarily similar across all cultures. Even more, they observed how colour lexicalisation follows
a clear evolutionary sequence: languages having two colour terms will have one for dark/cool
colours and one for light/warm colours. When having three colour terms, a term for red will be
added, then a term for green or yellow and so on. These worldwide regularities have led to
conclusion that colour categories are genetically determined, a view which has remained widely
accepted up till this day (e.g. Kay and Regier, 2003).
Indeed the similarity between different cultures colour categories (and other perceptual
categories) is remarkable, but different mechanisms than just genetic expression of innately
specified categories might be responsible for this. One theory explains colour categories as being
the result of an individual learning process. The structure of the environment from which categories
are learnt where some colours appear more than others is translated into colour categories.
Proponents claim that the environment contains enough structure to explain the similarities
between colour categories across different cultures.
We however wish to argue for linguistic relativism, which considers colour categorisation to primarily
be a cultural process. Colour categories are not encoded in the genotype nor are they learnt by
the individual, instead they are the result of a cultural agreement among a group of individuals.
Language plays a crucial role in this all. When assuming colour categories to plastic and taking into
account that colour categories can be lexicalised, linguistic communication drives the categories
of individuals to resemble each other. If not, successful communication would not be possible.
Colour categorisation is thus a self-organising process in a population of language users, with the
need to communicate effectively serving as selective pressure.
We wish to present a novel approach using computer simulations, which complements research
from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. With this approach, the conditions of the different
stances in the colour category debate are modelled and run in a simulation. The results from these
simulations show us how linguistic relativism is a valuable alternative to the conventional universalist
explanation for colour categories.
References
Berlin, B. and Kay, P. (1969) Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Kay, P. and Regier, T. (2003) Resolving the question of color naming universals. PNAS, 100(15):90859089.
20
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
The development of truth-seeking and other epistemic norms in evolved cognitive agents
Keywords: normativity, truth-seeking, epistemic agent
Marie Curie-Sklodowska University
ktalmont@yahoo.com
One thing that apriorist approaches have traditionally been thought to be better at than
naturalised epistemology is explaining normativity in general and truth-seeking as a norm in
particular. I will argue, however, that it is EE that is fruitful in this respect whereas traditional
epistemology turns out to fail.
My approach will be based upon a characterisation of epistemic agents (and cognitive agents as
a sub-set) which is closely aligned with the regulatory systems approach pursued by Hooker and
Collier and, in particular, the concept of autonomy they have developed in that context. The traits
of epistemic agents that will play the biggest role will be their ability to affect their environment,
their capacity for being affected by that environment and, most importantly, their goal-oriented
behaviour (all three being aspects of autonomy).
As I will show, traditional attempts to provide for normativity run into two problems: motivating the
choice of norms and explaining their relevance. Both questions can be dealt with once an
evolutionary epistemological position is taken up, however. The relevance of the norms will be
based upon their adaptive value, while their actual make-up will depend upon the actual
relationship between the agent and it environment.
What is particularly interesting is the way EE can provide for truth-seeking as an explicit norm. Truthseeking has been traditionally specified as a motivating norm for epistemic inquiry. There, it shares
in the difficulties that the apriorist approach has with normativity as well as leading to
counterintuitive results. The counterintuitive results can be avoided once truth-seeking is seen as
part of a regulatory control hierarchy where its force is limited by its relation to other norms such as
promptness, relevance, etc. In that context its relevance can be properly understood while an
inaccurate representation of the environment may be adequate to choose the optimal course of
action where the wrong action is taken for an epistemic reason this will be because of an
inaccurate or an inadequate representation, either of which would have been avoided given a
better representation. Because of its relevance to any epistemic agent that fits the general
characterisation that was given, the appearance of truth-seeking as a broadly applied and
possessed norm is unsurprising.
21
Session 8, Chaired by Kathleen Coessens

Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea
A complex and non linear approach to cognitive evolution/development: sociality, experience
and knowledge
Keywords: Cognition, Experience, Sociality, Autopoiesis
Dpt. Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNED, Madrid. Spain and Dpt. Social Anthropology/ Pembroke College. U.
Cambridge (UK)
eramirez@fsof.uned.es
The aim of this paper is to provide an integrated account of human cognition as a biosociocultural
phenomena embedded within evolutionary and developmental processes. Relying on the
epistemological frame provided by the theories of dynamic systems (autopoiesis, complexity,
criticality and chaos) and non linear approaches to time, evolution and social action, emergent
properties of systems, unpredictibility and irreversibility are analysed together with attractors,
structuration, recursivity and reorganization.
Culture is envisaged as the building and re-constructing process of sociality, cognition and
experience as mutually constituted, thanks to evolved capacities and precursors brought forth
locally, historically and developmentally.
A critical revision is made of genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology and memetics, their
cartesianism, objective realism and disembodiment that unable them to account for the
complexity of becoming (a) human as species, as a person and as a member of groups. Emphasis
is given to ontogeny, experience (practices and meaning) and environment, as shown in neural
epigenesis, neurophysiology, perception/representation, socialisation and social action. Brain
modularity, domain-specificity and neural architecture are reviewed from developmental research.
Special attention is given to crossmodality, heterocrony, exaptions and piggybackings in respect to
hominid evolution.
At last but not least, some considerations are made in respect to externalisation and objectivisation
of knowledge (communication, institutions, social relationships, technology) as recursive
mediaters/amplifiers for further cognitive evolution.
22
Robert K. Logan
The Extended Mind: The Origin of Language and Culture
Dept. of Physics - University of Toronto
logan@physics.utoronto.ca
One of the difficulties in understanding the origin of language is the lack of empirical data. The
thesis that will be developed in this paper is that historic data relating to the evolution of language
after the advent of speech and beginning with the emergence of writing can shed light on the
origin and evolution of human language. In The Sixth Language (Logan, Toronto: Stoddart, 2000a)
language is assumed to be both a medium of communication and an informatics tool to show that
speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of
languages. Each new form of language emerged as a bifurcation and a new level of order to deal
with the chaos and information overload that the previous forms of language could not handle.
Exploiting this approach the origins of speech and the human mind are shown to have emerged
simultaneously as the bifurcation from percepts to concepts and a response to the chaos
associated with the information overload that resulted from the increased complexity in hominid
life. Our ancestors developed toolmaking, controlled fire, and hence, developed manual praxic
articulation. They lived in larger social groups which resulted in the development of social
organization. And they engaged in large scale co-ordinated hunting which required mimetic
communication. As a result of these developments their minds could no longer cope with the
richness of life solely on the basis of its perceptual sensorium and as a result a new level of order
emerged in the form of conceptualization and speech. Speech arose primarily as a way to control
information and then was used as a tool for communication. Thought is not silent speech but rather
speech is vocalized thought.
The mechanism that allowed the transition from percept to concept was the emergence of
speech. The words of spoken language are the actual medium or mechanism by which concepts
are expressed or represented. Word are both metaphors and strange attractors uniting many
perceptual experiences in terms of a single concept. Spoken language and abstract conceptual
thinking emerged together at exactly the same point of time as a bifurcation from alingual
communication skills and the concrete percept-based thinking of pre-lingual hominids. (Logan
2000b).
The transition from percept-based thinking to concept-based thinking represented a major
discontinuity in human thought. Language extended the brain which hitherto served as a percept
processor into the human mind capable of conceptualization and planning (mind = brain +
language). We use our dynamic systems model of the mind to understand the connections
between technology, commerce, artistic expression, narrative and science and to generate what
we have playfully called the Grand Unification Theory of Human Thought. Manual praxic
articulation evolves into technology, social intelligence into commerce and mimetic
communication into artistic expression.
A synthesis of the Extended Mind model with the work of Christiansen (1994), Deacon (1997) and
Donald (1991) is made showing an overlap of these four approaches in which a parallel is drawn
respectively between conceptualization, sequential learning and processing, symbolic
representation and mimetic culture as a pre-adaptations for spoken language.
Christiansen's notion of treating language as an organism is generalized to the consideration of
culture as an organism also with the result that a notion of Universal Culture emerges in parallel with
the notion of Universal Grammar.
References
Christiansen, Morten. 1994. Infinite languages finite minds: Connectionism, learning and linguistic structure. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Edinburgh UK.
Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of the Brain and Language. New York: W.W.Norton&Co.
Donald, Merlin. 1991. The Origin of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press.
Logan, Robert K. 2000a. The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing.
Logan, Robert K. 2000b. The extended mind: understanding language and thought in terms of complexity and chaos theory.
In Lance Strate (ed), 2000 Communication and Speech Annual Vol. 14.
23
Tinneke Beeckman
Reflections on destiny within a non-reductionist naturalist anthropology
Keywords: anthropology, cultural philosophy
Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
tinneke.beeckman@vub.ac.be
Human beings are genealogically related to each other and have common ancestors with other
species. However, we are also clearly distinct from (other) animals, for instance in the fact that we
have culture, or that we suffer from a large variety of psychopathologies. But how can we think this
difference? What is culture? Or, what is the specificity of the human being? It is very tempting like
Dawkins when he introduced memetics - to think culture as different units that are gene
analogues. Cultural evolution thus becomes analogous to natural selection. This move allows
scientists to remain within the existing and successful paradigm of the natural sciences. However,
many criticisms have been formulated and to name just a few: unlike genes, memes do not have
an syntactic and semantic identity, meme-mutations are directed, convergent evolution make a
genealogical reconstruction difficult and thoughts (or culture) cannot be divided in units (see
Dennett 1995, Midgley 2001, Wimsatt, 1992). Gould claims that cultural evolution occurs according
to different mechanisms all together. This memetic approach is hereby often opposed to literature
(Midgley). Rejecting the explanatory power of memes has a far-reaching effect. It implies
considering the need for a different kind of explanation when it comes to what is specifically and
exclusively human. Two phenomena are interesting and maybe related: culture and
psychopathology (to certain degrees). Involving psychopathology is not the same project as trying
to understand pathology merely within the framework of natural selection and adaptation. It is
namely problematic how evolutionary theory could serve as the general theoretical framework for
explaining and treating mental disorders (in spite of Troisi & McGuire1998), although it is undeniably
true that our minds were shaped by natural selection. In itself, an integration of psychiatry and
evolutionary theory seems desirable. But what is the difficulty (and the challenge)? It is not clear
how an evolutionary theory could clarify an important asp0ect of both culture (e.g. literature) and
(mild) psychopathology, namely the reflections on how humans perceive their destiny. The problem
of destiny as a subjective experience, is at the heart of religion, philosophy, literature and
psychopathology. It constitutes what philosophers sometimes call singularity(as it is used in the
human sciences, not in the meaning of the exact sciences). That we are capable of reflecting on
our destiny is not only the result of our evolution, but it strongly influences our cultural productions
and psychopathological experiences. How narrow the link between culture and psychopathology
really is, becomes clear when one considers the fact that different cultural surroundings imply
different pathologies. According to Nesse (in Cosmides & Tooby 1992), there are several reasons to
believe that repression and other psychodynamic traits may be mental mechanisms shaped by
natural selection. Although the scientific acceptability of psychodynamics is highly questionable,
there is some agreement that people, for instance, admit to an underlying selfishness in altruistic
behaviour. Deception and ultimately self-deception can be expected strategies when individuals
act on behalf of their genes. (Nesse 1990, Dawkins 1982). The general capacity for keeping things
unconscious can have selective advantages and current benefits. This may be convincing in itself,
but is it sufficient to understand psychopathology? In analysing specific psychodynamic traits as
specialised strategies for deceiving others, psychopathology is mainly seen as a reaction to social
behaviour. But social and cultural are not the same. Maybe cultural effects imply a sort of extra
(non-reducible) operation that can not be accounted for by merely considering the aspect of
benefit in relation to others. In my paper, I would like to explore some possibilities and difficulties of
an alternative which is at the same time indebted to evolutionary theory and capable of thinking
culture and psychopathology as testimonies to the experience of the singularity of human life.
24
Invited speaker, Chaired by Hendrik Pinxten

Tim Ingold
Beyond genes and memes: a relational approach to the evolution of language and culture
Department of Anthropology - University of Aberdeen
tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk
Neo-Darwinian theorists typically regard culture as comprising a body of rules and representations
that are transmitted across the generations by non-genetic means. Such a view entails the
assumptions: (i) that the informational content or meanings of transmitted culture can be read off
from its manifest components (such as words, gestures, artefacts and designs) through decoding
rules that are given independently of the social and environmental contexts of transmission; and (ii)
that the process by which culture is acquired classically known as social learning, and involving
some combination of observation and imitation is separable from the process by which acquired
knowledge is applied, in practice, within the lifetime of each individual.
I argue that both assumptions are untenable. As regards the first, I show that there is no reading of
words, gestures, etc. that is not part of the novices practical orientation towards his or her
environment. Thus they do not carry meaning into contexts of interaction, as the neo-Darwinian
model of information transmission requires, but rather gather their meanings from the contexts of
the activities and relationships in which they are in play. As regards the second, I argue that
learning is not a matter of acquiring mental templates, in the form of rules and representations for
the production of appropriate behaviour, prior to running off exemplars of the behaviour from the
templates. Rather, novices learn by being placed in practical situations where, through the
repeated performance of certain tasks, they can develop and fine-tune their own skills of
awareness and response. In this process, each generation contributes to the next not by handing
on a corpus of representations, or information in the strict sense, but by introducing novices into
contexts that afford selected opportunities for perception and action, and by providing the
scaffolding that enables them to make use of these affordances.
A crucial implication of this argument is that variations of skill that we are inclined to call cultural
are, in reality, developmentally embodied properties of the organism, and in that sense fully
biological. If, by evolution, we mean differentiation and change over time in the forms and capacities
of organisms, then we must admit that such skills have evolved. We cannot, however, attribute this
evolution to changing gene frequencies. Skills are no more the operations of a mind impregnated by
culture than they are of a body designed by natural selection. They are rather achievements of the
whole organism, at once body and mind, positioned within an environment. And to account for these
achievements, we need nothing less than a new approach to evolution, one that sets out to explore
not the variation and selection of intergenerationally transmitted attributes (whether genes or memes),
but the self-organising dynamics and form-generating potentials of relational fields.
25
Session 9, Chaired by Tim Ingold

Derek Turner
Universal Darwinism and Process Essentialism
Keywords: Essentialism, Dawkins, Dennett, Hull, Universal Darwinism
Department of Philosophy, Connecticut College, New London, USA
Dtur@conncoll.edu
According to conventional wisdom, the Darwinian revolution was a revolution against Aristotelian
essentialism. Philosophers and biologists continue to disagree with respect to a number of
questions about biological species: Are they sets or metaphysical individuals? Does it matter?
Which species concepts are appropriate for which scientific purposes? What is the point of a
taxononomic system? And so on. Virtually no one today, however, thinks that species are natural
kinds, or that there are any such truths as that all and only humans are rational animals.
In this paper, I argue that many contemporary Darwinists are nevertheless closet essentialists. While
they deny essentialism about species, they remain committed to a view that I call process
essentialism. This process essentialism is most explicit in the work of universal Darwinists such as
Dawkins, Dennett, David Hull, and other proponents of Darwinian accounts of mind and culture.
What these theorists have in common is a commitment to the idea that biologists should be
interested in a certain natural kind of historical processcall it a Darwinian evolutionary process
that can be characterized in the following way:
All and only processes having such-and-such features are Darwinian evolutionary processes.
This process essentialism is explicit in Dennetts claim that evolution is a substrate neutral algorithmic
process, and in Hulls abstract characterization of Darwinian evolution in terms of the sub-processes
of replication, interaction, and selection. After showing that Dawkins, Dennett, and Hull are indeed
committed to process essentialism, I will go on to show that their evolutionary accounts of mind,
culture, and science actually depend on this process essentialism.
I then show that one does not need to be a process essentialist in order to be a Darwinist. Process
essentialism is optional. A reasonable alternative is to think of Darwinian evolutionary processes in
much the same way that Wittgenstein thought of games. We can identify a number of family
resemblances of Darwinian evolutionary processes, without supposing that we can give a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions for somethings being a Darwinian evolutionary process. I
conclude by arguing that this anti-essentialist view is more loyal to the spirit of Darwinism than the
process essentialism of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hull.
26
Sverker Johansson
The individual and the species in the cultural evolution of language
Keywords: cultural evolution, coevolution, idiolect, species
School of Education & Communication, University of Jnkping, Sweden
lsj@hlk.hj.se
Language is an evolving entity of its own, the cultural evolution of which has almost certainly
played a major role in the biological evolution and success of Homo sapiens. But what are the units
of selection in the evolution of language, and what levels of selection may be relevant? To what
extent may biological analogies be fruitful, and when should they be avoided? Are there linguistic
equivalents of genes, organisms, and species? There are several linguistic entities on different levels
that may be candidates for evolutionary considerations:
Meme level. Reductionistically, one might adopt the equivalent of the genes eyes view of
Dawkins (1976), which would be the smallest linguistic units that can be coherently replicated, the
memes of language. Memes are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in many cultural contexts, but
possible linguistic meme candidates might include individual words or individual grammatical rules
(or parameter settings in a Universal-Grammar framework). This might be a useful level of analysis
for the study of contemporary language change, on a rather short time scale, linguistic microevolution, but is unlikely to be helpful in the study of the roots of language as a system.
Organism level. The organism level in biology may be regarded as a coherent set of genes
working together as a team, forming a common interactor. Individual genes of a human being do
not do anything useful on their own they are meaningful evolutionary units only in the context of
all the other genes of our genome. Similarly, individual words or rules in language are not
meaningful in isolation, only as parts of a coherent system. The lowest-level entity in which all these
low-level pieces are gathered together in a coherent whole would be the idiolect of an individual
language-user. In biology, the lowest-level entity in which all human genes are working together
as a coherent whole is an individual human being, as a biological organism. I will regard an idiolect
as a linguistic organism in the same sense. It is quite accidental that the organism levels of
biology and linguistics very nearly coincide, and perhaps unfortunate, as it may invite confusion as
well as over-extension of biological analogies; this will have to be kept in mind.
This organism level may be the most fruitful for the study of the origin of the human language
capacity. Very little interaction can be expected between individual language memes and individual human genes, so the meme/gene level is less likely to yield interesting insights into this issue.
Direct interaction, and possible co-evolution, may instead be expected at the system level,
between the human being as a system, with emergent properties beyond the sum of the genes,
and the idiolect as a system of, but similarly beyond the sum of, language memes. An important
aspect here, with implications for the innateness and modularity debates, is the interplay between
biological selection for language acquisition capability, and cultural selection between idiolects for
learnability.
Species level. In biology, a species can be regarded as a set of organisms that are mutually
reproductively compatible. Alternatively, from a gene perspective, a species is a gene pool within
which genes can flow freely. A linguistic analogy of the species concept would then be either a
population of mutually compatible idiolects, or a meme pool within which language memes can
flow freely. With either perspective, a linguistic species concept is indicated that is quite close to
our everyday notion of a language. This level of analysis is relevant for the study of the historical
development of languages and language families, but hardly for the ultimate origins of language.
27
Nathalie Gontier
Evolutionary Epistemology and the Origin and Evolution of Language and Culture Taking
Symbiogenesis Seriously
Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Nathalie.Gontier@vub.ac.be
Within the last 20 years there has been a renewed interest in the origin and evolution of language.
The study of language is not only of philosophical or linguistic import, it begs for a biological interest
as well, the idea being that language is first and foremost a biological adaptation (Hurford,
Studdert-Kennedy, Knight: 1998; Knight, Studdert-Kennedy, Hurford: 2000). The Neodarwinian
paradigm, founded on a functionalistic approach surely has its merits, and highlights new and
interesting perspectives, but what is lacking within the field is a critical evaluation and reflexivity
about the pros and cons of Neodarwinian theory. Theres no question about the fact whether
language needs to be comprehended as a biological phenomenon, the question I want to raise is
whether there are also other evolutionary mechanisms, besides Darwinian mechanisms, which can
help in the scientific study of the origin and evolution of language.
Therefore it is necessary that we look into the field of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE). EE is an
interdisciplinary field that evolved out of science and philosophy of science that investigates (1) our
specific human capacities from within evolutionary biology (2) how we can put the evolutionary
mechanisms to use in other fields such as science in general, economics, culture and linguistics. EE
has as its main theme of interest, the search for a universal evolutionary mechanism, which can be
used as a normative framework from wherein we can understand the evolution of all our cognitive
capacities, including language. There are, however, numerous accounts already given of what
exactly this universal mechanism is. Theres the blind variation and selective retention-scheme of
Campbell (1987), 'Universal Darwinism' put forward by Dawkins (1983), 'Universal Selectionism'
(Czicko: 1995), the generate-test-regenerate-scheme of Plotkin (1995), and the replicationvariation-environmental interaction'-scheme, introduced by Hull, Langmann and Glenn (2001). All
these universal evolutionary mechanisms plead for a functionalistic approach, which means,
applied to language, that we must search for the function and the adaptive value of the evolution
of our capacity of language. Because of this, researchers in the field are urged to develop
evolutionary just so-stories, which try to explain the evolutionary benefit of our language
development, a development which all too often gets reduced to the evolution of syntax and
semantics, grammar and words. A question concerning the function automatically poses a
question which addresses itself to the future (what is the goal of language: answers given being for
example, communication, gossip, rites, social bonding, ). This is quite a paradox, because,
studying the origin and evolution of language one should pose questions which are directed to the
past, instead of the future.
My suggestion will be that we have to consider the possibilities a systems theoretical point of view
might bring for the study of the origin and evolution of language. Neodarwinians use a vertical
concept of evolution, to explain how individual variation and speciation came about. Although
this is very fruitful, we should also investigate the possibility of applying a horizontal evolution
concept for the origin and evolution of language. Croft (2000), for example, already emphasized
that the evolution of language, language contact and perhaps even the origin of individual and
groupsspecific language variation takes on the form of hybridization, typical of the evolution of
plants. I would like to push Crofts idea a little further: contrary to other species, humans dont
necessarily have to pass on their genes to the next generation to be able to introduce novelty:
humans have a capacity to learn, by imitating or simply observing each others behaviour. This
learning can be understood as a form of horizontal evolution and therefore I am investigating how
we can use the idea of Universal Symbiogenesis to understand the origin and evolution of
language. Symbiogenesis (Margulis: 1999; Margulis and Sagan: 2000) is a theory of horizontal
evolution which explains the origin of the eukaryotic cell. Within EE however, Dyson, has developed
a universal theory of Symbiogenesis, being: the reattachment of two structures, after they have
been detached from each other and have evolved along separate paths for a long time, so as to
form a combined structure with behaviour not seen in the separate components" (Dyson,
1998:121). Ideas like conceptual blending (Turner and Fauconnier, 2002) fit well into this general
framework and can also be applied to the study of the origin and evolution of language.
28
Session 10, Chaired by Piet Van de Craen
Mario Alinei
The Paleolithic Continuity Theory of Language Evolution

Keywords: Paleolithic, prehistory, language innatism and language evolution
University of Utrecht (emeritus) - malinei@tin.it
At least five different disciplines, in recent times, have addressed the problem of the origin of
language and languages, reaching conclusions that show a remarkable convergence: (1) In
general linguistics, Noam Chomskys theory on the psychological and formal foundations of
language is centered upon the claim that language is innate. Until recently, this claim formed a
major obstacle for the integration of his theory in a Darwinian, evolutionary framework. A major
breakthrough, however, independently made by scholars specialized in different sciences (see the
following points), has provided an unexpected solution to this problem. (2) In paleoanthropology,
the last discoveries have brought Ph. V. Tobias, one of the world leading specialists, to conclude
that the question now is no longer whether Homo habilis spoke (which is considered a factual
certainty), but whether the capacity for language was already optionally present in some
Australopithecus, to become obligatory in Homo, as one of his unique traits (Tobias 1996). (3) On
independent evidence, a similar conclusion has been reached also in the field of cognitive
sciences, by Steven Pinker: "a form of language could first have emerged [...] after the branch
leading to humans split off from the one leading to chimpanzees. The result would be languageless
chimps and approximately five to seven million years in which language could have gradually
evolved" (Pinker 1994, 345). (4) In genetics, the school founded and led by Luca Cavalli Sforza has
made fundamental discoveries about the relationship between genetics and linguistics, such as:
(A) the areal distribution of genetic markers largely corresponds to that of the world languages; (B)
language differentiation must have proceeded step by step with the dispersal of humans (probably
Homo sapiens sapiens) out of Africa. More over, the latest outcome of DNA genetic research is that
that 80% of the genetic stock of Europeans goes back to Paleolithic (e.g. Sykes 2001, 240 ff). (5) In
the last three decades, archaeology has made quite a few revolutionary advances, among which
the most well-known is the much higher chronologies of European prehistory, obtained by
radiocarbon and other innovative dating techniques. But the most relevant conclusion for our topic
is that also in Europe there is overwhelming evidence for demic and cultural continuity, from the
final Paleolithic to the Metal Ages. To these advances can also be added the so called Uralic
Continuity Theory, currently accepted by both archaeologists and linguists of the Uralic area (FinnoUgric plus Samoyed languages). This theory claims that the Uralic people settled in their present
area after the deglaciation of Northern Euarasia, and thus they must have present as groups of
Homo sapiens sapiens - in glacial Eurasia in Paleolithic times. On the basis of these converging
conclusions, a general Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) of language origin and evolution has
been proposed (Alinei 1996-2000), the main lines of which are: (I) Language in general and
languages in particular are much more ancient than traditionally thought. (II) Consequently, the
internal differentiation of the worlds various proto-languages reconstructed by comparative
linguistics (Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Semitic etc.), as well as that of their
differentiated branches (Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Greek etc., Finno-Ugric, Samoyed
etc.), must have followed an extremely slow process, associated with the varying episodes of the
original migration from Africa, and with the varying cultural stages reached by ethno-linguistic
groups in the different settlement areas, and well-studied by archaeology. (III) Similarly, the
emerging and gradual development of the different grammatical and semantic structures of the
world language families including Indo-European - must now be seen as representing the
awakening and the slow development of human conscience in all of its forms in already
differentiated groups of Homo sapiens. (IV) While traditional linguistics, by reifying language, had
made linguistic change into a sort of biological, organic law of language development, the new,
long chronologies of language origins and language development impose a reversal of this
conception: conservation is the law of language and languages, and change is the exception,
being caused by language contacts and hybridization, in concomitance with the major
ecological, socio-economic and cultural events that have shaped each area of the globe.
With different emphases the PCT has been independently advanced by both archaeologists (e.g.
Otte 1994, Husler 1996) and linguists (e.g. Costa 1998, Poghirc 1992), and is now shared by a
growing number of linguists (e.g. Ballester 2000, Benozzo 2002, Cavazza 2001, Le Du 2002).
29
Junichi Toyota
Kaleidoscopic grammar: the emergence of the verb
Keywords: language evolution, verb, cognition, binary
University of Freiburg
junichi_toyota@yahoo.co.uk
In this paper, the emergence of the verb in the evolution of language is discussed. It is generally
agreed that language initially had only nouns, probably along with some motion verbs. Various
previous approaches to the origin and the evolution of language assume that the use of language
was advantageous to our ancestors for some reasons and the emergence of nouns benefited the
speakers and such pieces of information were duplicated (or imitated) from generation to
generation. The historical change happens, when the information was not properly duplicated. The
problem of such approaches is the emergence of the verb: the noun is used to refer to an object,
which is inherently stative and the verb, to express dynamic event and it helped to form a
predicate. If earlier verbs were all used to denote state, the transition from noun to verb can be
viewed a gradual one and the change is much easier to understand. However, the earlier verb
can express action, and the copula, an inherently stative verb and frequently used in a predicate
with complement, did not exist at an earlier stage in, say, Proto-Indo-European (cf. Gamkrelidze
and Ivanov 1995). So, the emergence of the verb seems to be an abrupt one, which is not
common in the historical change of languages in general, and it certainly does not fit in the
evolutionary view of the language change.
Facing this problem, I focus on a particular feature of ancient languages, i.e. binary system. The
grammatical structure of ancient reconstructed languages such as Proto-Indo-European is
organised with the binary opposition, such as stative-dynamic aspectual distinction. The opposite
features in the language are complementing each other and thus, stabilising the expressibility. This
is what I call kaleidoscopic grammar. The binary system can be found not only in human language,
but also elsewhere: in most animals, ranging from a single cell microbes to higher life forms such as
mammals, the body structure is normally symmetrical, therefore, it is a type of binary construction.
This indicates that the mutation in evolution happened in two places simultaneously. Considering
the fact that asymmetrical features are far rarer in creatures, some evolutionary biologists such as
Dawkins (1997: 204-235) claim that symmetry can be a great advantage in evolution (in his term,
evolution of evolutionability). The importance of binary or symmetry system does not seem to be
restricted to the evolution of animals alone, and some pieces of such evidence can be found in
the history of human civilisation or cognition, such as various trances of symmetrical artefacts (cf.
Wynn 2000).
The human cognition generally prefers the time-durable (i.e. stative) expression (cf. Hopper and
Thompson 1984; Bloom et al. 1980; Shirai and Andersen 1995) and this can be shown in the
language acquisition too (e.g. recapitulationist hypothesis. Cf. Lamendella 1976, Givn 1979,
Bickerton 1990). Based on the non-linguistic evidence such as artefacts, the binary system can also
be added to this preference of human cognition: the presence of noun at the earlier stage of the
language was due to the stativity, but at the same time, our cognition requires a binary opposition
in order to balance the expression. So this can be considered why the verb emerged in language,
to play an opposition role to the noun. This does not involve the generally assumed biological
account of language development, and the cognition is given more prominence in this case.
30
Jim Scoggins
A Study to demonstrate the use of signed language in medieval and renaissance paintings and
sculpture
Registered, American Inst. of Architects, Interpreter for Deaf
ISignok2@aol.com
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND PURPOSE

This study was designed to validate the discovery of signed language in paintings and sculpture of
the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
The purpose of this study was to focus on the recent discovery of signed language in several
hundred paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. This was achieved by:
(1) identifying and reporting examples of signed language in specific paintings and sculpture of the
Medieval and Renaissance periods; (2) determining the feasibility of validating the findings of the
Study; (3) executing a validation system that will show the existence of signed language in
paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, if feasible; (4) delineate findings
and make recommendations for further study in this field.
PROCEDURES
This study utilized historical review, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. The
quantitative research utilized a survey to identify specific examples of signed language used in
samples of paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Experts in sign
language for the deaf were utilized for this survey. The qualitative research involved a study of
twenty-five (25) samples of paintings and sculpture of the Medieval and Renaissance periods that
were identified in the quantitative research as exhibiting signed language utilizing those that
responded to the survey. A criterion was developed to choose 25 from 640 examples. A panel of
experts was used to validate the research instruments and recommendations proposed in the
study. A bibliography of seventy-five scientific journals was utilized for reference.
FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This discovery of signed language in paintings and sculptures of the Medieval and Renaissance
periods is both an original and heretofore unknown step in the development of communication
systems by mankind. Some efforts were visualized to make this the universal language of man. Art
Historians will now find it necessary to reevaluate paintings and sculpture of this period by this
additional standard.
31

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Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Invited speaker, Chaired by Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 1, Chaired by Erik Myin

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 2, Chaired by Tony Belpaeme

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Invited speaker, Chaired by Luc Steels

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 3, Chaired by Franz Wuketits

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Ruben Gmez-Sorianoand Rubn1 and Humberto Vianna2

de Psicologa Bsica de la Universidad Autnoma de Madrid.

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 4, Chaired by Frank Brisard

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Invited speaker, Chaired by Liane Gabora

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 5, Chaired by Marek Czachor

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 6, Chaired by Myriam Vermeerbergen

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Jean Lachapelle1, Luc Faucher and Pierre Poirier

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Invited speaker, Chaired by Francis Heylighen

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 7, Chaired by Olaf Diettrich

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 8, Chaired by Kathleen Coessens

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Invited speaker, Chaired by Hendrik Pinxten

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 9, Chaired by Tim Ingold

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Session 10, Chaired by Piet Van de Craen

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory of Language Evolution

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture 2004 Congress Booklet

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND PURPOSE

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