The Origin Of Language And Consciousness
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The Origin of Language and Consciousness
This book presents an evolutionary theory of the origin and step-by-step development of linguistic structures and cognitive abilities from the early stages of anthropogenesis to the Upper Paleolithic. Emphasizing the social nature of the human mind and using an extended version of C.Hempel's explanatory logic, the author proves that language and consciousness emerged and evolved through the daily efforts of our ancestors to overcome mutual misunderstandings in increasingly complex social orders with increasing tasks on memory, thinking, and normative regulation of behavior, with the addition of new and new communicative concerns. The book addresses questions such as the following: What unique social conditions led to the emergence of the first protosyllables and protowords? What steps enabled the crossing of the "linguistic Rubicon" (between animal communication and human speech)? Why were syllables and phonemes needed? How did our ancestors overcome the difficulties of misunderstanding? How, when, and why did ancient people learn to speak in turns? Why did they begin to talk about past and distant events? What is consciousness and how did it evolve along with language? How many original languages were there and why are there roughly 200 philas (language macrofamilies)? How and why did the number of languages and the degree of their complexity change in pre-written history? Did the Romance languages really evolve from Latin? Accordingly, the book will appeal to scholars in various disciplines who are interested in a better understanding of the cognitive aspects of anthropogenesis and the ancient origins of language and consciousness.
Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness
Author: Trân Duc Thao
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2012-12-06
Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human
The Origin of Language and Consciousness
This book presents an evolutionary theory of the origin and step-by-step development of linguistic structures and cognitive abilities from the early stages of anthropogenesis to the Upper Paleolithic. Emphasizing the social nature of the human mind and using an extended version of C.Hempel's explanatory logic, the author proves that language and consciousness emerged and evolved through the daily efforts of our ancestors to overcome mutual misunderstandings in increasingly complex social orders with increasing tasks on memory, thinking, and normative regulation of behavior, with the addition of new and new communicative concerns. The book addresses questions such as the following: What unique social conditions led to the emergence of the first protosyllables and protowords? What steps enabled the crossing of the "linguistic Rubicon" (between animal communication and human speech)? Why were syllables and phonemes needed? How did our ancestors overcome the difficulties of misunderstanding? How, when, and why did ancient people learn to speak in turns? Why did they begin to talk about past and distant events? What is consciousness and how did it evolve along with language? How many original languages were there and why are there roughly 200 philas (language macrofamilies)? How and why did the number of languages and the degree of their complexity change in pre-written history? Did the Romance languages really evolve from Latin? Accordingly, the book will appeal to scholars in various disciplines who are interested in a better understanding of the cognitive aspects of anthropogenesis and the ancient origins of language and consciousness.