I want to consider, in light of fairly new philosophical and scientific research, two long-standing conceptual objections to evolutionary theory: Wallace’s Problem and Darwin’s Doubt.
It is well-recognized that Wallace saw the need for some supernatural intelligence in explaining human evolution, in contrast to Darwin’s naturalistic speculations in Descent of Man. What is less recognized is that Wallace was, in an important sense, right. He squarely faced the problem, “can natural selection alone account for the unique cognitive abilities of human beings, such as abstract thought, self-consciousness, radical reshaping of the environment (e.g. clothing, building), collective self-governance by ethical norms, and the symbolic activities of art, religion, philosophy, mathematics, logic, and science?” Whereas Darwin thought there was continuity between humans and non-human animals, his evidence is primarily amount emotional displays, rather than the genuinely cognitive discontinuity.
A closely related problem, however, was squarely faced by Darwin: the question, nicely phrased in his famous letter to Asa Gray, as to whether it is plausible to think that natural selection can have equipped a creature with a capacity for arriving at any objective truths about the world. (It is not often noted that in that letter, Darwin says that he believes in an intelligent creator — what is in doubt is whether natural selection gives him reasons to trust in his cognitive abilities.)
These two questions, Wallace’s Problem and Darwin’s Doubt, are two sides of the same coin: if natural selection (along with other biological processes) cannot account for the uniquely human ability to grasp objective truths about reality, then we must either reject naturalism (as Wallace did) or question our ability to grasp objective truths about reality (as Darwin did).
Call this the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism. Can it be solved? If so, how?
What I want to suggest is that we can solve Wallace’s Problem and resolve Darwin’s Doubt by assembling the following materials.
1. A philosophical revolution that I call “embodied discursive pragmatism”. Discursive pragmatism, in C. I. Lewis, W. Sellars, and Robert Brandom treats language as logically prior to thought, such that we can explain intentionality and semantic content in terms of language (rather than treating language as the mere vehicle by which logically independent thoughts are communicated). Language here is a kind of activity; languaging is something that we do, and we are enlanguaged beings because of what we have learned to do. To this, embodied discursive pragmatism stresses that language is itself a particular way of being an embodied being — speech (and writing) are themselves ways of enacting an embodied way of life.
2. Recent work in niche construction theory, embodied-embedded cognitive science, comparative primatology, and paleoanthropology (none of which were available to Wallace or Darwin).
Assembling these philosophical and scientific resources allows us to understand how, in the first instance, many animals generally are able to arrive at a primitive kind of proto-objective (and proto-subjective) knowledge by being able to reliably track objects across space and time (even when not being perceived directly), recognize that co-occurent sensing through different sensory modalities can have the same spatio-temporally coextensive causes, correlate exteroceptive and interoceptive information (necessary for distinguishing movement-caused perceptual changes and perceptual changes not caused by the animal’s own movement), learn, predict, imagine, and infer.
In the second instance, the construction of a uniquely hominid niche involved obligate cooperative extractive foraging. While extractive foraging is common in primates, and many great apes use tools to extract foods from their environments, humans are cooperative in extractive foraging (and must be so). Adequate provisioning requires that everyone in the group who is able to contribute will in fact contribute to the provisioning of everyone else, through division of labor that involves hunting and scavenging; setting traps for small animals; gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines; cleaning and cooking food, making clothing, weapons; transmitting to future generations the knowledge of how to do all these things through active teaching.
Obligate cooperative foraging involves two important cognitive transformations: displaced reference and joint intentionality. Displaced reference, which put hominids on the road to language, is the capacity to communicate about objects and events that are not perceptually present to (at least) the hearer. Joint intentionality is the ability for two creatures to take an object as their shared object of attention, to know of the other creature that it is also attending to that object and to want them to do so, so that the two creatures can coordinate their actions in order to succeed at a task that neither of them could accomplish alone (or which would take much more time or energy to do so).
Displaced reference as a communication system, whether vocal or gestural, puts hominids on the road to language. (The next major hurdle would the evolution of syntax.) Joint intentionality puts hominids on the road to collective intentionality and thence to culture, art, religion, exchange of goods and services, and so on.
But once we see, with embodied discursive pragmatism, that all there is to be explained is our ability to play the socio-linguistic game of giving and asking for reasons as itself a particular form of animal embodiment, then we can see that there are no insurmountable obstacles to getting to that point from a sufficiently rich, empirically informed of animal cognition in general and of primate cognition in particular.
And thus we can solve Wallace’s Problem and resolve Darwin’s Doubt: we can explain our capacity for rational discourse and objective thought in naturalistic terms.
Seems better than becoming a spiritualist, for sure.
Glen Davidson
Oh, for sure. But part of my point in framing the problem here was to underscore that Wallace’s spiritualism was in fact a perfectly reasonable solution (at the time) to a very difficult problem.
So if I understand the OP correctly, the way to overcome Darwin’s Doubt and Wallace’s Problem (in which language is not a product of evolution) is to propose that language is a product of evolution?
The Kingdom of Speech
Are you proposing tht we need to re-think how evolution really works, and are you proposing this radical shift in understanding about evolution for all levels of evolution, or does evolution itself also evolve?
Books I’ve been reading about this stuff:
Embodied discursive pragmatism:
Making It Explicit and Articulating Reasons by Robert Brandom, for the basic view of discursive pragmatism.
‘Yo’ and ‘Lo’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons by Kukla and Lance and also their “Perception, Language, and the First Person” (in Reading Brandom, ed Wanderer and Weiss)
How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism and Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image, both by Joe Rouse.
Embodied/Embedded Cognitive Science:
Action in Perception by Noë
Remaking the Cognitive World by Wheeler
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Chemero
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by Gibson
Surfing Uncertainty: Perception, Action, and the Embodied Mind by Clark
Primate Cognition:
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, A Natural History of Human Thinking and A Natural History of Human Morality, all by Tomasello
Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality by Okrent.
Niche Construction Theory (and its role in human evolution):
More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution, by Bickerton
The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique, by Sterelny
Articulating the World by Rouse
There are two distinct moves here.
The first is a philosophical move, in which we see language as underpinning and making possible, both in evolution and in development, abstract thought, symbolic communication, self-consciousness, and objectivity. (That’s what I’m calling ’embodied discursive pragmatism’.)
The second is a scientific move, in which we understand how language is a result of evolution (more precisely: the co-evolution of language and human cognition).
Neither of those moves was available to Darwin or Wallace, which is why a retreat to spiritualism was a reasonable position for Wallace. (Arguably it was more reasonable than Darwin’s own speculations.)
I’m a philosopher who knows a bit about evolutionary theory, and not an evolutionary theorist. It’s not that I’m proposing to re-think how evolution works but rather pointing out that many others are already doing so. In particular niche construction theory seems like a very promising conceptual supplement, and one for which there’s a good deal of evidence. The explanatory role of niche construction theory in driving the evolution of language and shared intentionality is a very exciting development.
I suppose I’m not really sure what to understand by the last question. Certainly new kinds of organisms bring in their wake new evolutionary processes. There’s no sexual selection before the evolution of sex, and no niche construction before the evolution of organisms that are cognitively sophisticated enough to modify their behaviors in response to changes in the environment.
And here’s Alva Noe on Accidental Tools: A Difference In Our Ancestors And Monkeys, with links to other recent discussions of similarities and differences between us and other primates.
There is certainly a discontinuity today, because there are no surviving australopithecines or ardipithecines or sahelanthropodes (if we leave aside humans). But that of course is true in other groups. The intermediates between african elephants and asian elephants also have not survived.
KN treats it as obvious that there is some difficult problem in explaining how one could get from nonhuman apes to humans. Is it obvious that this is a great deal harder than explaining how elephants diverged?
If pre-Homo hominids or earlier species of Homo had survived, we’d be much less impressed with how much we differ from the great apes. That much is true.
But that doesn’t undermine the fact that there cognitive differences between us and the extant great apes, including language and shared intentionality and what they make possible (art, religion, science, philosophy, ethics, politics, economics, etc.). This is not just a philosopher’s prejudice, a sad result of reading too much Kant and not enough Darwin; we have a lot of empirical psychology, done by people like Tomasello and Povinelli, who have been tracking these differences very carefully for decades.
If the intermediate species had survived, we wouldn’t be as impressed with the discontinuity and we wouldn’t face the cognitive differences between us and great apes as a problem.
But we’d have a very different set of problems, such as which of these species should be granted human rights!
I think I mainly disagree with KN’s post.
I do not see a discontinuity with animals, except in the sense that Joe mentions.
To a first approximation, KN is discussing how we have the kind of mind that is discussed in philosophy of mind. My answer is that we do not actually have anything like that.
To get more specific, I’ll quote this paragraph:
I don’t think we actually do that. That is to say, I don’t think we have any ability to track objects. Rather, we have developed the ability to conceptualize as objects, what we are able to track. So we talk about shadows as if objects; we talk about reflections as if objects; we talk about songs as if objects.
Given that humans are animals, neither do I.
Yes, these are all objects of thought.
I know what it is for a song to be a track, I do not know what it means to track a song.
Ask the copyright police.
A “philosophical revolution” spearheaded by Kantian Naturalist?! LoL, jargon, cough.
Given that they are probably looking for me, why would I do that?
KN. here is a book you might enjoy:
The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
If there were no discontinuities there would be no discontinuities! That there would be no discontinuities if there were none can hardly be disputed. Is this the sort of tautologies that population geneticists at the University of Washington excel at?
If only those three groups had survived, there would be no discontinuities?
The essence of humans is that we are intellectually unique.
No creatures ever would have the discussion about this as here on this forum.
Never or ever.
We are unique. so our intelligence is the most important thing about us. Not our bodies or desire to exist like any critter.
So evolutionists must have this intellect evolve. Aw shucks its easy they say.
Just a more mobile primate moving in the fields.
It seems to be unthoughtful.
I don’t think we have more brain mechanics then critters.
We have the same memory ability , I think, and thats all what our brain gives us. The rest is our soul made in Gods image. Thats the thinker.
evolutionism seems silly to say they explain human smarts by a mere addition of steps from a monkey with a stick.
Its just guessing.
Evolutionism was never based on scientific methodology. not just biology silence but anything.
Its all speculationms.
In fact Stephen Gould admitted this in his book I posted about.
He admitted it was inferences all the way.
He had to to introduce HIS NEW inference called PE and overthrow the previous inference including thats all it was. Not actually scientifically proven.
No, but they would fill in the gap more. The point, just to make it clear to all, is that the perception of a gap is quite possibly a function of our not being having the intermediates around, still-surviving.
The point, just to make it clear to all, is that the perception of a discontinuity is quite possibly a function of our ignorance, which is not a function of our not having the .intermediates around, still surviving.
KN,
That would seem to rule out non-linguistic thinking in humans and other animals. Do you really want to go there?
What if any of those moves is false? What is your plan B proposal?
A simpler question: What is language? How exactly does it underpin e.g. abstract thought? What’s the mechanism?
Just as the dichotomy between male and female does not disappear if we can see a continuum between masculine and feminine individuals. the dichotomy between humans and animals would not disappear if there is a continuum between homo sapien and homo stultum.
The dichotomy exists and needs to be explained you don’t explain a dichotomy by pointing to border line cases.
You can’t explain the female gender by appealing to hermaphrodites It’s a category error.
peace
No, it would recognize the obvious difference between non-linguistic thinking and thinking that is centered in language. It’s the difference between intuition and cognition.
peace
In the beginning was the Word 😉
peace
There’s something right about this, but also something not quite right about this.
I can see the point that a cognitive animal and its environment are closely coupled together, whereby the animal’s purposive behavior is continually responsive to variations in the perceptible environmental features to which it is perceptually sensitive and motivationally attuned to. The affordances and solicitations which are the animal-environment relationship at work are constantly being adjusted in light of changes in both environment and animal.
In light of that roughly Gibsonian view of animal cognition, I can accept the objection that animals do not just “see” objects as entities that are there anyway waiting to be perceived. The animal-environment relationship has got to be much more holistic.
At the same time, however, I also think that the pattern of an animal’s activity — i.e. its habits — does articulate the objects-for-it. An object-for-an-animal is any relatively stable, relatively invariant feature of its environment that can be perceptually distinguished from relatively transient, relatively variable features.
In other words, to the extent that a cognitive system can distinguish between relatively variable features and relatively invariant features, within a heterogeneous and complex environment in which being able to track relative invariants and classify variations as deviations from invariants would be adaptive from a neurocomputational standpoint.
That’s proto-objectivity enough for me, at any rate. I suppose I would say that animals are perceptually receptive to and practically engaged with “proto-objects,” so to speak. I don’t think that non-linguistic animals are equipped to think that shadows and reflections are more or less real than the things that cast the shadows or reflections.
However, I do think that human beings can think about objective reality in ways that non-linguistic animals cannot.
Here’s what I mean: two human beings can convey to one another what it is they are perceiving. They can share their representations of their environment. Successful cooperation requires that they work to minimize the discrepancies between their representations, because the proper function of representations is to guide action.
In order to cooperate, each needs to have a meta-representation of both its own representations and the other person’s representations, and both meta-representations need to be updated continually as the joint action sequence unfolds until the goal is satisfied or thwarted.
But minimizing discrepancies between individual representations requires that each person be aware of himself or herself as occupying a particular embodied/embedded perspective on the joint situation, and that the other is occupying a different embodied/embedded perspective on the joint situation. And that in turn allows each person to attribute what is similar in their representations to what is true of the situation, and attribute what is different in their representations to what is true of their perspectives on the situation.
But they cannot do this unless they have a system of communication rich enough for displaced reference that can distinguish between informative, expressive, and directive uses of signs, whether vocal or gestural.
That, in turn, gives both humans a fundamentally different degree of objectivity and subjectivity than what would be attained by individual cognitive agents. Individual cognitive agents have a much less sophisticated grasp of the objective/subjective distinction, because they can only compare their own movement-independent perceptual changes with their own movement-dependent perceptual changes (e.g. by integrating into a higher-order model their exteroceptive and interoceptive information).
In short, what I am suggesting — following in the footsteps of Bickerton, Sterelny, Tomasello, etc. and most definitely not claiming any originality for myself — is that we can think about the evolution of language in terms of the ecological function of language. The ecological function of language is to facilitate successful cooperation, and that’s going to be important for an organism that depends on successful cooperation to extract nutrients from its environment.
In short, a deeper and more nuanced grasp of the distinction between what is objectively real and what is subjective appearance is a consequence of occupying the ecological niche of cooperative foraging.
It doesn’t rule it out, but it does raise the question as to what non-linguistic thinking consists of. I’ve just started reading Bermundez’s Thinking Without Words, which I think will help.
The problem here is that the more Gibsonian one’s view of animal cognition, and thus the more holistically integrated sensorimotor abilities and environmental features, the more difficult it will be to satisfy the criteria for predicating of the animal exactly which specific feature of the environment counts as the intentional object of the animal’s thought.
This is a nice challenge that Rouse develops in his work, and he just doesn’t think that animals have intentionality. I think he’s wrong about that, but I’ll confess that I don’t yet have an argument.
You mean, “what will I do if everything I believe turns out to be false?” I don’t know. Buy a cabin in Montana and learn to fish, maybe.
I think of language as a rule-governed system of symbolic communication, where symbols are understood in the roughly Peircean sense as those signs that are perceptually decoupled on the part of either speaker or hearer, or both, from the features of the world that they stand for. Thus any language will have syntax (rules of sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (use).
You’re the linguist, though. Is that definition good enough for you?
As to how language makes possible abstract thought, my suggestion here is that when someone has acquired a word, they have acquired a neural representation that is functionally integrated with many different sensory and motor representations. The word “dog” has many different visual, auditory, and tactile representations in long-term memory, and also many different motor representations — dogs can be played with, taken for walks, run away from, be attacked by, etc.
We don’t just talk with others though — we also “talk” with ourselves. In talking with oneself — in thought as “inner speech” — one is using one’s acquired linguistic resources to manipulate other kinds of information. But since language is perceptually and practically cross-modal, thoughts feel as if modality specific sensory information has been removed. Thus one can think about dogs without having to think about any specific dog.
And from there it takes only the process of making explicit the very act of thinking itself — something that happens with the invention of writing — to get one thinking about what it is that one is doing when one is thinking. And from there, philosophy itself begins to emerge.
KN:
keiths:
KN:
In that case you aren’t asserting that language is logically prior to thought, merely that language is logically prior to linguistic thought, which is a tautology.
keiths,
Language is logically prior to thought in that our understanding of the conceot of thought is initially arrived at by reflecting on the conceot of language.
Language is prior to thought in the order of understanding, which is compatible with saying that thought is prior to language in the order of being. Logical priority is epistemological priority, not ontological priority.
As Gregory points out the common denominator here is of course Logos (Word).
You can’t even conceive of “priority” of any kind with out Logos/Word.
In the beginning was the Word.
The solution was revealed two thousand years ago.
peace
I mostly agree with that.
I would change that to “Humans do think about reality in ways that animals don’t.”
I not at all sure that language, rather than culture, is what makes the difference.
I think we need to distinguish between linguistic representation and perceptual representation. It is perception that guides action, and we do not share our perception. Our linguistic representations are less detailed than our perception, and we do attempt to reduce discrepancies there. But often the linguistic representation need only hint at the perceptual representations on which we really depend.
I’m not so sure about that.
I mostly agree with that.
KN,
In your OP you were claiming ontological priority:
If thoughts can be independent of language — and you seem to acknowledge that they can — then their semantic content itself is independent of language, and language is merely the vehicle by which those non-linguistic thoughts are communicated to others.
I was referring to your solid conviction that all explanations are provisional and incomplete. Given this conviction of yours, you must be fully aware that your hypothesis-building here is also provisional and incomplete, and likely to be overturned any moment. A wise person would have a plan B in such a situation. Many eggs in the basket, not everything on one card. Are you not wise?
As to your theory of language, it’s a fundamental mess. If language is a rule-governed system of symbolic communication, then there are those who communicate by means of it, so language is an instrument. Which is logically prior, the instrument or its maker/user? Even on your deeply twisted definition of “logical” you should see the point.
And language is rule-governed, you say. What are those rules, if not laws of thought? Or if not directly laws of thought, then what are those rules, if not human conventions to facilitate communication?
Any way you look at it, language is not and cannot be prior to thought. So this part of your hypothesis is false. What’s your plan B?
Language is not prior to thought,
It coincides with the act of thought and the object of thought in interrelated trinitarian harmony.
You can’t have one with out the others. They are Irreducible complexity typified.
To paraphrase Aristotle “God is thought thinking itself”
peace
Mixed metaphor alert!
I’ve had Gregory on ignore for a long time. And I’m now putting you on ignore as well.
Gregory:
Joe:
Gregory has to burn the midnight oil at both ends to come up with those. He’s certainly shot the wind out of KN’s saddle. KN must be sweating like a bullet.
Unmixed metaphors are like the pot looking before it leaps.
Glen Davidson
I’m running an ongoing experiment to see if a squirrel having a brain the size of a pea can outthink me on the subject of bird feeders.
Preliminary results favor the squirrel. Not just over me, but over the engineers who design feeders, and internet posters who suggest solutions.
How can language come before thought/ Thought exists independent of language.
Animals think. Just very dumb about what they think.
The soul does the thinking. Just like God.
Its a very minor detail to use sounds/symbols to express thoughts from one to another. Our typing here is just symbols agreed upon and memorized.
Our words are just a special case of uniting sounds within the tonal spectrum.
I watch recently Leonard Berstein say there was a universal tonal language.
This is partway. I think language, right from Adam, was about thought coupled to spirit and so sounds/tones must be obeyed and not created.
Like any baby crying. Its innate and not learned. likewise laughing.
A bear crying in pain likewise is not copying a tone agreed upon in the bear world but is natural or rather a tone of the spirit accelerating from a point of a original sound.
Moved a comment to guano. Avoid personal attacks, please.
From a Darwinian point of view, the argument whether development of language precedes thought seems not so black-and-white. A large brain is very costly to grow and maintain. A while ago in another thread, someone suggested drift might play a rôle and then humans subsequently developed their “flowering” civilization and the beauty of language in all its varieties and intricacies… Don’t buy it!
We evolved from ancestors who were social. Sociality in apes and monkeys goes back a long way. Social groups need to communicate. In a forest niche, vocal communication has advantages over visual communication and signalling.
Co-evolution of the morphologies needed to make, hear and process complex sounds seems much more plausible than than chicken or egg.
Wait till they start to organise beyond the family group. Then there could be trouble! 🙂
Sorry to hear that. Oh well I do understand.
Good luck in your quest. I truly do mean that
peace
I have not read the responses to your post, KN, but I think there’s a different way to address this problem than through abstract concepts like language, consciousness and so on. Rather than appeal to a selective pressure working to enhance or make favorable such conceptual and abstract thinking, it seems to me that at a more basic level there is a selective advantage to more problem-solving brain-tissue. That the answer to the conondrum is effectively found in cell and developmental biology (more tissue helps solve even more complex problems in the same amount of time), rather than purely through philosophy.
In this sense, in so far as the basic requirements (energy for information processing) for more brain-tissue is and can be met, it pays off to have more of it because it aids survival to have these expanded abilities to reason abstractly. After all, what have it given us? Technology, medicine, civilization. From such a perspective the issue disappears, since it seems pretty obvious to me that our increased cognitive capacities have massively helped our survival and proliferation. Why would natural selection favor our unique cognitive capacities that helped us create technology, language and civilization? Well because those same things have helped us survive enormously.
From the OP (my emphasis added):
Along the same lines as Rumraket’s comment, I do not agree that this description is correct. It is just as sensible to say that it is “well-recognized” that Darwin “saw rhe need” for some problem-solving capabilities in nonhuman mammals, particularly in primates, in contrast to Wallace’s “supernaturalistic speculations”.
And that’s why the field of animal behavior has worked intemsively on this issue (and discovered a lot in apes. monkeys, and even in crows parrots, and now in octopuses. And why creationists at sites like UD are so concerned to deny every case of it.
Joe Felsenstein,
Yea right, creationists really have to be concerned about more whack job evolution theories about life:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kids-supernatural-thinking_us_580a5dcde4b0cdea3d873f9b?section=
You just have to laugh.
This is one of the many blind spots in thinking for evolutionists.
EVERY animal that is surviving well is surviving well with the characteristics they have. So how can one say, oh, it is a selective advantage to be this way…
Its a selective advantage to have an exoskeleton. Its a selective advantage to be able to hold your breath long underwater. Its a selective advantage to be a dumb rat that can squeeze through sewer pipes.
How can any one selective advantage be considered better than any other? How utterly unaware one must be to not realize that.
I sometimes worry that many people at TSZ don’t understand what I’m doing and why, and that’s largely because of a certain caricature about what philosophy is and about the difference between philosophy and science.
I shall put it as bluntly as I can: I see philosophy and science are inter-dependent. We have no better way of discovering truths about the world than through science, but we also need philosophy to understand the concepts we use to interpret the world around us (and also, importantly, ourselves).
I do not think that science could ever supersede the need for philosophy, nor do I think that philosophy investigates a different kind of reality than that of science, nor do I think that philosophy is superior to science or science to philosophy.
In the work I am currently doing, I am using a lot of recent stuff on neuroscience, comparative primate psychology, paleoanthropology, and niche construction theory in order to show how to naturalize rationality.
Maybe you don’t care about whether rationality can be naturalized. That’s fine. I do.
(Just to note, I have a BA in biology and a PhD in philosophy. I really do know what I’m talking about.)
My initial reactions here:
Firstly, anatomically modern humans emerge by 100,000 years ago, long before technology and civilization begin making an appreciable difference in human quality of life. (And in fact, the rise of agriculture and settlement actually decreased quality of life and life-span and increased infant mortality.)
Secondly, the survival-enhancing effects of technology and civilization only really kick in around 8,000 years ago at the most. Is that enough time for those features to become fixed by natural selection?
Thirdly, this technology-first approach overlooks the kind of reasoning that is required to have any kind of technological innovation in the first place.
Put this way: medicine, technology, sanitation, etc are all effects of our capacity to engage in collaborative problem-solving. And that means that we can’t appeal to them in explaining how our capacity to engage in collaborative problem-solving was selected for.
I also really don’t think that one can construct an adequate account of collaborative problem-solving without also talking about abstract thinking and self-consciousness.
And in case anyone missed it, the whole point of my emphasis on obligate cooperative extractive foraging as a constructed niche unique to hominids was precisely to focus on the selective pressures for collaborative problem-solving, shared intentionality, and language — which in turn drove the evolution of rationality, self-consciousness, and abstract thought.
In other words, I am trying to think through the ecological contexts in which rationality, self-consciousness, and abstract thought were adaptive. And the most plausible explanation I can come up with is that they were adaptive precisely because of their role in facilitating collaborate problem-solving, which in turn is crucial to an organism that makes a living in the world by way of obligate cooperative extractive foraging.
FWIW, I also have a Ph.D. in philosophy (though no B.S. in bio), and I often don’t understand what you’re doing and why, but I don’t think it’s because of a caricature about what philosophy is and about the difference between philosophy and science.
Sure, co-evolution sounds great. That doesn’t remove to need to identify the selective pressures that drove the co-evolution of language and cognition.
And here the differences between language and ape communication are important, right? Here’s the thing: the vocalizations and gestures of great apes correspond to what we call, at the linguistic level, directive speech acts. They are ways of manipulating the behavior of others: begging for food, asking for grooming, initiating play or sex, challenging a rival, etc. And even apes that have been taught to sign almost never communicate anything besides directives.
The significance of this should not be overlooked: great apes do not make assertions. They do not express something that they take to be true and which others can accept, endorse, challenge, criticize, etc. in short, they can’t play the game of giving and asking for reasons. That’s something that humans start acquiring at the age of three or four.
So what’s needed here is an account of the selective pressures that drove the co-evolution of language and cognition, including the ability to engage in the kinds of speech acts that are central to reasoning.
Though your theory is interesting, these two comments seem misguided. Natural selection is measured neither by quality of life nor infant mortality, but by relative contribution to the next generation. Agriculture may not have enhanced quality of life, but it certainly allowed for greatly increased populations (and population density). I would also claim that technology greatly contributed to reproductive success long before that, as soon as humans began making tools. (Again, “quality of life” is not a useful measure, though I would expect that better tools would still affect that too.)