8.4 /10 1 Votes
Media type Print ISBN 0-393-03838-6 LC Class QP399 .D43 1997 Country United States of America | 4.2/5 Goodreads Pages 527 Dewey Decimal 153.6 20 Originally published 1997 Page count 527 OCLC 35025924 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Subject Language, Co-evolution, Symbolic representation, Human evolution, Genesis of language, Cognition Similar Incomplete Nature, Language and Species, Origins of the modern mind, The Language Instinct, Grooming - Gossip and the Evolut | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Symbolic Species is a 1997 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon on the evolution of language. Combining perspectives from neurobiology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, and semiotics, Deacon proposes that language, along with the unique human capacity for symbolic thought, co-evolved with the brain.
Contents
The Symbolic Species is a multi-disclipinary book that at the time of publishing was seen as groundbreaking. It is considered to have bound together a wide array of ideas in a way that advanced the understanding of professionals in several fields.
Symbolic thought and language
The reasons for the unique cognitive capacity of humans are explored, along with those for why many human activities are impossible for animals. Human use of language is said to be responsible for both.
Co-evolution
A chicken-and-egg problem is shown to exist between the emergence of symbolic thought and language: language is said to be the medium of symbolic thought, but it is reasoned that mastery of language would first require the ability to think symbolically. The solution of this chicken-and-egg problem, according to Deacon, is the subtle evolutionary process of co-evolution.