Bart Hopkins Jr.'s Blog, page 3

More than Nature Needs by Derek Bickerton

This book was written to attempt an answer to a problem, Wallace’s problem, that has long bedeviled those who study evolution. Why are human brains and language so much different and more complex than would seem necessary? How could this leap, this gap, occur?

Derek Bickerton has outlined the most likely scenario yet for the development of language, probably beginning with Homo erectus. He combines common sense with developmental data and evidence, drawing parallels and noting differences be...

Language and Species by Derek Bickerton

You only run into a few really important ideas in your life, and you tend to remember them, if not always exactly when and where they were first heard or read. Years ago, I read this book, and crashed headlong into one of these ideas.

The idea was this: We use language to communicate, and it’s no doubt our most important invention. But communication isn’t what language is, it’s what language does. Language is a system of representation.

Okay, what’s that mean, and what’s important about it?

F...

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett

The main premise of Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett is that language, contrary to Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary ideas earlier this century, is not innate. It is an invention and tool of culture. He convincingly refutes the idea that children could not possibly learn the necessary complexities of language, although he credits a more general learning device, not one that is specialized for language only. He also gives a brief overview of the many items infants and toddlers learn fr...

How Language Began by Daniel Everett

How Language Began by Daniel Everett

 

How Language Began is an excellent exposition of the possible manner in which language originated. Many linguists believe that the explosion of symbolic art and other artifacts, traced to times between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, signaled the rise of language. The author of How Language Began, Daniel Everett, contrary to this hypothesis, situates the origin of language some 2 million years earlier, in the time of Homo erectus.

He argues that Homo erect...

Let’s Talk About Nothing

That’s right. Remember Jerry Seinfeld and the rest of that gang? They did a little show about nothing.

Sometimes no thing can be a really important thing.

Take zero, for instance.

What did zero do? It allowed regular procedures to be developed for adding, multiplying, division, and subtraction.

Let large numbers be written easily.

Permitted the development of the number line with positive and negative numbers. (Deacon, 2012)

Before the development of the symbol and the concept, you could talk...

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities by Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner

     The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities offers a very exciting and intuitive premise. The way we humans think is due to an underlying capacity to blend concepts together, concepts that often seem disparate and unrelated on the surface. This “blending ability” underlies our capacity for language and many other mental operations. It is the basis of human thought.

     And we do it all the time, unceasingly, and in large measure, unconsciously. And at differ...

The Next Big Thing

The Future:

In my last post I discussed the many changes the digital revolution is bringing to our world. I thought I would get a bit more concrete today. Microsoft and others are working right now on technology that will make your smart phone, in its current incarnation, obsolete. Here’s the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens

The Microsoft Hololens is a headset that eventually will do everything your phone does now and much more. It will be a hands-free device that tracks your vi...

The Digital Storm

Okay, you’re surrounded by technology, but you probably don’t think about it that much, do you?

Maybe you should.

The last time anything remotely resembling the current digital revolution occurred was over 500 years ago, when the printing press was reinvented in Europe, causing many unforeseen, indeed unforeseeable, results.

One event it precipitated was a need for eyeglasses. That’s right. Eyeglasses.

Because suddenly, reading became an activity not limited to the rich. Books became possible...

Two Systems of Thought

So, let’s say we were standing around together talking, shooting the breeze, instead of me writing this to you.

You would almost certainly be taking in my posture, gestures, and demeanor along with these words. You’d have some kind of opinion as to my reliability and authority on this or other subjects. Am I a rich attorney or a busboy at a restaurant? Famous author or struggling blog writer? The answer to those questions would likely make quite a difference in how you assess my comments. (Ev...

Concepts

 

Concepts are the distinctions we make in the world. Humans made distinctions long before we could talk. Almost all organisms do.

But language expanded our ability to make distinctions from that which was directly in our environment to the abstract and not present, although it allowed us to label and make more distinctions in our direct environment or vicinity as well.

Imagine all the facts and images about dogs. If you put all those together and added extensive personal experience, you woul...