Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
We all take comfort in our ability to project into the future. Be it through arbitrary patterns in Spring Pouchong tea leaves, or making statistical inferences about the likelihood that it will rain tomorrow, our accumulation of knowledge about the future is based on continued attempts of attaining certainty: that is, we wish to know … Continue reading “Tea Leaves and Lingua Francas: Why the future is not easy to predict”
When thinking about bilingualism and language evolution, there appears to be a paradox: Children are adept at learning more than one language at a time and there are many bilingual societies in the world. However, pressures on memory and redundancy makes it unclear what the adaptive advantage of a cognitive capacity for learning multiple languages … Continue reading “The Bilingual paradox in Language Evolution: Top down versus bottom up approaches”
It has long been obvious to me that the so-called cognitive revolution is what happened when computation – both the idea and the digital technology – hit the human sciences. But I’ve seen little reflection of that in the literary cognitivism of the last decade and a half. And that, I fear, is a mistake. … Continue reading “Cognitivism and the Critic 2: Symbol Processing”
Right, I already referred to Atkinson’s paper in a previous post, and much of the work he’s presented is essentially part of a potential PhD project I’m hoping to do. Much of this stems back to last summer, where I mentioned how the phoneme inventory size correlates with certain demographic features, such as population size and … Continue reading “The Return of the Phoneme Inventories”
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where interacting groups use several languages. In fact, by some estimates, bilingualism is the norm for most societies. If one views language as a tool for communicating … Continue reading “The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal”
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where linguistic diversity emerges and persists within groups of interacting individuals. Previous research has identified the use of linguistic cues of identity as an important factor in … Continue reading “Emergence of linguistic diversity in the lab”
Imitation is often seen as one of the crucial foundations of culture because it is the basis of social learning and social transmission. Only by imitating others and learning from them did human culture become cumulative, allowing humans to build and improve on the knowledge of previous generations. Thus, it may be one of the … Continue reading “Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (I): Imitation, Overimitation, and Conformity”
In an attempt to write out my thoughts for others instead of continually building them up in saved stickies, folders full of .pdfs, and hastily scribbled lecture notes, as if waiting for the spontaneous incarnation of what looks increasingly like a dissertation, I’m going to give a glimpse today of what I’ve been looking into … Continue reading “Fungus, -i. 2nd Decl. N. Masculine – or is it?: On Gender”
cross-posted at Shared Symbolic Storage In this post I will offer a short overview of some aspects of Michael Tomasello’s latest book „Why We Cooperate,” which is based on his 2008 Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Tomasello deals with the question how cooperative behaviour and its socio-cognitive foundations arise both in development and during the … Continue reading “Michael Tomasello – Why We Cooperate”
