ion, Metaphor and Mimesis Southwest is very conscious of its own corporate ‘way of life’. A list is given on its website under the heading ‘culture’ of the desired characteristics of a Southwest person (perseverant, egalitarian, passionate), and these qualities are abstracted into the more general injunctions to be low cost and have high customer service delivery, and the mission statement talks of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. So there are clear abstractions here that create a unity and coherence to activities across domains. Throughout this book I have shown how entanglements involve material and conceptual components. In Chapter 2 I described a pebble on a beach that was brought into different assemblies with other things depending on how it was recognized, remembered and owned. In that chapter too I described how the equipmental totality of a thing depended on the different theories about and perspectives towards it. In Chapter 3 I used the quote from Gibson that ‘an affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer’ (1986: 129). In Chapter 4 I noted that the maintenance of walls in the Yorkshire Dales depended on expert ideas about organic foods and recent collective nostalgia for a rural way of life. In Chapter 5 I showed how a sail boat had different entanglements, and different affordances depending on the perspectives of sailing, entertaining and protecting the ecosystem of the bay. These ideas about the boat are themselves tied to wider ideas about what is leisure and how the environment should be protected. So entanglements and affordances and functions are always tied to abstractions (ideas, thoughts, words, feelings and senses). These abstractions are hierarchical and nested as noted above, and they often cross domains so that humans seek unities, coherence, metaphor within different realms of experience. Abstractions are general and can often be applied to more than one domain of activity. Their transferability Hodder_c06.indd 120 2/3/2012 12:14:59 PM

Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling.

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Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual founda- tions of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsy- chology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus en- abling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or "agency detector," whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects rele- vant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors, and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious be- liefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

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Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/DeYoung-2014-CB5T-JRP.pdf

Cybernetic Big Five Theory.

The emergence of a complex language is one of the fundamental events of human evolution, and several remarkable features suggest the presence of fundamental principles of organization. These principles seem to be common to all languages. The best known is the so-called Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of a word decays as a (universal) power law of its rank. The possible origins of this law have been controversial, and its meaningfulness is still an open question. In this article, the early hypothesis of Zipf of a principle of least effort for explaining the law is shown to be sound. Simultaneous minimization in the effort of both hearer and speaker is formalized with a simple optimization process operating on a binary matrix of signal-object associations. Zipf's law is found in the transition between referentially useless systems and indexical reference systems. Our finding strongly suggests that Zipf's law is a hallmark of symbolic reference and not a meaningless feature. The implications for the evolution of language are discussed. We explain how language evolution can take advantage of a communicative phase transition.

/pdf/least-effort-and-the-origins-of-scaling-in-human-language-iet0jkq6t7.pdf

Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language

A review of The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrance Deacon, 1997. New York: W.W. Norton, 527pp. ISBN 0393317544. $29.95 USD. Hardcover.

https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/complicity/index.php/complicity/article/download/8719/7039

Susan Bowsfield

Papers

The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain