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The Origin of Symbols in the Brain
Christian Balkenius, Peter Gärdenfors and Lars Hall
Lund University Cognitive Science
Kungshuset, Lundagård
S­222 22 Lund, Sweden
Christian.Balkenius@lucs.lu.se,
Peter.Gardenfors@lucs.lu.se,
Lars.Hall@lucs.lu.se

0. Introduction Deacon's (1997) book is an interesting attempt to explain the critical aspects of the evolution of language as the learning of symbolic relationships. Deacon blurs the traditional distinction between syntax and semantics by arguing that the meaning of symbols is primarily determined via the combinatorial relations between symbols, and only secondarily via an indexical relation between a symbol and a referent (Deacon 1997, Ch. 3). However, this account of how acquisition of symbols involves multiple hierarchies of associative learning has proved rather difficult to understand (Hurford 1997), and even more difficult to incorporate into an explicit representational model. In this article, we want to use Deacon's theory as a platform for a more elaborated and precise model of symbol learning. Our model will be presented in rough phylogenetic order, and will contain only those cognitive elements that are minimally required for the learning of symbols. These mechanisms have evolved for other purposes than symbolic processing, but taken together they form a substrate for the emergence of a symbolic ability. The purpose of this article is therefore to show that given the coevolutionary dynamics of Baldwinian evolution (i.e. that behavioral adaptation tends to precede biological/cognitive change, Deacon 1997, p345, see also Laland, Odling­Smee & Feldman, to appear), and some rather conservative assumptions about the cognitive capacities preceeding the evolution of language, the end state of modern human language ability can be reached. These capacities can be divided into three groups: (1) general learning abilities that are present in many animal species; (2) communicative capacities, some of which are present in ...

@unpublished{balkenius00theOrigin,
  author={Christian Balkenius and Peter Gardenfors and Lars Hall},
  title={The Origin of Symbols in the Brain},
  year={2000},
  institution={Lund University Cognitive Science},
  note={},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/balkenius00theOrigin.html}
}

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