본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Weak Adaptationism and Language

  • PHILOSOPHY·THOUGHT·CULTURE
  • 2010, (10), pp.1~18
  • Publisher : Research Institute for East-West Thought
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities

Youngjin Kiem 1

1경기대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

From the evolutionary point of view, adaptation is understood in two distinct ways. On the one hand, adaptation indicates an organism's fitting process in the given environment; on the other hand, it designates a property or trait obtained by an organism that resulted from the fitting process in question. In this regard adaptationism is a theoretical framework or research paradigm that aims to explain an organism's current traits in terms of the notion of adaptation characterized above. Recently Scott Atran, an influential cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, claims that we need to make the distinction between ‘weak adaptationism’ and ‘strong adaptationism’, and have to approach the issue of the nature of language from the weak adaptationism perspective. The feature of that approach lies in treating an essential aspect of language mechanism such as the capacity for syntactical recursion not as the product of an organism's task-specific adaptation to the ancestral environment called the ‘niche’ but as the product of an interface between organisms and the general physical environment.I take it that Atran's view is, to some extent, plausible. Nevertheless his claim presented above conflicts with another important idea regarding the nature of language, i.e. the thesis of the derivative character of the aboutness of language (the thesis that the aboutness of language is derivative in the sense that it only works insofar as cognitive subjects use and interpret the language at issue). Furthermore Atran's claim seems to imply that a particular form of the aboutness of language is not derivative but rather intrinsic. I find that that implication is not acceptable. In this way the present paper attempts to pin down exactly in what respects Atran's weak adaptationism could have a serious difficulty with the explication of the nature of language mechanism.

Statistics

  • 313 Viewed
  • 60 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search