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Symbols, Stimulus Equivalence
and the Origins of Language Thomas E. Dickins and David W. Dickins London Guildhall University and University of Liverpool, United Kingdom Recent interest in the origins of language within the strongly cognitive field of evolutionary psychology has predominantly focused upon the origins of syntax (cf. Hurford, Knight and Studdert-Kennedy, 1998). However, Ullin Place's (1995/6, 2000) theory of the gestural origins of language addresses the more fundamental issue of the antecedents of symbols, and does so from a behaviourist perspective, stressing the importance of the peculiarly human ability to form stimulus equivalence classes. The rejection by many developmental psychologists of a behaviourist account of language acquisition has led to a modular and distinctly nativist psychology of language (cf. Pinker, 1994, 1997;Pinker and Bloom, 1990). Little has been said about the role or nature of putative alternative learning mechanisms in the evolution of language. Although Place does not provide any defence of a behaviourist linguistic ontogeny this is no reason to rule out his phylogenetic speculations. One possibility we shall discuss is that such learning mechanisms have been canalized (Baldwin,1894, Ariew, 1996; Dickins, Boucher & Davies, 1999) by specific constraints to deliver symbols during modern human development. We aim to outline Place's evolutionarily parsimonious view of symbol origins and their relation to stimulus equivalence, and contrast this with the views of Bickerton (1990, 1996) and Deacon (1997). We also propose to discuss the critical issue of symbolic symmetry in the light of some recent computer simulations of the evolution of language (cf. Hurford, 1989; Oliphant, 1998). Finally, we applaud Ullin Place for bringing symbols into focus within the broader discipline of language origins. Keywords: symbols, stimulus equivalence, symmetry, learning |
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