Search

The present state of scientific knowledge is characterized by the view which holds that knowledge is constructed and even sometimes fabricated. The pressing issues of contemporary epistemology which has produced this new skepticism are discussed. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that epistemology is evolutionary. Like genetic mutations, theories can be both arbitrary and objective, in the way that mutations are random and adaptive.

The assumption that a complex and fuzzy notion like smile can be the basis of a scientific, rather than semantic, inquiry can only lead to confused and inconclusive results. It would be more productive to start with the well-defined and measurable patterns of the clearly: visible contrasts that are produced on the human face by various muscular contractions around the white patches formed by the sclera and the teeth. These features are universal, whereas a common word, in whatever language, is necessarily ambiguous, culture-dependent, and historically rather than biologically determined. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10001627

This commentary questions the general assumptions concerning the cognitive value of analogical reasoning on which the argument developed by Leech et al. appears to rest. In order to better assess the findings of their meta-analysis, it shifts the perspective from development to evolution, and frames their 'how' concern within a broader 'why' issue.

The target article authors have been drawn into two metaphoric models of attitudes toward money that have prevented them from developing a convincing evolutionary theory able to account for the various behaviors they list and categorize as either tool-type or drug-type. Instead, hoarding could provide an evolutionary model that is better supported by behavioral and neurological evidence and could account for the whole range of behaviors they review. Moreover, the authors' focus on money as the common denominator of these behaviors brings an ideological bias to their inquiry.

Falk's hypothesis is attractive and seems to be supported by data from primatology and language acquisition literature. However, this etiological narrative presents a fairly low degree of plausibility, the result of two epistemological fallacies: an implicit reliance on a unilinear model of causality and the explicit belief that ontogeny is homologous to phylogeny. Although this attempt to retrace the early emergence of prelinguistic capacities in hominins falls short of producing a compelling argument, it does call attention to an aspect of linguistic behavior which may indeed have evolved under the pressure of nurturing constraints.

The notion of culture implies the relative stability of sets of algorithms that become entrenched in human brains as children become socialized, and, to a lesser extent, when immigrants become assimilated into a new society. The semiotics of culture has used the notion of signs and systems of signs to conceptualize this process, which takes for granted memory as a natural affordance of the brain without raising the question of how and why cultural signs impact behaviour in a durable manner. Indeed, under the influence of structuralism, the semiotics of culture has mostly achieved synchronic descriptions. Dynamic models have been proposed to account for the action of signs (e.g., semiosis, dialogism, dialectic) and their resulting cultural changes and cultural diversity. However, these models have remained remarkably abstract, and somewhat disconnected from the actual brain processes, which must be assumed to be involved in the emergence, maintenance, and transformations of cultures. Semiotic terminology has contributed to a systematic representation of cultural objects and processes but the philosophical origin of its basic concepts has made it difficult to construct a productive interface with the cognitive neurosciences as they have developed and achieved notable advances in the understanding of memory over the last few decades. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that further advances in semiotics will require a shift from philosophical and linguistic notions toward biological and evolutionary models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gesture is mostly a function of the upper limbs of Homo sapiens and is constrained by the skeleton and neuromuscular apparatus which have evolved under the selection pressures of arboreal environments. This article raises the issue of the early adaptations which determined the range of movements which made possible the emergence of gesture both technical and cultural. It addresses the problem of explaining in evolutionary terms the multi-functionality of the human hand and arm. It suggests that once early humans became bipedal further pressures combined to conserve and expand the range of adaptations afforded by the upper limbs through selection processes such as exaptation, niche construction and the Baldwin effect. It concludes that a theory of gesture must integrate evolutionary and developmental considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles about gesture research is presented, including one by Marion Blute and Paul Bouissac who attempts to cast gesture in wide, speculative framework of evolutionary ecology.

The first part of this paper raises some epistemological issues relevant to the construction of a scientific knowledge of pre-Historic cultures. It shows the interplay between data and narratives and calls for explicit methodological procedures. The second part takes as an example the treatment of hands in rock art and suggests that early assumptions have biased the way in which hand data have been construed and interpreted so far. It claims that these biases have curtailed the full exploitation of the information available and that there is ground in principle for a wider range of hypotheses. The final part tentatively examines the script hypothesis that could provide a basis for construing hand clusters as symbolic rather than deictic. The interest of this hypothesis is that, contrary to most interpretations, it could be easily falsified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first issue raised by this paper is whether semiotics can bring any added value to ecology. A brief examination of the epistemological status of semiotics in its current forms suggests that semiotics' phenomenological macroconcepts (which are inherited from various theological and philosophical traditions) are incommensurate with the complexity of the sciences comprising ecology and are too reductive to usefully map the microprocesses through which organisms evolve and interact. However, there are at least two grounds on which interfacing semiotics with ecology may prove to be scientifically productive: (a) the very looseness of semiotic discourse can be an important catalyser for multidisciplinary interactions, an important condition for the emergence of truly holistic ecology; (b) the present semiotic conceptual apparatus is not carved in stone. All its notions, frames of reference and types of reasoning can evolve in contact with the problems encountered in evolutionary ecological research. Semiotics, as an open-ended epistemological project, remains a proactive intellectual resource. The second issue raised by this paper is precisely to call attention to the opportunity provided by recent developments for rethinking and furthering semiotic inquiry. An attempt is made to show that counterintuitive theories such as memetics and new frontiers in technology such as nanotechnology, could help recast ecosemiotics along more intellectually exciting lines of inquiry than the mere rewriting of ecological discourse in terms of the traditional semiotic macroconcepts. It goes without saying that memetics and nanotechnology are not presented here as definitive solutions but simply as indicative of possible directions toward a comprehensive evolutionary ecosemiotics that would radically transform the basis of the 20th century semiotic discourse and its ideological agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interface between semiotics and psychology, first from the historical point of view of their parallel developments originating in late 18th-century philosophy, then from the theoretical perspective of contemporary evolutionary thinking. Undifferentiated within the speculations of the French `Idéologues', such as Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), semiotics and psychology progressively acquired distinct epistemological and institutional status with minimal mutual interactions. However, the emergence of cognitive psychology during the second half of the 20th century provided new theoretical grounds for a potential dialogue. As the Darwinian revolution eventually recast many problems common to both semiotics and psychology in evolutionary terms, it is argued that these two parallel approaches to the study of mind, symbolic behaviour and meaning are bound to merge in the foreseeable future. The example of a recent work by Terrence Deacon (1997) is cited in the conclusion of the paper as a symptom of this epistemological restructuration that is currently taking shape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]