Excerpts from the symbolic species

pp. 541-580

in: Donald Favareau, Essential readings in biosemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

In 1866, the recently formed Societe Linguistique de Paris passed an official resolution banning the presentation of any further papers regarding the origins of human language. The nature of the inquiry itself, it was decided, lacked even the possibility of scientific certainty – and all work pertaining to it was likewise dismissed on the grounds of being empirically irresolvable, incorrigibly speculative and unproductively divisive. Almost 150 years later, neurobiologist and biological anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon would author an empirically vigorous and conceptually groundbreaking study of language origins challenging many of the core assumptions underlying both the biological innatist and the evolutionary psychological theories of language evolution that had found their way into scientific discourse since the Societe's inquiry-blocking resolution.