Sergio Balari

Computational phenotypes : towards an evolutionary developmental biolinguistics

1. The Pains of Being Owenians/Chomskyans/Cartesians at heart 2. My Beloved Monster 3. The Dead End of Communication 4. On True Homologues 5. Computational Homology 6. Introducing Computational Evo Devo 7. Other Minds 8. Conclusions Appendix References Index

The archaeological record speaks: bridging anthropology and linguistics.

This paper examines the origins of language, as treated within Evolutionary Anthropology, under the light offered by a biolinguistic approach. This perspective is presented first. Next we discuss how genetic, anatomical, and archaeological data, which are traditionally taken as evidence for the presence of language, are circumstantial as such from this perspective. We conclude by discussing ways in which to address these central issues, in an attempt to develop a collaborative approach to them.

It is an organ, it is new, but it is not a new organ. Conceptualizing language from a homological perspective

It is a widely shared opinion among specialists that language is an evolutionary innovation, or that it contains some key evolutionary innovations. However, such claims are not based on a correspondingly consensual concept of ‘evolutionary innovation,’ but are rather expressed on atheoretical grounds. This fact has thus far acted as an obstacle for the collaborative effort upon which the task of disentangling the evolution of this human capacity should be built. In this paper, we suggest a formal approach to the issue, based on Gunter Wagner’s recent theory of homologies and novelties. Within this new framework, we conclude that language is the human instantiation (thus an ‘homolog’) of a character widely represented in the nervous system of animals, which incorporates a number of interdependent innovative states that allows us conceptualizing it as a ‘variational modality’ of this ancient organ.

Ahistorical homology and multiple realizability

The Mind-Brain Identity Theory lived a short life as a respectable philosophical position in the late 1950s, until Hilary Putnam developed his famous argument on the multiple realizability of mental states. The argument was, and still is, taken as the definitive demonstration of the falsity of Identity Theory and the foundation on which contemporary functionalist computational cognitive science was to be grounded. In this paper, in the wake of some contemporary philosophers, we reopen the case for Identity Theory and offer a solution to the problem of multiple realizabilty. The solution is based on the necessity, at the time of establishing identity relations, of appealing to the notions of “homology” and “analogy” developed in the nineteenth century by Richard Owen. We also suggest that these notions are useful in order to correct certain shortcomings of some recent attempts at rebutting the Multiple Realizability argument.