Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place.
Culture and brain January 1, 2016 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s40167-016-0039-2 via PubMed
Summary
Hyper-cooperation (HC) is a species-specific human trait. This paper integrates archaeological and neuroscientific perspectives through hermeneutical phenomenology, arguing that advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC) evolved relatively late as a reflexive system rooted in face-to-face social cognition and tool use. The tension between ALC and a more ancient, pre-thematic 'in-between' cognitive system frames an 'internal' niche construction, where ALC mirrors the pre-thematic structure, amplifying social cognition to produce 'social place' as humanized space. Language acquisition trains co-location, and when internal niche construction combines with religious cosmologies, it enables 'hyper-place'—solidarity beyond face-to-face interaction.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Human hyper-cooperation arises from an internal niche construction where advanced linguistic consciousness converges with the pre-thematic 'in-between' cognitive system, enabling the production of social place and, with religious cosmologies, hyper-place beyond face-to-face interaction. |
Abstract
New data is emerging from evolutionary anthropology and the neuroscience of social cognition on our species-specific hyper-cooperation (HC). This paper attempts an integration of third-person archaeological and second-person, neuroscientific perspectives on the structure of HC, through a post-Ricoeurian development in hermeneutical phenomenology. We argue for the relatively late evolution of advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC) (Hiscock in Biological Theory 9:27-41, 2014), as a reflexive system based on the 'in-between' or 'cognitive system' as reported by Vogeley et al. (in: Interdisziplinäre anthropologie, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014) of face-to-face social cognition, as well as tool use. The possibility of a positive or negative tension between the more recent ALC and the more ancient, pre-thematic, self-organizing 'in-between' frames an 'internal' niche construction. This indexes the internal structure of HC as 'convergence', where complex, engaged, social reasoning in ALC mirrors the cognitive structure of the pre-thematic 'in-between', extending the bio-energy of our social cognition, through reflexive amplification, in the production of 'social place' as 'humanized space'. If individual word/phrase acquisition, in contextual actuality, is the distinctive feature of human language (Hurford in European Reviews 12:551-565, 2004), then human language is a hyperbolic, species-wide training in particularized co-location, developing consciousness of a shared world. The humanization of space and production of HC, through co-location, requires the 'disarming' of language as a medium of control, and a foregrounding of the materiality of the sign. The production of 'hyper-place' as solidarity beyond the face-to-face, typical of world religions, becomes possible where internal niche construction as convergence with the 'in-between' (world in us) combines with religious cosmologies reflecting an external 'cosmic' niche construction (world outside us).