Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place.

Human hyper-cooperation (HC) evolved through a combination of advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC), which emerged relatively late, and a more ancient, pre-thematic 'in-between' cognitive system rooted in face-to-face social cognition and tool use. The tension between these two systems creates an 'internal' niche construction, where complex social reasoning in ALC mirrors the structure of the pre-thematic 'in-between', amplifying social cognition to produce 'social place' as humanized space. Language acquisition, as a training in co-location, develops shared consciousness. The production of hyper-place, as solidarity beyond face-to-face interaction, arises when internal niche construction converges with external religious cosmologies, enabling world religions.

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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).