Message-Id: <199906200037.UAA27314@smtp2.mindspring.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 20:40:38 -0400
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: bbenzon@mindspring.com (Bill Benzon)
Subject: Re: Paper on chimp culture
At 10:10 PM 6/19/99 +0200, Mario Vaneechoutte wrote:
>
>Creole starts from pidgin. So there is a basis to work with. So, it is possible
>that a society of chimps might develop some sign language of their own,
>provided
>that we give them a start. In the end: we have once started language, chimps
>did
>not. That is what remains to be explained.
The question that interests me is whether or not a society of chimps can
maintain signing over several generations without any human contact. I
suspect that they can't, that they need human support for their signing.
But I don't know this.
>But that is what we claim in some way: we say that animals have general mental
>capacities shared with us. Some mental grammar exists in animals. Different
>brain
>modules in an animal brain must be 'talking' to each other before a decision is
>made. But self-talk somehow becomes only truly possible when you have symbols.
I agree with this. You should take a look at Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky's
seminal _Thought and Language_, which talks about the childhood development
of inner speech from interaction with others. You should also look at
Sydney Lamb's remarks on inner speech in his recent _Pathways of the Brain:
The Neurocognitive Basis of Language_ (pp. 125 ff.).
>(I
>have to be careful, since I recall some people some time ago on this list
>reporting that they were thinking in images and had to translate that to words.
>This thinking in images might be what animals do, while we have made this much
>more efficient because we could develop words. Could those people comment
>again,
>I'd like to know more about this interesting phenomenon).
I certainly think in images, I even draw them. As a musician, I think
directly in inner music.
William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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