Abstract

What lies on the two sides of the linguistic divide is fairly clear: On one side, you have organisms buffeted about to varying degrees, depending on their degree of autonomy and plasticity, by the states of affairs in the world they live in. On the other side, you have organisms capable of describing and explaining the states of affairs in the world they live in. Language is what distinguishes one side from the other. How did we get here from there? In principle, one can tell a seamless story about how inborn, involuntary communicative signals and voluntary instrumental praxis could have been shaped gradually, through feedback from their consequences, first into analog pantomime with communicative intent, and then into arbitrary category names combined into all powerful, truth value bearing propositions, freed from the iconic "shape" of their referents and able to tell all.