In the title of his Perspective (16 Jan.. p. 318), David Premack asks the
provocative question, “Is language the key to human intelligence?” I agree
with his main thesis that recursiveness, a cognitive property that
monkeys lack according to Fitch and Hauser (1), is
not the necessary ingredient for the emergence of language. Like many
others, I believe that recursiveness was probably a consequence of symbolic
verbal language, not a causal factor. What prompts this commentary on
Premack’s article is that I do not believe that he has answered the
question he posed in his title. With the exception of the section on
intelligence, the other topics he deals, namely, voluntary control of
sensory-motor systems, imitation, teaching, theory of mind, and grammar do
not speak to the issue of whether language is the key to human
intelligence.
The voluntary control of sensory-motor systems is a mechanism that
makes vocal or signed verbal language possible. As pointed out by Tomasello (2), imitation, teaching, and a
theory of mind are a part of
or consequence of joint attentive interactions, a unique property of
humans, which also played a key role in making verbal language possible.
Tomasello suggests that “infants’ early understanding of other persons as
‘like me’ is indeed the result of a uniquely human biological adaptation,”
which gave them the ability to identify with conspecifics. This in turn
gave rise to “many, if not all, of the most distinctive and important
cognitive processes of the species Homo sapiens" (2, pp. 11 and 71).
When Premack discusses human intelligence, he focuses on the
role of flexibility in creating human intelligence and concludes that
“language and recursion are not the sole contributors to human
uniqueness.” But he makes no attempt to link flexibility to language as is
the case in Extended Mind model (3) of the origin of language.
According to my hypothesis, verbal language emerged as the bifurcation
from percepts to concepts and a response to the chaos associated with the
information overload that resulted from the increased complexity in
hominid life. As our ancestors developed toolmaking, controlled fire,
lived in larger social groups, and engaged in large-scale coordinated
hunting, their minds could no longer cope with the richness of life solely
on the basis of their perceptual sensorium, and as a result a new level of
order emerged in the form of conceptualization and speech. The words of
spoken language are the actual medium or mechanism by which concepts are
expressed or represented. Words are our first concepts acting as strange
attractors for all the percepts associated with the concept being
represented. Spoken language and abstract conceptual thinking emerged
together at exactly the same point of time as a bifurcation from alingual
communication skills and the concrete percept-based thinking of pre-
lingual hominids to verbal language and abstract conceptual thought.
Language extends the brain, which before language was a percept processor
into a mind capable of conceptual thought and planning.
Not only is thought silent speech, but one may also think of speech as
vocalized thought. This is the sense in which language is the key to human
intelligence. The concept-based thought that language makes possible gives
rise to the flexibility that Premack correctly pointed out is a key factor
in human intelligence.
I also agree with the commentary of Alexander and Kane (“Language and
Systems of Symbols,” 23 April, p. 516) that Premack’s list of symbol systems
is not inclusive enough. I would add to their suggestions alphabetic
writing which is a much more abstract form of writing than nonalphabetic
scripts. It has been shown (4, 5) that
alphabetic writing can be linked to the emergence of codified law,
monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic. Because the alphabet
codes phonemes into visual signs and decodes visual signs into spoken
words, the use of the alphabet promotes abstractness, analysis (breaking
spoken words into their basic phonemes), coding (writing), decoding
(reading), and classification (through alphabetization), all of which lead
to codified law, monotheism, abstract science, and deductive logic. These
four ways of thinking and organizing information all emerged among people
using alphabetic (or phonetic) writing systems between 2000 and 500 B.C.
in the narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system
and the Aegean Sea.
References
1. W. T. Fitch, M. D. Hauser, Science 303:377 (2004).
2. M. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999).
3. R. K. Logan, NYSCA Communication and Speech Annual 14, 63 (2000).
4. M. Mcluhan, R. K. Logan, Etcetera 34: 373 (1977).
5. R. K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect (Wm. Morrow, New York, 1986).
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