Deacon

[J.L. Mackenzie]

Like Dick Hudson, I too have just read and enormously enjoyed Terrence
Deacon's *The Symbolic Species* (Penguin, 1997). Not only is the book very
well written, but it also is the most eloquent, erudite and effective
debunking of the nativist position on the language abilities of homo sapiens
that I have seen.

He takes Peirce's distinction between icon, index and symbol and argues that,
against the evolutionary odds, the ancestors of the human being 2m years ago
acquired the power of symbolic thought, and claims that language developed as
an evolutionary consequence. Against the nativist position that "the language
faculty must be innate, otherwise no chuild could learn it", Deacon argues --
to me convincingly -- that language structure has a "kid-friendly logic",
i.e. has evolved to be such that it can be readily acquired by children with
their particular thought processes at their stage of mental development.
Indeed, the human being has evolved to become a "savant of language and
symbolic learning"; the genetic basis for symbol-learning abilities has
become a fixation, i.e. a universal trait of the species.

This book, with its claim that language and the brain have co-evolved, seems
to me to offer an alternative view on the cognitive status of language that
will be attractive and appealing to functionalists and will dovetail with our
research findigs as functionalists. Not unusually, Deacon tends to equate
linguists with nativists, but he is aware of the functionalist
psycholinguistic tradition from Vygotsky to Bates.

Dick Hudson asked for reviews. I've seen the following:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10calvint.html (by
William Calvin)

and

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/deacon.html (by Mark Turner)

Lachlan Mackenzie

Department of English
Faculty of Letters
Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands

tel: +31-20-444 6492
fax: +31-20-444 6500
home phone: +31-20-671 1491
e-mail: mackenzi at let.vu.nl