Review of research on gesture

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Mon May 12 07:53:33 UTC 2014


>>> Johanna Rubba <jrubba at calpoly.edu> 2014/05/09 06:50 PM >>>
Fundamentally, if language (as opposed to gesture) isn't at all necessary to communication, why did it evolve?  It is a pretty elaborate system to have evolved in the absence of a need for it.
 
There is another view regarding evolution, and that is that language emerged first as a mute system of inner modeling (Sebeok et al) and only later "exapted" for communication. Obviously language would have made a huge difference in the potentials for communication, which itself would have reflected back into enhanced thought processes again. Explaining it this way does have the merit of avoiding the mechanistic view, in which humans initially had thoughts just as we do and so they developed language "in order to express" those thoughts (!)
Tahir



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