3.3 Language and the conceptual mind: Dennett and BickertonDennett (1991a) argues that human cognitive powers were utterly
transformed following the appearance of natural language, as the mind
became colonised bymemes(ideas, or concepts, which are transmitted,
retained and selected in a manner supposedly analogous to genes – see
Dawkins, 1976). Prior to the evolution of language, on this picture, the
mind was a bundle of distributed connectionist processors – which confer-
red on early hominids some degree ofXexibility and intelligence, but which
were quite limited in their computational powers. The arrival of language
then meant that a whole new – serial – cognitive architecture could be
programmed into the system. This is what Dennett calls theJoycean
machine(named after James Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’). The idea
(to which we shall return in chapter 9) is that there is a highest-level
processor which runs on a stream of natural-language representations,
utilising learned connections between ideas, and patterns of reasoning
acquired in and through the acquisition of linguistic memes. On this
account, then, the concept-wielding mind is a kind of social construction,
brought into existence through the absorption of memes from the sur-
rounding culture, which is both dependent upon natural language and
constitutively involves natural language.
Bickerton’s (1990, 1995) proposals are somewhat similar, but more
biological inXavour. He thinks that, before the evolution of language,
hominid cognition was extremely limited in its powers. He thinks that
these early forms of hominid cognition consisted largely of a set of relative-
ly simple computational systems, underpinning an array ofXexible but
essentially behaviouristic conditioned responses to stimuli. But then the
evolution of language some 100,000 years ago involved a dramatic re-
wiring of the hominid brain, giving rise to distinctively human intelligence
and conceptual powers. Bickerton, like Dennett, allows that subsequent to
the evolution of language the human mind underwent further transform-
ations, as the stock of socially transmitted ideas and concepts changed and
increased. But the basic alteration was coincident with, and constituted by,
a biological alteration – the appearance of an innately structured lan-
guage-faculty. For Bickerton is a nativist about language (indeed, his
earlier work on the creolisation of pidgin languages – 1981 – is often cited
as part of an argument for the biological basis of language; see Pinker,
1994). And it is language which, he supposes, conferred on us the capacity
for ‘oV-line thinking’ – that is, the capacity to think and reason about
topics and problems in the abstract, independent of any particular sensory
stimulus.
These strong views seem to us unlikely to be correct. This is so for two
216 Forms of representation