Month: September 2022

THE ABSTRACT BECOMES POSSIBLE. “Without verbal language our mental life would be reduced to feelings, emotions, and the processing of our perceptions as is the case with all other forms of life. Verbal language makes conceptualization, abstraction and reflection possible.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

INFINITE SCOPE. “Our ability to use verbal language is what differentiates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Other animals are capable of communicating with each other but the range of what they can express is limited to a small number (less than 50) of signals. Human verbal language, on the other hand, is generative so there are an infinite number of possible messages or meaning that we are capable of composing and communicating.” (Not quite true, the nematode vocabulary is hundreds). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

CONCEPTS. “Abstract thinking and language cannot be separated. Only humans are capable of verbal language, abstract thought, mathematics and conceptualization.” (Again, some would take issue with this). https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHESIS. “It is believed that first came verbal language and then mathematical thought. But I suggest otherwise. The origin of verbal language, the origin of the mind and the origin of mathematic thinking all happened at approximately the same time and that these three elements are basically interlinked. Human verbal language was as much a product of mathematical thinking as mathematics was a product of verbal language.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

SET THEORY. “The human mind is a product of the brain and verbal language as was argued in The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture (Logan 2007), but verbal language as we have argued was dependent on the ability of humans to think in terms of sets employing a primitive form of set theory.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

EARLY COMMUNICATION. “Before verbal language, we lived in a world of percepts. Our communication was mimetic consisting of hand signals, facial gestures, body language and non-verbal prosody or tones such as grunts and whines. We could only communicate about the here and now.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

FIRST CONCEPTS. “Conceptual thinking only became possible with verbal language and our first concepts were our first words. These words acting as concepts linked to and representing all the percepts associated with those words.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn

SETS AND WORDS. “The skill that made language possible and allowed a word acting as a concept to represent all of the percepts associated with that word was the mathematical ability to create sets, the set of all the percepts associated with that word.” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59177-9_13 View in LinkedIn