What Motivated the First Speakers?

An early (Oldowan) chopping tool.I have received a letter from a reader who goes by the handle jgkess. Under the titlethe origin of communicative intent in the use of hominem proto-language he (or maybe she) writes: "The idea was to get another to Do something, (or not do something) either proximally or distally (in a temporal sense), by way of getting him to think or feel in an intended way. There was no "generic" intent just to "inform" another---that would be insufficiently motivating, and communicative behaviour is, after all, motivated behaviour. In the pragmatics of hominem proto-linguistic communication, I think, lie the seeds of the evolution of our kind of general intelligence---this is a kind of take on Dan Sperber's work. "Seventy years ago, Norbert Wiener published a book e...

from #Head and Neck by Sfakianakis via simeraentaxei on Inoreader https://ift.tt/2BzoBWi