La evolución del lenguaje y el comportamiento social. Conferencias de Kim Sterelny (Australian National University)

El martes 4 y el miércoles 5 de setiembre de 2018, en la Sala de Consejo de Estudios Generales Letras de la PUCP, Kim Sterelny (Australian National University) dictará dos conferencias: “The Evolution of Social Norms” y “Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language”. Evento organizado por el Grupo Interdisciplinario de Investigación Mente y Lenguaje. Ingreso libre.

Martes 4 de septiembre, de 1:00 a 3:00 pm

The Evolution of Social Norms

Sumilla:

We are moral apes, a difference between humans and our relatives that has received significant recent attention in the evolutionary literature. Evolutionary accounts of morality have often been recruited in support of error theory: moral language is truth-apt, but substantive moral claims are never true (or never warranted). In this article, we: (i) locate evolutionary error theory within the broader framework of the relationship between folk conceptions of a domain and our best scientific conception of that same domain; (ii) within that broader framework, argue that error theory and indication are two ends of a continuum, and that in the light of our best science, many folk conceptual structures are neither hopelessly wrong nor fully vindicated; and (iii) argue that while there is no full vindication of morality, no seamless reduction of normative facts to natural facts, nevertheless one important strand in the evolutionary history of moral thinking does support reductive naturalism—moral facts are facts about cooperation, and the conditions and practices that support or undermine it. In making our case for (iii), we first respond to the important error theoretic argument that the appeal to moral facts is explanatorily redundant, and second, we make a positive case that true moral beliefs are a ‘fuel for success’, a map by which we steer, flexibly, in a variety of social interactions. The vindication, we stress, is at most partial: moral cognition is a complex mosaic, with a complex genealogy, and selection for truth-tracking is only one thread in that genealogy.

Miércoles 5 de septiembre, de 11:00 a 1:00pm

Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language

Sumilla:

I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called ‘‘protolanguage’’ to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also (perhaps more importantly) defends and illustrates a methodological proposal too. I argue that language is a special case of a more general phenomenon—cumulative cultural evolution—and while we rarely have direct information about communication, we have more direct information about the cumulative cultural evolution of technical skill, ecological strategies, and social complexity. These same factors also enable us to make a reasonable estimate of the intergenerational social learning capacities of these communities (on which rich communication depends) and of the communicative demands these communities face. For example, we can, at least tentatively, identify forms of cooperation that are stable only if third party information is transmitted widely, cheaply, and accurately. So we can use these more direct markers of information accumulation to locate, in broad terms, the period in our evolutionary history during which we became lingual.

Sobre el autor:

Sus áreas de investigación están en la intersección entre filosofía de la ciencia, filosofía de la mente y filosofía del lenguaje. Es autor de muchos libros y artículos importantes en estas áreas, incluyendo trabajos en la selección de grupo, la teoría del meme y de la evolución cultural como El Retorno de los Genes (con Philip Kitcher), “Memes Revisited” y “La Evolución y la capacidad de evolución de la Cultura.” Junto con su antiguo alumno Paul Griffiths, en 1999, Sterelny publicó Sex and Death,, un tratamiento integral de problemas y posiciones alternativas en la filosofía de la biología. En 2004, el libro de Sterelny Pensamiento en un mundo hostil: La evolución de la cognición humana recibió el Premio Lakatos​ por su distinguida contribución a la filosofía de la ciencia. Este libro proporciona una explicación darwiniana de la naturaleza y la evolución de las capacidades cognitivas humanas, y es una alternativa importante a los relatos nativistas familiares de la psicología evolutiva. En 2008 Sterelny fue galardonado con el Premio Jean-Nicod. Sus conferencias se publicaron bajo el título, The Evolved Apprentice. Estas conferencias se basan en el enfoque darwiniano no nativista del Pensamiento en un mundo hostil, al tiempo que proporcionan una discusión de una gran cantidad de trabajos recientes de otros filósofos, antropólogos y ecólogos biológicos, teóricos de coevolución de la cultura génica y teóricos del juego evolutivo.