Contents
Section 1
Palaeoanthropology
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Photogallery Outline of Human Phylogeny Evolutionary Trees and DNA Brain Evolution Hand and Bipedality |
Section 2
Social and socio-
cultural systems
Section 3
Ontogeny and symbolism
Section 4
Language systems
Links
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Links Policy Relevant Links |
Theories of symbolization and development
Chris Sinha
Abstract
An interdisciplinary approach to human symbolic evolution draws upon psychological, semiotic, and social theory, as well as upon evolutionary biology. This chapter provides a historical and theoretical overview of main trends in the theory of signs, and examines the fusion of semiotic, psychological, and biological themes in the classic works of genetic psychology.
Contemporary semiotic theory, as well as some key issues in
the philosophy of language, have their origins in the work of
three major figures at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century. Charles Sanders Peirce
attempted to found a general theory of knowledge upon his
analysis of the nature and function of signs in cognition and
communication; he introduced the term 'semiotics', and can
also be considered as the founder of pragmatics. The logician
Gottlob Frege introduced the distinction between sense
and reference which was one of the major foundations of
analytic philosophy. Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of
structural linguistics, analysed language as a system of
'signifying differences', in which the value of an element is
dependent upon its relations with other elements.
More recently, analyses of language as a communicative vehicle
- as pragmatic instrument, that is - have been coupled with
criticisms of the way in which traditional linguistic theory
treats language as an abstract object independently of use and
of context. The theoretical contributions of Mead, Bakhtin,
and Barthes provide important insights into the role of
language in the creation and maintenance of social life.
Freud, Piaget, and Vygotsky - the three principal figures in
the foundation of 'genetic psychology' - were all concerned,
in elaborating their theories, to understand processes which
can be conceived at one and the same time as semiotic,
cognitive, and biological. These three psychologists employed
concepts from Darwinian (and, in the cases of Freud and
Piaget, Lamarckian) evolutionary theory to fashion their
observations of child development (and, in the case of Freud,
of clinical symptoms) into integrated theories in which human
nature, culture and society, and semiotic and cognitive
processes are treated as evolutionary and developmental
phenomena.