It is widely held that the gradual development of metarepresentational Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities constituted at least one important hominid upgrade. Are such abilities really needed to explain hominid (i) tool-making, (ii) social cohesion, or even (iii) basic interpretative and language formation/learning capabilities? I propose an alternative explanation of what underlies these sophisticated capacities – the Mimetic Ability Hypothesis (MAH). MAH claims that a vastly increased capacity for recreative imagination best explains the kinds of sophisticated intersubjective engagements of which hominids would have been capable – and that these constituted an important basis for the development of complex language. This proposal puts the idea of the evolution of ToM devices under considerable strain.
How did humans bridge the tremendous gap between symbolic thought and the nonsymbolic forms of intelligence that still dominate the rest of the animal kingdom? Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind
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Berio, Leda
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Fenici, Marco & Duilio Garofoli
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Garofoli, Duilio
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Garofoli, Duilio
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Garofoli, Duilio & Antonis Iliopoulos
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Hutto, Daniel D.
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Hutto, Daniel D.
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Placiński, Marek, Przemysław Żywiczyński, Theresa Matzinger, Marta Sibierska, Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska, Anna Szala & Sławomir Wacewicz
2023. Evolution of Pantomime in Dyadic Interaction. A Motion Capture Study. Journal of Language Evolution
Thibault, Paul J.
2011. First-Order Languaging Dynamics and Second-Order Language: The Distributed Language View. Ecological Psychology 23:3 ► pp. 210 ff.
Unternbäumen, Enrique Huelva
2017. The codification of intersubjectivity in the diachronic change AD locative > A(D) indirect object in Spanish. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16:1 ► pp. 107 ff.
Wacewicz, Sławomir & Przemysław Żywiczyński
2021. Pantomimic Conceptions of Language Origins. In Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, ► pp. 701 ff.
2010. Phenomenology and Cognitive Linguistics. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ► pp. 415 ff.
Żywiczyński, Przemysław, Sławomir Wacewicz & Marta Sibierska
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