It was not at all the ability to speak, mentally or verbally, that made man a man. What distinguishes us from animals and forms the basis of our developed thinking? The ability to assume what others think of us, to rethink the past and build complex structures like: "I know what you think …", says New Zealand professor Michael Korballis.
Thinking arose earlier than language, and it was not at all the ability to speech and speech that made a person a person. Michael Corballis, a professor at the University of New Zealand, Auckland, is developing this theory, which refutes many of the usual ideas in linguistics and cognitive psychology. Recursion is what set us apart from the series of higher mammals and allowed us to reach the heights of progress, turning yesterday's monkey into a completely different creature, says the professor of psychology in his work "Recursive Mind: The Origin of Human Language, Thought and Civilization" ("Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization ").
According to Corballis, the mental faculties that made language possible were not originally linguistic in nature. That is, we do not need to know any language, even our own, to start thinking.
This statement, despite its apparent simplicity, refutes a number of linguistic theories that have many followers. Until now, this area of science has been dominated by the postulate of the American linguist and publicist Noam Chomsky (aka Noam Chomsky), put forward in 1955, that every person has an innate ability to speak one language or another. Chomsky argued that our thinking is initially formed as a linguistic one, and the structures with which every person thinks are easily transformed into lexical units (that is, words) and grammatical structures (that is, ways of connecting these words). As proof of his theory, Chomsky cited the indisputable fact that young children learn their native language incredibly easily and that regardless of the type of this language, they make about the same mistakes.
However, Corballis took the risk of looking at the origins of human thought from a completely different angle. “Chomsky looks at thought through the prism of language, and I prefer to look at language through the prism of thought,” he said.
According to Corballis, the thinking process is based on the ability of people to recursion, that is, the ability to "build" some ideas into others, as if creating a new level of thought. For example, the basic idea "The cat drank milk" can be turned into the following recursion: "I guessed that the cat drank milk", and even this: "Now you know that I guessed that the cat drank milk", - etc.
Note that it is not for nothing that psychologists are engaged in linguistic problems in Auckland: assumptions about the connection between language and thinking open up a completely new look at the development of human abilities and behavior. Moreover, at the moment cognitive psychologists are developing a new - recursive - model of the functioning of the psyche. According to this model, the ability to recursively allows us to make assumptions about the intentions and thoughts of others, evaluate the situation we are in, make decisions, and rethink past experiences.
This is what Corballis emphasizes in developing his theory. The ability to "fit" one idea into another helped our ancestors overcome the linearity of time, he says. Through recursion, we ponder the past and predict the future, and sometimes even mix the real and the fictional. Recursion allows us, communicating with the interlocutor, to draw a conclusion from his remarks about how well he understood us and how he interpreted what we said.
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by the way, man is not the only creature who knows how to make assumptions about the thoughts and intentions of others. In the 70s, scientists - ethologists and ethnopsychologists investigated the ability of animals to "put themselves in the place of a relative" on chimpanzees. They proved that animals have a so-called "theory of mind", that is, the understanding that other creatures also have their own mind. Moreover, scientists have found that great apes are able to guess how other individuals relate to them, understand their needs and take into account intentions.
This can also be a confirmation of a new linguistic theory: after all, monkeys do not have a language like humans. However, recursive thinking is present - which means that it appeared earlier, and, perhaps, really served as an impetus for the development of thinking.
Of course, humans have the ability to recurse on a qualitatively different level. This allows us to compose stories (that is, our own experience, ideas learned in it, in fictitious circumstances), as well as to make films and paint pictures, which can also be attributed to rethinking experiences, ideas and impressions.
According to Korballis's colleagues, his revolutionary theory could explain the emergence of some atypical languages. For example, in the language of the South American people of Piraha there are no numbers at all, and even the concept of number itself is not indicated in any way. Such examples include the language of the Indian tribe Amondava, in which there is no concept of time.
Moreover, it cannot be said that the speakers of these languages have absolutely no idea about the number and, accordingly, the time. Native speakers of the Piraha language use two definitions, which can be roughly translated as “several” (for objects numbering from one to four) and “many” (which means five or more). As for the Amondawa Indians, many of them are currently studying the Portuguese language and, according to eyewitnesses, have no difficulty in mastering the concept of time and the words related to it.
All these facts fit perfectly into the theory of the New Zealand scientist: after all, recursion, in his opinion, is a cognitive, not a linguistic concept. It is present in our thoughts, but not necessarily reflected in language.
YANA FILIMONOVA