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7 - Leaping to Language

from Part II - Symbolic Behaviours

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2020

Rudolf Botha
Affiliation:
University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
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Summary

Chapter 7 appraises the language inference. It is the final component of the jewellery inference, the cave-art inference, the body-decoration inference and the deliberate-burial inference. It comprises one step: Certain Neanderthals had symbols → These Neanderthals had language. This inference fails all three soundness conditions. First, the conclusion that certain Neanderthals had language lacks pertinence: the entity central to this conclusion, language, is on the whole not clearly identified and adequately characterised in the literature. That is, language is not distinguished in a principled way from other linguistic entities, including linguistic capacity, language ability, linguistic skill, speech and communication. Second, the inferential step lacks uncontentious grounding: it has not been uncontroversially established that Neanderthals engaged in symbolic behaviours. The inferential step lacks an appropriate warrant: it moves in an arbitrary way from putative cultural symbols that cannot be semantically combined to linguistic signs that can be semantically combined, a distinction drawn in a principled way in the literature. So, the language inference is unsound.

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Chapter
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Neanderthal Language
Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of our Extinct Cousins
, pp. 97 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Leaping to Language
  • Rudolf Botha, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
  • Book: Neanderthal Language
  • Online publication: 26 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868167.009
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  • Leaping to Language
  • Rudolf Botha, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
  • Book: Neanderthal Language
  • Online publication: 26 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868167.009
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Leaping to Language
  • Rudolf Botha, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
  • Book: Neanderthal Language
  • Online publication: 26 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868167.009
Available formats
×