Reprinted with permission from The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology by Daniel Dor, published by Oxford University Press. © 2016 by Daniel Dor. All rights reserved.

Go here for Brian Boyd’s interview with Daniel Dor.

The question of the emergence and evolution of language is recognized today as one of the central questions in the whole of science—certainly the most crucial issue we have to contend with if we wish to understand how the human species came to be what it is. In the last three decades, the question has inspired an unprecedented wave of re- search, in which scholars from a wide array of disciplines—linguistics and philosophy, the different branches of psychology, anthropology and sociology, paleontology and archeology, evolutionary biology and genetics, primatology and ethology, neuroscience and computer science—have been collaborating to nd and interpret clues to what actually happened. The fact that we have no direct evidence—language does not leave material traces behind it—forces us to adopt a detective’s mindset, searching for pieces of circumstantial evidence that we then try to piece together into theoretically plausible hypotheses. Disciplinary boundaries lose their significance: every piece of evidence counts.

The question of the evolution of language, however, is not just important for its own sake. It should also be properly understood as the most crucial bottleneck that any theory of language should be able to squeeze through. With all the advances in the linguistic sciences, evolutionary biology is still light years ahead of us in maturity, sophistication, insight, and methodology: we have a much better understanding of the nature of evolution than we have of the nature of language. For every theoretical model of language we should thus ask: how is this evolvable?

In the final account, then, the deepest paradox of Chomsky’s program is the fact that it does not squeeze through the bottleneck: if language is genetically given to us as a universal cognitive capacity, we should have somehow evolved to get there. But if language as an innate cognitive capacity is universal and non-functional, infinitely generative and static, its emergence in the life of the human species cannot be explained in evolutionary terms. For this, of course, only evolutionary theory should be blamed. A language of this type would make sense in other worldviews—in the one, for example, that has the gift of language bestowed upon all human souls by a superior power. But the replacement of creationism with the evolutionary perspective carries certain implications that cannot be ignored: things in this world arrange themselves in complex patterns of variability; they develop and evolve because they are functional; they are always finite; and they are always dynamic. This is what evolution is all about.