Daniel Dor

In The Instruction of Imagination, Daniel Dor offers a new perspective on the essence
of human language. This enormous achievement of our species is best characterized as a communication technology - not unlike the social media on the Net today - that was collectively invented by ancient humans for a very particular communicative function: the instruction of imagination.
While all other systems of communication in the biological world target the interlocutors’ senses, language allows speakers to systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended meaning, instead of directly experiencing it. This revolutionary function changed human life forever, and in this book it operates as a unifying concept around which a new general theory of language gradually emerges. Dor identifies a set of fundamental problems in the linguistic sciences: the nature of words; the complexities of syntax; the interface between semantics and pragmatics; the causal relationship between language and thought; language processing; the dialectics of universality and variability; the intricacies
of language and power; knowledge of language and its acquisition; the fragility of
linguistic communication; and the origins and evolution of language. Dor then shows
how the theory provides fresh answers to these problems, resolves persistent difficulties in existing accounts, enhances the significance of empirical and theoretical achievements in the field, and identifies new directions for empirical research. The theory thus opens a new path toward the unification of the linguistic sciences - on both sides of the cognitive-social divide.

... which I would like to present in this article is the following: The distribution of that-deletion (in complement position) in English is determined by a single semantic property, which ... Generally speaking, cognitive agents can make the truth claim either by thinking it or by expressing it ...

In the last decade, the introduction of a developmental framework into the core of evolutionary theory has brought about a radical change in perspective. In the emerging synthesis, known as “evolutionary developmental biology”(or “evo devo”), the ...

ABSTRACT Presents a new theoretical framework for the origins of human language Adopts an interdisciplinary approach with contributors from diverse fields of research Sets key issues in language evolution in their wider context within biological and cultural evolution This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual and other social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and novel perspectives on the time-frame for language evolution. The contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics, anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive science.

... which I would like to present in this article is the following: The distribution of that-deletion (in complement position) in English is determined by a single semantic property, which ... Generally speaking, cognitive agents can make the truth claim either by thinking it or by expressing it ...

Ernst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and promising linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: (i) natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; (ii) the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises & partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; (iii) this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and (iv) linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits.

Current research on the syntax-semantics interface demonstrates the dramatic extent to which syntactic structures constitute transparent reflections of well-defined semantic regularities. As this paper shows, the empirical results accumulated within this framework strongly suggest that a theoretical distinction should be made between two distinct levels of meaning representation: A level of conceptual meaning on the one hand, and a uniquely linguistic level of meaning — Linguistic Semantics — on the other. The semantic notions and regularities which turn out to determine major syntactic phenomena are best interpreted as belonging to the level of Linguistic Semantics, rather than to the level of conceptual meaning. This view helps characterize language as a unique and functional system — a cognitive system whose function is defined at the level of Linguistic Semantics. It explains the fact, most recently highlighted by Levinson (1997), that the expressive <LINK "dor-r18"> power of language, as a tool for the communication of meanings, is constrained in non-trivial ways.

This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines. Couched within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual effect and processing effort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for specific stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading the stories.

In this paper, I present a new general hypothesis concerning the origin and evolutionary development of human language and its speakers. The hypothesis is based on the theory of language I develop in Dor (2015): language should be properly understood as a social communication technology of a very particular type, collectively constructed for the specific function of the instruction of imagination. The hypothesis, then, runs as follows: pre-linguistic humans (most probably Homo erectus) developed their culture and their pre-linguistic communication to the point where the collective invention of language became both necessary and possible. The moment of the origin consisted of no more than exploratory attempts to use what had already been achieved to go into the realm of the instruction of imagination. When the new function began to show its potential, a developmental process was launched that was directly driven throughout by the constant pressure to raise the levels of collective success in instructive communication. Throughout the process, individuals were selected for their ability to meet the challenges of the emerging technology, and the required capacities were (partially and variably) genetically accommodated. Homo sapiens, an imaginative species adapted for fast speech, and maybe our sisters species too, eventually emerged from the collectively-driven process with unique adaptations to language.

The literature on language evolution treats the fact that language allows for lying as a major obstacle to the emergence and development of language, and thus looks for theoretical means to constrain the lie. In this paper, I claim that this general formulation of the issue at hand misses out on the fact that lying made an enormous contribution to the evolution of language. Without the lie, language would not be as complex as it is, linguistic communication would be much simpler, the cognitive requirement of language would not be so heavy, and its role in society would be radically different. The argument is based on Dor's (2015) theory of language as a social communication technology, collectively-designed for the instruction of imagination. The theory rethinks the essence of lying, and suggests that the emergence of language did more to enhance the human capacity for deception than it did to enhance the human capacity for honest communication. Lying, then, could not be constrained, but language did not collapse. The conception of lying as a threat to language, as it is formulated in the literature, is based on a series of unrealistic assumptions. Most importantly, the cognitive, emotional and social capacities required for lying, lie-detection and moral enforcement are never equally spread within communities: they are highly variable. Lying and language came to be entangled in a never-ending co-evolutionary spiral, which changed the map of communicative relationships within communities, and participated in shaping our languages, societies, cognitions and emotions. We evolved for lying, and because of lying, just as much as we evolved for and because of honest communication.