Ronald J. Planer

This essay critically reviews Alan Fiske’s recent book Representing Relationships: Modes of Cognition and Connection (2026). The book presents a sustained argument for Fiske’s conformation systems theory of human sociality. In this essay, I first reconstruct the main ideas of conformation systems theory, and then move to a topical discussion. The discussion covers: (i) why conformations take the form they do; (ii) whether conformations are conceptual metaphors; (iii) the place of mindreading (“theory of mind”) in conformational practices; and finally, (iv) applications of conformational systems theory to ancient human (i.e., Pleistocene) symbolic behavior.

Stage 2 of Chater and Christiansen’s (henceforth CC) model involves the ability to copy. Our comment concerns not the order of copying in CC’s model, but their time estimate of its origins. CC treat copying as present in apes and implied by early stone tools, and hence (presumably) had by the last common ancestor. Here we argue for a later onset.

Three main approaches exist for finessing the cognitive demands of Grice's model of communication (a notorious problem): namely, deflationism , modularity , and interpretivism . Here, I consider each in light of human metacommunication, a phenomenon that has been neglected in foundational discussions of Gricean communication. This neglect is surprising, as metacommunication is central to human communication and is also something quite young children appear to engage in. I argue that metacommunication bears upon the plausibility of these three approaches very differently. More specifically, both deflationism and an intuitive version of the modularity approach are significantly challenged. Interpretivism, in contrast, is left unaffected.

Sometime in the not-too-distant evolutionary past, our species began to engage in novel cultural practices such as painting the body, making jewelry, and producing art, a syndrome of behaviors collectively referred to as “symbolic.” And while there’s near universal acceptance of the idea that the origins of symbolic behavior must tell us something crucial about the final stages of becoming “fully human,” there is much less agreement about its causes (or its effects, for that matter). A broad variety of theories have been and continue to be offered. However, rather than suggest that our problem is one of an embarrassment of riches in this area, the present article makes the case that a valuable culturally evolutionary perspective has been left by the wayside by mainstream theorists working on Pleistocene symbolic behavior. This is the perspective of memetics, or of a meme’s eye view . In making this case, I shall be guided by Dan Dennett’s most recent version of meme theory, which I take to be the best development of the theory to date. In particular, I focus on Dennett’s treatment of two key topics: namely, (1) digitization schemes, and (2) memes’ interests (as distinct from ours, memes’ bearers). After unpacking and evaluating Dennett’s thinking on these topics, I seek to apply the lessons learned to the Pleistocene symbolic record. Towards this end, I use three case studies as my point of entry: one relating to the African Middle Stone Age, and two relating to the European Upper Paleolithic. As I hope to show, taking a meme’s eye view in these cases recasts the evidence in new and interesting ways, while also suggesting some fruitful lines for future inquiry.

It is widely agreed that human linguistic communication draws on theory-of-mind abilities more sophisticated than those possessed by our great ape relatives. However, controversy persists regarding the role of enhanced theory-of-mind abilities in explaining the ultimate origins of language. On one common view, an upgrade in our theory-of-mind abilities was a crucial driver of the expansion of communicative complexity in our line, ultimately culminating in the first human (proto)languages. In contrast, on a rival and increasingly influential view, the enhanced theory-of-mind abilities of humans are instead understood to be a cultural evolutionary product of the appearance of human (proto)languages, with these theory-of-mind abilities feeding back to subsequently affect the shape (e.g., the flexibility) of human linguistic communication. This article aims to progress this debate, and ultimately bridge this divide. Towards this end, we make use of recent empirical work on interactive repair in homesigners (i.e., individuals who lack meaningful exposure to natural language models, but whose developmental environment is otherwise normal). Against the strongest versions of cultural evolutionary thinking in this area, we argue that the way in which homesigners flexibly request repair from conversational partners reveals the possession of theory-of-mind abilities that are distinctively human in their sophistication. Nevertheless, we see reason for positing a residual theory-of-mind gap between homesigners and individuals with normal language exposure, and suggest that this gap may be naturally filled by the linguistic tools and processes emphasized by cultural evolutionary theorists, thereby offering a synthesis of the two schools of thought.

Magnus Enquist, Stefano Ghirlanda & Johan Lind THE HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY TRANSITION Reviewed by Ronald J Planer & Claudio Tennie Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on RedditShare by Mail Home The Human Evolutionary Transition Magnus Enquist, Stefano Ghirlanda & Johan Lind Reviewed by Ronald J Planer &

Stibbard-Hawkes forcefully alerts us to the pitfall of false-negative reasoning in symbolic archaeology. We highlight the twin problem of false-positive reasoning in what we call the “false-symbol problem.” False symbols are intuitively special entities that, owing to their non-utilitarian nature, invite symbolic interpretation. But they are not symbolic. We link the false-symbol problem to work in comparative primate cognition, taking “primate art” as our main example.

Theorists of human evolution are interested in understanding major shifts in human behavioural capacities (e.g. the creation of a novel technological industry, such as the Acheulean). This task faces empirical challenges arising both from the complexity of these events and the time-depths involved. However, we also confront issues of a more philosophical nature, such as how to best think about causation and explanation. This article considers such fundamental questions from the perspective of a prominent theory of causation in the philosophy of science literature, namely, the interventionist theory of causation. A signature feature of this framework is its recognition of a family of distinct types of causes. We set out several of these causal notions and show how they can contribute to explaining transitions in human behavioural complexity. We do so, first, in a preliminary way, and then in a more detailed way, taking the origins of behavioural modernity as our extended case study. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which the approach developed here might be elaborated and extended.

The evolution of human communication and culture is among the most significant—and challenging—questions we face in attempting to understand the evolution of our species. This article takes up two frameworks for theorizing about human communication and culture, namely, Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture of the human language faculty, and the cultural evolutionary framework of Memetics. The aim is to show that the two frameworks uniquely complement one another in some theoretically important ways. In particular, the Parallel Architecture's account of the lexicon significantly expands the range of linguistic phenomena that are plausibly covered by Memetics (e.g., from words to constructions and pure rules of syntax). At the same time, taking a “meme's‐eye‐view” of the lexicon retools the Parallel Architecture's treatment of the origins and subsequent cultural evolution of language.

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others’ malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies “the agential view of misfortune.” After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists’ exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others.