The Representational Revolution

Abstract

Minds are very accessible when their owners connection between pretense in children and are around, and the written record of speech and artistic achievement, and between changes to action keeps a tolerable connection with minds social structure and pretend play. Scholars such of the recent past.1 Looking further back is as Merlin Donald, Nick Humphrey, and Steven much harder. Brains decay quickly, and, for our Mithen have helped to make speculation in cogspecies, fossils indicate little more than a boring nitive anthropology respectable. Trouble would uniformity of brain size over a hundred thoucome if the speculation became dogma; that is sand years. For ideas about the minds of our very unlikely to happen in the case of the distant ancestors we are heavily reliant on the present essay. record of their nonlinguistic artifacts, so our To what genre, then, does this essay belong? reasoning in this area is very precarious. Still, A kindly view would be to see it as contributing when we focus on the astonishing cultural prodto a philosophically informed anthropology of ucts of around 30,000 years before the present art. But the fact that it brings philosophical (BP), it is hard to resist the conclusion that we ideas and modes of thought to bear on the topic are seeing what Paul Harris calls a new power does not make it a piece of philosophy of art, or of the imagination.2 What happened, and why? philosophy of anything. There may be no Steven Mithen has offered an explanation of absolute distinction between using ideas from a these dramatic cultural achievements that domain and contributing to that domain itself, appeals to assumptions about changes in human but my efforts are far toward the former end of mental architecture; I argue that, even granting the spectrum. Indeed, I end by biting the editoMithen these assumptions, his theory does not rial hand that feeds me, arguing that what I am explain what needs explaining. I suggest instead doing is not aesthetics at all. that those who believe in a cognitive revolution These are partly speculations about evolution, around this time consider two factors that may but I shall not be concerned with genetic have led to a growth in pretend play: the extenchange, or exclusively with factors that depend sion of childhood in Homo sapiens sapiens on genetic change. Changes in gene frequency (H.s.s.), and changes in diet, population density, are causal factors in some of the (putative) social organization, and child-rearing practices. events I shall be describing, but they do not All this is highly speculative, though I hope constitute any kind of explanatory bedrock. my references make clear that few of the ideas Macro-level explanations are not merely devices are my own. But it is not quite a house of cards, of convenience, pressed into service when we where failure at any level brings everything happen not to know the micro-level detail that crashing down. Some parts would survive the underpins them; they allow us to formulate true annihilation of others: my criticism of Mithen is counterfactuals that would be unavailable at the pretty much independent of anything else I say, micro level.3 We need not even assume that all as are my complaints about the use of a toothe factors we will consider here are filtered general category of the symbolic. What if the through the genome. According to Developmental timetable I am using turns out to be wrong? Systems Theory (DST), changes at the genetic There may still be merit in the ideas of a level have no privileged place in evolutionary