Abstract
Accounts of the evolution of human must, by their very nature, express claims of a historical sort, including claims about why, when, where or how human emerged and/or developed in some distant past. What is more, it is of the essence of these claims that they are put forward in the absence of direct evidence - contained in natural or man-made records - about the events and factors that may or may not have been involved in the evolution of language. In modern work on evolution, however, scholars have come up with various means of ameliorating this problem of evidential paucity. One of these is an approach that proceeds from the assumption that evolution can be studied by examining other phenomena about which there is direct evidence. These other phenomena are taken to offer windows on the evolution of language. Thus it has been contended that features of evolution can be seen by looking at them through windows offered by prehistoric stone tools, fossilized (fragments of) ancestral skulls, bird song, language genes, motherese, pidgin languages or homesigns created by deaf children of non-signing parents - to mention just a few.
Highlights
Accounts of the evolution of human language must, by their very nature, express claims of a historical sort, including claims about why, when, where or how human language emerged and/or developed in some distant past
The concept applies to any instance of an inference where a conclusion about an aspect of language evolution is drawn on the basis of data about a phenomenon that is distinct from language evolution
Series of inferences constructed with the aid of such window chains need to have the basic good-making property of coherence. To see what this property involves, let us consider in outline the chain of windows used by Wendy Wilkins and Jenny Wakefield (1995, 1996) for inferring from data about fossil skulls that the human language capacity emerged for the first time in Homo habilis some two million years ago
Summary
Accounts of the evolution of human language must, by their very nature, express claims of a historical sort, including claims about why, when, where or how human language emerged and/or developed in some distant past. The concept applies to any instance of an inference where a conclusion about an aspect of language evolution is drawn on the basis of data about a phenomenon that is distinct from language evolution.
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