Human Life Worlds Final Komp Let T

David Dunér / Göran Sonesson (eds.
)
David Dunér / Göran Sonesson (eds.)
Human Lifeworlds
Human Lifeworlds
This book, which presents a cognitive-
semiotic theory of cultural evolution,
thinking beings, and to transfer experi-
ences, knowledge, meaning, and perspec-
The Cognitive Semiotics
including that taking place in historical
time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic
tives to new generations. of Cultural Evolution
artefacts and abilities. It claims that what
makes human beings human is funda-
Human Lifeworlds
mentally the semiotic and cultural skills by The Editors
means of which they endow their Life- David Dunér, Professor of History of Ideas,
world with meaning. The properties that Lund University, has been concerned
have made human beings special among with the history of sciences in the 17th-18th
animals living in the terrestrial biosphere century, and more recently with cognitive
do not derive entirely from their biological- history.
genetic evolution, but also stem from their Göran Sonesson, Professor of Cognitive
interaction with the environment, in its Semiotics, Lund University, has written
culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. extensively on pictorial and cultural
This, in turn, becomes possible thanks semiotics, and more recently on semiotic
to the human ability to learn from other evolution and development.
ISBN 978-3-631-66285-4
Human Lifeworlds:
The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution
Edited by David Dunér and Göran Sonesson
Published with contribution from

The Tercentenary Foundation of the Swedish National Bank
1
Table of Contents
Göran Sonesson & David Dunér

Introduction
The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution��7
Göran Sonesson
Chapter One
Lifeworlds: The Cognitive Semiotics of Culture��23
Jordan Zlatev
Chapter Two
Mimesis: The Role of Bodily Mimesis for the Evolution of
Human Culture and Language��63
Gerd Carling
Chapter Three
Language: The Role of Culture and Environment in
Proto-Vocabularies��83
Sara Lenninger
Chapter Four
Pictures: Perceptions of Realism in the Service of Communication��97
Michael Ranta
Chapter Five
Art: On the Evolutionary Foundations of Art and Aesthetics��123
Anna Cabak Rédei & Michael Ranta

Chapter Six
Narrativity: Individual and Collective Aspects of Storytelling��145
Andreas Nordlander
Chapter Seven
Religion: The Semiotics of the Axial Age��163
6 Table of Contents
Göran Sonesson & Gunnar Sandin

Chapter Eight
Urbanity: The City as the Specifically Human Niche��191
David Dunér
Chapter Nine
Science: The Structure of Scientific Evolutions��229
David Dunér & Göran Sonesson

Chapter Ten
Encounters: The Discovery of the Unknown��267
Göran Sonesson
Epilogue
Cultural Evolution: Human History as the Continuation
of Evolution by (Partially) Other Means��301
References��337
Index of Subjects��385
Index of Names��395
Authors��399
Göran Sonesson & David Dunér
Introduction
The Cognitive Semiotics of
Cultural Evolution
Until only a few centuries ago, most people, scientists and scholars alike, took
it for granted that human beings were special, and in no way to be compared
to (other) animals, and if they were asked about why they had this convic-
tion, they most probably would have pointed to the Bible or some other holy
script. Early Enlightenment (dated by Jonathan Israel (2001) to the middle
of the seventeenth century) sustained, and Charles Darwin finally brought
home, the idea that the culture and history of human beings are very much
connected to the evolution of all animal species on earth. This certitude, once
recognised, has prompted a series of endeavours, the most recent of which
is Mainstream Evolutionary Psychology (also known as Socio-biology), to
reduce the history of humanity to just another ethogram of an animal species
staking out its life in its more or less unvarying niche. Nevertheless, such
undertakings do not obviate the necessity of finding out why human beings
alone have created a culture that is inherited over numerous generations, and
thus a history. Viewed from an extra-terrestrial position, the observation
that human history has occasioned numerous, and far-reaching, changes
of habitat may not appear too remarkable. However, already the fact that
human beings have been able to write down the history of all these changes
(and, before that was possible, no doubt reflected on it and, by oral means,
gave these reflections in heritage to later generations) should be sufficient to
make us special, even from such an otherworldly perspective.
Perhaps nobody has been more acutely aware of the contradiction be-
tween the evolutionary point of view, and that of the common sense world,
than Darwin, but, unlike his contemporary Herbert Spencer, and unlike
latter-day evolutionary psychology, he never found an easy way out. If,
as we have suggested above, human behaviour, including human cultural
production, is different from that of other animals (which is not to deny that
there are intermediary cases, notably in case of the apes) in being a kind of
8 Göran Sonesson & David Dunér
behaviour always already offered to the interpretation of others, semiotics,

as the general study of how meaning is conveyed, and in particular cultural
semiotics, which focuses on the meaning of cultures in their relationship to
other cultures, may help us bridge the space between evolution and history.
But, unlike classical semiotics, cognitive science has, on one hand, accepted
the relevance of empirical findings, and, on the other hand, allowed for
philosophical reflections on those results. Much of the time, however, these
reflections have been too much tainted by the original chock, sustained
two centuries ago, that human beings were, after all, just another kind of
animal. To take into account the mutual interdependence of evolution and
culture, the continuity between evolution and history, and the way in which
the latter is special, all of which helps in defining human beings, we need
to have recourse to cognitive semiotics, which is a synthesis of theories of
meaning production and approaches to the embodied mind.
1. History and Definition of Cognitive Semiotics

According to one current definition (see Sonesson 2007a, b, 2009; Zlatev
2012, 2015), cognitive semiotics is the attempt to bring together the theo-
ries, methods, and findings of the cognitive sciences and of semiotics, as
well of more traditional human and social sciences, into one integrative
framework. As applied to history, cognitive semiotics rests on the sup-
position that people in history, as well as at present, use abilities which
have evolved through millions of years of cognitive-semiotic evolution.
However, it must also be supposed (following Donald 1991) that there
are other abilities, other cognitive means, which are the product of history
itself. A cognitive-semiotic analysis of the historical records is needed in
order to fill in the gap between the Palaeolithic and the “(post)modern”
human being, which can give us an understanding of the evolution of the
human cognition, particularly of the impact of cultural change on cogni-
tion. The semiotics of culture, which is devoted to the study of transac-
tions between cultures, taking its origin from the Moscow-Tartu school of
semiotics particularly associated with the work of Yuri Lotman, although
it also has deeper roots in phenomenology, as we shall see (in Chapter 1:
Lifeworlds), can serve as an instrument for taking a cognitive-semiotic
approach to history and evolution.
The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution 9
Cognitive semiotics can be conceived as an extension of classical semiotics,

which differ from the latter methodologically, in making use of experiments
and other empirical approaches more commonly associated with the social
sciences, as well as theoretically, at least in the double sense of taking not
only structures into account, but also the modes of access of the subject to
these structures, and in considering semiotic properties in relation to other
mental properties as they emerge in evolution and development. It can also
be considered as an extension of cognitive science, in that it takes issues of
meaning to occupy centre stage in cognitive processes, and that it indulges
in the study of differences and similarities between the diverse cognitive re-
sources by means of which cognition is manifested. Finally, it can be seen as
an extension of linguistics to other semiotic resources, as classical semiotics
was meant to be, but was unable to bring to fruition, because it was often
conceived on the model of the kind of autonomous language study preconised
by the followers of Noam Chomsky as well as those of Ferdinand de Saus-
sure. From the contemporary point of view, it could perhaps more precisely
be considered an extension of cognitive linguistics, which, in its references
to Gestalt psychology and (implicitly) to phenomenology, is already on the
way to cognitive semiotics. In this latter sense, the extension should not only
be understood as an inclusion of other semiotic resources than language,
but also as the integration of language and other semiotic resources into the
complete socio-cultural Lifeworld in which human beings stake out their life.
Customarily, the cognitive sciences are said to comprise linguistics,
computer science, cognitive anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and
philosophy. The field was strongly influenced at its inception in the mid-
twentieth century by formalist theories in linguistics and Artificial Intelli-
gence. Indeed, in its early phase, it was heavily dependent on the computer
metaphor of the human mind. It has since then gone through several distinct
phases, of which the most recent one, joining trends in the philosophy of
mind, have meant an influx of approaches derived from Husserlean phe-
nomenology, as in the work of Shaun Gallagher (2005a), Evan Thompson
(2007), and Dan Zahavi (2014), and from Gibsonean ecological psychol-
ogy, as is most evident in the work of Anthony Chemero (2009). This latter
approach clearly overlaps in many ways with what we here call cognitive
semiotics. Additionally, we have inherited a number of constructs from
more mainstream cognitive sciences, such as folk psychology, embodiment,
situated cognition, distributed cognition, and so on. Although we are going

to suggest that these constructs have a prehistory in phenomenology and
Neo-Kantianism (see Section 1.1.3), their return to the scholarly scene, and
the ensuing debate, has no doubt been useful.
Semiotics, by contrast, has commonly sought to unify the classical dis-
ciplines of the humanities under the umbrella of theories building on a
tradition dating back to the reflections on signs and meanings in Greek An-
tiquity, which were pursued within the numerous treatises of signs popular
with Scholastic philosophers, then being taken up again in Enlightenment
and Counter-Enlightenment theories of signs and other meanings, as well
as in the Neo-Kantian and phenomenological movements of the early twen-
tieth century, finally to find its current most well-known manifestations
in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as in the Saussurean
structuralist tradition originally only present within linguistics, which then
spread, through French structuralism, to all of the humanities as well as
some other disciplines.
The merit of the semiotic approach is the emphasis it places on the arte-
facts that are the result, as well as the objects forming the basis of, human
meaning-making, or semiosis. Cognitive science offers the advantages of a
basis in experimental methods, as well as a perspective in which the arte-
facts of interest to semiotics are situated within a wider context of human
(and non-human) cognition. The goal of cognitive semiotics is to bring these
distinct, but complementary, assets to bear on each other.
Some of us working within semiotics have long rejected the autonomy
postulate taken over from linguistics by classical semiotics, which denies
the relevance of anything not “purely” linguistic and semiotic, as the case
may be, to the discipline in question. Thus we have taken into account facts
and findings of psychology and other empirical sciences in our theories in-
volving semiotic phenomena (see Sonesson 1989). It is only more recently,
however, that semioticians have taken to designing their own experiments,
in order to construe experimental situations more adequate to the issues
defined in semiotic theory. As one pioneer of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt,
already recognised, however, experiments are more easily conceived at the
individual level than when being involved with groups and cultures. In the
present work, the integration of cognitive science and semiotics will thus
have a more general sense, in two respects: as first suggested by Thomas
Daddesio (1994), cognitive semiotics should, apart from semiotic structures,

take into account the abilities that any subject experiencing such struc-
tures requires (and not only at the abstract level of Saussurean langue and
Chomskyan competence); and it should relate semiotic abilities to mental
and intersubjective abilities in general, which may be a requisite for the
attainment of the semiotic kinds, and vice-versa. As the first psychologist
to talk about the semiotic function, Jean Piaget (1967 [1945], 1970) was
certainly a precursor in this domain, though, in the end, he downplayed the
contribution of semiosis to evolution and development.
2. Phenomenology of the Lifeworld

Cognitive semiotics, in a sense approaching the conception sketched above,
has been invented numerous times. In his recent grand overview, Jordan
Zlatev (2015) lists a number of research centres connected to different varie-
ties of cognitive semiotics: the Centre for Semiotics at Aarhus University,
Denmark, associated with the work of Per Aage Brandt, Frederik Stjernfelt,
and Peer Bundgaard; the Centre for Cognition and Culture at Case Western
Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, which was later the headquarters for
Brandt, as well as for Mark Turner, Todd Oakley, and Merlin Donald; the
Centre for Language, Cognition, and Mentality in Copenhagen, Denmark,
around Søren Brier and Peer Durst Andersen; and the Centre for Cognitive
Semiotics at Lund University, Sweden. Without here entering the discussion
about the differences between these approaches, we will still single out one
feature, which is not unique to the Lund approach, but which is still very
much one of its characteristics: the recourse to the phenomenological method.
The aim of phenomenology is to describe, as exactly as possible, experi-
ence as it is directly given to consciousness. Phenomenology is not (primarily)
involved with introspection, which is directed to the specific experiences of an
individual subject, but with the uncovering of structures that are invariant to
the experience of all human beings. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund
Husserl, introduced the term Lifeworld for talking about those invariant
structures most immediately given to experience. One of his most immediate
followers, Alfred Schütz, pertinently paraphrases this as “the world taken for
granted.” In the later terms of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the
Lifeworld corresponds both to naïve physics and folk psychology. Another
follower of Husserl, Aron Gurwitsch, suggested that, apart from the general
invariants of the common Lifeworld, there could also be specific invariants

of different socio-cultural Lifeworlds. It is in this double sense that we will
be interested in the notion of Lifeworld in the present volume. Indeed, we
will add a third sense, intermediate between that which is taken for granted
by all human beings, and that which is only supposed to be self-evident in
specific Lifeworlds which are historically and geographically situated: a typol-
ogy of different kinds of Lifeworlds, which, as it turns out, is foreshadowed
in the idea of a semiotics of culture, as suggested by the Tartu school, and
developed, notably, in the Lund interpretation of cultural semiotics. Phenom-
enology will be more fully explained, and the notion of Lifeworld situated
within this framework, in the first chapter of this book.
3. On Symbols and Other Signs

In the present volume, we will take semiotics to be the study of meaning,
not only signs, which we will suppose to be something which can be divided
into a vehicle or expression (the sound, in the case of spoken language), and
a content (what the word is listed as signifying in the lexicon). Cultures,
like percepts, are clearly meaningful in a much wider sense, because what
is expression and content in them cannot be told apart, except in singular
circumstances (for instance when a way of speaking, clothing of some spe-
cial kind, a particular way of wearing a beard or a distinct tattoo is taken
to stand for a nation or an ethnic or social group). Although, in the present
volume, we will not be especially involved with signs, as against other ways
of conveying meaning, something has to be said at this point about how
to understand in the following terms referring to different kinds of signs,
which, in the literature (that of semiotics, and even more that of psychol-
ogy, philosophy, and cognitive science), are multiply ambiguous, and thus
may easily lead to confusion. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the
present volume, quoting and discussing ideas of scholars from many dif-
ferent domains, it has, in the end, turned out to be impossible to use terms
having to do with different kinds of signs in an entirely coherent way. While
we regret this fact, we are happy to offer, unlike any other book we know
of, a guide for the perplexed in the paragraphs to follow.
There is one division of signs that can be traced very far back in time,
but it is now mostly known by the labels given to its kinds by Peirce, that is,
as icons, indices, and symbols (see Sonesson 1989). Without in the present
context getting involved in the intricacies of Peirce’s system, while still try-
ing to avoid too many of the common confusions, we will suppose, in the
following, that icons are signs based on the similarity between expression
and content, indices take their grounding from a relation of contiguity,
and symbols are based on some kind of regularity, which may be a habit
or a convention or anything in-between. These definitions, which have
imposed themselves in semiotics, also outside the strict Peircean obedi-
ence, and also in many other quarters, are no doubt problematic in many
ways, but, for the time being, we will only be interested in the ambiguities
of the labels as such.
It should be evident that the term icon is multiply ambiguous: iconic
codes, as understood in cognitive psychology, are defined by visuality, but
iconic signs can exist in any sense modality; computer icons are certainly
visual, but they do not have to be similar to what they stand for; icon paint-
ings, as compared to pictures generally, are characterised by being more
symbolic and less iconic than others; and cultural icons, in the sense of
persons or objects to which fame or recognition is ascribed, can clearly be
manifested in any sense modalities, and similarity has nothing to do with
their being, but they are certainly something which draws attention, which
we more easily conceive as something taking place in the visual mode. The
ambiguity of the term index is much less apparent. However, when it comes
to the term symbol, the ambiguities are such that there does not seem to be
any way to go beyond them. This is not only a historical problem. Quoting
the term from a small number of contemporary thinkers, and even from one
of them, you are sure to enter into contradiction. Since the contradictions
appear not only in the texts of the contributions to this book, but in the
texts they cite, there is no way to avoid the problem. All we can offer, at
present, is a kind of Vademecum for steering free of the ambiguities in the
use of the term in the different chapters (partly inspired in Sonesson 1997).
“Symbol” is a term derived from the Greek word “sy’mbolon” meaning
“sign of recognition,” “token,” from the verb “symba’llō” meaning “to
put together.” Given this etymology, one would expect it to be a synonym
for index, in the sense of being a part of a whole, but that is about the only
meaning it has never carried. Instead, what we find is the following quite
diverse list of meanings attributed to the label “symbol:”
1) A synonym for “sign,” in the sense of everything that can be meaning-
fully divided into expression and content. This is probably how the term
is used by Merlin Donald, in the quotations from his work appearing
in Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7 and 9, as are most other uses of the term in those
chapters, except the quotations from Terrence Deacon in Chapter 7
(see acceptation 7 below). “Conventional symbolic systems,” as used in
Table 2.1, should probably also be understood in this sense (or accord-
ing to acceptation 6, in which case the term is pleonastic). “Symbolic
message” as used in Chapter 8 should also be understood in this sense.
2) A synonym for iconic sign, as used, for instance, in opposition to sign
(which is arbitrary or conventional), in the work of Saussure, and taken
over, in this sense, by Piaget, who, however, would seem to take the no-
tion in the direction of acceptations 4 or 5 below. The traditional term
“sound symbolism,” as used in Chapter 2, seems to involve this accepta-
tion. Also the “symbolic, repetitive mood of movement” mentioned in
Chapter 10 could be understood in this way.
3) A concrete phenomenon that represents an abstract concept with which
it shares a property (e.g. the equilibrium which is a property of scales
but also, more abstractly, of justice). In the Peircean schema, this would
be a special kind of iconic sign, in which the property held in common
is very abstract.
4) A sign in which the expression and content belong particularly close
together, in contrast to allegory, where they are felt to be more distantly
associated, i.e. a sort of iconic and/or indexical sign. This is the sense
given to the term by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as by the
writers and artists of, particularly, German Romanticism, as well as in
German idealist philosophy.
5) A sign whose expression can be fixed, but whose content is indetermi-
nate or ambiguous or forms chains of associations. This sense, which is
found in art and literary criticism, in psychoanalysis, and in Symbolist
art, might be related to acceptation 4.
6) A conventional sign, formed by arbitrary rules that prevail in a particular
culture, such as most words of language. This is how the term is used
in logic, and, following Peirce, in semiotics, although in the latter tradi-
tion, conventionality is only one variant of the kind of regularity or rule
defining the term. “Symbolic communication” and “symbolic ground,”
as used in Chapter 2, are no doubt of this kind, and so are the uses of
“symbolism” in Chapter 3, except in the combination “sound symbol-
ism,” where it involves a perceived similarity, in the sense of acceptation
2. Deacon, also quoted in Chapter 7, himself claims to be following this
usage.
7) An acceptation peculiar to Deacon, according to which a symbol is a
sign whose meaning is derived from its interplay with other signs in a
system (an idea which he attributes to Peirce, but which comes much
closer to Saussure’s vision of language).
8) A concrete phenomenon that represents a social entity, a country, a party,
etc., and where the relationship has been explicitly determined, although
it has indexical or iconic origins (three crowns standing for Sweden, the
hammer and sickle for communism, etc.). This is clearly the sense of
“symbolic architecture” as representative of a community, in the way it
is used in Chapter 8, which is not to deny that the phrase is often used
in some of the other senses listed above, such as acceptation 2.
As should be clear from the earlier sections of this introduction, the term
symbol, however problematic, is not the theme of this volume. In fact, the
only reason for including this section in the introduction is that, from a
semiotic point of view, the ambiguities of this term, which could not be
avoided in this volume, nor, as, we believe, in any other, are highly problem-
atic. Since there is no obvious remedy to this problem, we simply want to
acknowledge its existence, and go on with the issues that are central to the
present volume: the specificity of human beings in the context of evolution.
4. The content of the present volume

This book constitutes a cognitive-semiotic approach to cultural evolution.
In focus are some key-factors in the cultural evolution of human cogni-
tion and semiosis. What makes human beings unique or special in the bio-
sphere of the earth, is not just a biological-genetic evolution of human
cognitive capacities, but also the human interaction with the environment,
its Lifeworld, and particularly human cultural skills, i.e. the ability to learn
from other thinking beings, to transfer experiences, knowledge, meaning,
and views to new generations. In ten chapters and an epilogue, we analyse
various cognitive-semiotic artefacts and human cultural abilities, such as
mimetic, linguistic, pictorial, aesthetic, and narrative skills. We also enter

into the emergence and particular role of religion, urbanity, and science in
human culture, and the cultural semiotics of cultural encounters. Finally, in
the epilogue, we extend ideas from evolutionary theory to the models of cul-
tural semiotics, in terms of altruism and empathy and their opposites. Being
a key-concept in the book, the term “Lifeworld,” in its phenomenological
understanding as the world given to experience, is treated at length in the
first chapter. Another central concept for our understanding of human cog-
nition and culture is “evolution,” which is treated in detail in the epilogue.
Human beings thus are here seen as products of a bio-cultural co-evolution.
Chapter One: Lifeworlds (by Göran Sonesson) introduces some elements
of importance also for the other chapters: the notion of Lifeworld, a par-
ticular conception of cultural semiotics, and a model of evolution, including
cultural evolution, adapted from the work of Donald. After sketching some
elements of phenomenology, the chapter focuses on the phenomenological
notion of the Lifeworld. It also offers a presentation of the classical version
of cultural semiotics, which is then further developed, in part by approach-
ing it to the Husserlean subdivision of the Lifeworld into Homeworld,
identified with Ego-culture, and Alienworld. By suggesting that there are
two very different kinds of Alienworlds, Alter-culture and Alius-culture,
the brute division between empathy and alienation is disputed. From the
point of view of Ego-culture, basically, Alius-culture is the group which
you treat as a thing, with which no communication is possible, and Alter-
culture is a group, different from your own, with which you are neverthe-
less on speaking terms. The chapter then pursues cultural semiotics into
evolutionary time, making use of the schema proposed by Donald, which,
through the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages, brings us from
primate evolution to human history. After clarifying the role of the Ego in
Ego-culture, as the individual situated within his or her specific culture, and
relating the latter to other cultures, we have a look at classical hermeneutic
and phenomenological approaches to empathy, as well as contemporary
ones, suggesting that the relation between Ego and Alter may be of different
kinds, confirming several of the models which have been proposed so far.
An evolutionary adaptation for “bodily mimesis” – the volitional use of
the body as a representational devise – is argued in Chapter Two: Mimesis
(by Jordan Zlatev) to be the precondition that made the evolution of human
culture possible, including uniquely human (and yet pre-linguistic) features

such as (over)imitation, pedagogy, intentional communication and represen-
tational capacity. Furthermore, it is mimesis that potentiated the evolution
of language itself. Speech evolved atop bodily mimesis, via a transitional
stage of multimodal protolanguage. This hypothesis is supported by (a) the
extensive presence of sound symbolism in modern languages; (b) its psycho-
logical reality for speakers; and (c) its contribution to language acquisition.
Evidence for each of these claims is presented and discussed.
The evolution of human language is something that certainly rests on
evolved cognitive abilities and cultural factors. Chapter Three: Language (by
Gerd Carling) discusses vocabularies and how they relate to Donald’s evo-
lutionary schema. Typically, research on language evolution and vocabulary
focus on basic parts of vocabulary, i.e. lexemes for universal or near-universal
lexical items, such as body parts, kinship terms, as well as basic motions and
sense perceptions. Research on language evolution and vocabulary seldom
takes into account lexemes for fundamental items of the environment, such
as tools, which supposedly play an important role in language evolution but
which are too diverse in languages to be related or compared by means of
language-universal basic vocabulary word lists, such as the Swadesh and
Leipzig-Jakarta word lists. The chapter goes on to argue that a more dynamic
view on proto-vocabularies, including analysis of cultural niche and environ-
ment, is required in order to trace the evolution of early language.
Human use of pictures is analysed in Chapter Four: Pictures (by Sara Len-
ninger), where pictures are discussed as semiotic resources from a perspec-
tive of human cultural evolution. The material picture (the picture-thing) is
examined both as a perceptual object, and as a communicative resource. An
assumption of this chapter is that the discrimination of the picture as a com-
municative resource had (and may still have) a vital, but also distinct, role in
the human endeavour to explore sign relationships. Its distinctiveness does
not consist in being the original or the prior semiotic resource in relation to
other semiotic resources developed in human communication. Rather, its spe-
cific role derives from the combination of visual and communicative meanings
employed in pictures, having recourse to the inherent qualities of “natural
meaning,” but at the same time not being mere “natural experience.”
The following chapter, Chapter Five: Art (by Michael Ranta), goes on
to discuss the use of pictures and objects for human aesthetic endeavours.
It takes its point of departure in customary attempts to define aesthetic key

concepts such as “art,” “aesthetic value,” and “beauty,” that is, in terms of
finding their core characteristics or necessary and jointly sufficient condi-
tions. Still, the history of art has challenged and often departed from these
concepts, seemingly making these aspirations unachievable. Art might in-
stead have better been thought of as an open concept or, in Wittgensteinian
terms, as constituted by networks of similarities, i.e. “family resemblances.”
However, it might still be reasonable to look for underlying generative
structures, such as historical narratives, as suggested by Noël Carroll for
example, functioning as art-constituting or art-consolidating frameworks.
Despite any advantages of such historically and conceptually more flex-
ible accounts, the starting point of such an endeavour must also involve
the (cultural) evolutionary foundations of these art-narrating practices. In
particular, proposals made by Merlin Donald and Ellen Dissanayake seem
to provide a supportive understanding of the basic mimetic and formal
interests involved in art-making activities, throughout hominine history.
The importance of storytelling in human culture is highlighted in Chapter
Six: Narrativity (by Anna Cabak Rédei and Michael Ranta) from an indi-
vidual as well as from a social perspective. After having introduced some
proposals concerning the nature and possible functions of narratives as
such, the chapter gives an account of the emergence of narrative structur-
ing as a result of early infant-adult interaction as well as of its impact on
the relation to long-term memory. In a subsequent section, the social role
of narratives, and their relevance from a cultural evolutionary viewpoint,
are accounted for, partly by taking Donald’s approach into consideration.
Basically, this chapter emphasises the role of narratives as cognitive tools,
contributing to the establishment of individual as well as collective identi-
ties, and as a means of comprehending and manipulating various environ-
mental conditions encountered by humans.
The first half of Chapter Seven: Religion (by Andreas Nordlander) in-
vestigates the resources of cognitive semiotics for the development of a
theory of religion. Because the reductive approach of much mainstream
evolutionary-cognitive theory of religion is arguably too restricted, it needs
to be complimented by a renewed attention to human consciousness. Only
then can cultural evolution be fully taken into account in the origin and de-
velopment of religion. A general framework for a cognitive-semiotic theory
of religion is therefore sketched out, drawing in particular on the work of

Merlin Donald and Robert Bellah. It is argued that the origin of religion
is likely found in the development from mimetic to mythic consciousness,
but also that religion evolves into religion as we know it through the de-
velopment of narrative and theory. In the second half of the chapter, the
development of Axial religion in the first millennium B.C.E. is considered
as one aspect of theoretic consciousness. The notion of a radical transcend-
ence is seen to be crucial to this development, as such a notion is involved
both in the emergence in the Axial age of a socio-political critique in the
name of a higher justice, and in the movement towards ethical universalism.
In Chapter Eight: Urbanity (by Göran Sonesson and Gunnar Sandin) the
city is discussed, not as an assembly of buildings, but as the arena in which
specific behaviours are played out, which can be seen as constituting a late
phase of the cultural evolution of human specificity. A central focus of this
study is the boulevard scenario (largely realised today by the pedestrian
street), which, at least as perfectly as the coffee house, corresponds to the
description given by Richard Sennett of the latter as a place where persons
coming from different social groups and classes, as well as from all parts
of the country, can meet on equal footing without their individual history
or personality having any importance. To this effect, the chapter uses, on
one hand, literary and filmic testimonies of life in the city, and, on the other
hand, spells out Sennett’s formula, as applied to the boulevard, in terms of
time geography and spatial semiotics. This leads us on to a discussion of
certain recent archaeological findings, which tend to show, on one hand,
that the first cities, like Çatalhöyük, might have been devoid of public
spaces, and, on the other hand, that public spaces, like Göbekli Tepe, might
have preceded cities and indeed any kind of sedentary life and agriculture,
which is traditionally thought to be a requisite for the former.
Chapter Nine: Science (by David Dunér) discusses how science emerged
through the interaction between human cognitive abilities and changing
environmental conditions, in other words, how it depends on an extensive
bio-cultural coevolution. Science is a disciplined way of studying the human
Lifeworld, by using certain cognitive and cultural abilities that have evolved
through a bio-cultural coevolution. Even if scientific thought is part and
parcel of human thinking, it tries to transcend the subjectively and cultur-
ally coloured Lifeworld, aiming to an intersubjective, shared Lifeworld,
grounded in universal features of human consciousness. Scientific thinking

arises in a dynamic interplay between acting human beings and their envi-
ronment, between the thinking, interactive mind, and the experiential world.
The chapter is involved with the way in which our cognitive resources – that
are also found in other human and everyday thought operations – are used
in scientific thought, particularly in seventeenth and eighteenth-century sci-
ence, during the so-called “scientific revolution.” Inevitable cognitive abili-
ties determining the structure of scientific evolutions, and thus explained
here, are: external tools to enhance thinking (distributed cognition and
extended mind); the discovery of new worlds (situated cognition); enhanced
senses (perception); stronger links between cause and effect (causality); new
ways of seeing something as something else (metaphors); a renewed interest
in systematisation and classification (categorisation); and new opportunities
for collaboration of minds (intersubjectivity).
Chapter Ten: Encounters (by David Dunér and Göran Sonesson) concerns
human encounters with unknown environments giving occasion to the hu-
man mind to understand unfamiliar phenomena by using certain cognitive
and semiotic resources. The argument is that human encounters with unfa-
miliar things, landscapes, and living beings cannot simply be explained by
social, political, or economic circumstances, nor just by extrapolating given
biological grounds. Instead, human encounters must be seen as instances of
the bio-cultural coevolution of human cognition, the incessant interaction
between the human mind and its environment. The first section of this chapter
discusses some cognitive phenomena arising from the encounter of human
beings with unknown environments. The second section goes deeper into
cultural semiotics and explains the specific semiotics of cultural encounters,
how human beings, in a certain culture, the Ego-culture, get to grips with
the unknown, foreign culture, the Alien-culture. This second part is also
particularly concerned with encounters within a long time-span, when one
of the cultures has come to occupy what was formerly the space of the other.
Finally, in the Epilogue (by Göran Sonesson), we return to cultural se-
miotics as projected into evolutionary time, inquiring into the possibility of
Alter-culture, which requires some amount of altruism or at least empathy,
given the constraints of evolutionary theory. The chapter starts out with a
critique of mainstream evolutionary psychology, also known as socio-biol-
ogy, but goes on to explore more complex versions of evolutionary theory,
such as the spandrels of Stephen Jay Gould, the four kinds of inheritance
posited by Eva Jablonka, the multi-level selection theory of Elliott Sober
and David Sloan Wilson, as well as the theory of bio-cultural evolution
defended by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. Commenting on the par-
allels between biological and cultural evolution, as set out by the latter pair
of authors, we try to show in which way semiotic structures play a role in
making cultural evolution, contrary to biological evolution, into human
history. The main aim of this chapter is however to inquire into what makes
the existence of Alter-culture possible, if, as Sober and Wilson have claimed,
armed with game theory, an altruistic society (an Ego-culture in our terms),
is only possible in opposition to another group in relation to which group
egoism rules (that is, in our terms, an Alius-culture). The final part of this
chapter follows Michael Tomasello in arguing for the primacy of games of
cooperation, rather than competition, while adding an historical dimension,
which serves to explain how such cooperation can be extended beyond the
primary group (our Ego-culture).
The present volume is, in a sense, the result of a collective endeavour.
It has been worked out within the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund
University (financed by the Tercentenary Foundation of the Swedish Na-
tional Bank), as the subproject “Historical Development of Cognition and
Semiosis.” The chapters have been written by different authors, sometimes
in collaboration, sometimes alone, but they have all been read and com-
mented upon by the entire group. As far as possible, we have tried to
maintain some kind of consensus about essential matters, so that the book
may be read as a fairly coherent whole. Still, in some cases our opinions
diverge, and in those cases, only the authors putting their name to the
chapter can be held responsible. As editors of the volume, we like to thank
the authors, not only for their contributions, but also for their comments
on other chapters, and, not least, for their participation in the group which
has discussed these texts for the better part of the six years that the project
has lasted. The final product of our endeavours is this book in which we
present our cognitive-semiotic theory of cultural evolution. What makes the
human species human is, we maintain, to a considerable extent the semiotic
and cultural skills by which she endows her Lifeworld with meaning.
Göran Sonesson
Chapter One
Lifeworlds: The Cognitive
Semiotics of Culture
Human specificity emerges in evolution and is reflected in the human brain

and body. It has been suggested, however, notably by Merlin Donald (1991,
2001), that part of that which makes human beings different from other
animals develops in history, and thus is transmitted, not from body to
body, by means of genomes, but from mind to mind, using at least in part
the intermediary of external memory devices (Donald’s “exograms”; see
Donald 2010). As a parallel to children’s development it might be surmised
that human history serves as an all-purpose bootstrapping mechanism (see
Tomasello 2008). The details of such a process remain unclear, however.
History, as here understood, is not exclusively that of war mongering,
nor politics or statistics. It is the history of thinking and of the resulting
artefacts. To clarify what is specific to human history, we need to adopt
the approach of cognitive semiotics, which is a new field that integrates the
cognitive sciences and semiotics (see Section 0.1). The aim of the present
chapter is to introduce the particular version of cognitive semiotics culti-
vated in Lund, which is very much inspired in Husserlean phenomenology,
to relate it to the evolutionary schema proposed by Merlin Donald, and
to develop a more thick historical approach than is customary using the
models of culture proposed within the semiotics of culture.1
1.1. Adumbrations of the Lifeworld

As cognitive semiotics is conceived by the Lund school, a fundamental instru-
ment for bringing it about is the phenomenological method, as it was most
thoroughly developed by Edmund Husserl. Elsewhere, when I have argued
1 The author wants to thank Gunnar Sandin and Jordan Zlatev, in particular, for
their very thorough comments to this chapter.
24 Göran Sonesson
for an experimental approach to cognitive semiotics (Sonesson 2013b), I have

maintained that phenomenology is a necessary prerequisite both for setting
up an adequate experimental situation, and for making sense of the result,
by relating it to the common sense world in which we live, the Lifeworld
(see Section 1.1.2). At the levels of culture, history, and evolution, however,
experimental methods have a rather limited use. This is why phenomenology
becomes ever more important, as a method of attaining a description of the
invariant structures of human life – the invariant structures of our common
Lifeworld, as well as the invariants of the different peculiar socio-cultural
Lifeworlds in which it is instantiated. It is by introducing the phenomenologi-
cal notion of the Lifeworld that we prepare the way for a typology of possible
Lifeworlds, in-between the Lifeworld common to all human beings, and the
specific adumbration in which it is given to members of a specific culture.
1.1.1. Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology

Phenomenology is a method of description. The phenomenological method
is based on the fact that everything that, in the normal course of events, is
available to (at least human) consciousness is present to this consciousness
as something outside of it. Consciousness is consciousness of something –
and that thing is (experienced as being) outside of consciousness. This is
what, in the Brentano-Husserl-tradition, is known as intentionality: the
contents of consciousness are immanent to consciousness precisely as be-
ing outside of consciousness. Thus, we may describe a particular phase in
the stream of consciousness as being an act in which something outside of
consciousness becomes the subject of our preoccupation. In accomplishing
such an act, we are directed to something outside of consciousness. When
we are doing phenomenology, however, we are turning our regard inwards:
the theme is not the object outside, but the act of consciousness itself. This
is what Husserl described as the phenomenological reduction. There are
several other methodological moments to Husserl’s phenomenology, such
as the epoché, the suspension of belief as to whether the object to which
the act studied is directed exists or not, and the “eidetic reduction,” the
directedness to the general structures, rather than the individual character,
of each given act. In order to attain this level of generality, we have to go
through free variations in the imagination, also known as ideation, by
Lifeworlds: The Cognitive Semiotics of Culture 25
means of which we vary the different properties of the act, in order to be

able to determine which properties are necessary in the constellation, and
which may be dispensed with. If, like Husserl, we start out from perception,
we might want to vary the different ways of perceiving the cube. There are
indeed many acts of perception that are still the perception of a cube, and
even, more specifically, the perception of this same cube. Most notably, of
course, the cube may be seen from different sides, from different perspec-
tives, only in part as it appears through a peep-hole, and so on.
In spite of the terminology often used by Husserl, such as Wesensschau
(intuition of essences), phenomenological results do not present themselves
in the form of any kind of revelation, given in a single instance. Rather,
the phenomenological method supposes the accomplishment of an arduous
work, which has to be done over and over again in order to ascertain a reli-
able result. At least this is how Husserl, in actual practice, went about the
task: as can be seen in the numerous volumes of the Husserliana published
after his death, he laboriously went through the same descriptions and vari-
ations over and over again, without ever being completely satisfied with the
result. Some early phenomenologists, such as Alfred Schütz (1974 [1932],
1962–1966), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) and Aron Gurwitsch (1957,
1974, 1985), and several more recent ones, such as Robert Sokolowski
(1974, 2000), John Drummond (1990), Eduard Marbach (1993), and Evan
Thompson (2007), went through some of Husserl’s painstaking analyses
once again, finding new facts about perception, the field of consciousness,
and embodiment. Indeed, as in all scientific endeavours, the result of the
phenomenological method always remains provisional. This is what Husserl,
with another rather misleading term, calls Evidenz.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1998, vol. 2, p. 259), similarly, defines phenom-
enology (later rebaptised phaneroscopy) as that particular branch of science
that “ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the
phaneron, meaning by the phaneron whatever is present at any time to the
mind in any way.” Experts on Husserl and Peirce have had different opinions
about how much their respective notions of phenomenology have in common,
but, if you substitute “phenomenon” for “phaneron” in Peirce’s definition
given above, this could also be a definition of Husserlean phenomenology.
As I have argued elsewhere, all the different phenomenological operations
listed above, such as epoché, ideation, and so on, can be recognised in Peirce’s
26 Göran Sonesson
approach, although he has no particular name for them (see Sonesson 2009,
2013). Also the provisional character of any phenomenological pursuit is reit-
erated by Peirce pointing to the (potentially infinite) sequence of interpretants,
whose final interpretant is perhaps never attained. There is one appreciable
difference, nevertheless, which derives from Peircean phenomenology being
a method of discovering the three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness, whereas Husserlean phenomenology prides itself on being free of
any presuppositions. In this sense, Peircean phenomenology is only one of
the many possible results of the Husserlean operation of ideation.
1.1.2. The Lifeworld as Naive Physics Plus Folk Psychology

Husserl posits the Lebenswelt (Lifeworld) to explain the foundation on which
the models of the natural sciences are constructed, serving both as the pri-
mary objects studied and transformed by the model, and as the common
sense world in which the scientists are accomplishing their work. Indeed, you
cannot treat the accelerator permitting you to study the electrons as being
simultaneously a bundle of electrons itself. Students of Husserl such as Schütz,
Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch, and Herbert Marcuse considerably extended, not
the meaning, but the function of the concept of Lifeworld, using it to explain
social reality itself. We owe to Schütz, in particular, the description of the
Lifeworld as “the world taken for granted.” The “commens” characterised
by Peirce (1998, vol. 2, p. 478) would seem to be a similar domain of shared
assumptions. When the psychologist James Gibson postulated the world
of “ecological physics,” to explain the possibility of immediate perception,
where the older school of constructionists had to suppose complex calcula-
tions, he does not refer to Husserl explicitly anywhere in his writings, but he
often uses the same phrases and examples. Algirdas Julien Greimas certainly
took the idea of a semiotics of the natural world from Husserl via Merleau-
Ponty. Common sense has always been the basis of Anglo-Saxon philosophy,
from the British Empiricists to the Oxford school. At long last, however, even
this tradition has come to appreciate the gap, diagnosed by Husserl, between
the contemporary natural sciences and the world of our experience, postulat-
ing both a “naive physics,” and a “folk psychology,” which together would
seem to make up the Lifeworld. In a more general sense, what John R. Searle
(1995, p. 127) calls the “background” would also seem to correspond to the
Lifeworld, as does, if Searle is right about his parallel, a lot of things written
by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Pierre Bourdieu. Coming from a very different
tradition, Jakob von Uexküll introduced the notion of Umwelt to serve as
some kind of world taken for granted by a species of animal – although, of
course, in a deeper sense, the tick and its kin do not have the choice of taking
anything for granted at all (see Section 1.2).
It is a basic property of the Lifeworld that everything in it is given in a
subjective-relative manner. This means, for example, that a thing of any
kind will always be perceived from a certain point of view, in a perspective
that lets a part of the object form the centre of attention. Gibson observed
that when we are confronted with the-cat-from-one-side, the-cat-from-
above, the-cat-from-the-front, etc., what we see all the time is the same
invariant cat. To Husserl, this seeing the whole in one of its parts is related
to the “etc. principle,” our knowledge of being able, at any one point, to
turn the dice over, or go around the house, to look at the other sides. This
principle applies to the temporal and the spatial organisation of the world
alike. In time, it accounts for our expectancy, at every moment, that life
will go on, or that something will change, or some more determinate fact,
such as that the dice will turn out to have a certain number of eyes on the
hidden sides (the protensions), as well as our knowledge that we existed in
the moment immediately preceding the present one, that the dice did so too,
and perhaps also our memory of the sides of the dice we have seen before,
and the context in which the dice appeared (the retentions).
Every particular thing encountered in the Lifeworld is referred to a gen-
eral type. According to Schütz, other people, apart from family members
and close friends, are almost exclusively defined by the type to which they
are ascribed, and we expect them to behave accordingly. Closely related to
the typifications are the regularities, which obtains in the Lifeworld, or, as
Husserl’s says, “the typical ways in which things tend to behave.” Many of
the “laws of ecological physics,” formulated by Gibson (1982, p. 217), and
which are defied by magic, are also such “regularities [that] are implicitly
known:” that substantial objects tend to persist, that major surfaces are
nearly permanent with respect to layout, but that animate objects change as
they grow or move; that some objects, like the bud and the pupa transform,
but that no object is converted into an object that we would call entirely
different, such as a frog becoming a prince; that no substantial object can
28 Göran Sonesson
come into existence except from another substance; that a substantial de-
tached object must come to rest on a horizontal surface of support; that a
solid object cannot penetrate another solid surface without breaking it, etc.
Clearly, many of these regularities no longer obtain in present-day physics,
but they are necessary for the human environment to hold together.
More than Husserl, Gibson attends to the general background of the
world taken for granted. The “terrestrial environment” of all animals has
continued to possess certain simple invariants during the millions of years
of evolutionary history, such as the earth being “below,” the air “above,”
and the “waters under the earth” (Gibson 1966, p. 8). The ground is level
and rigid, a surface of support, whereas the air is unresisting, a space for
locomotion, and also a medium for breathing, an occasional bearer of
odours and sounds, and transparent to the visual shapes of things by day.
As a whole, the solid terrestrial environment is wrinkled, being structured,
at different levels, by mounts and hills, trees and other vegetation, stones
and sticks, as well as textured by such things such as crystals and plant
cells. The observer himself underlies the consequences of the rigidity of the
environment and of his own relationship to gravity.
The idea of their being, apart from the general invariants of all possible
Lifeworlds, more particular invariants of specific socio-cultural Lifeworlds,
was first expressed, in these terms, by Gurwitsch (1974). In-between the
Lifeworld in general and such particular socio-cultural Lifeworlds, we will
here place the middle-range typifications of Ego-culture, Alter-culture, and
Alius-culture (see Section 1.2).
1.1.3. Anticipations of Cognitive Science

Some ideas given new names in contemporary cognitive science were in
fact already formulated in other terms in the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl (and to some extent by Immanuel Kant, Ernst Cassirer, etc.) and
then elaborated by such phenomenologists as Schütz, Merleau-Ponty, and
Gurwitsch: First, there is the idea of the embodied mind (Varela, Thompson
& Rosch 1991; Krois 2007; Thompson 2009) according to which we think
(also) with the body. The mind is not detached from the body. This idea
was very much present in Husserl’s later work, but is better known from
the work of Merleau-Ponty, who was interestingly one of the first assiduous
students of the Husserl Archive in Louvain. The idea of situated cognition

claims that our cognitive processes are not just inside our brain. The en-
vironment has an active role in driving cognitive processes of what Andy
Clark and David Chalmers called the extended mind (Clark & Chalmers
1998). In Husserl’s work, this is present as the idea of the Lifeworld, the
world taken for granted, enlarged by Gurwitsch to a plurality of different
socio-cultural Lifeworlds. To this we can add what is called distributed
cognition (Hutchins 1995): that we are using our environment and tools
for enhancing thinking, and we place our ideas and memories in things—
books, computers, etc. Husserl first broached this idea in his study of the
origin of geometry. Within semiotics, it has played an important part in the
models of the Prague and Tartu schools (see Section 1.2). From semiotics,
however, we will in particular take over the idea of a semiotics of culture,
first suggested by the Tartu school. But we will add to this model the idea
of history as a continuation of evolution first intimated by Merlin Donald,
who might be claimed both by semiotics and cognitive science.
1.2. Further into the Lifeworld: From Homeworld to

Alienworld
I have always considered it odd (and redolent either of arrogance or parochiality)
when a small minority divides the world into two wildly unbalanced categories of
itself versus all others — and then defines the large category as an absence of the
small, as in my grandmother’s taxonomy for Homo sapiens: Jews and non-Jews
(Gould 2000a, p. 129).
All human beings live in a niche adapted to human life. This niche – if seen
in a geographical and ecological perspective – increasingly seems to become
coextensive with the city in many parts of the world (see Chapter 8: Urban-
ity). There are two principal ways of interpreting the notion of niche. It might
simply be the kind of physical environment in which the life of a particular
species tends to take place and to which it is adapted. But it might also be the
physical environment as it is adapted to the life of a particular species (see
Jablonka & Lamb 2005; Sterelny & Griffiths 1999, pp. 268 ff.). The latter
interpretation corresponds to the notion of Umwelt, first characterised by
Uexküll (1983 [1934]). In this conception, it is the sense organs as well as
the parts of the animal’s body that might cause changes to the environment,
the organs of perception and effection, in Uexküll’s parlance, which define the
30 Göran Sonesson
Umwelt. Thus, according to a now famous example, the tick’s physical envi-
ronment partly overlaps with that of human beings and other mammals, but
there are no mammals in the Umwelt of the tick. There is only butyric acid,
warmth, and hairiness. To characterise the much freer world of human (and
some other primate) experience we need another term, and we will adopt a
term stemming from Husserlean phenomenology: the Lifeworld. This is a
world consisting of things, persons, and the sun ascending and descending
(as both Husserl and Gibson say), not, for instance, of cells, atoms, and black
holes (see Section 1.1.3).
1.2.1. The Original Tartu School Approach

In the following, semiotics of culture as originally proposed by the Tartu
school (Lotman et al. 1975), will be reconstructed as a typology of different
kinds of Lifeworlds. But, before being able to pursue this task, I have to spell
out two lessons from my reading of the Tartu school papers, which might
not stand out in the original texts: that the model is not about Culture per se,
but about what the model members of a Culture make of their Culture; and
that this model itself is more involved with relationships between cultures
(as well as subcultures, cultural spheres, and so on) than with a Culture in
its singularity. This is not to deny that a model of Culture easily becomes
a factor in Culture; thus, for instance, those who insist that contemporary
Culture is a society of information and/or a global village certainly contrib-
ute to accomplishing that very transformation. The Tartu school model has
been variously described in a number of texts, some of which were written
together by Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, and some involving several
other authors (see Lotman & Uspensky 1971, 1976; Lotman et al. 1977;
Lucid 1977; Shukman 1984). In spite of Lotman’s late book, Universe of
the Mind (1990), there really is no comprehensive statement of the theory,
but its elements must be put together from a number of texts.2
In the following I will present the Tartu model in the schematic form
of two overlapping squares representing Culture and Nature, respectively,
which are connected by different arrows, referring to the inclusion and
2 The latter book introduced the term “semiosphere,” which in part clearly corre-
sponds to the notion of culture, but which is at the same time made to accomplish
several other jobs, which renders it less useful for us in the present context.
exclusion of texts and non-texts (see Figure 1.1). This schema is of course
too simple to do justice to the Tartu school conception: in fact, it only ac-
counts for one part of the examples given in their articles. On the other
hand, it is a model in a more pregnant sense than the one which seems to be
implied by the Tartu school: it is, as we shall see in the rest of this chapter,
a simplified likeness, the business of which it is to be continuously modified
in the confrontation with new real-world examples.
Figure 1.1. Canonical model as it can be deduced from the Tartu school articles
(in the interpretation of Sonesson 2000).
What I will henceforth call the Canonical model is built around an opposition
between Nature and Culture by means of which both terms are constituted,
in the classical sense of linguistic structuralism, i.e. by mutually defining
each other. Yet a fundamental asymmetry is built into the model: Nature is
defined from the point of view of Culture, not the opposite. According to
the Canonical model, every Culture conceives of itself as Order, opposed to
something on the outside, which is seen as Chaos, Disorder, and Barbarism, in
other words, as Culture opposed to Nature. There are two respects in which
the Tartu school model of Culture is curiously reminiscent of the proxemic
model which describes how distances become socially meaningful, going from
more or less private to more or less public distances (Hall 1966): first, they are
relative to a centre, an origo, which in one case in his/her own Culture, and
in the other his/her own body, that is, like the Husserlean Lifeworld, they are
“subjective-relative;” and, in the second place, the categories defined by both
models attribute meaning to objects to the extent that they transgress borders,
in one case between our own Culture and other cultures, and in the another
32 Göran Sonesson
case between different spaces having the body as their centre. Though this
feature certainly remains rather implicit in the Tartu school approach, this
means that cultural models are always ego-centric: Culture is always culture
from the point of view of an Ego.
Only in this way can we understand that something, which is a “text”
on one side of the cultural divide, becomes a “non-text” on the other side
of the border, and vice-versa. “Textuality” is relative to a centre. This is the
sense in which the model is necessarily asymmetric: Culture defines Culture
and Nature, not vice-versa. Most “non-texts,” in this sense, will be placed
outside of culture by the mechanism of exclusion, however some of them
can be “translated”, but then also deformed, by means of the “mechanism
of translation” (on this terminology, see Section 10.2.2). In the terminol-
ogy of the Tartu school, that which is inside culture is regarded as a “text”
proper, and that which is outside it is a “non-text.”3
In the Tartu school papers there are several conflicting criteria for de-
fining what a text is, and hence what Culture is (since Textuality is that
which is inside Culture), and these do not always go together. Indeed, as I
have shown elsewhere (Sonesson 1998), many different criteria are used to
distinguish texts from non-texts in the Tartu model (such as meaningful-
ness, order, ease of interpretation, prominence, worth, etc.). Reducing the
criteria for inclusion and exclusion as much as possible, I concluded that,
from one point of view, the non-text is that which is not possible to under-
stand, but, from another point of view, it is that which we do not care to
understand because it is not familiar and/or because we do not ascribe any
value to it. Often those two criteria do not coincide, as is the case of sacred
languages (Latin, Hebrew, etc.), which are, at certain historical moments,
highly valued, but very difficult to understand.
This suggests a way in which the Canonical model is too simple: the lim-
its between texts and non-texts (extra-texts, centro-texts, etc.) will often be
different as different criteria are used, which means that the limits between
Culture and Non-culture (Extra-culture, Centre, etc.) will also be different:
the Canonical model is simply the case in which all these different oppositions
will map out the same border (see Sonesson 1998). Thus, if, in an example
3 Thus the notion of “textuality” and “non-textuality” in Figure 1.1 and 1.2.
given by the Tartu school, Peter the Great wanted to emulate Western culture,
he followed an inverted model from the point of view of value, in which
he projected his ego to what was, from the point of view of understand-
ing (and geographical situatedness), his own original culture devaluated to
non-culture.4 A more familiar model, from the twentieth century onwards,
is the endeavour of people in many cultures to imitate what they take to be
American culture. Again, American is culture to them, from the point of view
of value, although the culture in which they have grown up would normally
have to remain their culture, from the point of view of familiarity.
As long as we think in terms of the Canonical model, Nature will include
other cultures, not recognised as such by the cultural model. It is easy to
see that this is true of most traditional cultures and is even codified in their
language: one of the Mayan languages still spoken in Mexico, the Huesteco,
has only one term (“uinic”) for saying “human being” and “speaker of the
Huesteco language.” Indeed, it is well-known that Barbarians were, to the
Greeks, those who could not speak the Greek language: those who babble,
i.e. who make sounds which not only are not meaningful but even lack
organisation; the Aztecs took the same view on those who did not speak
Nahuatl, “popoluca” (see Sonesson 2000). But, beyond such linguistic relics
in cultures which can no longer defend their central position (such as the
case of Maya Huesteco, the speakers of which are now reduced to being
poor farmers in a society dominated by Spanish speakers), the reign of the
Canonical model is also testified to in ethnological studies of traditional
societies, many of them only historically retrievable, but also apparent
in some societies only recently “contacted” (by our reputedly globalised
society), such as those in the innermost parts of New Guinea. As Jared
Diamond (2012, pp. 49 f.) observes, in traditional societies “‘friends’ are
members of your own band or village, and of those neighbouring bands
and villages with which your band happens to be on friendly terms at the
moment. ‘Enemies’ are members of neighbouring bands and villages with
which your band happens to be on hostile terms at the moment.”
4 I refer to the example of Peter the Great as used by the Tartu school. In real-
ity, it seems that Peter’s Western values did not go very far (see Israel 2006,
pp. 195–216).
34 Göran Sonesson
And, as he goes on to say, the third category, “strangers,” about which

you cannot know very much, is, to be on the safe side, better assimilated
to the second category.5 Nevertheless, it would be naive to think that there
is not still a similar mechanism at work in the relationship between con-
temporary cultures, subcultures, and cultural spheres. On the other hand,
it is clear that the Canonical model is too simple to account for all those
relationships that it is today possible to have with other cultures.
There is, however, another way in which the Canonical model may seem
insufficient to describe our relationship to other cultures. It certainly seems
to be possible for a subject in one Culture to conceive of some other society,
cultural sphere, or whatever as being a Culture, without being part of his
or her Culture. In other terms, “strangers” are sometimes not “enemies.”
We may therefore imagine a model in which Culture is opposed not only
to Non-Culture (or Nature), but also to Extra-Culture. The latter term is
mentioned, but not given any systematic meaning, in some of the Tartu
school texts. In his extension of the Tartu school model, Roland Posner
(1989) conceives the difference in terms of a scale of semiotisation, which
runs from zero degree in Non-Culture, then increases in Extra-Culture and
even more in Culture, within which it attains its maximum degree at the
Centre (as opposed to the Periphery). This solution is unsatisfactory for
several reasons, the most important one, in the present context, being that
the distinction between culture types appears to be qualitative, rather than
quantitative, in nature (see Sonesson 2000, 2012a).
1.2.2. The Homeworld and the Double Aspect of the Alienworld

Husserl emphasises that the Lifeworld is a relative world – relative, to a
(type of) subject. Even the Umwelt is relative to a type of subject, that is,
an animal species. However, Husserl goes on to say that the structures of
the Lifeworld are not themselves relative. They are found in each and every
5 As Diamond (2012, pp. 79 ff.) goes on to show, war was in fact endemic in
traditional society, contrary to what has often been claimed by many scholars
attributing such war mongering to the influence of imperialism. This interpreta-
tion is particularly notable, since Diamond (2012, pp. 173 ff.) shows, that in
many other respects, traditional societies may have found better solutions to
many problems than those available in contemporary world culture.
socio-cultural Lifeworld. When Husserl first mentioned the universality

of the structures of the Lifeworld, he was clearly thinking about tempo-
ral and spatial constraints: every point in time is embedded in a string of
earlier moments (retentions) and of moments to come (protentions); and
we always see a thing from a particular point of view, and yet the thing is
what we see, not the perspective. In posthumous texts, nonetheless, Husserl
pinpointed another such universal structure, which is of particular interest
to us here: the distinction between homeworlds and alienworlds (as referred
in Steinbock 2003, pp. 296 ff.). In this sense, the Homeworld “is not one
place among others, but a normatively special geo-historical place which
is constituted with a certain asymmetrical privilege” (ibid.), and which can
be identified with a family or with a whole culture. In each case, what is
outside of it is the Alienworld.
Figure 1.2. The revised Canonical model of cultural semiotics.
Basically, this is the same conception, clearly without there being any in-
fluence, as that formulated by the Tartu school of semiotics (see Section
1.2.1). Both Husserl’s version, and that of the Tartu school are too sim-
ple, at least in one respect: they involve the smallest possible scope of the
alienworld, to use Husserl’s term, such as may be characteristic of small,
isolated groups of people. According to what Sonesson (2000) called the
36 Göran Sonesson
extended model, there really are two kinds of alienworlds (Figure 1.3).
There are those you treat as different but equal, with whom you are on
speaking terms, those others that are really other egos to you. These repre-
sent the second person of grammar, or, in other words, the Alter. And there
are those you treat as things, as the third person of grammar, or, in other
terms, as Alius. In this analysis, Christopher Columbus is a good example
of somebody conceiving the American continent as Alius, since he treated
the people he encountered on a par with gold, species, and other material
resources, whereas Hernán Cortés took the attitude of an Alter, since he
addressed the natives as human beings, even if only to deceive them better
(see Chapter 10: Encounters). Adopting a term without any clear definition
in the work of the Tartu school, Sonesson (2000) called the world of Alter
Extra-culture, while retaining the term Non-culture for the world of Alius.
However, it might be more enlightening, following Cabak Rédei (2007), to
espouse a terminology differentiating between Ego-culture, Alter-culture,
and Alius-culture. Indeed, this is a natural conclusion from each of these
“worlds” being defined by the central position of the Ego, Alter, and Alius:
Ego-culture is simply culture as defined from the point of view of the Ego
(already in Sonesson 2000).
Figure 1.3. The Extended model of cultural semiotics.
Now, let us add some history to this picture. Although the Tartu school
was principally involved with historical moments, the model itself does not
contain any explicit diachronic dimension. It is nevertheless easy to think of

Ego-culture, Alter-culture, and Alius-culture as distributed in time rather than
in space. The hermeneutic act would then amount to the transformation of
Alius into Alter – similar to empathy, in present-day interaction (see Section
1.4). The depth of history becomes more palpable if we take into account
what Husserl called the genetic and generative dimensions (cf. Welton 2000;
Steinbock 1995). Every object in our experience has a genetic6 dimension:
it results from the layering, or sedimentation, of the different acts that con-
nects it with its origin, which gives it its validity, in the way in which ge-
ometry, in Husserl’s most well-known example, derives from the praxis of
land-surveying.7 There is also the further dimension of generativity, which
pertains to all objects, and which results from the layering, or sedimenta-
tion, of the different acts in which they have become known, which may
be acts of perception, memory, anticipation, imagination, and so on. The
term generativity8 is meant to evoke the ideas of generations following each
other, as well as the trajectory accomplished by each individual from being
born to dying. Thus, Culture, as identified with the Occident, is, as a type of
experience, genetically constituted for Peter the Great from his experiences
of living in Western countries, but it is in this sense opposed to his generative
experience, of being born, as a result of many early generations of his family,
into Russian society. In the same way, America is genetically constituted for
the young generations of the twentieth century by the experience of American
movies, music, and other paraphernalia, although, at the same time, they are
generatively related to some other country into which they have been born.
1.2.3. Communication Between Cultures

Semiotics of culture is really about communicative events, in which cultures
are confronted. Of course, a number of such events (perhaps the normal or
normative ones) may then be abstracted to a more general level, presenting
6 This sense of “genetic” should not be confused with that extant in “genetic
evolution.”
7 This cannot amount to a reduction of geometry to land surveying, in which case
non-Euclidean geometry would be impossible.
8 Not to be confused with the Chomskyan notion of generativity.
38 Göran Sonesson
how encounters between these particular cultures normally play out. Cortés
meeting the first natives and Cortés ordering the destruction of all the idols
in Tenochtitlán is not living the same encounter between cultures. In the first
case, he clearly related to the Aztecs as an Alter, in the second case as an
Alius. It is therefore important that we consider the nature of the situation
of communication as such.
To gain an understanding of communication, whether between cultures,
or within a single culture, we have to start by rejecting the classical model of
communication which has gained a following both in semiotic and in media
studies. This latter model conceives communication as consisting basically of
the two processes of recoding (transferring something from one “code,” in
the most general sense, to another) and transportation (moving something
from one locus in space to another), but none of these is really necessary
for communication to take place. All kinds of communication consist in
presenting an artefact to another subject and assigning him or her the task
of transforming it into a percept by means of concretisation (see Sonesson
1999, 2014). This is a generalisation of the model of artistic experience
proposed by Jan Mukařovský (1970), the main figure of the Prague school
of semiotics in the 1930s, but such a possibility of generalisation is built
into the model from the start, since it is based on the phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl – or, more exactly, that of his follower Roman Ingarden
(1965 [1931]), – but then adds to this a social dimension.
An artefact is produced by somebody, and it has to be transformed by
another person into a work of art going through a process of concretisa-
tion. The term concretisation is used here, not only in the sense of Roman
Ingarden to refer to the set of “places of indeterminacy” present in a work,
many of which are filled in by an individual interpretation of the work, but
more specifically in the sense of Jan Mukařovský and the Prague school
generally, to emphasise the active, but still regulated, contribution of the
receiver/audience to the work, which, moreover, takes place in a social
context. Since, to Mukařovský (1970), this is a social act, the process of
creating the artefact, as well as that of perceiving it, is determined by a
set of norms, which may be aesthetic (and in works of art they would be
predominantly so), but they can also be social, psychological, and so on.
The work of art is that which transgresses these rules. Mukařovský points
out, however, that these norms may be of any kind, going from simple
regularities to written laws. We could conclude that there is a continuum

from normalcy to normativity, without qualitative divisions being left out.
Figure 1.4. Model of communication integrating the Prague and the Tartu

model, as proposed by Sonesson 1999.
According to the Prague school model all interpretation also takes place
in accordance with a pool of knowledge, more or less shared between the
sender and the receiver, which has two main incarnations: the set of ex-
emplary works of arts and the canon, in the sense of the rules for how art
works are to be made. Again, this double aspect of the pool of knowledge
may be generalised from the special case of art to any artefact offered up
for communication. On the one hand, there are certain exemplary artefacts,
and, on the other hand, there are the schemas of interpretation.
It is a question of projecting the communication model within the model
of the semiotics of culture (see Figure 1.4). In this model, any couple of
the three possible kinds of culture may be brought into communication
with each other, occupying one or the other of the two positions. When
this communication takes place using verbal language (also as written or
signed) we call this translation, or, as Jakobson (1959) says “translation
proper” (see Sonesson 2014).
40 Göran Sonesson
Figure 1.5. Communication between cultures. Culture 1 may be Ego-culture,

Alter-culture, or Alius-culture, and Culture 2 may be any of these,
but not the same as in Culture 1.
1.3. The Evolution of History

Following Donald’s evolutionary theory, I will assume that history, including
the development of cultures, just as much as biological evolution, is needed to
account for what is today specific to human beings. In a very general sense,
I am also convinced that there is a sequence of evolution, roughly paralleled
in child development, from episodic culture to mimetic culture, in which hu-
man beings already begin to be special, and from mythic culture to theoretic
culture, which falls entirely within what is traditionally called history. Any se-
quence established in human evolution is bound to be partly speculative. Nev-
ertheless, I would like to voice here some of my perplexities, some of which
will be returned to in later parts of this book (see the Epilogue in this volume).
1.3.1. Merlin Donald’s Evolutionary Schema

Donald maintains that episodic memory, the memory for single situated
happenings, is something that human beings share with many other animals.
Mimetic memory, or perhaps rather the peculiarly human form of mimetic
memory, is restricted to human beings and their predecessors, such as Homo
ergaster and/or Homo erectus (see Figure 1.6). Contemporary primatology

suggests, on the other hand, that non-human primates may possess simi-
lar capacities (cf. Tomasello & Call 1997; de Waal 2006; Persson 2008;
Chapter 2: Mimesis). Many remarkable things seem to happen within the
stage which Donald calls the mimetic stage. From my point of view, it seems
important to tell these apart, whether or not some of them “come for free,”
once the others are present, as Donald (2010) maintains. First there is the
use of tools in a systematic way, which certainly requires some kind of mi-
metic memory (which may be thought of as embodied in the limbs). If tool
use is going to gain currency in a community, imitation must take place, and
imitation would seem to require the capacity to pick up (cognise) the type
given a number of tokens – or, in other words, extracting it from a sequence
of episodes. Thus, when seeing somebody use a hammer, which is a token of
the act of hammering, which as such is a type, one must be able to abstract
away from this individual act and the particular physical and motivational
context in which it takes place, which are the parameters which give rise to
the token. It is only once you conceive the act of hammering as a type that
you can transpose hammer usage to other contexts, in this way giving rise
to a second token, and a third, etc. We now know that non-human primates
are much better at using tools than was recently thought, but they appear
to be notoriously bad at transposable imitation – in the sense of learning
new behaviour, not, of course, of repeating species-specific acts.
Not only is imitation ambiguous in this sense, but gesture is clearly more
than mere imitation. According to this scenario, indeed, something very
radical happens in the mimetic stage: the emergence of the sign function.
This would mean that imitation is not used only to perpetuate a type first
introduced by a particular token, but to represent a particular token, for
instance, the fact of the first human being using a stone for hammering. This
is not to say that signs are only used to refer to episodes. On the contrary,
most signs would seem to refer to types – and, only by means of types, to
episodes. If we start from the first act observed, nevertheless, it is easier to
see that imitative learning and sign use relate to this act in very different
ways. Adapting the bodily movement used by some other individual to ham-
mer a nail because you yourself want to fix a nail to an object is semiotically
quite different from imitating the very act of hammering, because you want
to illustrate how this is to be done, to suggest to somebody how this is to be
42 Göran Sonesson
done, or to convey the idea of a person occupied by the act of hammering.

In the first case, your object is to get the nail incorporated into the object.
In the second case, you want the act of hammering itself to be observed.
Figure 1.6. A rendering of Donald’s stages of evolution, with some semiotically

inspired additions.
When Donald claims that all this “comes for free,” he may perhaps want to
suggest that they are not neurologically distinct, and yet, it seems that there
are differences which make a difference from the point of view of cultural
boot-strapping. On the other hand, Donald shows great subtlety in allow-
ing later stages of his schema to affect earlier stages, as when narrativity,
for instance, is considered to emerge from language but act in return on
mimesis. Without prejudging this issue, however, it is useful to separate the
different levels corresponding to the mimetic memory of a single individual,
the shared mimetic memory resulting from imitation, and the use of mimesis
for constructing signs (adequate for further contexts). Donald’s next stage,
mythic memory, corresponds to language, and would thus already require
the ability to use signs. Donald choses the term “mythic” here, because it
involves the construction of narratives, no doubt initially used to recount
myths, and thought by Donald to be at least one of the reasons why lan-
guage evolved. In this scenario, language would seem to be a limiting case:
the capacity for language might well have an evolutionary origin, but the
development of particular languages is part of history. It could be surmised
that the very variety of human languages, which permits them to function
as identity markers, is already part of human specificity, even though we

now know that the “dialects” found, notably, in the signals systems of
non-human primates and birds may also be different as a function of the
learning environment.
It is in the fourth stage, however, which Donald calls the theoretic cul-
ture that history comes into its own. Pictures, writing, and theories are the
three human products typically manifesting this stage according to Donald. It
would seem, however, that non-human primates and even dogs may be taught
to interpret pictures, and some of them have certainly learnt to use some very
special kinds of writing (plastic figures, computer keyboards, etc.).9 But none
of them have on their own created any pictures or any pieces of writing, let
alone developed theories that exist on their own. It might be objected that
there may be human groups that have not developed the use of pictures,
and there are certainly those that have not made use of writing. Still, such
creation is within the developmental potential of all human beings, and they
certainly seem to form part of what being human means today (see Chapter 4:
Picture). It is in this spirit, of linking cognitive and semiotic capacities with
the evolvement of specific behaviour, that we will suggest that some other
features might be added to historically developed parts of human specificity,
such as for instance urban life (see Chapter 8: Urbanity).
1.3.2. Some Glosses on Donald’s Schema

According to Donald (1991, p. 149) apes live entirely within the bounds of
episodic memory, which means that “their lives are entirely in the present,
as a series of concrete episodes, and the highest element in their system of
memory representation seems to be at the level of event representation.”
To live entirely in the present may seem a simple condition, but if it implies
awareness of the insertion of the present within the past and the future, it
is already a complex capacity. Indeed, it would require what Husserl calls
retentions (of the past) and protentions (of the future). This is very different
from living solely in the present, without opposing it to the past and the
future, as we would expect to be the case with Uexküll’s tick. Donald is no
doubt aware of this, since he attributes his episodic memory specifically to
9 Or sign language – but if this is a problem, it is a problem for the third stage.
44 Göran Sonesson
apes and human predecessors. But one would then expect there to also be
a pre-episodic stage (see Sonesson 2015).
It is also very different from living within a genetic-generative horizon,
in which past, present, and future are more consciously construed as part
of a tradition or a life-story. Endel Tulving, who coined the term “episodic
memory,” as Donald (1991, p. 150) also notes, seems to be thinking about
something more along these lines, since he claims that it allows “mental
time travelling,” that it requires language, and that it is exclusive to human
beings. Since then, no doubt, students of animal behaviour have been busy
trying to show that not only apes, but, for instance, scrub jays, are capable of
episodic memory, and notably time-travelling, since they are able to recover
food hidden at different places and at different times (cf. Clayton & Dick-
inson 1998). How ever that may be, this could hardly involve what Tulving
calls “autonoetic consciousness” which is supposed to accompany the act of
remembering, thus enabling the individual to be aware of his/herself in sub-
jective time. Autonoetic consciousness would seem to be a kind of thematic
consciousness, in the sense of phenomenology (see Gurwitsch 1957), and thus
cannot exist at the episodic level, in Donald’s sense, which would rather corre-
spond to the “stream of consciousness” featuring retentions and protentions.
I have already suggested that the mimetic level contains a very heterogene-
ous mass of phenomena, and we will return to the issue in later chapters (see
especially Chapter 2: Mimesis). Another question, which has not received
a satisfactory answer, is whether narration must be verbally expressed. It is
difficult to deny that films and comic strips convey narrativity, but one could
even argue that single pictures and gestures have the capacity to tell stories, at
least in a very general sense. But at least gestures (and also pictures, from one
point of view, as we will see) are part and parcel of the mimetic stage, which,
in Donald’s view, does not involve any narrative capacity. Donald would
claim that narrativity only emerges with the mythic stage, but that it may
then be shared with semiotic resources that have originated at earlier stages.
There is no obvious way of showing which answer is the right one, since we
have no direct access to evolution, and there are of course numerous ways
of understanding the very notion of narrativity (see Chapter 6: Narrativity).
If it could be shown that apes can tell stories by means of gestures and/or
pictures, in particular if they can do so without being language-trained, or if
small children who have not developed language are able to do so, a parallel
in evolution could be suggested. The first alternative a priori does not seem
very plausible, and it is not even clear how we could test any of them. But
there is a further possibility: that, in human beings, as part of the specific hu-
man use of mimesis, narrativity can be embodied in pictures and/or gestures
without having passed by language.
It is at least somewhat curious that Donald locates the picture at the theo-
retic stage. This is no doubt because pictures, as we know them today, are
always organism-independent artefacts or, in Donald’s terms, “exograms.”
But it is not impossible for pictures to have been at the beginning at least
somewhat less independent of the human body, as is the case with tattoos,
and/or made in less durable material, such as skin and sand. The latter is well
known in the form of sand painting in some traditional cultures, in which
they are part and parcel of performances. Indeed, both kinds of pictures are
still marginally present even today, tattoos even becoming increasingly so in
recent times. Sand paintings are short-lived acts in time and space, but they
still persist as patterns ready to be applied in-between each of their instan-
tiations. Tattoos may have started out as the same kind of types persisting
as potentialities in the mind in-between its different instantiations, though
nowadays they are more clearly available as designs on a pattern sheet.
This could be taken to indicate that pictures are primarily a result of
mimesis, but it is not clear that they would therefore be reducible to bodily
mimesis (see Chapter 3: Language, and Chapter 4: Picture). Interestingly,
William Noble and Iain Davidson (1996) have suggested that depiction is
a necessary stage on the way to language, because by means of freezing
the percept, it introduces a kind of communication independent of the
immediate context and so is capable of being the subject of reflection and
narrative. In this sense, the picture could be seen as more of a precursor
to language than gesture or other kinds of mimesis. Thus, the picture sign
would be an important link between mimesis and language. It could be
objected that some kinds of a gesture already inaugurate communication
independent of the immediate context. However, a case could be made for
gestures themselves being movements, and thus incapable of freezing the
percept. Nevertheless, such a translation of the argument (without quoting
Noble and Davidson) to gesture is exactly what Michael Tomasello (2014,
pp. 95 ff.) proposes in his most recent book. In fact, considering a gesture to
be the missing link between the limited semiotic world of other primates and
46 Göran Sonesson
the speaking human being (as many other scholars do today, see Chapter 2:
Mimesis), Tomasello sets up a scenario in which the pointing gesture, being
an index and thus serving to anchor the proposition in the world of our
experience, is soon followed by iconic gestures which are already categorical
(that is, in our terms, on the level of types) which serve to attribute proper-
ties to that which is singled out be the index, before being complemented,
in this very capacity, by symbolic signs, notably by language.
1.3.3. Going Deeper into History

If part of the evolutionary schema characterising human specificity is his-
torical and cultural, rather than biological, we would expect history to be
different from evolution. The thrust of the recent notion of “deep history”
(see Smail 2008; Shryock & Smail 2011) seems to have the effect of making
the history of humanity appear as a series of episodes, more or less similar
to each other and to others, in the vast schema making up the history of
the world or the universe. The discovery of America could be taken as an
instance of world history more or less identical to the discovery of Europe
from the African horizon of Homo erectus or Homo sapiens – or even to
the discovery of the planet by the dinosaurs, or by primitive life. The idea
of “deep history” is no doubt an excellent corrective to traditional history
writing, which tends to be utterly individualistic and generally person-
based – but it also risks doing away with the specificity of human history.
History is special, not only because it is a privileged part of the evolution
of our own species – but also because it is that part which made us into the
only species so far that is capable of history writing. Even if some day com-
puters will be able to write history for us, we will be the only species having
been able to invent devices that can write our history. Although Stephen Jay
Gould (2000b) is no doubt right in pointing out that the “wonderful life”
of unicellular, and indeed prokaryotic, species enormously outcompetes hu-
man beings and any other kind of more complex life forms both in time and
space, this only serves to put more emphasis on the old hermeneutic insight
that we are, so far, the only kind of life which has been able to serve both
as observer and as participant in the history of the world – or so we will
no doubt believe, until someone discovers the forgotten autobiographies
of the dinosaurs, or even of bacteria.
Another risk in reducing history to the last episode of evolution, as

implied by the notion of “deep history,” is that history is easily seen
as always and everywhere the same, as a series of repetitive, basically
pre-determined events, leaving no scope for human will and determina-
tion. In this respect, such a perspective is very much opposed to another
recent branch of history that also goes beyond the individualistic focus
of traditional history, characterised, among others, as “the history of
mentality” and/or “of daily life,” which claims to find appreciable differ-
ences even between relatively recent historical periods. Representatives of
this approach are the members of the Annales school, as well as Michel
Foucault, Philippe Ariès, Norbert Elias, etc. Some examples of the kind of
claims made in this approach are Ariès’ idea of childhood being invented
in the (European) eighteenth century, and Foucault’s suggestion that the
(notion of) human being as such originated shortly before that. In such
extreme formulations, ideas on these lines are probably not defensible.
However, there can be no doubt that the variety of human culture is im-
mense in both time and space, as exemplified by the changes in the notion
of privacy, from the (European) Ancient world over the Middle Ages and
to the eighteenth century (cf. Ariès & Duby 1985–1987). Other notions
may have similar histories, even in recent times, among those Alius-culture
and Alter-culture. There is actually no precise time when the Renaissance
started (even if we ignore the differences between countries), and the
globalised world may not exist or has perhaps always existed, but there
are no doubt real changes taking place in human culture which in some
way justify these qualitative distinctions. Any approach to the evolution
of human culture out of the animal world must take such variability and
capacity for innovation seriously.
Although, for ideological reasons, gender theory, more specifically, the
idea of the social construction and even “performance” of sexual roles
(from Simone de Beauvoir to Judith Butler), is taken to be a separate study,
it is similar to the above-mentioned traditions of relativistic history, in spite
of the relativity involved being that of the sexes, rather than of historical
periods. For precisely the same reason, gender theory is opposed to evo-
lutionary psychology, particularly in its mainstream form. For the same
reason, some version of this study may well have something to contribute
to a less ideologically limited evolutionary psychology.
48 Göran Sonesson
1.4. On the Meeting of Minds

As has hopefully been made clear so far, the three members of our cast, Ego,
Alter, and Alius, should not merely be identified with individuals. They serve
to define a world, so they may appear to be collective subjects, or, with a Pei-
rcean term, “compact persons” (Singer 1984; Colapietro 1989). On the other
hand, their use to designate cultures and relations between them is clearly a
metaphor reposing on the relations between persons. If we closely consider
the way in which we have characterised Ego-culture, Alter-culture, and Alius-
culture above (see Section 1.2), there is really no need for personifying the
different cultures. Indeed, Ego-culture is culture as seen from the point of
view of a subject situated within culture; and Alter- and Alius-culture are also
defined from the point of view of this subject situated within Ego-culture. In
this sense, we are all the time concerned with relations between subjects, or,
more exactly, between the single subject saying “I” (which could of course
be said in chorus between all the subjects identifying with the same culture)
and all the subjects assigned to Alter- or Alius-culture. Within Ego-culture,
the relationship between members would normally be Alter-cultural, though,
to the extent that the opposition to other cultures predominates, it must be
considered to be Ego-cultural. Since the point of view, by definition, is always
that of Ego-culture, it is not clear what kind of relationship might be con-
ceived to prevail, from this point of view, between the members of Alter- and
Alius-culture. Perhaps the most likely situation would be for the members of
an Alter-culture to be posited as being Alter-cultural in-between themselves,
and the members of an Alius-culture being Alius-cultural.
1.4.1. Classical Theories of Empathy

Discussions of Alter-culturality have more commonly been framed in terms
of empathy, altruism, and/or intersubjectivity in classical philosophy, and,
more recently, in terms of “theory of mind” and/or “mindreading,” in psy-
chology and cognitive science (see Chapter 2: Mimesis; Zlatev 2008, 2014).
Even in evolutionary psychology, a central issue in recent times has in fact
been whether altruism may be a crucial factor in human evolution, in spite
of the latter being conceived as “the survival of the fittest” (see Sober &
Wilson 1998; and the Epilogue in this volume). If anything, empathy must
be a requisite for altruism, but certainly not identical to it. An Alter-cultural
relationship would seem to suppose some kind of empathy, but not neces-
sarily (as epitomised in the case of Cortés) any altruism. Indeed, as has been
pointed out by Zahavi (2014), even the sadist, who derives pleasure from
the suffering of the other, needs to be empathic, in the mere attentive sense
of taking account of the feelings of the other, in order to attain his or her sa-
distic goal. Altruism could be considered as a particular kind of behavioural
manifestation of empathy, though involving more self-sacrificing sentiments
and/or values than other-oriented knowledge.10
Empathy normally involves the relation of Ego to Alter (and only indirectly
to Alius). In the classical conception, there are two main alternatives: either
both Ego and Alter are immediately known (as well as felt and/or valued),
because of the relation of empathy existing between them (classical empathy,
or projection, theory; Figure 1.7); or only Ego is known immediately, and
knowledge of the inner workings of the Ego, together with observations of
the other’s body, are used to create an idea of Alter by inference (Classical
inference theory: at least by Helmholtz described as being “unconscious”;
Figure 1.8). Both these alternatives, nevertheless, have long since been shown
to be problematic. As we will see later, the description of classical empathy
theory given above is too simplistic, but it will be convenient to start out
from this simple alternative.
Figure 1.7. Empathy as projection.
10 It might be reminded, at this point, that the criteria indicated above for alterity
concerns both relative evaluation and relative understanding; see Section 1.2.
50 Göran Sonesson
In the case of inference theory, as classically manifested by Hermann von

Helmholtz and John Stuart Mill, it has been observed that our understand-
ing of the other often does not seem to work in a way which is laborious,
time-consuming, and conscious to the point of being adequately termed an
inference; and it is not clear what would permit us to discover the analogy
between Ego and Alter in the first place, if we only know the outside of
the latter and the inside of the former (cf. Gurwitsch 1979; Stueber 2013;
Zahavi 2014, pp. 95 ff.). While the idea of the inference being unconscious,
as suggested by Helmholtz may take care of some of these qualms, the very
notion of “unconscious inference” is difficult to make sense of, even if we
translate it, by way of modern parlance, into “subpersonal inference” (anal-
ogously to another just as mysterious notion, “subpersonal simulation”).11
Figure 1.8. Empathy as inference.
Contemporary conceptions of empathy, most notably the so-called “Theory

theory” (cf. Stueber 2006, 2013; Bermúdez 2010, pp. 363 ff.; Doherty
2009; Apperly 2011), can basically be understood as varieties of the clas-
sical inference theory. In some ways, as we will see, “Simulation theory”
11 If this simply means that what happens can be described post festum as an infer-
ence (see Cassam 2007), this term may be unproblematic, but then it does not
tell us very much either. On “subpersonal simulation” as favoured by Robert
Gordon, see Stueber (2006, pp. 119 ff.).
should also be ranged in this category. Nevertheless, “Theory theory” sup-

poses there to be a body of knowledge (folk psychology) which can be
applied to singular cases, and already David Premack and Guy Woodruff
(1978, p. 515) talked about “a system of inferences,” indicating a more
systematic character to the knowledge involved than what might be sug-
gested by Helmholtz’ notion of “unconscious inference.” Indeed, some
proponents of “Theory theory”, such as Alison Gopnik (2009), explicitly
present such systems of inferences as being analogous to scientific theories,
notably in being subjected to proof and disproof.
As against the theory of projection, at least its original formulation as
a general mental operation by Theodor Lipps (1900, 1903), it can be ar-
gued that the other cannot be known immediately, or nobody would be
able to tell himself and his feelings and other states of mind apart from
those of other people, as was notably pointed out by Edith Stein (1917).
While Stein’s criticism may be true with reference to knowledge, the case
of emotional understanding, not to mention bodily resonance, seems to be
different: not only are these experiences even less easily understandable as
indirect procedures, but they also come closer to being identifications with
the other in the sense of a confusion of subjects. Indeed, if we separate mo-
tor empathy, emotional empathy, and cognitive empathy, as is often done
nowadays (cf. Preston & de Waal 2002), different models may be relevant
in different cases (see Section 1.4.4).
Max Scheler (1931), echoed by Merleau-Ponty (1964), would seem to
envisage the possibility of something like a complete access to the mind of
Alter, at least in the case of experiencing the emotion of the other directly in
the expressive field made up of his/her body. As a kind of meaning, this may
sound rather mysterious, but, after all, it is nothing else than the applica-
tion of the Gibsonean principle of “affordances” (see Chapter 8: Urbanity)
to living beings.12 With respect to emotions, the result may well become
conscious as an experience of the other, but, in other cases, it could simply
be an iterated behaviour pattern of the kind that William Condon (1980)
called “bodily synchrony,” and which is now often called “resonance” or
motor empathy. An early variety of the latter might be what is nowadays
12 In fact, an instance of this may be the so-called “Kindchenschema,” which

produces an immediate impression of cuteness (see Epilogue, 4.1.).
52 Göran Sonesson
known as “infant mirroring,” as instantiated by newborn children stick-

ing out their tongue when seeing somebody else doing this (see Meltzoff &
Brooks 2001). Even within this kind of empathy, there are clearly degrees,
because when seeing the emotion of the other, you still have to tell them
apart from yourself, but that is precisely what does not occur in the case
of motor empathy – nor, if this interpretation is correct, in such spontane-
ously coordinated movements of crowds which, in the nineteenth century,
seem to have been inspired by social issues (cf. Moscovici 1985), but which
nowadays, to judge from the daily press, mostly appear to be connected
with skirmishes between the aficionados of different football clubs.
Starting out from inference theory and projection theory, there logically
must be two other alternatives: only Alter is immediately known, and Ego
has to be constructed from it. Or both Ego and Alter are really constructions
made up from indirect evidence. No discussion of the knowledge of others
which I know of recognises the reality of these conceptions, the first proposed,
at least in some parts of his work, by Mikhail Bakhtin, and the latter, on at
least one interpretation, by Peirce. To Bakhtin, in fact, only Alter is directly
known, since only he or she can be seen as a complete, finished whole. Accord-
ing to Peirce, on the other hand, Ego and Alter are constructions to exactly
the same degree. What makes these two alternatives sound utterly absurd is
that there is an immediate “mineness,” in the sense of “a different pre-reflec-
tive acquaintance with our own on-going experiential life” (Zahavi 2014,
p. 88), to the consciousness of the Ego, which can uneasily be transferred
to Alter. But if there are also, as Zahavi (2014, pp. 50 ff., 80 ff.) maintains,
more complex and more dissolved notions of the Self, or of the “person,”
in Husserl’s terms, then these models may still find their employment.
1.4.2. Two Other Varieties of the Theory of Empathy

In his early work, Bakhtin (1990, 1993) is very much concerned with the dif-
ferences between the self and the other, often masquerading under the terms
Author and Hero.13 Bakhtin points out that it is only the other which may
be (and must be) seen from the outside, and thus is perceived as a complete
and finished whole; the self, on the other hand, is an unlimited process which
13 On the hazards of this confusion, see Sonesson 2012a.

can never be grasped in its entirety; indeed it is some kind of stream of con-
sciousness, which only comes to a stand-still at death. This is so because “my
emotional and volitional reactions attach to objects and do not contract into
an outwardly finished image of myself” (Bakhtin 1990, p. 35; cf. Bakhtin
1993). Only the other’s body can be seen completely: there is an “excess of
seeing.” In the case of oneself, some part of the body is always lacking from
view, even as reflected in a mirror. This difference translates to the mind. In
this sense, the other, contrary to the self, has the property of outsideness, or
transgredience (Bakhtin 1990, pp. 22 ff., 27 ff. and Figure 1.9).14
It is not surprising, then, that Bakhtin (1990, pp. 25 ff., 61 ff.) uses these
observations to criticise the theory of empathy popular at the time: under-
standing cannot be an identification with the other, for, to begin with, this
would be pointless, since it would only give us the same thing over again, and
in the second place, it is impossible, because the other, by definition, can only
be seen from the outside. Bakhtin (1990, pp. 15–17, 25 f.) admits that we
may imaginatively take the position of the other on ourselves, though what
is gained from this outside position can only be appreciated once it is reinte-
grated into the stream of consciousness, as a phase of the on-going process
that is the self. In a very late text, however, Bakhtin (1986) suggests that a
parallel can be made between the meeting of self and other and the interpreta-
tion of other cultures: in both cases, understanding is not possible by means
of a total identification with the other, but only by entering the other culture
and then returning to a position external to it. In our terms, Alius-culture can
only be transformed into Alter-culture by taking one’s own ultimate stand in
Ego-culture. Or, to be more precise, the particular subject of understanding,
the Ego, can only understand the other culture, as he can understand any
other subject, by following the dialectics of contact and withdrawal. Here,
curiously, Bakhtin, without knowing it, seems to meet up with Schütz (1974
[1932]), who, when talking about Ego and Alter as individuals, envisages a
similarly dialectical procedure, going from self to other and back again (cf.
Zahavi 2014, pp. 141 ff.). It is true that none of them takes into account the
much more extreme outsideness of what we have called Alius.
14 Whether or not this is a particular case of what phenomenologists call transcend-

ence need not be discussed here. I am using the terms employed in the transla-
tions of Bakhtin’s work, and in the secondary literature about his thinking.
54 Göran Sonesson
Figure 1.9. Bakhtin’s inversion of the projection theory.
While Bakhtin’s conception presents itself as an outright inversion of infer-

ence theory, Peirce would seem to extend the latter to both Ego and Alter.
Peirce thus proposes a symmetrical inference theory. It is the idea of the
other that is different. Both Bakhtin and Peirce see the self as something
which is not and cannot be concluded, something that exists only as devel-
oping in time. But while to Bakhtin the other is something static, essentially
closed off, for Peirce (as quoted by Colaprieto 1989 and Singer 1984) it is
of the same kind as the self, i.e. a stream of consciousness, which cannot
be halted — before the moment of death. So from the point of view of
finiteness, the other is just another self to Peirce. On the other hand, Peirce
claims there is no direct access to knowledge about the self, just as there
is none about the other: both are only indirectly known through signs.15
To Peirce, then, the access to Ego is thus as indirect as that to Alter. As
far as access to knowledge is concerned, then, the self is merely another
other to Peirce. The transgredience that Bakhtin attributes to the other is
15 Here, of course, it is important to remember that practically everything is a

sign to Peirce. In this context, at least, he must suppose that signs are somehow
more indirect than something else, but it is not clear what the latter is, since
even percepts are signs in his view.
also a property of the Peircean self. Ego and Alter appear as two parallel
(or perhaps imbricated) streams of consciousness. This latter conception
is still current today, as expressed by some representatives of the “Theory
theory” of mind. Indeed, Alison Gopnik and Peter Carruthers think the
child discovers his/her own mind, just as that of others, only around four
years of age (Mitchell 1997; Ziegler 2013; see Table 1.1). Carruthers (2013)
has recently published a book entirely dedicated to demonstrating “the
opacity of the mind.” More generally, those who claim that folk psychol-
ogy is essentially mistaken, and should be substituted by a neurologically
founded theory, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, and probably Daniel
Dennett (cf. Stueber 2006), must embrace some version of this conception.
The best response to all these models of the accessibility of Ego and Alter,
nevertheless, may still be Merleau-Ponty’s (1945, p. 405) quip, according
to which the other is not completely opaque to me, precisely because the
Ego is not totally transparent either. To rephrase it in Bakthinean terms, it
is only because there is a certain transgredience to the Ego, that there can
also be an ingredience of the Alter. But this is still far from embracing the
position of Peirce, Gopnik, and Carruthers.
Table 1.1. Four kinds of access to Ego and Alter (see the text below for the question
marks applied to the case of Simulation theory).
Access Access
Classical version Contemporary versions
to Ego to Alter
Inference theory (Helmholtz, Theory theory,
Yes No
Mill) Simulation theory?
Projection theory (including
direct perception) (Lipps,
Yes Yes Simulation theory?
Scheler, in some respects
Husserlean phenomenology, etc.)
Bakhtin’s theory No Yes Followers of Bakhtin
Peirceans. At least some
Peirce’s theory No No representatives of Theory
theory: Gopnik, Carruthers.
1.4.3. The Phenomenological Conception of Empathy

Following the interpretation of Edith Stein, I have presented Lipps as a
typical representative of the idea that we can have complete access to the
56 Göran Sonesson
mind of the other. According to Karsten Stueber (2006, pp. 9 f.), however,
this interpretation is the result of an “uncharitable reading of Lipps by
Edith Stein” (though this interpretation of Lipps’ conception as favouring
completeness clearly is shared by Husserl, Scheler, and Gurwitsch – and
apparently, though he gives no name, by Bakhtin). However, another criti-
cism of Lipps’ approach is that it fails to grasp the other as such, since
projection is something that takes place within the mind of Ego, and thus
may be entirely false to the experience of Alter. If so, projection does not
go beyond the experience of the primary subject, and it cannot be said to
have access to the experience of the other (cf. Zahavi 2014). This means, it
would seem, that either Stein’s interpretation of Lipps as a fusion theorist is
totally wrong-headed, or his conception is seriously incoherent. Neverthe-
less, it is interesting to note that, according to Stueber (2006), contemporary
“Simulation theory” prolongs the tradition inaugurated by Lipps. If we
follow up this analogy, at least one representative of “Simulation theory”,
Paul Harris, may help us understand how it is possible for both Stein and
Stueber to be partly right: according to Harris (as quoted by Doherty 2009,
pp. 44 f.), the simulation accomplished by Ego is subject to the change
of certain “parameters,” having to do with our suppositions about the
difference between Ego and Alter, the difficulty of changing such features
accounting for the slow progress of empathy in children’s development.
Martin J. Doherty goes on to claim that such a change of parameters must
depend on rules, corresponding more to the principles of “Theory theory”
than to “Simulation theory”.
The projection model has been criticised by Husserl (1950a, b), Scheler
(1931), and others, because a body from the outside “feels” very differently
from a body from the inside. Shaun Gallagher (2005b), however, thinks this
argument is no longer valid after the discovery of mirror neurons, which,
reputedly, react in the same way to movements executed by the subject and
to the same movements observed (see Hurley & Chater 2005). He appears
to identify the latter with Husserl’s kinesthemes, that is, the (largely passive)
intentions that constitute the body as such. Yet, this only seems to account,
in a direct way, for motor empathy. However, Husserl observes that some
parts of one’s own body are accessible for the Ego both from the outside
and the inside: while looking at a hand or grasping it with the other hand,
you also feel it internally, and you can thus relate the two experiences to
each other. Since, in this case, I am, in a sense, the other to myself, my body
could be said to become physical only by comparison with the other. This
may seem to lend some justification to Bakhtin’s model. Still, Bakhtin ap-
pears to conceive self and other as completely opposed, indeed, of the other
rather as an Alius than an Alter, while Husserl, as well as Schütz, would
rather fuse the two viewpoints together, as in the hands clasping each other.
On the other hand, more along the lines of Bakhtin (with whom he cannot
have been familiar), i.e. with the same bodily bias, Merleau-Ponty envis-
ages a continuous objectification of the own body, aided by the reflection
in the mirror. In recent decades, with the general availability of the video
camera, even as a function of smart phones, video clips may have gained
more importance than the mirror in this complete exteriorisation of the self
as a physical body in space (Körper, not Leib, in Husserl’s terms).
Gurwitsch (1979) suggests that, in order to recognise the other as other
(as Alter, in my terms) you have to see him or her not abstractly, but in the
pragmatic context of working in the world. More fundamentally, I would
like to add, there has to be a recognition that the other is an animate being,
and often more particularly, a human being, perhaps even before you begin
to expect the movements to be expressive. Nevertheless, it seems probable
that such recognitions are immediately given, or ecological, as suggested
by Ivan Leunder and Alan Costall (2009), who, very graphically, spell out
the presuppositions of different version of “Theory of Mind,” according to
which we all start out as behaviourists, only to discover, around four years of
age, that there is such a thing as a mind – something which hardly concords
with ecological experience, that is, the Lifeworld.
In his book on meeting the other, Gurwitsch takes his inspiration from
Martin Heidegger’s notion of things being present-to-hand, but he also
refers to Kurt Goldstein’s distinction between the categorical and concrete
attitudes, deficiencies of which are supposed to account for different kinds
of aphasia. Gallagher (2005), however, suggests that there is evidence from
the same kind of impairments for making a threefold distinction, between
a) abstract (categorical), b) pragmatic (concrete), and c) social contexts,
where the social context is not reducible to the pragmatic or abstract ones.
According to Gallagher, even patients having problems with motor action in
concrete contexts may be able to accomplish the same action in a personally
and culturally meaningful context. But perhaps, instead of different factors,
58 Göran Sonesson
we should think of this as a continuous contextualisation or, perhaps better,

subjectification, being the obverse of the objectification of the body. In this
sense, Alter and Alius are really poles on a continuous scale.
1.4.4. A Multi-Level Empathy Model

I suggested above (in Section 1.4.3), against Stueber, that Lipps may indeed
have been both a simulationist (in which case empathy does not go beyond
the own self), and a fusionist (in which case Ego and Alter are not differ-
entiated), if, like Harris in our days (quoted by Doherty 2009, pp. 44 f.),
he thought of the projection as being subject to “the resetting of some pa-
rameters.” It is true, as Doherty observes, that the latter process seems to
be rule-like rather than based on emotional identification, but perhaps it is
possible to think of this parameter setting as being subpersonal, or at least
very deeply embedded in the unconscious. I would like to suggest, however,
that there is a deeper reason why Husserl and his followers were critical
of Lipps: because, on Lipps’ account, it might seem that, if one somehow
could manage to gain complete knowledge of the other, he or she would be
identical with him or her, while phenomenology would claim that even such
a complete access to the knowledge possessed by the other must remain a
knowledge modified by being the knowledge of the other. In other words,
however complete, it would necessarily remain indirect, given in the form
of an appresentation, an intentional act in which (similar in that respect
to the sign), that which is directly perceived is not that which is the main
theme of the act (see Sonesson 2012b; Zahavi 2014, pp. 132 ff.). It is rather
difficult to grasp Husserl’s own conception of empathy, since, as Zahavi
(2014, p. 123) observes, it was “a preoccupation of a lifetime,” and thus
surfaces in most of his writings, often from different points of view. We owe
Zahavi (2014, pp. 123 ff.) for having gone through the meticulous work
of puzzling all the relevant passages together. The main point that emerges
out of this reading, however, is that there is no getting around the fact that
a stream of consciousness is always possessed by a first or a second person.
Several of the theories about the relation of Ego and Alter may in fact be
correct, as applied to different kinds of empathy, and when considered from
different points of view (see Table 1.2). Thus, Stueber (2006, pp. 131 ff.) dif-
ferentiates between what he calls “basic empathy” and “reenactive empathy”
(see also Apperly 2011 on “low-level” and “high level mindreading”). Basic
empathy would thus be on the side of motor empathy (and thus may perhaps
be accounted for by the mirror neurons), but may also be somewhat broader,
since it would involve the recognition of the other as human being and/
or a subject. Stueber (2006, p. 143) here refers to the work of Andrew N.
Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks (2001, p. 174), who claim to have discovered
a distinction present in infants between “those that perform human acts
(people) and those that do not (things).” According to Jean Mandler (2004),
the distinction may rather be between animate and non-animate things. In
any case, we can here recognise our old friends Alter and Alius. This then
is basic empathy in the sense of being a precondition for every other kind
of empathy. As for “reenactive empathy,” it is a conscious effort at reliving
the experience of the other, and here Stueber favours “Simulation theory”,
that is, the projection model, without excluding the possible presence of
“Theory theory”. Indeed, adopting a more phenomenological idiom, but
staying close to Stueber, we could say that a theory of mind may be the result
of the sedimentation of numerous simulations of, or projections into, the
mind of the other.16 It is thus something laid bare by genetic phenomenology
(as well as by the generative one, to the extent that it may result from the
chain of gossip that is culture; see Section 2.2.2).
We should not think of Ego-culture as a world in which identification is
complete: rather, the revised projection model of Husserl and Gurwitsch ap-
pears to be relevant. As for the relation between different cultures, something
similar to the projection model may apply (Alter-culture), or something closer,
in the best case, to the inference model (Alius-culture). This again, must
depend on the level of cultural understanding at which the model is applied.
Giambattista Vico’s famous principle in Scienza nuova (1725) according to
which we can understand everything made by human beings precisely because
of our shared humanity, supposes that we recognise the other as human,
16 The theory in question would then not be equivalent to a scientific theory, but
still retain some kind of systematic character, but most followers of Theory
theory would agree with this description (cf. Doherty 2009, p. 37). Moreover,
there appears to be a general consensus nowadays for accepting a hybrid of
Theory theory and Simulation theory (Nichols & Stich 2003; Doherty 2009,
pp. 48 f.; Apperly 2011).
60 Göran Sonesson
which has not always been a straight-forward conception in the relations

between cultures. It was not to Columbus discovering America, and it is not,
as is becoming very much apparent at the time of writing, to the members of
the terrorist faction calling themselves The Islamic State, not only because
of their assassinating of Christians, Yazidis, and Shiites, but also because of
their destruction of the testimony of our common human cultural evolution
as it was until now present, notably, in Mosul and Palmyra.
Table. 1.2. Different mental operations from the point of view of access to Ego and
Alter (This table is not meant to be chronological. Thus, for instance, it
is quite possible that at least some kinds of synchrony/resonance only
work once the affordance of animateness has been perceived)
Direct Indirect Direct Indirect Third

Type of
Access Access Access to Access person Precursor
empathy
to Ego to Ego Alter to Alter knowledge
Synchrony,
Lipps, Con-
resonance, No – Yes – –
don, Meltzoff
mirroring
Experience of
(emotional)
Scheler,
expressions.
Merleau-
Affordance of Yes – Yes – –
Ponty, Mand-
animateness
ler, etc.
(humanity,
etc.)
Yes in
Yes in part
Reenactive part (by Simulation
Yes (“parameter Possible
empathy way of theory
setting”)
self)
Husserl,
Dialogical Schütz,
Yes Yes Yes Yes No
empathy Bakhtin about
cultures
Reconst-
Yes/ Theory
ruction of Yes No Yes Yes
No theory, Peirce
motives
Possibly in
the form
Transgre-
(Yes) Yes No Yes of mirror, Bakhtin
dience
video clip,
etc.
1.5. Culture Out of Evolution

This chapter was meant to accomplish several tasks. It explains the impor-
tance of phenomenology within the new field of cognitive semiotics, which
brings together the two important transdisciplinary initiatives of the last
century, cognitive science and semiotics, focusing on the phenomenological
notion of the Lifeworld, both as the general schema of invariant structures
found in any possible human coherent whole of experience, and as particu-
lar cases thereof, the socio-cultural Lifeworlds characteristic, for instance,
of ancient Egypt, mediaeval France, and present-day Sweden. With the aim
of creating a typology of Lifeworlds, intermediate between the common
Lifeworld, and the different socio-cultural Lifeworlds, the chapter goes on
to present the classical version of cultural semiotics, which is then further
developed, in part by approaching it to the Husserlean subdivision of the
Lifeworld into Homeworld, identified with Ego-culture, and Alienworld,
and in part by suggesting that there are two very different kinds of Alien-
worlds: Alter-culture and Alius-culture.
The chapter then pursues cultural semiotics into evolutionary time, mak-
ing use of the schema proposed by Merlin Donald, which, through the
episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages, brings us from primate evo-
lution to human history. After clarifying the role of the Ego in Ego-culture,
as the individual situated within his or her specific culture, and relating it to
other cultures, we had a look at classical hermeneutic and phenomenologi-
cal approaches to empathy, as well as contemporary ones, suggesting that
the relation between Ego and Alter may be of different kinds, conforming
to several of the models which have been proposed so far. In so doing, we
have initiated the quest, not only of bringing the two contemporary trans-
disciplinary perspectives of cognitive science and semiotics together, but
to connect these two modern approaches to the classical tradition of the
humanities, the tradition of tradition itself, also known as hermeneutics,
according to which the understanding of other cultures and their artefacts
takes its point of departure in an understanding of human beings as human
beings, of ourselves as human beings, and of others as human beings – with
the small provision that the human beings about whom we are talking
emerged out of animal life, evolution, and more or less deep history.
Jordan Zlatev
Chapter Two
Mimesis: The Role of Bodily Mimesis for the
Evolution of Human Culture and Language
An evolutionary adaptation for bodily mimesis – the volitional use of the

body as a representational devise – is argued to be the precondition that
made the evolution of human culture possible, including uniquely human
(and yet pre-linguistic) features such as (over)imitation, pedagogy, inten-
tional communication, and representational capacity. Furthermore, it is mi-
mesis that potentiated the evolution of language itself. Speech evolved atop
bodily mimesis, via a transitional stage of multimodal protolanguage. This
hypothesis is supported by (a) the extensive presence of sound symbolism
in modern languages, (b) its psychological reality for speakers, and (c) its
contribution to language acquisition. Evidence for each of these claims is
presented and discussed.
2.1. What Makes Us Special?

It is often assumed that it is language that makes human cognition and
culture unique (e.g. Christiansen & Kirby 2003). Indeed, the representa-
tional and combinatorial powers of language place it on a level of semiotic
complexity that is qualitatively distinct from that of the communicative
systems of animals (Zlatev 2009). However, this does not imply that it was
the evolution of language per se that set our species on a separate trajectory
compared to that of all other living creatures on our planet. Rather, the thesis
put forth in this chapter1 is that human culture rests on a type of conscious-
ness that is both uniquely intersubjective and uniquely representational,
1 I would like to thank the editors David Dunér and Göran Sonesson, as well as
Michael Ranta for their helpful comments. A similar version of this text has
appeared in a special issue on language evolution in Humana.Mente: Journal
of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 27 (2014), edited by Francesco Ferretti and Ines
Adornetti, who should also be acknowledged.
64 Jordan Zlatev
and that this was potentiated by a specific pre-linguistic adaptation: bodily

mimesis (Donald 1991, 1998, 2001, 2012; Zlatev 2007, 2008a, 2008b,
2014a). The claim is that it is this ancient, nearly two million years old
adaptation that unleashed unprecedented capacities for representation, skill
and imagination, which then further developed over a prolonged process of
bio-cultural evolution.
In Sections 2.2 and 2.3, I spell out this thesis, showing how the bodily mi-
mesis hypothesis, in particular as formulated within the conceptual-empirical
model known as the Mimesis Hierarchy, helps to bridge the apparent gulf
between animal and human cognition, including language, within a generally
continuous, Darwinian framework. The empirical evidence for the thesis has
been presented elsewhere (Donald 1991, 2001; Zlatev 2008a, 2008b, 2014a).
Therefore I focus rather on the theoretical question of how a relatively “small
difference” – the evolution of enhanced motor control – could make a huge
difference in terms of cognitive-semiotic evolution. I also highlight the need
to distinguish between at least two different levels of bodily mimesis, and to
separate these from some of its precursors, on the one hand, and post-mimetic
competencies, on the other.
How could bodily mimesis lead to language, which according to many
is characterised by “arbitrariness” and dominance of the spoken-auditory
channel (Hockett 1960), while bodily mimesis lacks either of these features?
In Section 2.4, I argue that the thesis of the arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign (Saussure 1983 [1916]) has been both overextended and misconstrued,
in part due to the fundamental ambiguity of the term “arbitrary” in one
of the canonical texts of linguistics. Once the two major senses (1) conven-
tional (= socially shared) and (2) non-motivated (= lacking any iconicity or
indexicality between expression and content) are de-coupled, it becomes
possible to see speech as overwhelmingly conventional, yet still motivated.
I review recent work showing that sound symbolism should be regarded as
a universal feature of language, either vocal or signed. Furthermore, given
the whole-body, multimodal nature of bodily mimesis (Zlatev, Donald &
Sonesson 2010), it is possible to predict that with increased vocabularies
(emerging with increasingly complex cultures), the communicative channel
that has relatively less potential for iconic representation, i.e. vocalisation
rather than bodily movement, would have been utilised to a greater extent
(Brown 2012; Zlatev 2014a).
Mimesis: The Role of Bodily Mimesis 65
The main argument is thus that bodily mimesis is the essential aspect
leading to the unique properties of human nature – and culture – while
language, important as it is for all current human cultures and for our exist-
ence as individuals, is essentially “post-mimetic.” The secondary argument
is that the evolution of speech occurred gradually and partially, as shown
by multimodality and sound symbolism.
2.2. The “Missing Link” of Bodily Mimesis

Etymologically stemming from the Greek verb mīmeisthai (‘to imitate’) the
concept of mimesis encompasses imitation but goes considerably beyond
it, involving “an embodied, analogue, and primordial mode of representa-
tion” (Donald 2012, p. 180). It is Merlin Donald’s version of the concept
that is arguably most relevant in the context of human cognitive-cultural
evolution. Still, it should be acknowledged that the ancient Greeks and es-
pecially Aristotle gave mimesis a central place in human nature, highlighting
“man’s natural propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic
activity (and this distinguishes man from other creatures, that he is thor-
oughly mimetic, and through mimesis takes his first steps in understanding”
(Aristotle 1987, 4.2–5, p. 34). Prefiguring modern cognitive theories with
two millennia, Aristotle also thought that it is through a corresponding act
of mental mimesis (re-enactment) that we respond to the observed acting,
and are capable of empathising with the characters represented in the play.
Donald’s main contribution was to describe how a “naturalised” version
of the mimesis concept could be sufficient to account for the conjectured
lifestyles of “the first universally accepted member of our own genus” (Fitch
2010, p. 265), Homo erectus of 1.8–0.5 MYA. The specific hypothesis is
that of “a unified neuro-cognitive adaptation that formed the early founda-
tion of a distinctly human mind-sharing culture” (Donald 2012, p. 181).
The archaeological record of such mimetic culture includes fairly complex,
so-called Achulean tool-manufacture, campfires, long-distance migration,
endurance running and basically modern human anatomy. And yet, the
record shows no clear evidence for any of the fossilising markers of vocal
language. Combining this with evidence from neuroscience, psychology,
anthropology, and primatology (cf. Zlatev 2014a), it appears likely that
an adaptation for enhanced voluntary control of the body (“a mimetic
66 Jordan Zlatev
controller” in the terms of Donald) served as the key to a “cultural style

that can still be recognized as typically human” (Donald 2001, p. 261). A
strong advantage of the hypothesis to alternatives is its parsimony: while
the original function of bodily mimesis could have been tool production, it
would have been extended for much else: “pantomime, imitation, gestur-
ing, shared attention, ritualized behaviours, and many games. It is also the
basis of skill rehearsal, in which a previous act is mimed, over and over, to
improve it” (Donald 2001, p. 240).
Somewhat schematically, we may single out the following five social-
cognitive domains, in which bodily mimesis has contributed to uniquely
human capacities, or at least to uniquely high levels within these.
2.2.1. Skill Rehearsal

Many motor skills, especially those under strong genetic control such as
species-typical motor patterns of locomotion, feeding, procreation etc., do
not require anything corresponding to a mimetic controller. However, the
kinds of complex skills necessary for the production of Achulean bipolar
axes or for precision throwing, need systematic rehearsal and the ability
to “compare, in imagination, the performed act with the intended one”
(Donald 2012, p. 182). This would have necessarily brought about an
expansion in the scope and flexibility of consciousness, serving as an im-
portant prerequisite for representational thought, which implies the ability
to both distinguish and relate representamen (expression) and represented
(content). It also involves the ability to “shift attention from the external
world, and redirect it to [our] own bodies and actions” (Donald 1998,
p. 45), which is reminiscent of a description of the so-called phenomeno-
logical reduction (Gallagher & Zahavi 2008).
2.2.2. Memory and Re-enactment

The ability to (consciously) remember some event experienced in the past is
characteristic of episodic memory, allowing mental access to “a particular
experience (witnessed, or felt, or thought something) in a particular place
at a particular time” (Tulving 2005, p. 15). Such memory is also important
for planning and guiding of future actions, known as “foresight” or “pro-
spective memory.” There has been accumulating evidence that at least some
degree of episodic memory is not limited to human cognition (cf. Hurford

2007). In fact, Donald (1991) referred to the minds and cultures of chimpan-
zees – and analogously to those of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees
and our own species – as “episodic,” acknowledging that it is not only hu-
man consciousness that goes beyond the here and now of direct perception:
chimpanzees are capable of “flashbacks,” and thus at least to a degree of
so-called mental time travel. However, the mimetic controller makes it pos-
sible to explicitly access (recall) and re-enact a past event, and perhaps more
importantly, to go through the steps of a future act by rehearsing them, as
in skill-rehearsal. This kind of mimetic “acting out” goes beyond the repre-
sentational potential of a private “visualisation” (Thompson 2007), leading
to a fully-fledged public representation (cf. Sonesson 2007), accessible for
others, and more explicit for oneself than private mental imagery. Thus,
mimesis can be seen as introducing the roots of propositional (semantic)
and proto-narrative memory, before the onset of language.
2.2.3. Imitation and Pedagogy

More simple forms of learning with the help of others such as goal emula-
tion, response facilitation and stimulus enhancement, are available to many
primate species (Hurford 2007). However, true imitation in which a novel
act is observed, modelled and eventually added to the repertoire, is much
more restricted (cf. Tomasello 1999), and attested only to a degree in chim-
panzees. Importantly, only human children have been found to reproduce
an observed action with high fidelity even when some of the steps are clearly
not functional to achieving the goal, i.e. what is sometimes referred to as
“over-imitation” (Horner & Whiten 2005). From the other side, helping
the novice by overtly demonstrating, guiding and when necessary correct-
ing is also a universal, human-specific trait (Gergely & Csibra 2006). What
these features jointly demonstrate is that bodily mimesis should not be seen
as a purely motor-cognitive adaptation, but as a social-cognitive one, co-
evolving with aspects of intersubjectivity such as trust and altruism (Hutto
2008; Zlatev 2008a, 2014b).
68 Jordan Zlatev
2.2.4. Rites and Rituals

Moving further into the social domain and combining the functions dis-
cussed above – skill rehearsal, re-enactment and (over-)imitation – provides
the bases for another universal feature of human cultures: rituals. These
involve more or less “formalised,” invariant and stylised bodily perfor-
mances, loaded with “symbolic” (in the sense of non-utilitarian) meaning,
and serving social bonding (Bell 1997). Donald writes of “reciprocal mime-
sis” (Donald 1991, p. 6) as the means for establishing such forms of “group
mentality.” Still, we need to be careful here, since the highly normative
(i.e. conforming to shard criteria of correctness) and symbolic character of
many rituals (such as those of religious character), appear to transcend the
borders of mimesis proper, and intermix with the “mythic” stage (Donald
1991), characterised by narrative and language.
2.2.5. Pantomime and Gesture

A re-enacted hunting dance (e.g. as part of a ritual) is clearly representa-
tional, in the sense that expression and content are both differentiated and
related for both the performer and audience (see Section 2.2.1 and 2.2.2
above). In a general sense, it is also communicative. But rituals are generally
performative rather than informative, and lack the full sense of (Gricean)
intentional communication, in which there is both an intention to inform the
audience of something new, and a second-order intention for the audience to
understand this (Sperber & Wilson 1995). Hence, it is difficult to fully agree
with Donald (2012, p. 182) when he proposes that “mime and non-linguistic
gesture come for free with skill, because the neuro-cognitive mechanism and
computational logic is the same.” The cooperative motivations and cogni-
tive capacities for the use of communicative intentions are necessary as well
(Zlatev et al. 2013), and need to be seen as an extension of the motoric
aspects of mimesis. There is abundant evidence that human beings excel
in this, compared to other animals, including chimpanzees (Zlatev 2008a).
2.3. Defining Bodily Mimesis and the Mimesis Hierarchy

As summarised in the previous section, the concept of bodily mimesis is
both specific and rich in relations and extensions: from the motoric skill to
social cognition and human-specific culture. Hence, it has been necessary
to both constrain it, and to provide it with a hierarchical structure, distin-

guishing simpler forms from more elaborated ones.
Adapting somewhat of a definition provided in the context of ontogenetic
development (Zlatev 2013, p. 51), an actual or imagined act of cognition
or communication is an act of bodily mimesis if and only if: (1) it involves
a cross-modal mapping between exteroception (e.g. vision) and propriocep-
tion (e.g. kinaesthesia); (2) it is under conscious control and is perceived
by the subject to be similar to some other action, object or event, (3) the
subject intends the act to stand for some action, object or event for an ad-
dressee, and for the addressee to recognise this intention; (4) it is not fully
conventional and normative, and (5) it does not divide (semi)composition-
ally into meaningful sub-acts that systematically relate to other similar acts,
as in grammar.
The Mimesis Hierarchy follows from this definition by assuming that
the features (1–5) build incrementally atop one another, so that only pos-
sessing (1) yields proto-mimesis, (1) and (2) together give dyadic mimesis,
while adding (3) leads to full triadic mimesis. Adding the features in the
last two (negative) criteria in the definition leads to the two “post-mimetic”
stages: (4) protolanguage, with signs following normative criteria for cor-
rectness, but with very little systematicity and (5) language, with sufficient
systematicity to allow the construction of complex discourses and narra-
tives. Table 2.1, adapted from earlier work (Zlatev 2008b, p. 139), shows
the five stages of the Mimesis Hierarchy, alongside corresponding social-
communicative skills. Reviews of comparative psychological and social neu-
roscience research (Zlatev 2008a, 2008b) have revealed abundant evidence
for proto-mimesis in non-human primates, and some for dyadic mimesis
in non-human apes, and especially chimpanzees. But without extensive
human enculturation, triadic mimesis skills are inaccessible, and even the
most successfully enculturated apes such as the famous bonobo Kanzi do
not appear to master them fully; this can explain their inability to acquire
more than proto-linguistic skills. The conclusion is thus that it is the lack of
bodily mimesis, rather than any “language acquisition device” that prevents
non-human creatures from evolving both cumulative culture and language.
70 Jordan Zlatev
Table 2.1. The five stages of the Mimesis Hierarchy, with incremental features and
corresponding cognitive-communicative skills.
Stage Feature Communicative skills

#5 Language Semiotic systematicity – Grammar (= conventional
symbolic system)
– (Complex) narrative
#4 Protolanguage Conventionality/ – Two-word utterances
normativity – Multimodal constructions
#3 Triadic mimesis Communicative intention – Declarative pointing
– Iconic gestures
– Joint attention
#2 Dyadic mimesis Volitional re-enactment – (Over) imitation
– Imperative pointing
– Shared attention
#1 Proto-mimesis Mapping exteroception – Emotional contagion
and proprioception – Attentional contagion
– Neonatal mirroring
– Mutual gaze
While there are occasional reports of non-human (great-ape) performances

on the three highest levels of the hierarchy (#3–5), such reports have been
either anecdotic, or else the performances were brought about through
extensive human enculturation. A similar conclusion is reached by Krist
Vaesen (2012), who documents evidence for “striking differences between
humans and great apes” in seven pre-linguistic domains: (a) one motoric:
hand-eye coordination, (b) three social-cognitive: imitation, teaching and
social reasoning, and (c) three general cognitive capacities: causal reasoning,
function-based categorisation (e.g. related to tools) and executive control
(e.g. related to planning). Consequently, the conclusion is that “no in-
dividual cognitive trait can be singled out as the key trait differentiating
humans from other animals” (Vaesen 2012, p. 203). Considering the func-
tions of bodily mimesis outlined earlier (i.e. skill, planning, imitation, rites,
gesture), we may notice considerable overlap with these domains: from the
most specific (a), to the intersubjective consequences of bodily mimesis in
(b) and the most general ones in (c), the latter developing in tandem with,
or as consequences of the extended social-cultural mind (cf. Tomasello
1999; Zlatev 2008a). In other words, given the poly-functional nature of
bodily mimesis, we may concur that the bets need not be placed on a single
“cognitive trait,” and at the same time be able to acknowledge the internal
coherence among the features that distinguish human and animal cogni-
tion – independently from language.
The overlap discussed above is in part due to the fact that both Vaesen
(2012) and Donald (1991) highlight the production and use of tools as a
crucial evolutionary factor. But the payoffs of bodily mimesis go far beyond
this. The five functions emphasised in this section can be argued to provide
the essential ingredients of a uniquely human, yet non-linguistic culture:
based on shared skills, (simple) rites, (public) representations, and non-
linguistic communicative signs, though not yet on external representations
such as pictures (see Chapter 4: Picture in this volume). An essential property
of human cultures (as opposed to other behavioural traditions) is that they
are cumulative (Richerson & Boyd 2005). The proficiency in imitation that
comes with bodily mimesis permits this since “only imitation gives rise to
cumulative cultural evolution of complex behaviours and artefacts” (Rich-
erson & Boyd 2005, p. 108). But there is another no less important charac-
teristic of human cultures that mimesis potentiates even more clearly: they
are the only cultures building extensively on representational practices and
artefacts. While language clearly builds on this (as argued in Section 2.3) and
makes new important representational formats possible such as (developed)
narrative (see Table 2.1), it is a mistake to consider representations, or fully-
fledged signs (Sonesson 2007), as dependent on language.
A third universal feature of human cultures is morality, shared norms
of “right and wrong,” and socially accepted forms of punishment against
transgressors. The normative aspects and functions of rituals discussed ear-
lier are clearly relevant in this respect. However, as mentioned in 2.2.4,
precisely because of the strongly normative, rule-like character of moral
systems, there seems to be a strong relationship between them and language
(see Zlatev 2014b). Indeed, a co-dependence between the evolution of moral
systems and language was proposed by Terrence Deacon (1997). Hence,
while Donald (1991, p. 175) states that “[l]anguage is not necessary for the
development of complex social roles and rules, but mimesis is essential,” this
seems to be only partially true: some “social roles and rules” and commu-
nication systems may be mimetic, but with conventionalisation follows the
defining characteristics of language as a “conventional-normative semiotic
system for communication and thought” (see Zlatev 2008b, p. 137). Here
72 Jordan Zlatev
we encounter the need for a transitional stage between bodily mimesis with
its “embodied, analogue” representations on the one hand, and language
with hierarchical, narrative and normative structures on the other. Indeed,
Stage 4 of the Mimesis Hierarchy (i.e. proto-language) fulfils exactly this
role. While there is a general agreement for the need of such a transitional
stage, different authors envision it and its further evolution differently,
largely depending on their different conceptions of the nature of language
(see Zlatev 2008b). In the next section, I will outline one possible account
for this process.
2.4. Language “Atop” Bodily Mimesis: Multimodality and

Iconicity
An important implication of the bodily mimesis hypothesis is that the type
of “protolanguage” used by our ancestors of, say, 0.5 MYA would have
been neither only vocal (Fitch 2010) nor only gestural (Corballis 2002), but
multimodal (cf. Imai & Kita 2014). It would have been characterised by
combinations of facial-manual-vocal expressions, with high degrees of se-
miotic iconicity (similarity) and indexicality (contiguity) in relation to their
meanings. The speech and gestures of children toward the end of the second
year of life (e.g. Bates et al. 1979; Andrén 2010; Lock and Zukow-Goldring
2010) can be seen as a reflection of such a communicative system, with
many “multimodal patterns involving the coordination of specific gestures
and vocalizations” (Murillo & Belinchón 2012, p. 31). As it is well-known,
the close connection between the bodily and the vocal modes of expression
is also fully present in adults, to the extent that some psychologists consider
speech and gesture to be part of a single cognitive-communicative system
(McNeill 2005). Hence, the evolution of speech would have implied not a
“switch,” but a gradual shifting of the communicative load toward the vo-
cal channel – in the case of spoken languages (Collins 2013; Zlatev 2014b).
What is less known is that the close connection between mouth and hands
is also displayed in signed-languages (Sandler 2012), though naturally the
balance between the communicative channels is reversed in that case.
One has wondered: why is this so? In other words: why are languages
predominantly spoken (Kendon 2009)? A possible explanation goes as fol-
lows. Despite what was until recently the received wisdom (see below),
both spoken and signed languages display extensive iconicity, a “general

property of language” (Perniss, Thompson & Vigliocco 2010). Still, despite
the strong presence of sound symbolism in speech, the vocal medium has
less potential for representing meaning on the basis of similarity than the
manual-bodily medium (Fay, Arbib & Garrod 2013), and there is some
agreement that there is more iconicity in signed than in spoken languages.
Experimental studies and computational models have suggested a trade-off:
with smaller vocabularies it is more efficient with a highly iconic code (i.e.
system for expression-meaning mapping), but with larger vocabularies,
iconic coding leads to ambiguity, and hence a more “arbitrary” mapping
is preferred (Monaghan, Mattock & Walker 2012). Together, this interplay
between multimodality, iconicity and complexity provides a plausible basis
for explaining the gradual and partial transition from bodily mimesis to
“symbolic communication” (Brown 2012; Zlatev 2014a).
It is a partial transition, since as we saw above, even spoken languages like
English are not only “spoken” – when learned, and when used in communi-
cation – and even less so are other fully “natural” and “verbal” languages
like British Sign Language (BSL). It is also partial in the sense that the highly
iconic and indexical nature of bodily mimesis (and presumably of proto
language) is also found in the linguistic sign as well, as pointed out above.
The latter claim is only recently beginning to gain acceptance, since it ap-
pears to contradict “the fundamental principle of the arbitrary nature of the
linguistic sign” (Saussure 1983 [1916], p. 130). In fact, the thesis of “arbi-
trariness” has been radicalised in structuralist semiotics (and even more so,
in post-structuralism) to involve the sign and its relation to reality, as well
as relations between signs (i.e. grammar): “the arbitrariness principle can
be applied not only to the individual sign, but the whole sign system. […]
The arbitrariness of the sign is a radical concept because it establishes the
autonomy of language in relation to reality” (Chandler 2007, pp. 22, 25).
However, there is little license for such interpretations. First, Ferdinand
de Saussure himself warned against extending the arbitrariness of single
signs to that of a whole linguistic system: “A language is not completely
arbitrary, for the system has a certain rationality.” But even concerning
individual signs, Saussure warns:
The fundamental principle of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign does not
prevent us from distinguishing in any language between what is intrinsically
74 Jordan Zlatev
arbitrary – this is, unmotivated – from what is only relatively arbitrary. Not all
signs are absolutely arbitrary. In some cases, there are factors which allow us to
recognize different degrees of arbitrariness […]. The sign may be motivated to
a certain extent (Saussure 1983 [1916], p. 130).
This passage is not taken from the section where Saussure acknowledges on-
omatopoetic expressions such as bow-wow, only to discard them as “never
organic elements of a linguistic system” and as “far fewer than is generally
believed” (cf. Ahlner & Zlatev 2010, p. 303 f.), but where he struggles with
notions such as “relative arbitrariness,” and “partial motivation.” These
are difficult to comprehend alongside the “fundamental” nature of the
arbitrariness principle, and to reconcile with it. The only straightforward
conceptual resolution is to conclude that Cours de linguistique général
(1916), composed, as is well-known, by Saussure’s students on the basis of
his 1906–1911 Geneva lectures, conflates two related but distinct senses
of the French term arbitraire. The first sense is unmotivated, as in the
quotation above. Using the familiar Peircean notions (e.g. Sonesson 2007),
this means that the relation (ground) between expression and content is
neither iconic nor indexical: a purely negative definition. The second sense
is positive, and suggested in many other parts of the Cours, where Saus-
sure talks about the key roles of “tradition,” “society,” “collective habit,”
and “convention.” In other words, the linguistic sign is conventional, i.e.
an object of common knowledge (cf. Itkonen 2008). If this second sense
is taken as central, and as the true “design feature” of language, then it is
fully possible to combine it with various forms of non-arbitrariness in the
first sense, i.e. signs that are based on intermixtures of iconic, indexical
and symbolic grounds, even if dominated by the latter (Jakobson 1965; cf.
Ahlner & Zlatev 2010). Indeed, such intermixture is what unbiased descrip-
tion and psychological investigation of both spoken and signed languages
shows (Perniss, Thompson & Vigliocco 2010). Based on this research and
a few other recent summaries, we may outline below evidence for: (a) the
extensive presence of sound symbolism, i.e. the cover term for any kind of
motivated mapping between sounds and meanings across languages; (b) the
fact that adults are aware of and make use of it; and (c) that children do so
as well, and that it is functional for learning a language.
2.4.1. The Ubiquity of Sound Symbolism

Perhaps the primary reason for the downfall of the “Saussurean dogma”
(Jakobson 1965) has been the wealth of descriptive evidence of non-arbi-
trariness. It was possible in the past to downplay the relatively few expres-
sions resembling the sounds made by animals (e.g. meaw) or events (e.g.
bang) in familiar European languages, but hardly after the explosion of the
typological database of the last few decades. This has uncovered thousands
of sound-symbolic forms, per language, in practically all languages families:
When we move outside the Indo-European language family, however, we find that
iconic mappings are prevalent and are used to express sensory experiences of all
kinds. Languages for which a large iconic, or sound-symbolic, lexicon has been
reported include virtually all sub-Saharan African languages […], some of the
Australian Aboriginal languages […], Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian languages
[…], indigenous languages of South America […], and Balto-Finnic languages
(Perniss, Thompson & Vigliocco 2010, p. 3).
As stated at the onset of this quote, a central finding is that the iconicity
involved in such expressions (called variously “ideophones,” “expressives,”
“mimetics,” or simply “sound-symbolic forms”) is by and large cross-modal
(see Ahlner & Zlatev 2010), i.e. often in subtle ways, the sound shapes
resemble the experiences from other sensory modalities, movements, and
mental processes. Based on the typological evidence, Mark Dingemanse
(2012) proposes the typological implicational hierarchy shown in (1). This
states that languages with unimodal (sound) ideophones will be found in
all languages, while cross-modal mappings to the right in the hierarchy
imply the presence of all those to the left.
(1) sound < movement < visual patters < other sensory patterns < other
mental processes
Apart from the strong tendency for cross-modality (consistent with the
first feature of bodily mimesis, see Section 2.2), two related features char-
acterise such conventionalised iconic mappings. First is what is sometimes
called Gestalt iconicity, with more abstract structural properties of the word
matching the represented spatio-temporal structure. This can be realised
through reduplication, e.g. Japanese goro (‘heavy object rolling’) and goro-
goro (‘heavy object rolling continuously’). Second, phonological contrasts
(e.g. voiceless vs. voiced) mark semantic contrasts, e.g. compare the above
76 Jordan Zlatev
with koro and korokoro, ‘light object rolling (continuously).’ Together,

these properties make sound-symbolic forms semi-transparent: their mean-
ings are not as clear as those of “primary iconic signs” (Sonesson 1997)
such as pictures (Figure 2.1a), but at the same time, the expression-meaning
mappings are not as attenuated as in secondary iconic signs (Figure 2.1b),
where the similarity is usually seen first after being pointed out.2 This means
that sound symbolism can play a functional role in communication and
learning, as argued in the following subsections (see Ahlner & Zlatev 2010).
Figure 2.1. An example of (a) primary vs. (b) secondary iconic signs (from
Ahlner & Zlatev 2010, p. 306).
Furthermore, sound symbolism is not limited to ideophones, but can be

found to various degrees in “ordinary” vocabulary for semantic dimensions
such as size, shape, speed and distance. For example, demonstrative pro-
nouns such as English this and that tend to code the more proximal referent
with a front, close vowel like /i/, and the more distal referent with a back
vowel such as /u/. Niklas Johansson and Jordan Zlatev (2013) show that
in a typologically balanced sample of 101 languages (i.e. languages from
all over the world, representing language families proportionally to their
size) in 56% of the cases the more proximal term had a vowel of higher
2 “Primary iconicity: the perception of an iconic ground obtaining between two

things is one of the reasons for positing the existence of a sign function joining
two things together as expression and content. Secondary iconicity: the knowl-
edge about the existence of a sign function between two things […] is one of
the reasons for the perception of an iconic ground between these same things”
(Sonesson 1997, p. 741).
frequency (e.g. as in English), in 22% there was no difference (e.g. Swedish

denna/detta), while in (only) 22% the pattern was reversed. Skewed distri-
butions such as these can be explained by assuming that there is a bias or
preference for sound-symbolic coding, which of course, can be over-ruled
by historical and other contingent factors.
Another example of patterns of sound symbolism that only partially
overlap across languages are so-called phonesthemes (Abelin 1999): sounds
occurring in words that share some semantic component more often than
chance. Some English candidates are /gl-/ suggesting light (glimmer, glit-
ter, glisten, glow…), /fl-/ suggesting movement (flap, flee, flicker, fling, flip,
flow…) and /-mp/ suggesting physical contact (thump, bump, dump…).
2.4.2. The Psychological Reality of Sound Symbolism

The sceptical question that is often posed concerning examples such as those
presented above is: “Are (ordinary) speakers aware of such (potential) non-
arbitrariness, and do they make use of it in learning and communication?”
Indeed, if all we have are historical “relics” or “vestiges,” not much an
argument for the psychological reality of sound symbolism can be made.
That is why numerous ingenious experiments have been performed along
with the descriptive work. In an early study, Roger W. Brown et al. (1955)
showed that English speakers could match antonym pairs such as big-small
to corresponding pairs in Chinese, Czech, and Hindi significantly better
than chance, sometimes by as many as 90% of the participants.
Wolfgang Köhler (1929) introduced an experimental paradigm that has
been developed and re-applied in many ways: figures of two quite differ-
ent shapes, typically one sharp and the other roundish are to be matched
with various fictive words. In an often quoted paper, V. S. Ramachandran
and Edward M. Hubbard (2001) used bouba and kiki, showing that more
than 90% of participants matched kiki to the sharp figure and bouba to the
round figure. In our study (Ahlner & Zlatev 2010) we varied vowels and
consonants independently, showing that both contributed to establishing
the (cross-modal) iconic ground: /i/ was “sharper” than /u/, but so were the
voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, compared to the voiced sonorants /m/, /l/, /n/.
Chris Westbury (2005) was able to show that such matching affects word
recognition in a lexical decision task: words with stops were recognised
78 Jordan Zlatev
easier in spiky frames, and sonorants in roundish frames, even when the
visual frames where not relevant for the current task. In a context that
resembles language learning, Vanja Kovic et al. (2010) used an implicit
categorisation task where participants “made guesses” about which fictive
words referred to which depicted animals, received feedback and were later
tested on these mappings: some congruent with shape sound symbolism (as
described above), and others against it. The findings were that congruent
mappings were easier to learn, and were faster to confirm in the testing
phase.
Apart from the domain of shape, the domain of motion has been ex-
plored to some degree. Hadas Shintel et al. (2006) asked English speakers
to describe the movement of dots on a monitor and found that a higher
pitch was consistently used for upward movement than for downward
movement. Even more interesting, the speed in which the sentences were
pronounced corresponded (iconically) to speed of the movement. Further-
more, when listening to these descriptions, another set of participants could
correctly judge the speed of the described event, and thus “both speakers
and listeners used speaking rate to convey/comprehend information about
an event independent of the semantics of the lexical items” (Perniss, Thomp-
son & Vigliocco 2010, p. 7).
2.4.3. Functionality for Language Acquisition in Children

But are speakers aware of such (potential) non-arbitrariness, and do they
make use of it in learning and communication? If sound symbolism can
be shown to be (first) detectable and (then) functional for language learn-
ing, this objection would lose its power. The “types” of sound symbolism
studied ontogenetically have again concerned above all the domains of
shape and motion.
Ozge Oztruk, Madelaine Krehm, and Athena Vouloumanos (2012) could
show that infants as young as four-months were sensitive to sound-shape
mappings. Using an infant-controlled sequential preferential looking para-
digm, the researchers found that infants looked longer when a shape did not
match the label sound-symbolically then when it did, which can be inter-
preted as an index of effort or surprise. This is consistent with the findings
of somewhat older, eleven-month old Japanese infants (Imai et al. 2012).
Using an Event Related Potentials (ERP) method, in a number of trials the

researchers presented infants with a picture of a shape, followed by a sound-
symbolically congruent or non-congruent form. Both the timing and the
topography of the signal were similar to the so-called “N400 effect,” with
stronger negative deflection for the non-congruent forms at about 400ms
after the stimulus onset, which is usually taken as indicating difficulty in
semantic integration.
The ages of the children and the methods of these studies only allow
us to infer that the children are performing adequately cross-modal map-
pings, i.e. perceiving the iconic ground (which is remarkable enough). But do
they also use this for learning the signs themselves? In a recent publication,
Mutsumi Imai et al. (2013) show a “faciliatory role of sound symbolism
in infant word learning” with 14-month old children. First, the children
were repeatedly presented with two word-shape pairs, for half the children
sound-symbolically congruent, and for the others not. After this habituation
phase, they heard one of two fictive words (kipi or moma), and saw the two
shapes side by side; they looked faster and longer at the congruent shape.
Even if such word-referent associations do not equal lexical meaning, they
are a plausible first step to it. And indeed, in another study and experimental
paradigm, Daphne Maurer et al. (2006) showed that two-and-a-half year
old children perform on the classical “bouba-kiki” task at the same level
as adults. Since this task requires understanding the referential function of
linguistic signs (see Ahlner & Zlatev 2010), we can see the four studies re-
viewed here, from that of Ozturk et al. (2012) to that of Maurer et al. (2006),
as more or less tracing an ontogenetic version of the Mimesis Hierarchy (see
Table 2.1, Section 2.2): from the proto-mimesis of cross-modal mappings, to
the “post-mimesis” of conventional signs and the onset of a symbolic system.
Let me conclude this section by reviewing a few studies that converge
with the thesis developed in this chapter, both empirically and theoretically.
As noted earlier, Japanese is one of the languages with an extensive inven-
tory of sound-symbolic words, also called “mimetics.” Focusing on the
domain of bodily locomotion, Imai, Kita, Nagumo, and Okada (2008)
asked if Japanese children rely on the sound symbolism of such expressions
in acquiring them, or perhaps rather learn them as “arbitrary.” For that
purpose they constructed novel mimetics, modelled on existing ones, for
example: “batobato = a large energetic movement, arms are swinging back
80 Jordan Zlatev
and forward outstretched, whereas legs are making large leaping movement;
chokachoka = walking quickly in very small steps with the arms swinging
quickly with bent elbows” (Kantartzis, Imai & Kita 2011, p. 578).
In a first study, 25-month old Japanese children were presented with such
a novel mimetic expression and two video clips; the children were able to
select the congruent video at levels above chance. In a second, more difficult
task, three-year old Japanese children first observed an actor walking in
three very different manners, and heard either congruent or non-congruent
mimetic verbs, which they had to learn. Then they got to see new video
clips, and to point out which one displayed the newly learned expression.
Successful generalisation occurred only with the congruent sound-symbolic
expression. Kantartzis, Imai, and Kita (2011) then performed a correspond-
ing study with monolingual three-year old English-speaking children, using
the same “novel mimetics” as before (batobato, chockachocka, etc.). The
remarkable result was that the English-speaking children performed just
as the Japanese:
with words that did not sound-symbolically match their referent actions, both
Japanese and English 3-year olds failed to generalize the newly taught verb to
the identical action performed by another actor. However, when the novel verb
matched the action, not only the Japanese 3-year olds, also English-reared 3-year
olds […] were able to use this cue to generalize the verb to a new event (Imai &
Kita 2014).
Thus, the authors justifiably conclude that they are tapping onto a universal
capacity for sound-symbolism, and then proceed to link it to an evolution-
ary scenario:
the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, which states that sound-symbol-
ism can help children single out the referent of a novel word in the complex real-
ity, which in turn allows them to store the semantic representation in such a way
that children can correctly generalize the verb to new situations. [---] Universal
sound-symbolism in modern languages may be the “fossils” of a sound symbolic
communication system our ancestors once used (Kantartzis, Imai & Kita 2011,
pp. 576, 583).
I find the developmental interpretation of the phenomena fully compelling,

especially given the findings earlier reviewed of sensitivity to cross-modal
mappings from early infancy. On the evolutionary side, however, I do not
find the metaphors of “fossils” or “vestiges” appropriate, since they suggest
non-functional relics, despite the authors’ intentions. Also, there is hardly

any reason to propose any evolutionary stage consisting only (or predomi-
nantly) of a “sound symbolic communication system;” this faces comple-
mentary problems to those of a “purely gesture-first” theory (cf. Fitch 2010).
In fact, elsewhere Imai and Kita (2014) emphasise the close links between
sound symbolic forms and gesture, as well as some of the same reasons for
gradually attenuating iconicity in the vocal modality as those given in the
onset of this section. Thus, the bodily mimesis hypothesis encompasses the
empirical findings and the theoretical proposals of Imai, Kita, and colleagues
quite nicely.
2.5. Mimesis as a Crucial Prerequisite

In this chapter, I have emphasised what may at first have appeared as
counter-intuitive: it is not language but rather (above all) bodily mimesis
that makes human consciousness and human culture special. In the first half
of the chapter, I performed what could be seen as a valorisation of mimesis:
showing how it encompasses, and to some degree explains, unique human
features such as tool manufacture, a high degree of intersubjectivity, over-
imitation, pedagogy, cumulative culture, and last but not least: the evolu-
tion of language itself. Mimesis is a crucial prerequisite for language since,
as in Donald’s original evolutionary model, it provides the basis for three
of its essential features: (i) conventions (through imitation, dyadic mime-
sis), (ii) intentional communication (through triadic mimesis), and (iii) for
bringing the two together in shared communicative, representations/signs.
Donald himself puts this logical dependence in strong terms:
Language is different from mimesis, but it has mimetic roots. It is a collective
product and must have evolved as a group adaptation, in the context of mimetic
expressive culture. Given the conventional, collective nature of language, it could
not have emerged in any other way (Donald 2001, p. 274).
In the second half of the chapter (Section 2.3), I provided further support
for the hypothesis by arguing that mimesis was never just a “prerequi-
site” to be used and then pushed away, as with the proverbial ladder,
but that the “transition” to language should be conceived of as partial.
The lower “layers” of bodily mimesis are very much alive and kicking,
i.e. functional in everything from everyday communication, performance,
82 Jordan Zlatev
empathy and learning – also of language itself. I can summarise the argu-
ment of Section 2.3 by adding the part in italics to Donald’s quotation as
follows: “Given the conventional, collective nature of language, and given
its extensive multimodality and non-arbitrariness, it could not have emerged
in any other way.” The same can be said about human culture in general.
Gerd Carling
Chapter Three
Language: The Role of Culture and
Environment in Proto-Vocabularies
This chapter concerns vocabularies and how they relate to the evolution-
ary schema suggested by Merlin Donald. Typically, research on language
evolution and vocabulary tends to focus on basic parts of vocabulary, i.e.
lexemes for universal or near-universal lexical items, such as body parts,
kinship terms, and lexemes for basic motions and sense perceptions. Lan-
guage evolution and vocabulary unusually discusses the topic of lexemes
for fundamental items of the environment, such as tools, which supposedly
play an important role in language evolution, but which are too diverse in
languages to be related or compared by means of language-universal basic
vocabulary word lists, such as the Swadesh and Leipzig-Jakarta word lists
(as explained in Section 3.3). Here, I argue that there is a demand for a
more dynamic view on proto-vocabularies, including the analysis of cultural
niche and environment, in order to trace the evolution of early language.
3.1. Relating Language Evolution to the Evolutionary

Model by Donald
According to the model proposed by Donald (see adaption by Sonesson,
Chapter 1: Lifeworlds in this volume), language appears in human evolution
at a stage labelled the mythic stage, which follows the mimetic stage, charac-
terised by features such as imitation, gesture, and tool-making. Narrativity
is a core feature of the mythic stage and language evolution, and change
plays a central role here. The final stage in Donald’s model is the theoretic
stage, where humans develop pictures, writing, and theory.
According to this model, there is a continuation of these – according to
Donald’s model – “archaic” features of human behaviour, which precede
the evolution of language, such as tool-making, imitation, and gesture,
throughout the history of human culture and language. These features are
84 Gerd Carling
maintained, embodied in human cognition, behaviour and culture, as accom-

plishments parallel to the evolution of language, situated in a socio-cultural
and ecological environment. Just as tool-making, imitation, and gesture are
preconditions for the evolution of language, language is a precondition for the
development of pictures, writing, and theory, according to Donald’s model.
Following this model, it is of importance to consider the evolution and change
of language in the light of these aforementioned accomplishments, both pre-
ceding language (gestures, imitation, and tool-making) and following upon
language (pictures, and writing). In Chapter 2: Mimesis, the evolution of
language in relation to multimodality and iconicity is discussed. The current
chapter will look at language evolution in the light of language change and
relating to the model proposed by Donald. The focus will be on the rela-
tion between hominines, artefacts, socio-cultural niches, and the ecological
environment, and in particular on the reconstruction of universal, “culture-
free” proto-vocabularies versus a possible reconstruction of universally valid,
but culture- and environment-adapted culture vocabularies. The discussion
should be seen as related to the model of cultural semiotics described by
Sonesson in the introduction of this volume (Chapter 1: Lifeworlds).
3.2. Comparing Language Evolution and Language

Change – Models and Methods
The evolution of language and culture can be studied from the perspective of
the history of language. Within the discipline of historical linguistics, the most
important source of history is the interpretation of ancient texts, whereas the
most important source of pre-history is the method of comparative recon-
struction. Results from comparative reconstruction are frequently compared
to results from archaeology, anthropology, historical geography, and so forth,
putting pieces together into a patchwork that would represent, as far as pos-
sible, a presumed reality. This method, often labelled linguistic prehistory, is
a very powerful tool to investigate prehistory, in particular when combined
with other methodologies, such as those derived from other disciplines, e.g.
statistics, phylogenetics, or geography (see, e.g. Campbell 2013, pp. 405 ff.).
However, even though the method of linguistic reconstruction can reach
far back in prehistory (8,000–10,000 years), way beyond the earliest written,
interpretable attestations of language, it has considerable shortcomings
Language: The Role of Culture and Environment 85
when it comes to going beyond that time. By means of reconstruction, we

are able to attain a common point in prehistory, some sort of zero, where
all the different branches and sprouts of language change in a family meet
in prehistory, in a common proto-language. Beyond that, most reconstruc-
tions remain speculation, both on the form and the meaning side.
As mentioned above, basic vocabularies play an important role in cur-
rent historical linguistics, when analysed by means of software borrowed
from biostatistics, using Bayesian statistics, labelled language phylogenies or
linguistic phylogenetics. Here, not just language subgrouping and diversity
is being measured, but also linguistic time-depth and origin of prehistoric
migrations (see, e.g. Bouckaert et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2015).
Another powerful instrument for detecting the prehistory of language is
that of typology, where structures of languages are investigated over lan-
guage family boundaries, systematically looking for common patterns. Some
scholars assume that deep family relationships can be established by means of
typology (Dunn et al. 2005; Wichmann & Saunders 2007). A precondition
for this assumption is that some typological features (e.g. word order), just
like some lexical meanings (see Section 3.3 below), remain extremely stable.
However, a serious piece of criticism can be advanced against this theory:
from historical linguistic data we know that typological features are highly af-
fected by areal influence, which means that any feature in typology can poten-
tially be changed under certain circumstances (e.g. Campbell 2013, p. 486).
The considerable gap existing between the reconstructed proto-languages
(i.e. various reconstructed proto-families, such as Indo-European, Uralic) and
early language, emerging several tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of
thousands of years earlier, remains a problem. Even though there have been
several attempts towards reconstructing a common human proto-language,
such as recently the language labelled Ninatic, based on basic vocabulary
(40-Swadesh list: see below on this term) from 3,000 unrelated languages, us-
ing a computational, distance-based method (Wichmann, Holman & Brown
2010), attempts like these remain extremely speculative (cf. Section 3.4 below).
On the other hand, the methods of typology and the historical-compar-
ative method can be combined to draw conclusions on deep prehistory. By
looking at 10,000 years of change, we can make estimations about change
at earlier stages, such as changes in the mythic stage, where language once
evolved. This method has for instance been used by Berndt Heine and Tania
86 Gerd Carling
Kuteva (2006). They employed grammaticalization, which is attested as an

important driving force in language change, as a model for reconstructing
the development of early language.
3.3. Socio-Cultural Niches and Proto-Vocabularies

The prototypical socio-cultural niche, or Lifeworld (see Chapter 1: Life-
worlds in this volume), consists of an ethno-linguistic group of 150–300
hominines, sharing a habitat, complex family relations, socio-cultural
structures, as well as language. This is the “proto-group,” within which
we suppose that language once emerged. It is also within this unit that we
should look for linguistic reflections of distributed cognition, i.e. the way
in which environment and artefacts interact with ideas and memories by
means of language. All items shared by the socio-cultural niche, i.e. habitat,
complex family relations, socio-cultural structures, have their reflection in
the particular language, shared by the hominines of the niche.
We should expect items of a socio-cultural niche – concrete artefacts
to a higher degree than abstracts notions – to be reflected in vocabulary,
something that makes vocabulary particularly important when investigat-
ing reflections of distributed cognition in language. However, as we know
from languages spoken in socio-cultural niches in natural habitats simi-
lar to those of early hominines, vocabulary is typically very complex and
highly language-specified, i.e. vocabulary becomes specialised to cover a
huge number of items specific to the socio-cultural environment.
Nevertheless, we can make attempts towards generalisations over lan-
guage boundaries, establishing a semantic proto-vocabulary, which is sup-
posed to be shared by all languages and which has a high degree of stability
(see Geeraerts 2010, pp. 127–137). This can be done in various ways. The
highly influential list of lexical meanings by Morris Swadesh, the so-called
“Swadesh-list” (Campbell 2013, pp. 448 ff.), was established basically on
gut feeling from fieldwork on languages from various different language
families, with no underlying statistical data. The lists by Cliff Goddard
and Anna Wierzbicka on Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see Geeraerts,
op. cit.) were based partly on the universality criterion: lexical meanings
of a proto-language were expected to occur in all of the world’s languages
(which is not the case with the Swadesh list) and reflect a very basic setup
of semantic classes and items, partly on internal definition by speakers, a

methodology known as reductive paraphrasing (Geeraerts 2010, op. cit.).
In the study by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (2008) on universal
borrowability of vocabularies, stability, and universality in vocabulary was
investigated statistically. Their results (Haspelmath & Tadmor 2008, Chap-
ter 3) implicitly include the conceptualisation of universality by Goddard
and Wierzbicka: their basic vocabulary list, also labelled “Leipzig-Jakarta
list” was derived by statistically matching borrowability (whether or not
the lexemes are frequently borrowed), representation (whether they occur
in many languages), age (whether they have a long existence in language),
and simplicity (whether they are typically monomorphemic) of the lexical
meanings in their data set, based on a database with a worldwide sample
of 41 languages and a fixed list of 1,460 lexical meanings. Looking at their
list we notice a certain overlap with the classes and items of Goddard and
Wierzbicka’s proto-language, as well as, of course, the Swadesh list. How-
ever, there is also a correlation with universal frequency, with lexemes such
as personal pronouns/determiners (he, she, it, we, this, I), local markers
(here, under), as well as frequent verbs (go, come, say).
In relation to language evolution, the Leipzig-Jakarta list reflects im-
portant categories of Donald’s model, lexical meanings that are related to
mimesis, i.e. bodily or sensory-motor functions (rise, lie, stand, run, go,
blow, throw, hit, fart), body parts (ear, neck, arm/hand), or members
of the family. Besides, there are also items connected to the environment
(stone, leaf, rain) or notion of time intervals (night). In Haspelmath and
Tadmor’s (2008) results, there are four semantic domains that are identi-
fied as particularly stable (and thus universal), namely Sense perception,
Spatial relations, The body, and Kinship.
However, a fundamental problem of proto-vocabularies like these is – for
our purpose – that their implicit goal is to create vocabularies of seman-
tic concepts that are universally valid and therefore necessarily have to be
culture-free (cf. Haspelmath & Tadmor 2008). A negative side-effect is that
very important components in the evolution of human language, the role of
cultural artefacts (exograms in Donald’s terms), the relation to the ecological
and socio-cultural environment as well as the capacity of tool-making are en-
tirely left aside. This is due to practical reasons: human habitats and cultures
are extremely variable, and a common proto-vocabulary that compasses,
88 Gerd Carling
besides very fundamental items such as (in the Leipzig-Jakarta list) louse,
ant, fly, root, leaf, wood, house, rope, to tie would be extremely long
and complex and miss its main purpose. Let’s for instance consider verbs like
hammer, stick, cut, saw, dig, and the corresponding tools, such as axe,
hammer, stick, knife, sickle, saw, and spade. On the one hand we have
the functions, reflected in the activities, i.e. the verbs, on the other hand we
have the cultural artefacts, i.e. the tools, typically reflected in nouns. The func-
tions are possibly universal, but the tools are definitely not. In some cultures,
like in the Amazon, there are three main tools, the knife (of stone), used for
cutting, sticking, sawing, the axe (of stone), used for cutting, hammering, and
the digging stick (of wood), used for digging. In other cultures, there are
specialised tools for the functions which are here joined together, and there is
a rich vocabulary of different terms for tools. What we meet everywhere is a
highly specialised vocabulary for cultural artefacts as well as for items of the
environment, trees, plants, fruits, and wild or domesticated animals. Still, we
would expect that these items of vocabulary constituted an important part
of the language of early humans.
3.4. The Role of Iconicity

It is obvious that iconicity or sound symbolism (which is discussed fur-
ther in Chapter 2: Mimesis in this volume) has an impact on language.
There is also a rich literature on the role of iconicity in the development
of early language (for an overview, see Zlatev, Chapter 2 in this volume;
and Carling & Johansson 2014). The basic theoretical problem of iconic-
ity and early language is whether early language was mainly composed
of motivated lexical material, which then later became conventionalised
and arbitrary, or whether early language was, like most contemporary or
attested languages, a mixture of motivated and arbitrary forms. Roger W.
Wescott (1971, pp. 426–427) proposed the following evolutionary paths:
(1) “language once consisted exclusively of icons, but […] this pan-iconicity
was shattered by the introduction of symbols, which have subsequently
been replacing icons at a constant rate,” (2) “when primordial icons be-
came symbolic (as a result of sound-shifts of visual stylizations), new icons
are introduced at such a rate as to maintain the proportion of the two
sign-types at a roughly constant level,” and (3) “the relative proportions
of iconism and symbolism in language fluctuate slowly but rhythmically.”

The first proposition, i.e. early language was highly motivated and became
more and more conventionalised and arbitrary, is defended by a num-
ber of contemporary linguists, such as Piotr Sadowski (2001) and Talmy
Givón (2001). The theory is supported by evidence from restricted systems,
such as home signing children (Goldin-Meadow 2002) or the development
of writing systems (Givón 2001). According to Heine and Kuteva (2007,
pp. 348–349), there is opposite evidence, among others in communication
systems of animals, and therefore this question requires much further re-
search and “must remain unsolved at the present state of research.”
Looking at iconicity from a cross-linguistic perspective, we notice that
iconicity occurs more frequently within certain semantic domains, such as
Sense representation, Deixis, Acoustic sound, or Physical property,
such as being round, being cave-like (see Carling & Johansson 2014). It is
also apparent that iconicity is a mechanism of language change that operates
on various levels: it is involved in creating new lexical material by means of
lexical coining, morphological derivation and semantic change (Carling &
Johansson 2014), as well as being systematically re-organising paradigms,
such as deictic demonstratives (Johansson & Carling 2015). It is also likely
that iconicity plays a role in some of the core parts of the proto-vocabulary
(see, e.g. Wichmann, Holmann & Brown 2010; Johansson 2013), i.e. lexi-
cal meanings such as mother, I, you, breast, knee, we, name, nose, in
which, from a cross-linguistic perspective, certain phonemes are much more
frequently occurring than others. However, this is an issue that requires fur-
ther investigation, involving coding and statistical analysis of huge data sets.
3.5. Vocabularies for Culture and Environment

In order to get around the problem of universally valid vocabularies for cul-
ture and environment (discussed under Section 3.2), we have created culture
vocabulary lists, which are supposed to be different from common universal,
“culture-free” lists. Our hypothesis is that since early hominines lived in
highly varying ecological niches, we would expect the vocabulary of early
language(s) to reflect this variability. Even though early language(s) were
possibly as rich in lexical meanings as contemporary languages of speakers
living in natural ecological niches are, certain parts of the vocabulary, and
90 Gerd Carling
especially the parts related to the system of sustainability, would be highly

variable as well as having a high degree of stability.
The purpose of our culture lists is to create individual lists adapted to
regions, areas, and language families, and to represent, as far as possible,
the lexical content of socio-cultural niches and their environment. A more
detailed description of the principles of data collection and coding, as well
as preliminary results will be published elsewhere (Carling et al. forthcom-
ing). Here, we will give a brief overview as well as discuss some of the
preliminary results.
The culture vocabulary lists are derived from culture vocabulary tem-
plates that contain a fixed number of categories. In the culture vocabulary
lists, the lexical meanings are different, depending on: (a) geographic area;
(b) system of subsistence; and (c) kinship system. All lists contain the same
main categories, but the number of subcategories as well as the number of
lexical meanings is different, depending on area/subsistence/kinship system
and the degree of dependence within the subsistence system (cf. Murdock
1981, p. 92; Lomax et al. 1977). This means that we define at first a list for
a certain subsistence system using mainly the Murdock/Lomax taxonomy.
The main categories as well as the subcategories of the list piloted in Carling
et al. (to appear), Plough Agriculture-Europe /Intense-Cereals/ Bilateral
Kin, can be viewed in Table 3.1. The two columns to the left, corresponding
respectively to the main category and the subcategory, are similar (but not
necessarily the same) across the culture templates. The lexical meanings are
different depending on the taxonomic system of subsistence and are selected
according to (cf. the descriptions above):
• g eography and ecology (e.g. historic and prehistoric subsistence system,
areas of species, such as crops, wild plants, game, and predators)
• relevance to subsistence system (e.g. degree of dependence, cf. above)
• cultural function or affordance (cf. Section 8.3.1)
• occurrence in reconstructed vocabulary of language families (e.g. Schrader
1923; Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995; Mallory & Adams 2006)
These lists are not supposed to cover all lexical meanings in various cultures,
but to make up a representative selection, suitable for quantitative analy-
sis. The subsistence system of the piloted list, which is specific to European
plough agriculture (cf. Lomax 1977, p. 678), is highly agriculture-dependent
(with plough), with cereals as the main crop, animal husbandry, partly
pastoralism (certain areas), and milking. Accordingly, the subcategories of
SUBSISTENCE/ ACTIVITIES, IMPLEMENTS, PRODUCTS and PRODUCE
are rich in terms. The winter-time stall-feeding of cattle and corporate vil-
lages is reflected by the SETTLEMENT category. In the ENVIRONMENT
category, game is less important as a protein source (due to the milking), but
on the other hand, predators are important since they impact on the keeping
of domestic animals. The terms are selected to cover this scenario as well as
the distribution areas of the wild and domesticated species of Europe. Within
KINSHIP, the terms are mainly selected to reflect a patrilinear exogamous kin
structure (Omaha, cf. Fortson 2010, pp. 20–21). The TIME category is select-
ed due to the geographic area (four seasons, visible main constellations), the
MATERIALS category focuses on historically important trade goods in the
history of Europe, which is partly overlapping with the PRODUCTS group.
Table 3.1. Part of culture list of taxonomic group Plough Agriculture-Europe /

Intense-Cereals/ Bilateral Kin (PA-EUROPE) including subcategories
and lexical meanings investigated in the study Carling et al. (to appear).
Main Category Subcategory Lexical meanings (in alphabetical order)

GAME bison/ deer/ hare/ wild pig/
wolf/ bear/ leopard/ lion/ fox/ jackal/ snake/
ENVIRONMENT PREDATORS
raven/ eagle/ bat/
WILD PLANTS berry/ mushroom/
ACTIVITIES plough/ sew/ sow/ spin (thread)/ weave/
(ceramic) pot/ axe/ axle/ cultivated field/
furrow/ harness/ hoe/ hub/ knife/ pasture/
IMPLEMENTS
plough/ saw/ scythe/ sickle/ spade/ stirrup/
wagon/ wheel/ yoke/
bee/ bull/ cat/ cattle (collective)/ chicken/
SUBSISTENCE DOMESTIC cow/ dog/ donkey/ duck/ goat/ hen/ horse/
ANIMALS lamb/ ox/ pig/ piglet/ ram/ rooster/ sheep
(collective)/ yearling/
apple/ barley/ flax/ grain (generic)/ grape/
PRODUCE
hops/ lentils/ oats/ rye/ turnip/ wheat/
beer/ beeswax/ flour/ fur/ grease/ honey/
PRODUCTS
mead/ meat/ milk/ salt/ wine/ wool/
92 Gerd Carling
For a different geographic area, as the Amazon, the list looks completely
different, not just for the lexical meanings, but also as to the relative num-
ber of lexical meanings, depending on degree of dependence within the
subsistence system.
The data, collected and coded in the primary analysis, published in
Carling et al. (to appear), was adapted and retrieved via the LUNDIC
database, a geographic database, containing typological and lexical data
from a great number of languages from different language families. Data
was collected and coded from 27 modern and 15 historical languages
from the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Armenian, Greek, Balto-Slavic, and
Indo-Aryan branches of the Indo-European language family. Lexemes was
coded as to whether they were inherited, borrowed or had an uncertain
origin. The category “uncertain origin” covered all terms, which could
not be identified as either clearly borrowed or clearly inherited. In real-
ity, the category is supposed to cover very early borrowings, which have
been obscured by several millennia of language change. The “inherited”
category covered both inherited words with reconstructed proto-forms
and cognates in other languages as well as internal derivations, using in-
herited roots. Furthermore, the number of cognates (i.e. different lexical
roots) and number of lexemes in languages was counted. Adjusting to the
methodology used in Haspelmath and Tadmor (2009), the borrowability
criterion was counted for by the coding of inherited/loaned/uncertain, the
age criterion was accounted for by omitting all post-colonial loans, i.e.
loans later than 1500 CE,1 the representation criterion2 was accounted
for by omitting languages that had less than 60% lexemes for lexical
meanings, and the simplicity criterion was accounted for by including
monomorphemic lexemes only (i.e. excluding compounds).
Our data sets were then analysed in several ways. At first, the average
distribution of origins was 63% inherited, 12% loaned, and 24% uncertain.
Even though our coding system was a bit different from that of Haspelmath
1 In Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009, p. 68), the age criterion gives the value 1.00
to lexemes earlier than 1000 CE and a value of 0.90 for lexemes earlier than
1500 CE.
2 Universality in Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009, which was based on data from
languages from different families.
and Tadmor (2009), the vocabulary of our list was borrowed to a very
low degree, compared to the range of borrowability in their study, which
was between the lowest 12% (Sense perception) and the highest 41.2%
(Religion and belief). A principal component analysis biplot of languages
demonstrated generally a high degree of stability of the culture vocabulary
list: the difference between the culture vocabulary and a similar biplot from
a completely loan-free Swadesh-list was almost identical, demonstrating a
very low effect of convergence or contact on this part of the vocabulary.
Figure 3.1. Component analysis biplot of individual subcategories in the data set

with the average position of inherited, borrowed or uncertain marked
in the biplot. Bubble size indicates average number of cognates per
category. From Carling et al. (to appear).
94 Gerd Carling
However, a principal component analysis biplot of subcategories (Figure 3.1)

or lexical meanings (Figure 3.2) demonstrated interesting results. A principal
component analysis biplot clusters data according to their similarities versus
differences in relation to an ±x/±y-axis. This means that lexical meanings that
are more similar in a certain quantified aspect are clustering together more
closely on the biplot, as here, inherited, uncertain or borrowed.
We also quantified the number of cognate roots, by means of bubble size,
on the biplots. It is interesting to note that the subcategories, belonging to
different sub-categories of the socio-cultural system and the environment,
clustered differently. Activities, implements, and products were more in-
herited, whereas domestic and wild animals, like the produce category,
were more uncertain (probably indicating early borrowing) or borrowed.
This result, even though it has to be regarded as preliminary, is promis-
ing. In the vocabulary of items directly or indirectly involved in everyday
Figure 3.2. Principal component analysis biplot of individual lexical meanings

in the data set. Bubble size indicates number of cognates per lexical
meaning. Terms in the direction of -x are more inherited, +x/+y more
loaned, -y more uncertain. Core vocabulary which is rich in cognates
and leaning from average to stable (mainly inherited) has been
marked by a shadow. From Carling et al. (to appear).
activities of the socio-cultural niches, there was a clear difference between

lexical meanings related to manufacturing processes (implements, prod-
ucts, activities) and lexical meanings of the environment (produce, wild
and domesticated animals). Furthermore, there was also a difference as to
whether some categories were more inclined towards lexical creativity: as
seen from Figure 3.2, some lexical meanings, basically from the domestic
animal and implements subcategory, were also very rich in cognate roots.
3.6. What Can Be Measured by Culture Lists?

The purpose of creating universal proto-vocabulary lists, like the Swadesh-
list, the Leipzig-Jakarta list, or the Natural Semantic Metalanguage list, is
to produce lists of lexical meanings, a proto-vocabulary, that are valid to
all languages, “culture-free,” as well as borrowed to a very low degree,
“contact-proof.” A further purpose is to reach beyond the level of indi-
vidual language families, as concluded by historical-comparative linguistics,
and reconstruct a basic core vocabulary, common to all languages and very
likely also a core of the basic vocabulary of early language. Here, we have
a fundamental problem. All languages are spoken in socio-cultural niches
and ecological environments, which are extremely diverse and variable.
This diversity is also a precondition for the development of language. If
tool-making, imitation and gesture were preceding language, it is also likely
that early language very quickly developed lexical signs, i.e. words, for all
these artefacts and activities, as well as for the most important parts of the
environment (game animals, predators, edible fruits, and so forth). Gesture
and imitation, like universal environmental categories, are covered by cur-
rent proto-vocabularies. However, tools, as well as ecosystem-dependent
items of the environment, are not at all captured by proto-vocabularies and
can probably never be, because of the rich diversity of the socio-cultural
niches, the environments, as well as the various languages. This is the main
reason for constructing the culture-vocabularies in our study. Now, the
question remains: can results from culture vocabularies, as those presented
under Section 3.3, be used for drawing conclusions on the development of
early language? This answer lies in the future. Results from a restricted lan-
guage family, like ours, can probably give some interesting indications, for
instance that lexical meanings of manufactured items or activities behave
96 Gerd Carling
differently from lexical meanings related to the environment, such as game

animals and produce, but much more data and many more language fami-
lies and regions are required before a stable tendency can be established.
Once the data is collected and coded, it can be statistically investigated
from a number of angles, e.g.
• Iconicity: are some cultural artefacts or environment-related items mo-
tivated to a higher degree than others?
• Stability: which lexical meanings or categories of culture vocabulary lists
are more stable than others?
• Linguistic creativity: which lexical meanings are richer in lexemes and
cognates? Is there a correlation between creativity and stability?
It is only when we have a possibility to investigate a greater number of
languages from a cross-linguistic and cross-geographical perspective, that
we can draw any conclusions on reflections of tool-making and the environ-
ment in the vocabulary of early language.
Sara Lenninger
Chapter Four
Pictures: Perceptions of Realism in
the Service of Communication
Pictures have not evolved as isolated phenomena in human culture, but

occupy their place and contribute to changes in the complex and intricate
processes we in this book designate as cultural evolution. In this chapter,
pictures are discussed as semiotic resources from a perspective of human
cultural evolution. The material picture (the picture-thing) is examined both
as a perceptual object, and as a communicative resource. An assumption
in this chapter is that the discrimination of the picture as a communicative
resource had (and may still have) a vital, but also distinct, role in the human
endeavour to explore sign relationships. Its distinctiveness does not consist
in being the original or the prior semiotic resource in relation to other se-
miotic resources developed in human communication. Rather, its specific
role derives from the combination of visual and communicative meanings
employed in pictures, having recourse to the inherent qualities of “natural
meaning,” but at the same time not being mere “natural experience.”
4.1. The Place of the Picture in the Human Lifeworld

In the following discussion, it will be taken for granted that the development
of representational signs is a competence within human culture (Donald
1991; Shore 1996), and in addition that representational signs have devel-
oped in interpersonal communication. A “sign” is here taken to constitute
a specific meaning construction in the human evolution of meanings. It is
a meaning construction whose users understand that something which is
present or presented also refers to the meaning of something else. The sign
concept will be further discussed below, but for now it is sufficient to say
that a pictorial surface may have adequate meanings, due to its specific
capacity to convey similarity relations, with or without the perceiver actu-
ally using the picture as a sign.
98 Sara Lenninger
We will suppose, though it cannot be proven, that although pictures are

not necessary parts of human culture, the human species has a natural apti-
tude for inventing pictures. As a consequence, if all pictures were destroyed
and picture making forgotten in human culture, pictures would probably
still be rediscovered sooner or later – and be “recognisable” as such.
4.1.1. Pictures and the Increase of Pictorial Diversity in Human

Society
Today, at almost any place where people spend their days – they can see
pictures. Pictures reach us from billboards in public spaces as well as ap-
pearing on packages of groceries; and they can be actively looked for on
digital screens as well as in magazines and books. Furthermore, we pick out
pictures to decorate our homes and our everyday objects, and we use them
to identify the driver on a driving licence, etc. Pictorial artefacts are genu-
inely integrated in a variety of activities in society such as arts, commercials,
politics, science, scribbling, and education. From a historical perspective,
this abundance of pictures in people’s everyday life is a recent phenomenon.
Changes in lifestyles, religious beliefs, and political stands have throughout
history given rise to new arenas, or new forms of pictorial messages, but
have also acted restrictively on those.
Moreover, technological advancements have made new pictorial practices
possible, and have successively made reproduction and distribution of pic-
tures more diverse, while also more efficiently spread. Nonetheless, despite
this diversity of forms, material things that are identified as pictures are
recognisable all through a disparate and sometimes fragmentarily recorded
human history and prehistory. Moreover, across cultural differences, and
despite over thousands of years in oblivion, not only initiated specialists, but
also laymen, recognise reference meaning in perceiving such things as the rich
drawings of animals from the Upper Palaeolithic cave sites. Hence, in their
way of construing visual mimesis, pictorial artefacts have remained relatively
stable and intelligible within human cultures for at least about 35–40 ka. The
pragmatic dimensions of the ice age pictures are, however, less open to inter-
pretations today. Pragmatic aspects are semiotic dimensions that go beyond
the mere recognition of visual referents and rely on meanings resulting from
the part played by pictures in specific cultures and uses.
Pictures: Perceptions of Realism in the Service of Communication 99
4.1.2. Studying the Origin of Pictures in Archaeology,

Anthropology and Cognitive Semiotics
The oldest dated cave-paintings we know of today suggest that for about
40 ka people – at different places in the world – have explored the per-
ceptual and communicative qualities of pictorial surfaces. However other
archaeological findings suggest that the technology to produce pictures (e.g.
production of pigmented compounds) had been around for at least twice as
long (Lombard 2007). Moreover, recent observations indicate that motoric
preconditions for performing fine-graded manipulations of surfaces were
available already in the human ancestor Homo erectus (Joordens et al.
2015). As far as we know as yet, the archaeological findings reveal a long
time lag from between the moment pictorial activities were potentially ac-
cessible to human technology and the rich pictorial activity which seems
to appear in some of the Upper Palaeolithic sites.
Archaeologists trace and explore ancient sites and settlements, and give
us data about their findings; anthropologists interpret the findings as cul-
tural objects and help us to learn more about the nature of human cultures.
Archaeological data and anthropological observations are crucial for the
inquiry into the origin of pictures. The research field is actively growing
and, not in the least, being increasingly diversified as far more sites around
the world are discovered or re-explored. Some of these recent findings are
discussed later in this chapter.
In cognitive semiotics the nature of meanings and the means of making
and sharing meanings are in focus. In cognitive semiotics “meaning” is
always considered as meaning from the point of view of someone and thus
must be a relational entity. Note however that in human culture meaning
is also a social activity; meaning is constructed as a common means to
organise shared and individual values.
From the perspective of cognitive semiotics, the study of the origin of
pictures requires attention to both the user and the medium used. Picture
semiotics consequently investigates the pictorial medium; how meaning
in pictures is organised, what constitutes pictures as signs, and how they
differ from other semiotic resources and media. In this discussion on the
origin of pictures, it is important to consider primarily two theoretical issues
within semiotic theory. The first has already been mentioned and concerns
100 Sara Lenninger
the definition of the sign. The sign concept is central in semiotic theory but
nevertheless is not uniform. As indicated above, in the present chapter, not
just any meaning relation is understood to be a sign. In fact, the sign is sup-
posed to be evolutionarily rare. Sign meanings are meaning constructions
with a fixed set of interrelated meanings that together constitute the sign.
From the point of view of the user, something which is experienced as
the expression is differentiated, within a sign relation, from something else
that is interpreted as its content (Sonesson 2009). The expression is overt
(present) for experience now and here (i.e. it can be perceptually present
such as when watching a picture, but it can also be primarily conceptually
present as when imagining a picture, or remembering a picture) but is at
the same time a means for attaining a second meaning; that is the content
of the sign. The content is “indirectly present” by way of the sign expres-
sion, and from the point of view of the interpreter, the two are not mixed.
When watching a photograph of a dog, you know you are not watching
a real dog, and you have different expectations of the picture-dog and the
real dog. One also knows that the real dog can change without affecting the
picture-dog, and vice-versa. However, if one of them is changed, the relation
between the two in the sign relation is nevertheless affected such that they
may become more or less similar to each other, or are matched according
to new features. The point of distinguishing the sign as a specific form of
meaning is not to imply that signs are detached from “natural meanings”
such as perception or emotions. On the contrary, perception and emotions
are vital aspects of sign meanings but sign meanings are also meaning rela-
tions with an additional specific intrinsic structure.
While this sign concept is narrow, requiring a specific intrinsic structure,
it is also, in another way, a broad conception of the sign. Anything, in expe-
rience and near experience, can be involved in a sign relation and take part
as expression, or content, or both. The picture, as a sign, is a sign relation
that is defined by its way of conveying meaning by similarity.
The second theoretical issue in semiotic theory that is important for
the present discussion is the division of a “plastic” and an “iconic” or-
der in pictorial meanings, as suggested by Jean-Marie Floch (1986, 2000)
and the so-called Groupe µ (Edeline et al. 1992). The division emphasises
the merged but distinct aspects of meaning-making in pictures, embrac-
ing materiality factors as well as perceptually perceived pictorial content.
Moreover, it defines the picture not only as a cognitive artefact – relying

on the concept of the icon – but also as a material experience enhancing
the perceptual qualities of surfaces (see further Section 4.2). Pictures are
thus always also “outer objects” constituted by “hands” and “minds” in
a communicative human culture. (Although today, the “hands” are often
experienced through photographic technology, computer programs, etc.)
Further, a concept of prototypical pictures is implied in the following
discussion on pictures (Sonesson 1989). Prototypical pictures are what are
commonly conceived as representational or realistic pictures in the sense
that they contain visual material that is perceived as resembling, to some
extent, other objects or scenes that can be perceived, or can be imagined
to be perceived, in the ordinary (not pictorially mediated) Lifeworld (see
Chapter 1: Lifeworlds). Note, however, that this concept of a prototypical
picture does not have to coincide with the idea of the realistic picture being
the origin or the aim (goal) of a pictorial activity. The preconditions for
realism in pictures does not mean that they posit themselves as being real,
nor as necessarily counting as real, but that they suggest a display appearing
as a real object or circumstance. In this way, pictures do not only elucidate
the visible as a specific semiotic structure, but also allow deviations from
such expectations in the visual fields to be shared as meaningful. Hence,
one also expects others to perceive deviations in similar ways.
4.1.3. Perception and Cognition in the Development of Pictures

When searching for ways to describe the evolution of the picture from a
cognitive semiotic perspective, one should take into account the picture
both as perceptual experience and as a sign resource. Both aspects are key to
the understanding of the origin of pictures. Therefore, the two approaches
to meaning will not be put into opposition here, as is sometimes the case
(cf. Schwartz 2006). Rather it will be supposed that there is a reciprocal
relationship between experienced visual meanings and meanings in the sign
relationship that grabs our attention.
A phenomenological approach to cognitive semiotics is one that treats
meanings as inner and outer experiences (see Chapter 1: Lifeworlds). In
the interest of understanding human consciousness, Edmund Husserl in-
vestigates “image consciousness” (Bildbewusstsein) as a specific form of
102 Sara Lenninger
consciousness involving both “imagining” and “perception” (Sonesson

1989; Kurg 2014). It has also been noticed that Husserl’s conception of
the picture remained rather stable across his more elaborated investigations
of “image consciousness” (Stjernfelt 2007). Hence the main subject for
Husserl’s investigation of pictures is not to determine what kind of object
the physical thing that is a picture is, but rather he aimed to explore the
other instances of meaning involved in picture understanding. This is not
the place to embark on a detailed discussion on Husserl’s theory of pictures.
Nevertheless, his discrimination of several intra-related instances that pre-
suppose each other and together form the basis of picture understanding is
useful to illustrate the semiotic complexity of pictures. Three instances that
together define the understanding of pictures have been suggested according
to this discrimination (Sonesson 1989; Moran 2005; Stjernfelt 2007); the
Picture-thing, the Picture-object and Picture-subject or sujet. In this divi-
sion the Picture-thing is the physical thing that can hang on the wall or be
printed on a T-shirt. The Picture-object is the sensuous body of the picture
that is discriminated from the physical thing hanging on the wall. Hence,
the Picture-object pertains to the experience of, for example, seeing “mum”
in a small, flat, black, and white figure. The Picture-subject is the object
depicted (e.g. “mum”) from the world of experience or fantasy.
Thus, what a picture is, and its ways of having meaning are tightly
connected. For sketching the evolution of pictures, which is the aim in
this chapter, Michael Polanyi’s (1970) idea to describe the picture as a
“transnatural object” has been suggestive. In a paper to the British society
of aesthetics, “What is a painting?” Polanyi (1970) applies his theory on
focal and subsidiary awareness to human perception and knowledge. There
is, according to this idea, existential meaning alongside sign meaning; in
fact, the transgression to sign meaning in development is a “special case of
existential meaning” (Polanyi 1958, p. 91). Subsidiary knowledge is a “tacit
component” and is thus not necessarily known in itself, “but is known in
terms of something focally known, to the quality of which it contributes;
and to this extent it is unspecifiable” (ibid., p. 88).
Pictures are objects that rely on perceptual appearances known from per-
ception in natural (ordinary) space, while they simultaneously awake a new
genuine meaning unknown in any such perception. Thus, as a transnatural
object, the picture is an object in which tacit expectations of “known”
objects are merged with forms that substantially deviate from those ex-
pectations. Polanyi takes the painting as an example. He agrees with E. H.
Gombrich (1962) that a painting consists of canvas and paint blobs, how-
ever, he objects to the viewpoint that one either sees the canvas plus blobs,
or a painting (cf. a pictorial painting). The nature of a “representational
painting” (i.e. picture) always includes “illusion,” Polanyi maintains, and
is a “focally seen result” of the whole. The parts, such as paint blobs and
canvas, however, do not cease to exist to the perceiver but “to see them
forming a whole is to be aware of them subsidiarily” (Polanyi 1970, p. 228).
The unique integration of incompatibles, created by the perception of a
three-dimensional object from a flat pictorial surface, “reveals to us some-
thing beyond all that exists in nature or human affairs” (ibid., p. 230).
From this idea about the unique experience of incompatibles, Polanyi goes
on to suggest a concept of art – indeed this experience is what identifies the
category of art according to Polanyi (1970).
The duality Polanyi points to is based on a conflict between ordinary
perception of space and the tacit knowledge of the limited depth of surfaces.
This conflict – motivated by the materiality of the picture itself – makes the
picture into a unique object in human affairs. Also the perceptual psycholo-
gist James Gibson pinpoints a duality in the meaning of pictures. However,
while the duality in Polanyi’s description of the picture is based on a conflict
between what is subsidiarily known and what is perceived and thus singles
out a painting as an object of art, Gibson (1983) introduces the dimen-
sion of a referential function in pictures. A dimension that appears to be
implied or taken for granted in Polanyi’s (1970) discussion on the picture
(but cf. Polanyi 1958 above).
Pictures have at least two kinds of meaning according to Gibson (1979,
1983); affordance and referential meaning. Affordance is practical mean-
ing related to the picture surface, while referential meaning is connected to
meanings resulting from the picture being a sign. Referential meaning in
pictures directs attention to visual objects posited as existing outside the
picture, or imagined as concepts, whereas affordances are meanings present
directly on the pictorial surface (see Section 8.3). Colours, size, and other
physical qualities are features that affect the affordances of any perceived
object, but pictures are strange objects because a picture can also afford
(have affordance in relation to) qualities that are not present for practical
104 Sara Lenninger
meaning. Practical affordances in perceiving an apple, a tree, or a horse can

be communicated by pictures because of their perceptual quality. Neverthe-
less, these are “false” or second-hand perceptions. Referential meaning,
on the other hand, is not perceivable directly from the picture itself. It is
an additional structure that makes a common communicative use of the
second-hand perception afforded by the picture according to Gibson. To
use referential meaning, however, is a competence every child has to learn.
Gibson (1983) explicitly comments on the role of the picture as an arte-
fact in human culture and claims that the practise and invention of pictures
gave rise to a change in human thinking. He argues that the invention of
pictures had an impact on how people perceived the world. The process
is bidirectional and accumulative; pictures derive from the attentiveness
to meaning in perception, and the experience of pictures reinforces the
tendency to process visual meanings. He is less clear, however, as to why
pictures evolved: was there a need for a change in thinking about the world?
The psychologist and neuroscientist Merlin Donald (1991) also connects
pictures to a theory on the evolution of the human mind. The emergence
of pictures, he suggests, was part of the development of a greater cognitive
network (shared with others) and was motivated by a growing need to
store and extend memory in the existing narrative culture. The invention
of the picture was part of a technological development that has improved
the cognitive link to the external world (Donald 1991).
According to Donald (1991), the driving forces in the evolution of culture
and of cognition are inseparable. Culture is a collective resource and con-
straint that is co-opted in the living conditions of any species. The evolution
of the (human) mind becomes linked to increasing structures for passing
down existing culture across the (hominid) species. One level fosters needs
that require solving and lead to the next level in the cognitive evolution.
Donald observes that pictures arise quite late in human culture; moreover,
he points out that pictures are not directly linked to biological changes in
human evolution. The picture emerged as an additional – extra-somatic–
mnemonic resource enriching an existing mythic culture (ibid., 1991).
Donald’s discussion on the evolution of the human cognitive culture
has greatly influenced anthropological discourses that elaborate prehistoric
archaeological findings (Henshilwood & Marean 2003). Note that Donald
places the emergence of the pictorial artefact within the structure of a social
culture. This dimension is less present in Gibson’s ecological approach – and

perhaps cautiously avoided by Polanyi (1970). Emphasising personal expe-
rience, Polanyi (1958) seems to overlook the possibility that interpersonal
knowledge forms a substantial part of human personal knowledge.
4.2. Variables for Analysing Visual Meanings in Pictures

Before continuing the discussion on the origin and development of pictures
as semiotic resources in human culture, we need to return to the analytic
division of pictures in iconic and plastic organisation (Floch 1986, 2000;
Edeline et al. 1992) mentioned in section 4.1.2. However, in order to avoid
confusion with feasible interpretations of “icons,” and “iconicity” in semi-
otic theory, the iconic order will be renamed “the pictorial order” or “the
pictorial level” in pictures (following Sonesson 1996, 1998). Note, though,
that this shift also implies a relation to what is described as prototypical
pictures above (Section 4.1.2).
At the end of this section it will be observed that the pictorial order, in its
parts, is susceptible to rendering two related axes of variables referring to
visual realism, together describable as the axes of phantasm. One of them
renders “natural seeing” as if seeing objects in the Lifeworld, and the other
deals with the perceived scene as something believable, or not, as part of
the existing or possible Lifeworld.
In the analytic division of pictorial and plastic orders the pictorial order
involves mimetic qualities in pictures (see Chapter 2: Mimesis). The picto-
rial order refers to the suggested possible Lifeworld. In the pictorial order
visual meanings like seeing “a face,” “a lion,” “a coat made of fur” or
seeing “a unicorn” are analysed, but so are meanings that specify visual
conditions such as light reflections, space relationships, or “landscape.”
Together, the pictorial order relates to the recognition of “outer,” percep-
tual, or imaginable, objects.
The plastic order, on the other hand, disregards the figurative (mimetic)
theme specified in the pictorial order. The plastic order involves qualities such
as colour, hue and texture, but also graphical and compositional aspects such
as “lines,” “dots,” “compactness,” and “directors.” The plastic ordering in
pictures refers to the qualities of the picture surface when abstracted from
pictorial figuration (see Figure 4.1) (Edeline et al. 1992; Floch 1986).
106 Sara Lenninger
Figure 4.1. From the point of view of the plastic order the print above is a high
contrast image consisting in a black surface and white stripes (or a
larger black surface, and black and white stripes). From the point of
view of the pictorial order it can be interpreted as a picture of two
zebras facing each other in front of a black background. Serigraph by
V. Vasarely, 1989, “Tsikos – C (Stripes – C)” (with permission from
Masterworks Fine Art Gallery, Oakland Hills, CA).
Note that the distinction between the pictorial and plastic organisation in
pictures points to fundamental properties in the picture as a semiotic re-
source. A central point, that I derive from this division, is that the picture
surface is an artefact that contains two domains of meaning each of which
can be developed, refined, and changed, even though such modifications
of either domain have effects on the other. All production of pictures is af-
fected by this relationship; hence it is also a relationship that professional
producers continuously explore in their work.
Again, from the standpoint of a prototypical picture, the picture is a layout
that renders meaning by suggesting similarity with the perception of familiar
objects that are extrinsic to the picture surface, while it at the same time
fundamentally differs from such perceptions. These are meaning relations
that pertain to the pictorial organisation where, as pointed out using the dog
example above (in Section 4.1.2), the contrast between pictorial perception
and the implication of perceiving the “real thing” fundamentally influences
the ranges of meanings that are elaborated. Two non-exclusive variables for
the link between the picture and the potential lived world should be distin-
guished here. Hence a picture can present a “naturalistic vision” (e.g. an
illusion) of a believable scene or action, but it can also present a naturalistic
vision of a non-believable scene (e.g. pictorial fantasy as a “realistic” picture,
e.g. see the dragon biting into human flesh illustrated in Cornelius van Haar-
lem’s painting “Two followers of Cadmus devoured by a Dragon,” 1588, oil
on canvas, National Gallery, London. Visual features, such as bodies and
skin tissue, are rendered realistically, while the dragon scene as a Lifeworld
experience is mythological). On the other extreme, a believable scene (in the
Lifeworld) can be presented with only limited perceptual correspondence
to support visual similarity. The line drawing in Figure 4.2 communicates
assembly instructions for putting a piece of furniture together, illustrating
the details needed for this purpose. A correct correspondence to the factual
pieces is key to following the instructions. However, the line drawing does not
give the impression of presenting a natural vision with shading and colours.
Figure 4.2. The picture is an assembly instruction giving visual instructions on

how to put a piece of furniture together. The image renders focal
but only low visual correspondences to its real world pieces, while
the expected validity to actually put the factual pieces together is
nevertheless high (With permission from IKEA).
108 Sara Lenninger
Indeed, ancient Greek mythologies tell us that pictorial illusions have fas-
cinated perceivers for long. Moreover, the development of technology has
supported a striving to enhance the visual correspondence to the lived world
in pictures. Nevertheless, the appreciation of “naturalistic” illusions by
way of the picture is nonetheless often marginal for its conceived mean-
ing. Interestingly the fascination of trompe-l’oeil pictures, and some three-
dimensional films can be given as illustrative exceptions because in those
pictures, the variable of realistic visual correspondence is a vital aspect of
the pictorial meaning. A central idea with a trompe-l’oeil picture is the
possibility of “someone being fooled” for a moment, and the subsequent
reflection on that experience.
Pictures that are realistic in the sense of presenting naturalistic visions of
believable or unbelievable scenes are connected to questions of verisimili-
tude (creditability or plausibility). In this respect, different aspects of realism
relations in pictures work differently. This is why a photographic picture
with high-resolution is not necessarily perceived as depicting a more realistic
world-scenery than a less rich line drawing. In the end, the experience of
realism in a picture may depend on the appreciation of the pictorial subject
as a plausible Lifeworld scene, rather than depending on its conditions for
rendering rich visual cueing.
The variations from the point of view of the plastic organisation do not
involve realism in the same manner as from the point of view of pictorial
organisation. Observe, however, that meaning in the plastic order is abstract
in relation to visual realism, but concrete on the level of having meaning
based on the factual materiality of the pictorial surface. The impending
variations are immense, and I will not try to cover them here. The point is
that variations of these in-built visual variables (the plastic and the pictorial
orders, including the variables in the axes of phantasm) are intrinsically
explored in the rich history of human investigations of pictoriality and
visual rhetoric.
4.3. Starting from Scratch, and the Blombos Stone Effect

Trying to find the first pictorial artefacts in human culture is perhaps un-
rewarding. Pictures made in perishable materials likewise perish making it
impossible to say when the first pictorial artefacts were made. Moreover,
reflections on a water surface may have been contemplated many times in

prehistory, but could not be preserved. What is drawn in the sand likewise
perishes. Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective the beautiful and rich
pictures from Upper Palaeolithic found at different places in the world are
rather recent (30–40 ka old).
4.3.1. On Fossils and Artefacts

However, the parietal paintings and engravings belonging to Upper Pal-
aeolithic culture were not the first graphical manipulations of surfaces in
human history. Archaeological findings suggest that the technology to pro-
duce, refine, and stock raw materials that can be used for painting, or to
improve carving, are at least 60–100 ka old (Lombard 2007; Henshilwood
et al. 2011). Analyses of findings from Middle Stone Age sites in South
Africa strongly indicate that mixtures of mastic or fat, with powdered
ochre or coal were used. Archaeologists have suggested possible usages of
these compounds; such as adhesives for hafting in tool technology, or as
compounds used for (body) painting. Taken together, we have reasons to
believe that people in the Middle Stone Age era explored different mixtures
for different usages (Wadley et al. 2009). We can also presume from this
that a technology that could be used for producing painted pictures may
precede the oldest figurative paintings found so far with up to 60 ka.
While there is, at present, no clear evidence that the compounds with
ochre powder were used for body painting or to paint objects (although
cf. Henshilwood et al. 2011) archaeologists have found pieces of ochre
and bones with engravings in the site of Blombos caves, South Africa that
are estimated to originate more than 70 ka ago (Henshilwood et al. 2002,
2009). The sheer number of findings of this kind supports the interpretation
that the engravings were deliberately worked out. Moreover, the fact that
the pieces are found in separate historical layers indicates that the activity
to engrave on pieces of ochre persisted over a long time (more than 25 ka),
and indeed underwent changes. Together this suggests that the engravings
are part of a sociocultural trajectory (Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011).
Interestingly, the publications of the ochre engravings at the Blombos
caves seem to have given archaeologists renewed interest to re-examine
already accessible findings. In the so-called Dubois collection, stored at
110 Sara Lenninger
the Naturalis Museum in Leiden since the early 1900s, the archaeologist
Josephine Joordens and colleagues (2015) have recently made an amaz-
ing observation. On a fossil freshwater shell assemblage, the researchers
observed geometric marks that they interpret as engravings. The fossil was
originally found at a site excavated in the 1890s in Java, Indonesia. Earlier
dating of the site, and modern techniques to date the sediments in the shell
fossil, reinforce the interpretation that the shell belonged to a Homo erectus
habitat about 500 ka ago. If this is correct, the zigzag mark on the shell
fossil from Java antedates the oldest known marks made by Homo sapiens
by over 300 ka (Joordens et al. 2015).
Further, remarkable abstract marks were uncovered at Gorham’s cave in
2012. The site is located in Gibraltar on the southern end of the Iberian Pen-
insula, and has been known as an archaeological site since 1907. Moreover,
it has been “accepted” as being a Neanderthal habitat since the late 1980s
(Gamble 1999). The etchings, which are engraved on a horizontal platform
inside the cave, are a few millimetres deep, and have a size of about 20320
centimetres. By trying to replicate the marks archaeologists have concluded
that the etchings at Gorham’s cave are unlikely to have been made by a
stroke of coincidence (Rodriguez-Vidal et al. 2014).
The observations about the fossil from Trinil in Java and the etchings
from Gibraltar are interesting for our discussion on the development of
pictures for different reasons. First, as claimed by Joordens et al. (2015), the
findings indicate that the motoric control to engrave a solid surface was in
place in our hominid ancestors. Whether the marks are the remains of an
intentional act of engraving (by one individual, with one tool in one single
session), are a side effect of a distinct intentional act, or are a combined
result of several intentional acts, is an issue which will probably have to
be discussed further among anthropologists. A single engraved shell fossil
does not demonstrate a habit or a common capacity in a culture, but it
indicates a potentiality. Couplings between “single” observations at differ-
ent places in different contexts are scientifically inconclusive, but may in
the end indicate a trend. Moreover, unexpected affordances (e.g. a “given”
opportunistic moment) and elements of chance are not uninteresting for
understanding cultural evolution and should not be dismissed. The element
of chance involved in a developmental chain (or branch) is connected with
the probability in any of the thousands foregoing and coming moments

associated with that development (cf. Polanyi 1958).
Finally, observations on human infants observing their own-made marks
on a surface may support the idea of ornament being a spontaneous out-
come of a human impulse. Typically, when a child draws a finger, for
example, in the food plate, it will hesitate and withdraw the hand from
the visual field a few seconds and watch the mark (Matthews 2011). The
material properties of the surface afford manipulation for the child.
4.3.2. Visual Manifestations of Meaning Beyond the Body

As said, the pictures made in the Upper Palaeolithic culture are probably
not the first manifestations of human visuographic activity. Deliberate en-
gravings on extra-somatic surfaces (Henshilwood et al. 2011) and body
ornament with beads or pigment (Henshilwood et al. 2011; Vanhaeren et al.
2013) can be traced in layers dated to Middle Stone Age in South Africa.
The reasons for those activities, and the nature of the semiotic complexity
in Middle Stone Age, are however debated. Whereas some researchers argue
that traces from these activities prove the presence of a cognitive culture
that already is on par with modern cognition (e.g. Henshilwood et al. 2011;
Vanhaeren et al. 2013), others advocate more restricted interpretations.
Questions are raised as to whether cognition in technology and material
culture necessarily invokes a modern “sign culture” processing complex
representational signs (Wadley, Hodgskiss & Grant 2009; Garofoli 2014).
In semiotic theory, a central aim is to identify different types of semiotic
relations, such as meanings experienced (or produced) by way of similar-
ity (iconicity), proximity (indexicality) or by mere conventions (symbolic-
ity), across different pragmatic achievements. Moreover, it is often noted
that meanings are most often understood as combinations of these differ-
ent types of relations (Sebeok 1976; Colapietro 1996, in interpretation of
Charles S. Peirce). Indexicality, that is, meaning by proximity or contiguity
is a semiotic relation that has been singled out for not needing additional ab-
stract processing to constitute shared meanings (Piaget 1945, 1947; Bruner
1966; Daddesio 1994). In following-up on warnings for ascribing too much
of “modern cognition” into the Middle Stone Age cultures, indexicality has
recently been put forth as a simpler, and presumably better, description of
112 Sara Lenninger
how cognition worked within this culture. Hence, starting out from the
position that the Middle Stone Age is best understood as a material culture,
indexical meanings – as opposed to mentalistic inferences – are supposed
to enact social strategies in the Middle Stone Age, and thus explaining the
meaning of body ornaments for example (Garofoli 2014).
The remark on indexicality giving simpler explanations for processing
communicative meaning and values in groups of people is important. How-
ever, so is the observation commenting on the “next step,” that is, that the
transition from meaning by mere indexicality into abstract sign relations
is not clear-cut. As noted by Elisabeth Bates and colleagues (1979), the
normboundedness of symbols (signs that need a shared conventionality
to specify meaning) cannot always – from the subject’s point of view – be
distinguished from referential sign use that originate from indexical rela-
tions. My point about the beads goes two ways; there is no evidence of
cognitive limitations that preclude the possibility that meaning founded
upon indexical relations (as when wearing beads) also oscillated into having
more abstract referential meaning (in Gibson’s sense) in the Middle Stone
Age cultures; and even today, the person who is actually wearing the pearls
is the one that profits most from the value attached to them.
4.4. Figurative and Non-figurative Paintings in

Upper Palaeolithic
The discussion above concentrates on whether engraved portable objects
and the presumed usages of beads in Middle Stone Age are evidence of
abstract thinking with communicative signs or not. However, although
the critique so far put forth is that the debate concentrates too much on
verifying or refuting abstract representative meaning relations as an all-or-
nothing threshold in Middle Stone Age communication, our concern from
the point of view of analysing pictoriality in the Upper Palaeolithic culture
is instead that such a discussion is almost completely missing. The presence
of pictorial artefacts is simply taken to indicate the presence of “modern”
representational thinking. But, perhaps the accompanying sign relation in
picture understanding is taken too much for granted. Hence, as transnatural
perceptual objects, pictures may have adequate meaning also to a perceiver
who does not indicate having access to the range of meanings that come
with a genuine understanding of the picture as a sign. Again, that is, the
ability to construct meanings using various meaning relations that follows
from the possibility to conceive something as an expression for something
else that is also its content (see Section 4.1.2).
4.4.1. Transitional States and Proto-pictures

Nevertheless, some suggestions of transitional states, or proto-levels, in
the prehistoric understanding of pictures have been made. One of those,
which has received a lot of attention, was formulated by the archaeologist
and social anthropologist David Lewis-Williams in his book from 2002,
The Mind in the Cave. Lewis-Williams’ suggestion is based on (and made
problematic by) the assumption that with no pre-existing notion of the
picture one cannot see similarity between a physical surface, as given in
nature, and an independent familiar object. Thus he rejects the proposal
that “people could have stumbled upon the notion of two-dimensional im-
ages” in natural perception (Lewis-Williams 2004, p. 184).
Instead he suggests that pictorial layouts take their origin from hallu-
cinatory experiences in the cave environments of Upper Palaeolithic sha-
manist culture. In this sense, he suggests, pictures were not invented – as
hallucinatory experiences they were already “there” (Lewis-Williams 2004,
pp. 193 ff.). Furthermore, he claims that initially the cave paintings were
not representations of something else – in being fixed visions floating on
the walls they were, from point of view of the users, the real “things” (i.e.
visions). On the other hand, Lewis-Williams’ focus on the production of
pictures in the cave environments as socially shared ventures may be fruitful.
To sum up, a proto-sign is a meaning construction that evolves prior to
a true sign relation. While being the identical physical surface, the pictorial
surface nevertheless has the capacity to be either a potential proto-picture
or a true pictorial sign for someone. Lewis-Williams advantageously ob-
serves this possibility when he observes that the identical physical surface
can be appreciated for its pictorial qualities and nevertheless be interpreted
as substantially different kinds of meaning; as a representational device
(a sign expression) used to communicate about something else (a differ-
entiated content), or as the “real thing” which perhaps is affected by the
image. However, his basic assumption, that (in waking states and with no
114 Sara Lenninger
former cultural learning) one cannot see unexpected similarity between in-
dependent objects, leads him into speculative suggestions about endogenous
phenomena in hypnagogic states as the origin of (all) pictorial activities.
Moreover, and troublesome for the present discussion, he overlooks the
consequences of people having had former experiences (from waking states)
of “semiozised” surfaces, such as leaving marks and wearing beads.
4.4.2. Tracing a Place for the Original Picture

In The Mind in the Cave, Lewis-Williams (2004) argues that Upper Palaeo-
lithic culture should be understood as grounded in a different mind-set than
the one we have today. Moreover, he explicitly attributes the emergence of
pictures to the Upper Palaeolithic cave culture. An on-going debate on dat-
ing parietal painting taps into at least two themes that are of interest to the
present discussion. First, questions have been raised about the origin of the
pictorial acts that are articulated in Upper Palaeolithic cave environments.
Secondly, there is a debate on the dating of non-figurative versus figurative
painting in the caves executed during Upper Palaeolithic (García-Diez et al.
2013; Ochoa & García-Diez 2015; von Petzinger 2014).
According to Maxime Aubert and Adam Brum (et al. 2014), at the Cen-
tre for archaeological science at University of Wollongong in Australia,
primarily two models have been suggested for tracing the origins of parietal
paintings. The first model suggests that parietal painting originates from
sites in the European Upper Palaeolithic culture and successively spread
around populated areas in Asia and Australia, and moreover, that these
sites also present the origin of parietal pictorial (cf. figurative) activity.
However, as findings in Asia and Australia have been more rigorously dated,
the Eurocentric view can be questioned. For now, the oldest dated hand
stencil (39,9 ka) is found in the Sulawesi Caves in Indonesia, and next to
the hand stencil the archaeologists have dated a picture of a pig to be from
about 35 ka (Aubert et al. 2014). These new data about the paintings in
Indonesia supports the second model that claims that “figurative art” (i.e.
figurative layouts) already was established in human culture when Homo
sapiens were leaving Africa (Aubert et al. 2014; see also papers by Robert
G. Bednarik, e.g. 2008, 2014, for critical discussions).
Perhaps a third possibility can be considered. In this case the origin-from-

European-cave hypothesis is also rejected but, nevertheless, the African
origin of pictures is not necessarily supported. According to this hypothesis
the picture could have evolved anywhere (in human and possibly close
hominine culture), at different places and at different times (Clottes 2002;
et al. 2011). Moreover, according to this hypothesis, the pictorial surface
could have been discovered as such and then forgotten many times across
time and local uses. The pictures found in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in
France, and elsewhere, only constitute the proof of being preserved – not
of being the first ones manufactured.
4.4.3. Tracing Style Phases

European ice-age paintings are traditionally divided into styles or style
phases. In the 1960s the French archaeologist and anthropologist André
Leroi-Gourhan (1965) proposed four aesthetic styles (I–IV) characterising
European ice-age paintings. He proposed that typical technologies and gen-
eral stylistic patterns (based on both plastic and pictorial features in the im-
ages) can be traced across artefacts, across the production of those artefacts,
and spread over longer periods in prehistory and across different regions in
Europe and Asia. Together, these consistencies in practice were suggested
to motivate a division into styles. Leroi-Gourhan associated the four styles
with cultural tool industries (technocomplexes) named after four type sites,
all of them situated in modern France (The Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solu-
trean, and Magdalenian Cultures). Leroi-Gourhan’s styles were related to
the four technocomplexes but were not identical to them. As new findings
call for revision of Leroi-Gourhan’s divisions, archaeologists more often
refer to stylistic periods in-keeping with the mentioned technocomplexes.
The stylistic periods are not understood as chronologically fixed hence the
given periods vary with revised dating of the archaeological findings, and
between different regions in modern Europe and Asia. Moreover, the styles
have been further divided into stylistic periods (such as in upper, middle and
lower Magdalenian), but also according to different geographical regions.
A problem with the divisions is that they have been taken to imply a
progression in graphical and figurative expressions developing from rough
inarticulate forms in the Aurignacian style, to the more elegant forms and
116 Sara Lenninger
greater pictorial “control” of the late Magdalenian. It has also been im-
plied that this pictorial development can be specifically linked to “cave
art” (Ochoa & García-Diez 2015). Of course, there are opponents to the
idea that we can follow an original pictorial progression by studying de-
velopmental style phases in these contexts. The opponents aim to show
that already Aurignacian layouts constitute proof of figurative painting
and, more importantly, show complex diversity in form and technique.
Moreover, they aim to show that this is not unique for only a few places,
such as the Chauvet district (Clottes et al. 2011; García-Diez et al. 2013;
von Petzinger 2014). In this respect it also worth noting that hand stencils
as well as handprints are dated to the earlier periods in the Chauvet cave.
This, again, suggests flexibility in the production of marks in these periods
(see Figure 4.3).
Figure 4.3. Positive handprints (left) and negative hand stencils (right) are two
different types of marks corresponding to two different methods and
mark out different features of the hand as a result. However, both use
the physical presence of the hand as the model. Exemplars of both
are found at the Chauvet caves (separate panels) and are dated to be
about 30 ka old – corresponding with Aurignacian culture.
The flexibility of meaning in these artefacts is less easy to explore, but, it

may help to take into account the tacit component of knowing according
to Polanyi’s (1958) phenomenological distinction of focal and subsidiary

awareness. The close indexical relations embedded in the production of
marks can affect meaning both at the level of focal and marginal awareness
in perceiving the marks – giving rise to distinctly different interpretations.
When, from the point of view of the interpreter, the indexical relation en-
ters into focal awareness a mark on the wall can be defined by its closeness
to, lets say, a specific hand, and the connection to the person to whom the
hand belongs can be part of the tacit knowledge about the print. If, on the
other hand, the experience of similarity to visual features of human hands
is in focal awareness, then the possibility of its being a “print” can be sub-
sidiarily experienced, and the meaning can more generally be inferred to
be something like a “human hand.” Again, meanings are relational and,
together, the experienced and the tacit nature of these relationships affect
human experience of meaning.
If the flexibility in Aurignacian figurative pictures in Chauvet and Altxerri
caves are proved correct (Clottes 2002; Gonzalez-Sainz et al. 2013; von
Petzinger 2014), this weakens the hypothesis positing a prolonged process
from non-figurative to figurative paintings in comparable settings such as
in the western Pyrenees (cf. Ochoa & García-Diez 2015). Moreover, it also
becomes less likely to attribute the origin of pictoriality to the activities in
caves specifically (cf. e.g. Lewis-Williams 2004). An alternative hypothesis
could be that the pictorial surface was not invented, but still favoured, by
the particular features of the enclosed and protected spaces of the caves. The
paintings, figurative and non-figurative, and the enclosed spaces afforded
in the cave environment may have mutually given rise to communicative
spaces.
4.4.4. Comparing Pictures and Other Images

As was indicated above (Section 4.3.2), the dating of the origin of pictures
is controversial, and indeed, this also concerns concrete pictorial artefacts
that have been discovered. Other findings, unearthed at sites other than the
pictures, have sometimes been used as an argument to support the likeli-
hood that figurative painting originated with Aurignacian cave paintings.
Most of the time, comparison has been made to figurines found in the
118 Sara Lenninger
Swabian Alps in south Germany (Clottes 2002; Gonzalez-Sainz et al. 2013;

von Petzinger 2014; see Figure 5.1 in this volume).
Comparative methods are used where exact dating cannot be imple-
mented directly on the pictorial surface or by dating overlaying calcite
(Ochoa & García-Diez 2015). Alternative methods involve dating an ob-
ject by deducing the date from the dating of nearby objects or sediments.
Other alternatives are comparisons of graphical styles or types of artefacts.
Comparative methods are noteworthy here because both pictorial motifs
and plastic elements are used as comparative data within and across ar-
chaeological sites.
Interestingly, conditions for comparing graphical (i.e. plastic) elements
differ in figurative and non-figurative paintings in the Upper Palaeolithic
period (von Petzinger 2014). It has been claimed that the graphical style
of non-figurative paintings and etchings are traceable across different sites,
suggesting a more rigorous source for conventionalised communication
compared to what can be traced from an equivalent comparison of figu-
rative paintings (von Petzinger 2014). The claim is that when comparing
between sites, patterns can be found when juxtaposing non-figurative paint-
ings, but less so in the case of figurative paintings. One reason for this is that
non-figurative paintings are in general smaller in size, and therefore have
a higher probability of being intact. The less space a mark occupies on a
wall area, the lower the risk of it being partially affected by damages to the
wall. A second reason, which has less to do with practical consequences,
and which has a more semiotic aspect, is the suggestion that non-figurative
images were more conventionalised across sites than the pictorial images.
This suggestion remains to be systematically investigated, but one argument
that has been offered to support this suggestion is that communication with
non-figurative marks is older in human history than communication with
pictorial layouts and thus was already conventionalised in Aurignacian
culture (von Petzinger 2014). Probably the division in plastic and pictorial
organisation when looking for both diversity and common traits in figura-
tive paintings could be useful here. Moreover, a lack of conventionality
across only pictorial figures (in sites that show common traits across non-
figurative layouts) may support the interpretation that, at that time, the
pictorial artefact was not fully differentiated as a shared sign. However,
since pictures have the quality to mime visual traits from perception in the
ordinary Lifeworld the variety of salient features to communicate familiar

objects is immense. Indeed, the choice of depicted features could be delib-
erately varied. One has to bear in mind, however, that a shortcoming of the
comparison method is that one cannot compare with that which has not yet
been found. Again, pictorial motifs and styles have shown greater diversity
as more sites have been found, and thus the universality of previously sug-
gested patterns has subsequently been refuted (cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1965).
Although future findings may prove the opposite, there is a difference
in size among types of depictions found. The figurines found in Swabian
areas are miniature animals, whereas the painted animals on the walls are
larger in size. Moreover, inside the caves in France, the figurative paintings
of animals are generally larger in size than the non-figurative paintings
(von Petzinger 2014). The miniature size of the portable figurines may be
explained by practical reasons and promoted by the proximity value gained
from wearing, or having, the esteemed and chosen object. Hence, the small
size can either be explained by the small size of the material that induced
someone to carve out a figure from it, or by the size being a prerequisite
for making a suitably portable figurine made of a piece of ivory. Both ways
testify to the flexibility of the producers in processing visual and embodied
meanings. If the portable figurines inspired the cave paintings, the size of
the figurines was not copied. The bigger spaces on the walls consequently
allow for bigger paintings, and can of course motivate bigger drawings
of big animals (and thus mime the animal’s size). However, the generally
smaller size of the non-figurative images indicates that space alone does not
explain the size of the depicted animals. And indeed, small pictures of big
animals painted on walls are nevertheless not portable.
If the figurative and non-figurative images were produced in contempora-
neous cultural contexts, as has been suggested for the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
cave (Valladas & Clottes 2003; von Petzinger 2014), a general difference
in size may indicate a difference in communicative function. Then, that
is also a difference in the conception of the type of images produced here
(cf. Harris 1995). The proximate connection between the layouts, and the
material’s durability in the protected area, made comparisons available for
the perceivers over long time spans. If meaning by means of pictoriality is a
transnatural phenomenon (or at least not dependent on cultural specifica-
tions to be meaningful by means of its iconicity) this may also have been
120 Sara Lenninger
true for the Upper Palaeolithic people visiting the cave. Likewise, abstract
or geometrical figures may lack (or in some cases may have lost) perceptual
links to specify meaning and thus beg for a context (e.g. a ritual) or a con-
vention to have communicative meaning. However independent of specify-
ing meaning or not, the marks remain on the walls for future perception and
embody a subsidiary awareness of another person having made these marks.
4.5. The “Out of Africa”-Theory Applied to Pictures

People communicate, and we surround ourselves with communicative
spaces. The body is our first communicative sphere (Mittelberg 2014; see
Chapter 2: Mimesis), and people leave traces. Where people are together
with other people they also expect communication, and are prepared for
communication. Successively, in human cultural evolution people shaped
the habit together to deliberately select and produce artefacts in the service
of communication. People consciously integrated physical spaces outside
of their own body and extended the communicative sphere. Outside the
lithic industry, the first indications of artefacts selectively made for com-
munication by human beings are the findings of beads and etchings on
portable objects in African Middle Stone Age culture (100–70 ka ago).
Figurative artefacts and pictures, however, have not been proven to be part
of human culture until the Upper Palaeolithic culture in Europe and Asia
(i.e. 60–30 ka later). This is remarkable since visual meaning is essential in
human ecology (Gibson 1979), and visually communicated meanings were
probably deliberately explored already during Middle Stone Age. However,
the lack of evidence for pictorial artefacts older than, at best, around 40 ka
does not necessarily mean that no picture-like objects were experienced
before that. It should also be noted that the problem is not only due to the
gap in time, but also to the geographical gaps between the sites. Moreover,
political and economical reasons cannot be ruled out to have had impact
on archaeological endeavours.
The claim here is not that careful excavations will show that “the original
pictorial artefact” was made in Africa; that could be the case, but it does
not need to be so. Rather, the recognition of pictorial surfaces as signs may
have occurred over and over again at different places and at different times.
Understood as transnatural objects, pictures draw their meaning from an
ecological sphere or niche, and are not dependent on determinations from

culturally derived norms or habits.
Bearing in mind the transnatural characteristics of pictures, there is a
great likelihood that independent individuals at different times perceived
iconic similarity between a surface and a distinct familiar perceptual object.
For the pictorial experience to further develop into a more elaborated semi-
otic resource, however, it is also required that the similarity relation should
be experienced as such despite it being “false.” Such an experience may
depend on an individual perceiving that one can share the iconic experience
with others. When this happens sufficiently often, a sufficient amount of
people may come to share the assessment of objects as having the quality
of being similar, and a common interest may evolve to preserve the objects
(e.g. pictures) and to explore their potentialities to pass on meanings.
The rich findings from the Upper Palaeolithic period at least show that
pictures, and non-pictorial images, were thought to be worth the effort to
produce them, and sometimes to produce them at aloof places. What is less
clear is why they were made and what they meant for the cultures of which
they were a part. Today the practice of making pictures is part and parcel of
various contexts reaching from everyday communication to scientific think-
ing and art. Hence, not only can the picture be conceived as a transnatural
object, but also a “transcultural object,” that is as an object communicating
meanings across different cultures, and cultural spheres, including those
which are part of “deep history” (see Chapter 1: Lifeworlds).
Michael Ranta
Chapter Five
Art: On the Evolutionary Foundations
of Art and Aesthetics
Traditional attempts to define aesthetic key concepts such as “art,” “aes-

thetic value,” and “beauty” have frequently meant finding their core char-
acteristics or necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. At the same time,
the history of art has been one of more or less radical creativity that has
challenged and often departed from suggested essential features of these
concepts, and this conceptual openness has become even more acute during
the twentieth century. Moreover, art-related concepts such as “beauty” and
“aesthetic value” are highly problematic anyway, given their broad appli-
cability within and outside art, and sometimes based on other controversial
notions, e.g. “disinterested pleasure” or “aesthetic experience.”
Now, despite some lack of conceptual stability and continuity of aes-
thetic notions, one might still reasonably look for underlying generative
mechanisms,1 that is, mechanisms that on a rather fundamental level seem
to be crucial for the emergence of aesthetic activities and discourses (though
by keeping in mind that they do not have to be exclusive in these respects).
In this chapter,2 I extend Noël Carroll’s (2001) suggestion that preceding
and current art activities have a narrative connection, giving events and
objects significance by situating them within an explanatory (causal and
teleological) historical framework. But when and why did this aesthetic
“storytelling” begin? In opposition to aesthetics as a philosophical branch
relying primarily on art critical practices or language uses, I also claim that
one must take account of empirical studies from e.g. evolutionary theory,
1 It should be noted that that this term, employed by Noël Carroll in the work
referred to below, doesn’t have the same meaning as given to it by Husserl, to
which other chapters of this book refer, nor, it would appear, as it is currently
given in linguistics (Editors’ note).
2 This chapter is a revised version of a paper given at the XIXth International Con-
gress of Aesthetics, “Aesthetics in Action” (Kraków, Poland), July 21–27, 2013.
124 Michael Ranta
cognitive semiotics, and from a first-person or phenomenological perspec-

tive. Such studies may contribute to a fuller, more supportive understanding
of arts’ narrative connectedness from a cultural evolutionary point of view.
In the following, I shall outline some general approaches within the history
of aesthetics as well as some proposals concerning the prehistoric origins
of art (mainly the visual arts). In particular, it will be argued that mimesis
(or imitation), one of the key notions within classical aesthetics, indeed
constitutes one of the foundational ingredients of art-making practices,
seen from an evolutionary point of view.
5.1. The Emergence of an Aesthetic Discourse

What exactly does “art” mean and how is this concept related to e.g.
“beauty” or “aesthetic value?” These are some of the most central questions
that have preoccupied philosophers and aestheticians since at least ancient
Greece, attempting to elucidate the nature of these concepts, though some-
times in a quite perfunctory manner. It is certainly questionable whether any
art-specific considerations were discussed or had any explicit significance
for the production of cultural artefacts in the West before the fifth century
BCE. During the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, mainly pragmatic and
magical-religious interests seem, at a first glance, to have been the domi-
nant aspects of any cultural production. In ancient Egypt, for instance,
the economic value of used metals and other materials, the everlastingness
of buildings and other objects, and religious or political concerns appear
to have played a far more important role than what from our perspective
would count as explicit aesthetic purposes, i.e. having a more self-sufficient
value. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that aesthetic intentions
had no importance at all or did not exist. Despite the fact that we have no
knowledge of an art-specific discourse or terminology, the cultural produc-
tion in, say, Egypt may nevertheless have been influenced by aesthetic con-
siderations, i.e. by efforts to give their products qualities which – according
to present standards – works of art may also possess.
In Greece, however, a different interest in functional or inherent proper-
ties distinguishing paintings, sculptures or dramatic performances from
other objects or activities seems to have emerged during the Classical period
(c. 480–323 BCE). Admittedly, in texts from this period no concept of art
Art: On the Evolutionary Foundations of Art and Aesthetics 125
is used that exclusively denotes the “fine arts,” nor were clear-cut theories
of art elaborated. The ancient Greek umbrella term technê (which includes
what nowadays would be categorised as art) has a broader extension than
our modern use of the concept of art, referring to any rational production
or activity based on teachable rules, and could perhaps be translated as
“organized knowledge and procedure applied for the purpose of producing
a specific preconceived result” (Pollitt 1974, p. 10). This included the fine
arts (i.e. sculpture, painting, music, poetry, and perhaps architecture) as
well as the crafts and sciences. Furthermore, the concepts of art and beauty
were not always correlated, at least not before late Antiquity. Beauty was
neither considered to be a sufficient nor a necessary condition for something
to be a work of art, i.e. objects which we nowadays would include among
the fine arts. Finally, pre-Hellenistic writers such as Plato and Aristotle were
rather interested in clarifying the concept of image (and mimesis-related
expressions, such as the activity to imitate something else), not of art per
se (cf. Sörbom 1966, pp. 11–21).
It has frequently been maintained that the eighteenth century brought
some significant changes to Western aesthetic discourse, or even, to be
more exact, gave birth to aesthetics as a separate discipline, a more “unified
philosophy of art and beauty,” as envisaged by scholars such as Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and Francis Hutcheson (cf. Beard-
sley 1985, pp. 156–163). While some fundamental (and still persistent)
ideas and notions may be traced back to Antiquity, other central aesthetic
concepts such as “beauty” or “art” undergo quite radical alterations, which
assume a more precise shape and develop into the modern system of the
“Fine arts” (or “Beaux Arts”). Thus, as e.g. scholars such as Paul Kristel-
ler have claimed, the “system of the five major arts, which underlies all
modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent
origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century”
(Kristeller 1951, p. 498). “Beauty,” which traditionally was regarded as
a property inherent in objects, is also increasingly seen as an idea in the
mind (or emotional response, feeling of pleasure, or the like) of a percipient.
Though the search for objective properties in artworks that participate in
constituting their beauty does not disappear completely, the focus becomes
now also directed towards an analysis of human nature. The attitudes and
responses of percipients receive growing attention, and notions such as
126 Michael Ranta
“aesthetic experience” or “disinterested pleasure” are placed side by side

with, or even replace, earlier concepts of beauty. This tendency seems to
be especially notable and influential during the British Enlightenment with
its regular emphasis on beauty as a subjective reaction of the perceiver, and
its general interest in human psychology.
We should note, however, that most attempts to demarcate classical from
modern aesthetics appear in several respects to presuppose or imply signifi-
cant connections. Ancient and modern theories are commonly assumed to
be at least partially coreferential, that is, some of the concepts used are seen
as referring to the same types of objects or activities. The concepts used are
not treated as completely incommensurable, and a relative ontological or
functional stability and theory- (or concept-) independence of the objects
or activities under consideration is taken for granted. Thus, the existence of
some kind of foundational continuity between ancient and modern views on
art is regarded as almost self-evident. For many centuries certain texts from
Antiquity have de facto been used and interpreted as theories of art, and
their influence on modern aesthetics can hardly be denied. Third, a com-
mon trait in those ancient texts that deal with objects or activities such as
dance, theatre, music, painting, and sculpture is the stress on their imitative
or mimetic function. Although being mimetic is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient condition for something to be a work of art (antique or modern),
numerous artworks have actually been created with the intention of imitat-
ing (or representing by means of similarity) something and they have been
used and evaluated accordingly.
5.2. Analytic Aesthetics and the Concept of Art

Indeed, one of the historically most persistent views on art is that the func-
tion and value of artworks consist of their capacity to imitate or represent
(i.e. having a relation in which it is said to be of) something else, not least
by means of (visual) resemblance. However, this idea – or rather cluster
of ideas – is far more complex and multifaceted than some contemporary
debates concerning e.g. pictorial representation reveal, tending to focus
upon something like straightforward copy theories, which unfortunately
often have received something like a paradigmatic status. Pictorial mimesis
as such does not necessarily involve the depiction (or visual “imitation”) of
particulars or of real-world objects or subjects. Throughout history, picto-

rial works of art have quite regularly been created in order to represent
typical, ideal, or fictional entities. That is, imitation in a wide sense might
also be conceived as the rendering of universals, abstractions, essences, or
types, and imitation theories may also describe – or prescribe – imitative
representation as rendering certain idealisations, e.g. in terms of morality
or beauty (see Ranta 2000, pp. 41–43, 249–255). Apart from innumerable
examples in the history of art where the exact and literal imitation of real-
ity seems to not have been intended, certainly modern developments from
the nineteenth century onwards have increasingly made such copy theories
untenable, due to their very restricted applicability.
An alternative attempt to define art has been to focus upon its emotional
properties or its expressiveness. Also such expression theories of art might
in a wider sense be regarded as mimetic, i.e. by stressing the representa-
tion (i.e. imitation) of emotional properties inherent in a work of art (such
as gaiety, melancholy, aggressiveness, or serenity) or emotional states at-
tributed to the artist (e.g. at the moment of creation, or his usual state of
mind). Even these attempts have, for various reasons, faced serious diffi-
culties, not least because numerous counter-examples could be mentioned
where acknowledged works of art (at least superficially seen) seem to have
no expressive properties at all, or where the manifestation or elicitation
of emotional states are not artworks (such as a smile or hitting someone).
Now, confronted with these problems, a number of scholars have come
to suggest that attempts to find distinctive functional or institutional constit-
uents of art might be more promising, rather than focusing upon (straight-
forward) perceptual or semantic features (cf. Davies 1991, for an account
and discussion of such attempts). According to, for example, Monroe C.
Beardsley (Beardsley 1981 [1958], pp. 524–532; 1982, pp. 298–315) a
work of art is an object that belongs to a certain function-class and is
dispositionally efficient for fulfilling a certain desirable aesthetic function
(which here is supposed to be the capacity to provide aesthetic experiences
or aesthetic enjoyment). However, it might very well be doubted whether a
distinct aesthetic quality (having context-free, ahistorical, and cross-cultural
stability) can be attributed to certain experiences or states of enjoyment,
as pointed out by a number of philosophers, such as George Dickie (1965,
1974; Davies 1991, pp. 62–64). As a consequence, Dickie proposed an
128 Michael Ranta
institutional or procedural definition of art according to which an object is

conferred the status of candidate for appreciation as a work of art by rep-
resentatives of the so-called “artworld” (Dickie 1974, 1984). Thus, briefly
put, a work of art (in a classificatory sense) is (i) an artefact upon which
(ii) some person or persons acting on behalf of a cluster of certain social
institutions (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for ap-
preciation. Now, apart from the charge of circularity brought against this
definition (the crucial notions “artworld” and “art” seem to be logically
and semantically interdependent), the lack of criteria, or accounts of what
features artworld members rely on when conferring the status of being
“art” on something, has been regarded as a serious deficiency (cf. Davies
1991, pp. 109–114).
All these attempts, then, to define art in essentialist terms by referring
to distinctive, common, and all-embracing perceptual, functional, or pro-
cedural factors which members of this category are supposed to possess
are quite obviously more or less unconvincing. Moreover, if we consider
some twentieth-century movements in art (such as Dada, conceptual art,
minimalism, ready-mades, happenings, Land art, and so forth), it seems
that the proposals outlined earlier have become even more problematic.
Numerous further examples could of course be mentioned in order to il-
lustrate how the category “art” has expanded radically, it seems, during
the last century. Indeed, we have no reason to assume that this category
will not expand even further in the future.
Similar lines of thought have been put forward by a number of scholars
theorising about the arts. Morris Weitz, one of the first and most widely
cited proponents of an anti-essentialist position concerning the concept
of art (others are, for instance, William Kennick, Haig Khatchadourian,
Władysław Tatarkiewicz, and Paul Ziff), regards past attempts to define
art as rather evaluative and stipulative than descriptive and classificatory
(Weitz 1959; Kennick 1958; Khatchadourian 1969; Tatarkiewicz 1971;
Ziff 1953). According to Weitz, there is no pervasive property shared by
all objects that we are inclined to call art, and, moreover, any attempt to
specify such a property would foreclose on future creativity. As he puts it:
“the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes
and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of
defining properties” (Weitz 1959, p. 152). The history of art is a history
of a more or less radical creativity – despite the fact that art under certain
limited sociohistorical circumstances has been regarded as a quite clear-cut
category – which has challenged, altered, and departed from pre-existing
concepts of art (we may ask, though, whether the very characteristic of
alterability wouldn’t qualify as an essential property).3 Thus, as Weitz sug-
gests, inspired by Wittgenstein’s remarks on the nature of games and lan-
guage, art ought to be thought of as an open concept without necessary
and sufficient conditions for its application, thus being like a family whose
members resemble each other in some, but not in all or in commonly shared
respects, i.e. being joined by family resemblances.
This line of reasoning – and narrative outline of an aesthetic debate as
here presented – is of course quite familiar to those who are acquainted
with the analytic aesthetical tradition prevailing among Anglo-American
scholars. In the next section, I shall discuss an interesting proposal put for-
ward by Noël Carroll, focusing upon the narrative aspects of the concept
of art, which in itself could be regarded as part of and continuation of a
(meta-)narrative of aesthetics.
5.3. Noël Carroll on Narrative Connections

Referring to this discourse, Carroll argues that art indeed seems to have a
necessary or core condition for its existence, namely its historical dimen-
sion with regard to its production as well as to its reception and evaluation
(Carroll 2001, pp. 86–95).4 The reception of art on part of the audience, for
example, is guided by traditions of interpreting and appreciating art. Such
traditions or the knowledge of historical antecedents provide means for
orientation towards contemporary art. Historically preceding art activities
and present ones have, as Carroll further claims, a narrative connection.
Now, a narrative can be characterised as the representation of at least two
(real or fictive) actions, events, or situations with a temporal link on the
3 This seems to be basically the same idea earlier suggested by the Russian formalists
and the Prague school of semiotics (see Sonesson 1999, 2011) (Editors’ note).
4 Outside the analytical tradition, similar lines of thought have also been put
forward by proponents of the Prague school, such as Roman Jakobson and Jan
Mukařovský. More generally, Carroll’s proposal is of course reminiscent of
classical hermeneutic approaches (see Sonesson 1999, 2011) (Editors’ note).
130 Michael Ranta
content side (i.e. concerning the represented world) (Prince 1982, pp. 1–4).
Quite frequently, a narrative seems to consist of a beginning (or an equi-
librium), a middle (possibly with a disturbance or disequilibrium) and an
end or closure. When it comes to historical narratives, the same structure
likewise appears to occur frequently, though, in contrast to fictional nar-
ratives, the reported sequences of events and states of affairs are claimed
(or presupposed) to be true or at least accurate (Carroll 2001, p. 88). The
incorporated events are usually situated within an explanatory pattern that
gives them significance by delineating their causal roles and teleological
contributions to certain goals or outcomes. Art historical narratives show,
according to Carroll, a similar pattern. Some historical narratives function
as identifying narratives, that is, they are used to establish the art status of
contested or disputed works (Carroll 2001, p. 113).
Thus the beginning of these narratives includes a description of a set of
historical circumstances, of previous art practices, which are generally un-
disputed with regard to their art status. This background thus introduces a
context which is adequate or sufficient for making the further development
plausible and narratively intelligible. Artists or art schools can simply decide
to adhere to such traditions; in that case the produced objects would count
as mere repetitions, although not exact duplications, of previous artworks
with regard to genre conventions, formal styles, themes, and so on. Exam-
ples of artistic movements that are indeed characterised by a high degree
of (programmatic or stylistic) repetitive patterns are, for example, ancient
Egyptian art, Greek classicism, or Romanesque art.
Artists may also decide to modify existing artistic means and subjects.
These deviations or amplifications, as Carroll calls them, seem especially to
occur when preexisting art is regarded as problematic or obsolete, in one
way or the other, and the artists attempts to solve this problem (or prob-
lems) by introducing new themes or techniques, for example regarding the
rendering of light, space, ontological/metaphysical concepts, and so on, or
even radically dismiss earlier traditions. We should keep in mind, however,
that such works are not completely alien to or incommensurable with earlier
traditions. Actually, far from being made in a radical aesthetic vacuum,
they are created as a response to and as a conscious negation of prevailing
art practices. The artists in question are usually very well aware of the his-
torical background, they have a conventional training and education, and
they are, by means of social and economic networks, linked to established

art institutions. The very production and existence of their works is thus
dependent on a wider aesthetic context, and within this context identifying
narratives are of crucial importance. Their role is to establish a link between
more or less controversial works to intelligible and recognisable preceding
art-making practices; they function as arguments or explanations making
use of supporting historical evidence (thus epistemic criteria of truth or
plausibility play a vital role) presenting the artworks under debate as some
kind of conclusion.
For example, Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg presented historical identi-
fying narratives in defense of Modernist avant-garde art, arguing that earlier
works of art with representational aspirations had reached a deadlock which
could only be overcome by adhering to art’s formal, non-representational
aspects (Bell 1958; Greenberg 1984). But we might certainly also take his-
torically more remote cases into consideration, where similar identifying
narratives seem to have been at work. Giorgio Vasari, for example, in his
book Le vite de’ piú eccelenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani (The Lives
of the Artists, 1550/1568), outlines a historical narrative beginning with
artistic practices from the early Renaissance, or late Middle Ages (though
with a glance backwards to Antiquity and the early Middle Ages), with
representative artists such as Duccio or Giotto, culminating with the works
by Raphael or Michelangelo. Another example that could be mentioned is
Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The
History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764) which argued that Greek art should be
considered as an indisputable aesthetic ideal to strive for, with its love of the
good, the beautiful, and the true, or – as he put it – with its “noble simplicity
and calm grandeur.” Basically, Baroque and Rococo art is seen as a tradition
in decline, having reached a deadlock, while the purer classicism, represented
by Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova, and Anton Raphael Mengs, is
supposed to be a radical revival of a true classic ideal (cf. Potts 1994, p. 21).
5.4. When and Why Did It All Begin?

Carroll’s proposal is certainly worth considering and is indeed compatible
with certain practices within art history and art criticism. Furthermore,
it avoids many of the pitfalls that traditional essentialist definitions have
132 Michael Ranta
suffered from, for example the charge of circularity brought against Dickie’s
institutional theory of art. As Carroll puts it, “circularity is a real defect in
real definitions, and the narrative approach to identifying art does not entail
definitions. Narratives are not definitions” (Carroll 2001, p. 85). Still, this
line of reasoning necessitates the existence of prior-established works of
art in order to shed light on succeeding art discourses and practices. And
we might still reasonably ask how and for which reasons (or causes) these
discourses and practices emerged in the first place.
Most aesthetic theories have more or less considered (or been influenced
by) existing artistic practices or objects, historically significant aesthetic
theories, and experts’ and other people’s beliefs or language uses concern-
ing aesthetic theories or concepts. Put in another way, they have (at least
implicitly) taken empirical data into account. However, a deficiency of
numerous aesthetic theories consists of the rather narrow and somewhat
arbitrary selection of empirical data considered relevant. Sociological, his-
torical, art historical, psychological, neurophysiological, anthropological,
or other “empirical” studies have sometimes to a regrettable extent been
neglected or even completely ignored. Most notably, analytic aesthetics has
been described as a second-order discipline, a “philosophy of criticism”
(as conceived by Beardsley), which is more preoccupied with the language
used by art critics or art historians than directly with works of art them-
selves. As for aesthetics, and philosophy in general, we may further doubt
whether its scholars have given sufficient attention to the historicity of its
traditional issues and concepts. Within philosophical discourse, there is
an unmistakable tendency to disregard any socio-historical complications.
Indeed, a salient feature of philosophy has commonly been a striving for
basic and eternal “truths,” abstracted from cultural contingencies. A similar
tendency may likewise be noted within aesthetics. Its accounts of the nature
of art, aesthetic value, expression, or representation have frequently been
remarkably ahistorical.
In this respect, then, Carroll’s proposal certainly opens up a histori-
cally more dynamic approach towards aesthetic theorising. But, once again,
when and why did it all begin? Are there any proto-aesthetic activities or
discourses that could fruitfully be taken into account and which successively
seem to have evolved into more fine-grained, specific aesthetic theories?
These are still open questions and certainly worth investigating in order
to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of aesthetic activities (and

their accompanying narratives). Despite the inconclusiveness of essentialist
definitions of art outlined earlier, generations of scholars and artists have
nevertheless taken them very seriously, and they certainly still point to some
crucial aspects which disjunctively or conjunctively have participated in es-
tablishing the category “art.” Indeed, these definitions are not unreasonable
at all (although they do not provide necessary and sufficient conditions), but
hint at some characteristics that frequently, even nowadays, at least from
a common sense point of view, are associated with the core of art. Thus
imitation and expression (in all the senses indicated), functional efficiency
with regard to states of enjoyment, institutional approvals, and so on are
factors which have significantly contributed to the demarcation – as well
as (together with other characteristics, not least narrative connections in
Carroll’s sense) to the extension – of this category.
First, as to the “imitative” functionality of certain artefacts, already
Aristotle claimed that the recognition of likenesses is a cognitive activity
that gives humans enjoyment; it is natural for human beings to feel pleasure
when encountering mimetic representations (due to the fact that all cogni-
tive activities are supposed to be pleasurable). As he claims in the Poetics:
the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood […], and
so is […] the pleasure that all men take in works of imitation. A proof of this is
what happens in our experience. There are things which we see with pain so far
as they themselves are concerned but whose images, even when executed in very
great detail, we view with pleasure. Such is the case for example with renderings
of the least favored animals, or of cadavers. The cause of this also is that learn-
ing is eminently pleasurable […]. [In] the process of viewing they find themselves
learning, that is, reckoning what kind a given thing belongs to: “This individual
is a so-and-so” (Aristotle 1967, 1148 b, p. 20).
Interestingly in this context, according to the cognitive psychologist Merlin

Donald’s view on the development of human semiotic resources through
evolution, mimesis is indeed a cognitive capacity quite unique to hominines
that has evolved over the past two million years (Donald 1991; see also
Chapters 2: Mimesis and 6: Narrativity in this volume). A turning point
arose when hominines successively became able to function as “sign-pro-
ducing” cultural beings, presupposing “mimetic skills” required to rehearse
and refine the body’s movements in a systematic way, to remember those
134 Michael Ranta
movements, and to reproduce them at will. Homo erectus became able to

integrate and reconceptualise events, thus creating various prelinguistic
semiotic activities such as rituals, dance, and craft. This stage was then
superseded by mythic-narrative cultures that arose as a result of the acqui-
sition of speech and the invention of signs, which was a major cognitive
breakthrough for the externalisation and spreading of memory. Also present
in mythic culture, though, as Donald claims, seemingly appearing later than
speech, are mimetic and (convention-based) symbolic pictures like those
found in southern European caves. Donald argues that these hunting and
fertility images were used “to explore and develop the mythic ideas that
were already the governing cognitive constructs of human society” (Donald
1991, p. 282). In accordance with this proposal, it seems quite likely that
hominines at an early evolutionary stage must have developed and sustained
a deep-rooted interest in various forms of preservable, mimetic represen-
tationality (see Donald 2006 for his view on art). And here we might find
some of the evolutionary roots and causes for more full-fledged aesthetic
theories that emerged later on in ancient Greece.
Also worth considering from this perspective is Ellen Dissanayake’s work,
which has focused on the ethological and anthropological exploration of art
and culture and likewise might give us some clues as to the beginnings of
aesthetic behaviour. Basically, art is defined as “making something special;”
that is, art making involves taking something out of its ordinary use and
context and making it somehow special. The emphasis is hereby put on the
activity of demarcating objects or actions from everyday environments or
circumstances, often conjoined with ceremony and ritual behaviour, rather
than on the resultant artefacts themselves. This activity has also been named
“making the ordinary extraordinary,” “elaboration,” or “artification.” As
she states in her book Homo Aestheticus (1995):
At first glance, the fact that the arts and related aesthetic attitudes vary so widely
from one society to another would seem to suggest that they are wholly learned
or “cultural” in origin rather than, as I will show, also biological or “natural.”
One can make an analogy with language: learning to speak is a universal, innate
predisposition for all children even though individual children learn the particu-
lar language of the people among whom they are nurtured. Similarly, art can be
regarded as a natural, general proclivity that manifests itself in culturally learned
specifics such as dances, songs, performances, visual display, and poetic speech
(Dissanayake 1995, p. xii).
She argues that in making things special we draw on those aspects of the
world that evolution has led us to find attractive and to prize, such as visual
signs of health, youth, and strength (according to mainstream evolutionary
psychology; see Section 1.4.1), but also repetitive patterns, balance, geomet-
rical shapes as well as more complex forms arising from thematic variations,
or the absorbing of asymmetry and difference within a wider, encompassing
framework. The arts are not simply significant qua (static) packages of per-
ceptual stimuli, characterised by beauty, originality, or (evolutionarily seen)
by adaptive features related to e.g. healthy mates, nutritious food, or resolved
conflict. Instead, the operations/manipulations of stimuli are also important,
as well as these signals being made salient, given prominence, or emphasis.
Further, this gives rise to emotional responses when there are discrepan-
cies or changes provoking an interest. Artists in all media, so Dissanayake
claims, simplify, formalise, exaggerate, elaborate ordinary materials, body
movements, tones, beats, etc. – hereby sustaining emotional interest. In her
approach, Dissanayake has focused upon proto-aesthetic, prelinguistic, and
affective communicative mechanisms in early mother-infant interaction as
well as their adaptive consequences during human evolution. General adap-
tive advantages of artification, phylogenetically, as well as ontogenetically,
involve e.g. the reinforcement of social bonds as well as neurophysiological,
emotional, and social coordination. As to the interaction with infants, moth-
ers tend to use techniques such as simplifying, repeating, exaggerating, and
elaborating affinitive facial expressions, utterances, and body movements
(“baby talk”) that they use casually and unremarkably with adults. As to
adult social groups, strategies such as ritualisation, ceremonies, and other
means of artification are claimed to have been evolutionarily advantageous
(cf. also Dissanayake 2006). Artification, so Dissanayake maintains, is a
universal behavioural disposition whose components are ancient and influ-
ential features of human cognition and as important to human evolution as
tool making, speech, as well as the making/use of signs.5
5 It is difficult not to associate this with the definition of art as “making strange,”
first suggested by the Russian formalists, and then incorporated into the Prague
school notion of art, although, to these authors, this operation took place in
historical time, not at the origin of art (see Sonesson 1999, 2011) (Editors’ note).
136 Michael Ranta
Thus, as I would like to suggest, the story of aesthetics and art could
and should be considered on a much earlier stage than Carroll so far has
outlined. By studying humans’ very early evolutionarily significant adaptive
processes and preferences we might trace the emergence and the founda-
tions of more elaborated aesthetic theories and activities, manifested in
various modalities, where e.g. beauty (and its manifestations in objects or
activities) is understood in terms of harmony, symmetry, measure, order,
pertaining to the arrangement and proportion of parts, and so on (as, for
example, the Greeks did).
The category “art” and related concepts such as “beauty” or “aesthetic
value” certainly should be thought of as categories with fuzzy boundaries,
which we have all reason to expect to be extended and altered in the future.
Perhaps art indeed is peculiar in the sense that narrative links in Carroll’s
sense seem to have played a particularly crucial role in its formation. How-
ever, this doesn’t mean that anything goes. And we might still reasonably
ask how the (historically) very first works of art (and proto-aesthetic arte-
facts or activities) did come into being. Genealogically speaking, we might
assume that at earlier stages of human development quite broad and more-
inclusive categories (including ancient conceptions of mimesis) have existed
from which increasingly specialised subcategories have emerged. Beardsley
once criticised Arthur C. Danto’s proposal according to which theories of
art are necessary for constituting works of art:
Arthur Danto must be mistaken in his well-known view that it is theories that make
art “possible.” Danto says, “It would, I should think, never have occurred to the
painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls. Not unless there
were neolithic aestheticians.” Perhaps so; but it does not follow that they were
not producing art. An art theory may make the concept of art possible, but that’s
not the same as making art possible. Unless there were neolithic microbiologists,
it would not have occurred to the cave dwellers that their illnesses were caused
by micro-organisms; nevertheless they died from them (Beardsley 1982, p. 308).
Maybe Beardsley’s analogy is a little bit misplaced; a more appropriate

comparison could rather be made between linguistics and its relationship
to language and (proto-) linguistic behaviour. But Beardsley’s remark still
has a point, I think. The existence of aesthetic and proto-aesthetic activi-
ties certainly does not presuppose a full-fledged aesthetic discourse. As to
Carroll’s narrative on the narrative connections within aesthetic discourse,
its (historical-evolutionary) prologue still waits for being investigated in

more detail.
5.5. A Closer Look at the (Mimetic) Roots of

Art and Aesthetics
But where and when should such a prologue begin? Traditional attempts
to focus upon “history” in a traditional sense, i.e. concerned with the last
5,000 years or so, and to disregard “prehistory” (as revealed by fossilised
and artifactual, nonverbal remains) would seem to be quite narrow-minded.
As to history in a very wide sense (i.e. “deep history”; see Chapter 1 in
this volume), we might, of course, say it started with the Big Bang about
13.7 billion years ago, a history which rather occupies astronomers, physi-
cist, chemists, and – with the emergence of life as we know it – biologists.
Such a broad perspective would seemingly exceed the scope of an inquiry
into aesthetic phenomena and activities. Nevertheless, a thorough aesthetic
inquiry would certainly profit from taking at least the evolution of our
hominine ancestors as well as modern, though not necessarily literary, hu-
man beings into account, as envisaged within Donald’s broad chronological
model for example (cf. also Collins 2013, p. 8). In some sense, we would
hereby strive for some kind of explanatory aesthetic narrative, where art
historical narratives in Carroll’s sense should be regarded as the tip of an
iceberg, as one of the (preliminary) end results of humans’ general cognitive
and perceptual interaction with an external environment.
However, such an attempt is admittedly also quite risky, as the empirical
evidence needed for confirming (or falsifying) suggested explanatory hypoth-
eses, compared to our more recent history, is absent, instead of which rather
speculative hypotheses might come into play. Evolutionary psychologists
have frequently argued that aesthetic activities could be regarded as the re-
sult of, or correlated with, adaptive processes within our evolutionary past.
A general problem with those approaches is their reductionist tendency as
they try to find overarching general theories and adaptive foundations of art,
thereby neglecting the wide differences within this category (as already point-
ed out at the beginning of this chapter). It has further been argued that the
arts are by-products of adaptive mechanisms, e.g. “the hunger for status, the
aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and
138 Michael Ranta
the ability to design artefacts to achieve desired ends” (as suggested by Steven
Pinker, quoted in Davies 2012, p. 123) or as sexual courtship adaptations
(as suggested by Geoffrey Miller; cf. Davis 2012, pp. 123–126; and Chapter
1.5 in this volume). But these mechanisms may also give rise to a number
of activities which clearly seem to be non-artistic, such as technological or
other achievements in general. Numerous further evolutionary approaches
on similar lines could be mentioned, as reviewed (and criticised) by the phi-
losopher Steven Davies in his work The Artful Species (2012, pp. 121–135).
There is one approach, however, which Davies discusses at some length
and considers to be one of the most nuanced theories, namely Dissanay-
ake’s idea of aesthetic behaviour as “making something special.” The selec-
tion of items for their unusualness and the addition of decorative patterns
(from c. 100 ka onwards), followed by the emergence of more clear-cut
art-making activities, accompanied by religious rituals (40–20 ka), may
have been universal, innate sources of pleasure among humans, provid-
ing social advantages as well as the feeling of having control over nature.
And herein we might find some of the basic foundations and evolutionary
advantages of aesthetic behaviour.
Still, as Davies claims, also her concept of “making special” seems to
be too broad, seemingly including anything which humans experience as
interesting, for example “a video of our child’s university graduation or of
a horse we’ve heavily backed winning a major race” (Davies 2012, p. 131).
But perhaps even more troublesome is Dissanayake’s lack of concern with
the semiotic (cognitive, representational, symbolic, etc.) aspects of art or
aesthetic activities. As she explicitly states, here quoted at some length:
my own ethological viewpoint does not treat content – the actual thoughts, wishes,
or images inherent in the actions or objects that are being made special (shaped
and embellished) [---]. This does not mean, however, that I see “content” in some
way as less important than making special, just as I do not see food as being less
important than the behavior of food preparation and utilization [---]. While one can
study the raw material in order to understand its essential nutrients, or investigate
how an individual person or culture prepares it for consumption, an ethological
view wishes primarily to establish and emphasize that the transforming, treating or
making special itself has been of crucial significance in the evolution of the human
species [---] I am not particularly concerned with the symbolic character of art:
I find its presymbolic sources much more crucial to understanding its nature as a
biological endowment (Dissanayake 1995, pp. 85–86, 94).
However, such restrictions concerning the origins of art seem to be rather

odd and counter-intuitive. Admittedly, artification practices as here out-
lined may undoubtedly have played a considerable role as preconditions
for clear-cut artistic practices as manifested in more recent human history.
But certainly efforts (and the ability) to represent, and thus in some sense
preserve/reproduce, the “outside world” by various semiotic means – by
bodily mimesis, by speech, and not least by pictorial representations – seem
to have been especially crucial for the cognitive evolution of the hominine
species, clearly surpassing mimetic activities of other animals, including
non-human primates (see Chapter 2: Mimesis in this volume). This very
specific human capacity should for obvious reasons be taken into account
in order to investigate the origins of art. We may concur that an investi-
gation of, for instance, pictorial renderings of specific contents (such as
bulls or horses) might be less relevant for understanding the evolutionary
foundations of art making, but certainly the manifested and regularly oc-
curring “behaviour” of creating visual resemblances seems to be crucially
significant. To be sure, although ancient theories on image and mimesis
neither address art as such, nor are satisfactory as all-embracing aesthetic
theories, they still point to aspects that have been of considerable interest
throughout, and indeed permeate, earliest human “art-making” practices.
Some of the earliest abstract and non-figurative visual configurations
have been documented at southern African (e.g. Stilbaai, South Africa,
c. 75 ka) and European sites (e.g. El Castillo, Spain, c. 41 ka), which seem
to be clear examples of artification efforts in Dissanayake’s sense. But ex-
amples of figurative representations can likewise be found at relatively
early stages of the hominine evolution. Well-known are for example the
cave paintings from Lascaux (c. 17 ka) and Chauvet, France (c. 30–32 ka);
outside of Europe, figurative paintings have been found in Arnhem Land,
Australia (c. 40 ka), in the Apollo 11 cave, Namibia (c. 27.5–25.5 ka), and
recently in Sulawesi, Indonesia (35–40 ka; see Aubert et al. 2014).
Moreover, all over Europe, as far as Siberia, quite a large number, about
100, of small Palaeolithic Venus figurines have been discovered, that is,
statuettes of women with relatively similar physical attributes carved in
mammoth ivory, bone, soft stone, and even made of burned clay (cf. Conard
& Kölbl 2010, pp. 39–61). Most of them have small heads, wide hips, and
legs, where the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva are exaggerated;
140 Michael Ranta
arms and feet are often missing, and the head is normally small and faceless.
The most famous of these statuettes is probably the Venus of Willendorf,
discovered in 1908 in Austria and dated to 25–28 ka. Due to this and other
discoveries, it was commonly assumed that three-dimensional female depic-
tions did not develop before the Gravettian, i.e. 28–22 ka.
Figure 5.1. Top-down, front, and side views of the Venus of Hohle Fels (© Venus
von Hohle Fels. Photo: Hilde Jensen. Copyright: Universität Tübingen).
However, in 2008 a remarkable finding was made which necessitated a

revision, namely the discovery of the so-called Venus of Hohle Fels in the
Swabian Alps, Germany, dating to at least 35 ka (see Figure 5.1). This statu-
ette would thus be one of the earliest examples of figurative representations
worldwide. Also in this case sexual attributes such as the breasts and the
vulva have been exaggerated (“made special”?), which suggests that this
figure, as Venus figurines in general, was intended to be an expression of
fertility, life, and reproduction (and perhaps used within magic-religious
rituals). But apart from such a possible meaning function, a number of
further, more or less convincing interpretations have been put forward (cf.
Conard & Kölbl 2010, pp. 31–38, 61–65). Thus it has been suggested that
Venus figurines also could have been used as:
• Representations of female ancestors
• Self-portraits of women, that is, seen from a first-person perspective
(large breasts, thick stomach, shortened thighs, small feet)
• Representations of various stages of pregnancy or of ages
• Creations of ideals of beauty
• Decorative amulets, talismans, toys, and/or props in hunting rituals
• Devices for increasing male sexual drives by emphasising the vulva,
breasts, and hips
• Naturalistic depictions of women suffering from Iodine deficiency (!),
with symptoms such as shortened limbs and a thick torso.
Furthermore, these possible meaning functions/purposes of Venus statuettes
do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive; they may of course have
had multiple, coexistent functions. And perhaps no general sociocultural
uses existed, but specific ones could have been prevalent within certain
tribes, geographical regions, and cultural domains, while not in others. But
in the end, we cannot know for sure what these statuettes were intended to
signify or what practical purposes they were fulfilling; there is simply no
empirical evidence available that can pinpoint exactly how our Palaeolithic
ancestors themselves understood and used them. However, one fact is strik-
ing and undeniable, namely the obvious intent to create representations of
real-world objects by means of visual resemblance (admittedly with varying
degrees of accuracy), and which we also nowadays clearly can recognise
and identify as such.
During the last few decades, the idea that pictorial representation some-
how depends on (natural) resemblance has come under attack, and various
scholars in the humanities have suggested that the experienced relationship
of similarity between pictorial representations and the represented objects is
wholly determined by cultural and historical frameworks and internalised
codes, conventions, or habits of representation. Indeed, mimetic (or iconic)
pictures should be regarded as arbitrary signs, more or less comparable to
linguistic items. Among the most well-known proponents of this position –
which might be called call pictorial conventionalism – are, for instance,
142 Michael Ranta
Nelson Goodman, Umberto Eco, and Norman Bryson (Goodman 1976;

Eco 1979; Bryson 1983). The common sense view that visual representation
presupposes some kind of correspondence between picture and object in
terms of (natural) resemblance or similarity is explicitly rejected. I shall not
be concerned here with a detailed discussion of the arguments used against
this latter view. My point is rather that to a considerable extent these argu-
ments include rather artificially constructed examples, while empirical and
Lifeworld evidence from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, or
psychology is largely omitted.
It should be mentioned, though, that another kind of empirical support
sometimes has been used to defend pictorial conventionalism. According
to this line of reasoning, humans’ experience of pictorial fidelity, or their
ability to comprehend pictures, have de facto varied historically and cultur-
ally (e.g. Eco 1979, pp. 204–205). The question arises, however, as to what
extent or degree such variations have occurred. Despite our culture-specific
limitations we have, apparently, no doubts that some Palaeolithic cave
paintings represent horses, bulls, and so on, and that the Venus figurines
represent women. We have no serious problems in recognising the repre-
sented objects of numerous pictures or sculptures from pre-Columbian,
Sumerian, or other ancient cultures – despite the fact that we are not ac-
quainted with their codes or conventions of depiction. How do we know
that it is horses or bulls which are actually depicted, and not something
completely different? Indeed, we could not be sure that these visual configu-
rations are representations at all (and not just formal and purely decorative
patterns, which by sheer coincidence resemble pictorial conventions that we
are accustomed to). Pictorial conventionalism in its most radical form leads
to the absurd conclusion that we have no rational or well-founded means
of comprehending and making comparative investigations of pictures (qua
representations) belonging to remote cultures.
There are, in fact, numerous empirical studies that indicate that the radical
and rather counter-intuitive claim put forward by pictorial conventionalists
is simply wrong. For instance, investigations with congenitally or early blind
adults (and who thus are unacquainted with recognition codes, or any other
pictorial codes) have shown that these persons are capable of producing
drawings in much the same way as sighted people do (see e.g. Kennedy 1980,
pp. 158–161). These configurations (which are admittedly quite simple)
have been intended to depict, for example, faces, human bodies, emotional
gestures, wheels, tables, and so on (sometimes even perspectivally distorted)
which sighted people are able to recognise as such. We have historical ex-
amples where people (for example, from eighteenth-century Japan) who had
hitherto only been accustomed to domestic ways of pictorial representation
not only could comprehend foreign (in this case Western) pictorial styles,
but also experienced the latter as more realistic or faithful (Tormey 1980,
pp. 69–71). These examples contradict, of course, the pictorial conven-
tionalist’s claim that the comprehension of pictures, or one’s experience of
pictorial fidelity, is entirely culture-bound or simply a matter of habit. We
have empirical evidence that children who have grown up without previ-
ous familiarity with pictures, and thus without training in how to interpret
them, were still able to recognise and identify objects portrayed by both
photographs and drawings (cf. Hochberg 1972, pp. 69–70).
These and a number of further empirical findings and arguments appear to
contradict the radical version of pictorial conventionalism (for fuller discus-
sions, cf. Ranta 2000, pp. 90–101; Sonesson 1989, pp. 220–251). It may be
admitted that the comprehension of pictures may depend on the beholder’s
previous learning and his cultural or historical presuppositions insofar as
the interpretation of visual configurations is concerned. Thus facial or body
movements, postures or events, implied metaphysical, religious, or political
assumptions, to mention some examples, might be interpreted differently by
different viewers. But this rather trivial insight does not permit the conclusion
that the understanding of pictorial representations is completely contingent
upon cultural-historical circumstances. If there are physical and biological
constraints (i.e. due to features of our perceptual system on the one hand,
and of objects on the other) on our ability to recognise depictions of certain
types of objects and to experience relations of visual similarity, this abil-
ity cannot be explained with reference to mere conventions or habits. Of
course similarity cannot be referred to in an unspecified sense; if this notion
is defined as something like “shared (visual) properties,” an additional ac-
count of which properties are relevant to pictorial representations seems
to be necessary. Still, the experience of relevant similarity appears to occur
quite spontaneously and obviously with remarkable historical and cross-
cultural stability. Similarity, as seen from a phenomenological perspective,
has to be explained by considering the nature of human mind and human
144 Michael Ranta
perception. Accordingly, it might be fruitful to give greater attention to

those biological/perceptual as well as evolutionary preconditions that ap-
pear to be significant in this context. It is far from unreasonable to suppose
that hominines have developed some kind of visual input system (among
other perceptual systems) that, to a considerable extent, functions indepen-
dently of conventionalised frameworks and which has emerged because of
its survival value. Iconic or mimetic pictures are visual artefacts that have
been adapted and developed – along with other cognitive abilities and due
to changing environmental circumstances – in order to correspond to our
perceptual presuppositions.
5.6. Artification and Mimesis on the Background of

the Sign Function
In concluding this chapter, I thus argue that any attempt to understand
art and aesthetics should not only take into account historical and aes-
thetic narratives as suggested by e.g. Carroll. The story has to begin at a
much earlier stage, including the evolutionary and phylogenetic develop-
ment of the hominine species. And within this development, our species’
deep-rooted concern with, and our highly evolved capacity for engaging
in mimetic activities of various kinds, such as gesture/bodily mimesis and
the subsequent acquisition of speech, language, and other symbolic means
of communication, has played a crucial role. Mimesis, so it seems, indeed
constitutes as one of the key foundations of art-making (probably together
with other aspects such as “artification” attempts), and the production of
iconic images is clearly one of the earliest manifestations of this general
predisposition contributing to the hominine evolution. Ancient theories of
art (or image production) with their stress on mimesis should certainly not
be easily dismissed.
Anna Cabak Rédei & Michael Ranta
Chapter Six
Narrativity: Individual and Collective
Aspects of Storytelling
Within the humanities, narratology has been a standing research area during
the last 50 years, notably among literary analysts, linguists, and semioticians.
Most of the time, narration has been associated with verbal discourses,
whether written or oral, where, briefly put, events or situations are repre-
sented as temporally ordered. Moreover, within cognitive science, narrative-
like structures have figured prominently in two ways. Probably inspired by
the notion of memory schema propounded by Bartlett (1995 [1932]), early
cognitive science introduced notions such as frames, scripts, or event schemas
(e.g. Schank & Abelson 1977; Mandler 1984). According to this view, we
acquire through previous experiences a large amount of culturally based
stereotypes of events and scenes (along with idiosyncratic variations), either
due to direct familiarity with instances of events, or due to our acquaintance
with written, oral, and of course pictorial descriptions of them (e.g. religious
or mythological tales). More recently, it has been claimed that narratives play
a key role in human evolution and child development. Donald (1991) sees
narrativity as prominent during the penultimate “mythic” stage of human
cognitive development, and as a key factor in the evolution of culture and
language. Nelson (2003, 2007) and Zlatev (2013), in their discussions con-
cerning language acquisition and narrative, present the latter as a significant
factor in child development. Moreover, it has been argued that narratives
play a substantial role as to the establishment of human personal identity
and self-consciousness (cf. Bruner 1990; Neisser & Fivush 1994; Fireman
et al. 2003) as well as in the constitution of group identities (cf. Bartlett 1932;
Schank 1995; Pennebaker et al. 1997; Hutto 2008, 2009).
There are many reasons for taking narratives into account in the study of
human cognitive specificity, notably as it emerges in ontogeny, phylogeny,
and history. In this chapter, we outline and discuss some proposals having
to do with the role of narratives from an individual human, as well as from
146 Anna Cabak Rédei & Michael Ranta
an intersubjective cultural, perspective, pointing to the crucial importance

of narrativity within hominine cultural evolution. More specifically, we
argue that these two perspectives are mutually interdependent, although
they, on the other hand, also diverge. The latter fact, to which we intend
to point as well, is sometimes not sufficiently emphasised among narratolo-
gists. By studying a particularity of narratives, namely their endings, and the
importance of these for the perceiver’s cognitive perception of the whole,
we attempt to shed some light on these divergences.
6.1. On Narrativity
Unquestionably, narrative is a cross-cultural phenomenon, as well as some-
thing occurring basically across all individuals within cultures. In spite of
all cultural variations as to subject matters, the capacity and practice of
storytelling seems to be prevalent even among the most isolated societies.
Moreover, it has sometimes even been argued that we have an innate dis-
position to narrativise events, to impose narrative-like meaning on people’s
actions, revealed already in early childhood, especially after language ac-
quisition has occurred (Bruner 1990). From the point of view of content,
moreover, many successful stories seem to be concerned with more or less
universal human preoccupations, such as sex, danger, life and death, decep-
tion, violence, power, wealth, and so on (cf. Schank 1979). Many stories,
in various kinds of semiotic modalities (whether oral, written, or pictorial),
appear to touch upon human existential interests, fears, and hopes, and
thereby contribute to giving structure to the instability and vulnerability
of human existence. They tell us something about the world (or some of
its aspects) and about possible or recommended ways of interaction with,
or manipulation of, the world. Thus storytelling is an important means of
creating ontological, existential, or social orders as well as reminding us of
existent ones (of which we may not always be consciously aware), thereby
playing a part in their reproduction (see Ranta 2013).
However, the exact nature of what constitutes narratives has been, and
still is, a much-debated issue within contemporary research. A minimal con-
dition for something being a narrative has, for example, been claimed to
be “the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in
a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other” (Prince
Narrativity: Individual and Collective Aspects of Storytelling 147
1982, p. 4). No particular requirement is imposed on the expression side,

opening up for the possibility of narrative being enacted in media other than
language, and even in such media which do not permit any (clear) temporal
division, such as static pictorial representations (see Sonesson 1997). Quite
frequently, narratives have been delineated from non-narrative texts (e.g.
arguments, explanations, or chronicles) by a set of defining criteria, such as
temporal sequentiality, employment, eventfulness, causality or causal agen-
cy, and particularity (rather than generality). Since all of these features are
not necessarily found together, narrativity may be regarded as a prototype-
based category, i.e. centering on clear-cut “stories” experienced as reference
points, though as a whole constituting a category with fuzzy boundaries.
Narratives, one could argue, may be intertwined with, or at least include,
non-narrative texts; narratives may be manifested in various genres or me-
dia, and meaning bearers of various kinds may be more or less narrative.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner, whose concern with narrative and cog-
nitive processing will be discussed later on, has also stressed the inherent
sequentiality of narratives: “a narrative is composed of a unique sequence
of events, mental states, happenings involving human beings as characters or
actors. These are its constituents. […] Their meaning is given by their place
in the overall configuration of the sequence as a whole – its plot or fabula”
(Bruner 1990, p. 43). Another approach, suggested by the narratologist
Monika Fludernik, has also emphasised the relationship between “experi-
entiality” and narrativity. Rather than focusing upon formal properties such
as event structures or plots, Fludernik defines narratives as representations
of possible worlds in a linguistic and/or visual medium, involving (acting,
thinking, and feeling) “protagonists of an anthropomorphic nature who
are existentially anchored in a temporal and spatial sense and who (mostly)
perform goal-directed actions” (Fludernik 2009, p. 6; cf. also Fludernik
1996, pp. 28–30); these representations, in turn, are ideally experienced as
emotionally and experientially significant by the recipient. Thus, Fludernik
suggests that an appeal to the prototypical existential interests and concerns
of human beings demarcates genuine narratives from simple narrative reports
of event sequences.
In summary, then, what kinds of functions or needs might narratives
fulfil? As various scholars have suggested (see, for example, Ryan 2005,
p. 345; Korthals Altes 2005), narratives may function as:
• F undamental means for organising human experience and for construct-

ing models of reality;
• Means for creating, consolidating, and transmitting cultural traditions,
and building the values and beliefs that define cultural identities;
• Vehicles of dominant ideologies and instruments of power, designed to
influence recipients’ attitudes and behaviour;
• Instruments of individual or collective self-creation;
• Repositories of practical knowledge and means for experiential learning,
providing knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of particulars;
• Moulds for shaping, modifying, and preserving individual and collective
memories;
• Sources of education and entertainment;
• Scenarios for thought experiments;
• Means for fostering empathy and understanding others.
After these introductory remarks, let us have a closer look at how narra-
tives might have an impact on, and indeed be, crucial for establishing and
consolidating individual and collective memories. A significant denominator
for various kinds of narratives at all levels seems indeed to be the ability to
represent temporal structures. Insights from a phenomenological perspec-
tive regarding our sociocultural context (i.e. the cultural Lifeworld, our
daily life and the world we take for granted and live in – physically, practi-
cally, and together with others), tell us that it is vital to us in every single
moment to be able to anticipate the next moment (“protentionally” in Hus-
serl’s terms), as well as to presuppose or at least imagine the continuation
of our existence (“retentionally” in Husserl’s terms; see Chapter 1 in this
volume). To believe that “the world” will end, or radically change, within
a near future would certainly influence the role of narratives in our society.
The child is from the start incorporated within the Lifeworld, with its
specificities and generalities when it comes to communication, action sche-
mas, and emotional responses (facial expressions being particularly impor-
tant in this connection). The Lifeworld constitutes the frame within which
we form our memories, as individuals and as members of a sociocultural
environment. Thus, our autobiographical memories are intertwined with
collective memories as they are mediated in forms of stories, history books,
films, literature, and so forth. In this respect, narratives make up specifically
important forms of communication, both in the development of the indi-

vidual and within a sociocultural framework. In the following section, we
consider the role of narrative for the developmental history of individuals
within their own lifetime.
6.2. Individual Aspects of Narrativity

Katherine Nelson’s approach to the development of narratives in children,
and eventually in culture, is particularly fruitful in this context, because it
suggests that narrativity emerges from the child’s experience early on within
the specific human Lifeworld:
We have good evidence that children can understand and represent the sequence
of familiar repeated events, which involves several related actions by 1 year of
age. They understand the scripts of their own worlds, in terms of general event
representation, and will protest if an action is omitted […]. By 3 years of age they
can verbalize a number of familiar scripts in reliable sequence […]. These event
representations derived from personal experience then may form the basis for the
canonical events from which narratives are made (Nelson 2003b, p. 25).
Besides the ability to represent events evolving in sequences, the child’s

growing awareness of being a self (around 32 months; Nelson 2003b, p. 32)
is important to the emergence of stories of an autobiographical or self-
experienced nature. Thus, the growing awareness of a self implies a growing
awareness of contrast (Nelson 2003b, p. 32), i.e. the awareness that there
are others, which in turn have stories of their own.
In order to focus on philosophical aspects of narrativity important for
deepening our discussion, we may also turn to Paul Ricœur (1990, 1992),
who likewise points to the importance of contrast for the emergence of
a sense of identity. However, the contrast involved is of another kind,
dealing with closures and continuities. Thus, in congruence with Ricœur,
who underlines the phenomena of “distinction” or “rupture” between one
frame of mind and another in cognition, we seem to put basic dialogic
prerequisites into play as soon as we start to communicate with others.
Once a communicative distinction is made, either between the self and the
other, from the infant’s perspective, or in an adult’s existential reflections
pondering continuity and ending, a dialogic rupture is inevitable, but so is
an objective of transgressing, or surmounting, this distinction.
In the latter, “existential” case, otherness may be physically of an “ab-

solute” nature, in the sense of being out of reach for personal experience.
A concrete example of this would be that the other does not exist in an
absolute sense, in a here and now; it is the other that one could not even
in principle physically encounter. This could be a historical, non-existent
person, for instance, or a hero from a novel. An other of that kind might
only be possible to talk about, and not with, if we hereby mean the pos-
sibility to be engaged in a dialogue, a communicative act with a sender
and a receiver and, moreover, with these two parts being able to change
position in the act. In the former case, the other is within the range of
personal experience, interaction, and dialogue, that is, being possible to
get into contact with, physically (in an extended sense here, also including
social media, phone calls, and the like), and who is even appreciated to a
certain degree. This distinction, of being in or out of range of communica-
tion in dialogue, has an analogous function in cultural semiotics, where a
distinction is made between two types of “Otherness” (see Chapter 1 in
this volume): (i) Alter, with whom we may have a dialogue, and, (ii) Alius,
with whom, or what, we cannot have a dialogue (Sonesson 2000; Cabak
Rédei 2007). In the latter case, an Alius may – in an almost ontological
sense (because the respondent is no longer alive) or in a communicational
sense – be estimated as unreachable. Thus, Alius may take the shape of a
completely ignored or detested other living being, or a thing, like a doll, a
flower, a car, but still be subject to a pseudo-dialogue. But in a strict sense,
it would be a monologue, and only an imaginary dialogue.
Moreover, theories of cultural semiotics might be integrated with the con-
cept of Lifeworld as defined in phenomenology (see Schütz 1964), focusing
on the interaction between persons in a here and now (a “we” experience;
see Chapter 1 in this volume). As we have seen, in a present ongoing dialogic
moment the “Ego” and the “Alter” may change positions (as both may
oscillate between the position of speaker and listener), and this is impos-
sible in the relation between the author and the hero in a fictional text, for
instance (cf. Sonesson 2000). This fact is clarified by Alfred Schütz (1964)
when he discusses the Lifeworld and the status of the predecessor (a histori-
cal person), enclosed in verbal texts in the same way as the hero in a novel,
for instance (cf. Bakhtin 1986). “We may only get information about the
predecessor via sources such as, for instance, books, or other textual source
materials, consequently the predecessor cannot change position with the

‘Ego’ (here the reader subject)” in a communicative act (Cabak Rédei 2007,
p. 56). Thus, from the perspective of the “I,” the other which is enclosed in
texts, or otherwise impossible to get in direct contact with for various rea-
sons, or being from a culture that is being perceived as not worthy of getting
in contact with, is an Alius. Thus, the Alius, in contrast to the Alter, is the
other that the “I” cannot, or does not wish to, have a direct contact with.
In his account of identity, Ricœur (1990, 1992) stresses the importance
of a closure for the sense of unity of life, this closure being given by nar-
ratives, in particular, if we understand narratives as (internal or external)
representations of event sequences, which are causally intertwined in some
way. Thus, a narrative about the life of a protagonist (fictional or factual)
needs to have some sort of closure in order to be fully comprehended by
the reader. Moreover, the ending in itself determines the understanding of
the whole story in some important aspects that will be dealt with below. In
that sense the human way of narrating life stories consists of two elements
in interplay: cognitive and cultural, the latter including literary conventions
and canonical ways of narrating for instance.
The psychologist and Nobel laureate (for his work on behavioural eco-
nomics) Daniel Kahneman expresses something similar to Ricœur, claim-
ing that there are two selves: (i) the experiencing self (present) and (ii) the
remembering self (maintaining the story of the individual’s life).1 The latter
is a “storyteller,” that is: “Our memory tells us stories” (Kahneman 2010).
And a very critical part of the story is how it ends, he continues, referring
to empirical evidence provided by some studies he conducted on different
perceptions and memories of patients’ experiences of their colonoscopy (i.e.
the endoscopic examination of the large bowel and the distal part of the
small bowel with a camera). For instance, it turned out that if the pain oc-
curred at the end of the colonoscopy, this experience influenced the patient’s
memory to a higher degree than if the pain had occurred earlier on. Thus,
in the former case the memory gave rise to a “worse story,” because the
experience of the pain was more recent in memory. Notwithstanding the
1 This is clearly reminiscent of the classical distinction between “I” and “me,”
first suggested by William James and elaborated by George Herbert Mead (cf.
Aboulafia 2012).
fundamental experiential difference between an act of colonoscopy and an

act of listening to a story, we will further on point to an analogy concerning
early or late interruptions of a narrative, when readers took part in short
biographical accounts of other persons.
At this point we might ask: what are the connections between narra-
tives and life? And in what way may narratives help us in the process of
understanding ourselves and our embeddedness in the world? With refer-
ence to Ricœur and Kahneman, one way to approach the topic would be
to focus on the ending of the narrative for comprehending the content as a
whole, for both the author and the reader. We may suppose that precisely
the ending of a story is indeed fruitful for an inquiry aiming at scrutinising
differences between life and narratives. How is it possible to represent the
continuous flow of life in a narrative, which is necessarily constructed and
limited? These questions become perhaps most obvious when it comes to,
for instance, (auto-)biographies; how does one close the narrative of a self
in the midst of the ongoing time flow that constitutes life?
Another reason for focusing upon (self-)narratives, in order to elucidate
the links between written narratives and life, might be their connections to
memory (Nelson 2003). According to Kahneman (2010), the main task of
memory is to be a “storyteller.” And in Schank and Abelson’s (1995, p. 28)
words, which – although perhaps somewhat strongly put – might have a
kernel of truth: “Storytelling is not something we just happen to do, it is
something we virtually have to do, if we want to remember anything at
all.” There are stories that “memory delivers for us” and those “that we
make up” (Kahneman 2010). Both are partly subject to the same criteria
of storytelling, such as for instance, sequencing and contrast (“theory of
mind,” differentiation between self and others). And both are more or less
subject to (re-)construction.
In fact, following Kahneman, the problem of time comes to the fore
not in experiencing, as time is not thematised in the experiencing moment,
but in remembering, because “[w]e actually don’t choose between experi-
ences, we choose between memories of experiences” (Kahneman 2010).
To clarify: in the experiencing moment, we perceive outer stimuli through
our senses, and these are, according to cognitive psychology (cf. Sternberg
2006), influenced by our attention; a drastic example of this is formulated
in the so called “weapon-focus effect” (Loftus, Loftus & Messo 1987) or
more generally expressed in the notion of an “affective attitude” (cf. Bruner

1990). The basic idea of the former is that an eyewitness/a perceiver of a
crime will mainly remember the weapon, at the expense of other details
present in the scene (and subsequently leading to memory impairments for
those details): “Weapon focus refers to the concentration of some witness’s
attention on a weapon – the barrel of a gun or the blade of a knife – during
a crime, leaving less attention available for viewing other items” (Loftus,
Loftus & Messo 1987, p. 55). In a more general sense, we may also speak of
the human tendency to attend to what is relevant in a specific situation, or
for a problem-solving task. Schütz was especially interested in the problem
of the mind’s selectivity. According to Schütz, an agent is not indiscrimi-
nately oriented to the world; he selectively “organizes the world […] in
strata of major or minor relevance” (Schütz 1970, p. 227). Any perception
itself involves the problem of choice of elements that may become subject
to “interpretations.” They are driven by local estimates, guesses, and by an
individual’s rather specific “hopes” or “expectations,” which may or may
not be fulfilled, that the current heading of her attention and action will
not lead her to failures or dead ends.
Returning to the topic of narratology, we may also formulate the idea as
follows: due to the fact that we cannot narrate the present moment while
being in and experiencing it, the “present” must always be (re)constructed
reflectively in memory, in short-term memory (generally up to 20 seconds;
Passer & Smith 2007, p. 237) or long-term memory (large pieces of infor-
mation for up to a life time; Passer & Smith 2007, p. 239) – the principle is
the same. As to perception in general, we might argue that our memories in-
deed play a crucial role, as we need to match them with what we perceive in
order to make sense of the world. Narratives are involved in what is called
the top-down processing of sensory inputs (for example, when watching a
film), making use of experiences made in a sociocultural context in order
to comprehend what is perceived, in contrast to the bottom-up processing
of “lower-order multimodal physical/sensory input” (Cohen 2013, p. 119).
Thus, there may be a match between these two types of processes, and the
optimal match steers consciousness (Cohen 2013, p. 119).
Kahneman carries on the discussion in claiming that not only is the fun-
damental task of memory to narrate, but narrativity also starts straighta-
way: “we don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory
tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from experiences is a story”
(Kahneman 2010). Put in another way, what we are left with after any
experience is the memory of it. And to make sense of memories we need to
have a narrative (coherent) format for them, a format that Kahneman, for
instance, claims is embedded in remembering itself. Nelson also points to
the relations between memory and storytelling and the influence of affec-
tions on this mechanism. An “epistemic value” may be imputed to memory
as it keeps track of new and old events, forming a “platform for actions” in
the present as well as in the future, not least in order to provide for future
needs (Nelson 2003a, p. 126). In fact, Kahneman says something similar
when stating that we think about the future “as anticipated memories.”
Nelson writes:
Although this claim has been contested, it seems probable that memory for tem-
porally sequenced events or activities – a characteristic of episodic memory – may
have evolved as functional for certain kinds of knowledge: how to build a nest, for
example, or how to locate and dig out termites (Nelson 2003a, p. 126).
According to this view, one function of long-term memory, we might

add, seems to include the idea of a specific goal-directedness in learning.
Narrativity also becomes relevant here, as a function of memory, since
the structure of episodic memory has similarities with narratives. Episodic
memory is the memory of “personal experiences: when, where, and what
happened in the episodes of our lives” (Passer & Smith 2007, p. 246), and
where the emotions associated with them, are stored. And this seems to
share some important properties with narratives: temporal sequentiality,
also stressed by Kahneman, defining a story as something characterised by
“changes, significant moments and ending,” the latter being indeed “very,
very important,” sometimes even altering the narrative structure as a whole
(Kahneman 2010).
Another way of underlining the importance of narratives is put forward
by Jerome Bruner, in his influential work Acts of Meaning (1990), where he
states that one of the most global and important dialogic forms of human
communication is narrative: “Narrative structure is even inherent in the
praxis of social interaction before it achieves linguistic expression” (Bruner
1990, p. 77). For Nelson, however, narrative is not an “inherent mode of
thought.” In her view, “narrative form is a cultural invention, one that
may be adopted by individuals in organising their own autobiographical

memories” (Nelson 2003, p. 129).
Be that as it may, memory seen as a platform for actions and perception
of events is in its turn subject to affects. In this conjunction Bruner (1990,
p. 58) refers to the psychologist Frederick Bartlett who
insists in Remembering that what is most characteristic of “memory schemata”
as he conceives them is that they are under control of an affective “attitude.”
Indeed, he remarks that any “conflicting tendencies” likely to disrupt individual
poise or to menace social life are likely to destabilize memory organization as well.
It is as if unity of affect (in contrast to “conflict”) is a condition for economical
schematization of memory.
To the discussion of the affective attitude and its influence on the schematic
memory underlying any narrative (as a construct, or as an inherent feature),
we might add some insights formulated by the Russian philosopher of
language, literary scholar, and cultural semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin, who
writes about the biographical literary genre, based on empirical studies of
a number of important works: “The conception of life (idea of life) that
underlines a biographical novel is determined either by life’s results (works,
services, deeds, feats) or by the category of happiness/unhappiness (with all
of its variations)” (Bakhtin 1986, p. 17).
Important in this connection is to keep in mind that Bakhtin did not
make any distinction between autobiographical and biographical texts,
which makes his conclusions interesting in connection with Paul Rozin’s
and Jennifer Stella’s (2009) findings in their study of cognition, perception,
and biographical storytelling, to which we will turn below. The importance
of some sort of “result” or of an affective attitude (happiness/unhappiness)
is very much in line with their results from experimental psychology.
Rozin and Stella (2009) set up an experiment in order to study how
posthumous events change the way readers first conceive of a biographical
account. They focused their study around questions dealing with, for exam-
ple, altered understandings of happiness and unhappiness respectively of the
life they just read about. The results of the experiment showed that when
given a posthumous ending, the “meaning” of the previous ending which
might have been favourable is reversed to the opposite in concordance with
the posthumous version. Thus, Rozin and Stella show the importance of
the (posthumous) ending for the reader’s conception of the protagonist’s
life, especially for the evaluation of “goodness of life” (in comparison with
“happiness/unhappiness” of life). As Rozin and Stella put it:
posthumous events affected judgments of the goodness of lives, and even the judg-
ment of the happiness of lives. The effect was always in the direction of moving the
total life evaluation in the valence direction of the posthumous event. The mean
change for posthumous effect size for happiness/unhappiness is about one half of
the change for goodness of life (Rozin & Stella 2009, p. 275).
To sum up: the closure of a narrative, in our case a life story, seems to be
decisive for the reader when making sense of the protagonist’s experience,
as for instance the “goodness of life.” In that sense, the narrative seems to
share some important features with some functions of long-term memory:
to (re)construct, give form and closure (coherence) to experiences made by
an individual. On a cultural level, narratives may function as cultural tools,
and as such give additional formats to individual stories, determined not
so much by episodic memories, but by what the social psychologist and
cultural semiotician James J. Wertsch calls “collective memories” (Wertsch
2002). In that sense, individual and cultural narratives interact, but diverge
as well, the latter being foremost a result of episodic memory tied to per-
sonal experiences.
6.3. Collective Aspects of Narrativity

After having considered narrative’s significance from an individual per-
spective and its relation to memory, let us now address its possible bearing
from a sociocultural and, to be more specific, from a cultural evolutionary
point of view. It seems hardly controversial to regard narrative as a human
species-specific capacity, involving a number of advanced cognitive mecha-
nisms, such as causal reasoning, language (and other semiotic resources),
intersubjectivity, temporal structuring, and an awareness of self and others,
among other things. And if this seemingly universal capacity might have
had an adaptive function, we should ask to which selection pressures it
could have been a response.
As we have seen, narrative skills develop early and spontaneously in
children, though they emerge within a sociocultural context, already de-
veloping during parent/mother-infant interaction, where children succes-
sively “grow into” narratives provided by the family and, by extension, a
larger community. Due to the development of social communicative skills,

narrative frameworks are established which contribute to the child’s self-
awareness, understanding of the world, and his/her role within it. Subse-
quently, an expansion into large-scale narratives occurs, involving general
cultural, explanatory frameworks and goal-settings within larger public
spheres (cf. Nelson 2003b, pp. 19–22).
Cognitive psychologists, such as Jerome Bruner (1990, 1991) and Roger
Schank (1995, 1999) already mentioned, have argued that narratives are
indeed crucial and essential cognitive instruments or tools, which sustain
or enhance intelligence itself. According to Schank, intelligence involves to
a considerable extent the storage and retrieval of scripts, that is, general-
ised sets of expectations about what will happen in well-understood situ-
ations. Furthermore, such memory structures may occur on various levels
of abstraction. On lower levels there will be scenes – general structures
that describe how and when a particular set of actions takes place, such as
a restaurant scene, classroom scene or surgery scene. Each scene defines a
setting, a goal, and actions in attempting to reach a specific goal. Scenes
can point to scripts that provide the details concerning stereotyped actions
that take place within a scene. They may then be organised into wider
“memory organization packages” (MOPs) which are directed towards the
achievement of a major goal; in the cases referred to above, getting a meal,
learning from a lecture, and receiving treatment for an illness (Schank 1999,
pp. 123–136). On a still higher level, there are “thematic organization
packages” (TOPs), which allow us to connect events-in-scenes to abstract
principles or new contexts.
Now, it is hardly controversial to suspect that social identities of cultures
(and sub-cultures) are based to a considerable extent upon the sharing of
such low- and high-level narrative structures – and, as we might say, of
more or less specific constituents of “world views” (see below), such as
distinctions between self and others, temporal and spatial conceptions, and
so forth. As a matter of fact, as Schank has claimed, although the sharing
of certain stories actually defines a (sub-)culture, their members are often
unaware of their existence; they are rather tacitly taken for granted and
appear in highly abbreviated forms, e.g. as “skeleton stories,” proverbs,
or as “gists.”
But let us now return to the question whether and in which way(s) nar-
rative might have been evolutionary advantageous and which task(s) it
may have accomplished in our hunting-and-gathering past. Evolutionary
epistemology, as a term coined by Donald Campbell (1974), could be de-
scribed as the approach that addresses questions in the theory of knowledge
from an evolutionary point of view. It includes, in part, deploying models
and metaphors drawn from evolutionary biology in order to characterise
and resolve issues arising in epistemology and conceptual change. Thus,
evolutionary epistemology also attempts to understand how evolution de-
velops by interpreting it through models drawn from our understanding
of conceptual transformations and the development of theories, and vice
versa, to understand conceptual change in evolutionary terms.
One influential approach to conceptualise various levels of knowledge
from an evolutionary perspective has been put forward by Merlin Donald
(e.g. in Donald 1991; see also Chapters 1 and 5: Art in this volume). Ac-
cording to Donald (1991), early hominine culture based on mimesis, which
evolved about two million years ago, was followed by a slow cultural ac-
cumulation of knowledge, presupposing improved communication skills
which allowed for better social coordination as well as shared knowledge.
In contradistinction to mimicry (the literal attempt to duplicate in action
perceived events) or (motoric) imitation (a less literal and more flexible du-
plication of events with closer attention to their purpose), mimesis involves
communicative intentions where an audience is taken into account (see
Chapter 2: Mimesis in this volume): “Mimesis is fundamentally different
from imitation and mimicry in that it involves the invention of internal rep-
resentations. When there is an audience to interpret the action, mimesis also
serves the purpose of social communication” (Donald 1991, pp. 168–169).
A mimetic culture then made possible the so-called mythic culture
(c. 500 ka – present) and the emergence of symbolic language, a further ma-
jor shift in the human cultural development, accompanied by and enabling
a rapid acceleration of cognitive skills. At this point, narrative becomes a
crucial factor. The ability to narrate, according to Donald (1991), was a
skill that humans acquired during the mythic culture built upon the mimetic
skills established earlier.
Narrative skill is the basic driving force behind language use, particularly
speech: the ability to describe and define events and objects lies at the heart
of language acquisition. Group narrative skills lead to a collective version

of reality; the narrative is almost always public. Thus, “the adaptive pres-
sure driving the expansion of symbolic capacity, the usefulness of symbolic
invention, and the value of a high-speed speech mechanism with a huge
memory capacity all depend upon the ability of the mind to harness these
abilities toward the reconstruction of reality” (Donald 1991, p. 257).
As Donald further claims, a supreme product of narrative would be the
construction of myths (religious, historical, social, among others) which
consolidate (not least preliterate) societies, regulate behaviour and channel
the perception of the world (Donald 1991, p. 258). In general, we might say,
narratives have a vital function as to the establishment and consolidation
of wider world views (cf., for example, Kearney 1984), such as:
• T he awareness and distinction between the Self and the Other (that is, the
surrounding environment, other beings, gods – in other words, anything
that is “not-self”).
• Ways of categorising reality, for example, what should count as “real”
versus “unreal” or “natural” versus “supernatural.”
• Concepts of causality (the relationship between acts or causes and their
[desired] ends or effects).
• Concepts of space and time (e.g. linear/unidirectional or oscillating im-
ages of time).
Apart from these basic functions of narrative, we might also add some more
pragmatic aspects (cf. also the suggestions listed in Section 6.1). Storytelling
is basically a social action (or has emerged from social interaction), which
involves a storyteller and a recipient. Human beings seem to enjoy this way
of social exchange, almost for its own sake. But certainly narrative may
also function as a means of manipulating and deceiving others, in order for
the teller(s) to serve his (their) own end(s). As Donald claims, in “conquer-
ing a rival society, the first act of the conquerors is to impose the myth on
the conquered. And the strongest instinct of the conquered is to resist this
pressure; the loss of one’s myth involves a profoundly disorientating loss
of identity” (Donald 1991, p. 258; see also Scalise Sugiyama 1996; and
Chapter 10: Encounters in this volume).
Wertsch (2002), in line with Bakhtin (1986), Ricœur (1990, 1992), Bart-
lett (1997), and Hutto (2009), underlines that narratives, from an individual
as well as from a sociocultural perspective, organise the past into intelligible

units. In doing that, narratives – at the same time – also reduce the past,
because narratives are selections and (re-)constructions of a past and as
such restricted to the medium used to tell about it, which, most of time,
primarily involve verbal means with all its possibilities and limits. Thus,
narratives are both referential and, to use a term from Bakhtin, dialogic:
In contrast to the referential function, which concerns the relationship between
narratives and the settings, actors, and events they depict, the dialogic function
concerns the relationship between one narrative and another. From this perspec-
tive, it is essential to recognize that narratives do not exist in isolation and do not
serve as neutral cognitive instruments. Instead, they are embedded in concrete dis-
course characterized by dialogic and rhetorical opposition (Wertsch 2001, p. 59).
From Wertsch’s point of view, the double function of narrative creates an

equally double function of memory: to give a true image of the past, on one
hand, and to give the group a useful narrative around which it can construct
an identity on the other hand. Moreover, narrative may be an efficient
means for information acquisition and transmission, that creates virtual
realities and provides knowledge useful to the pursuit of fitness without
the risks and efforts involved in first-hand experience (cf. Scalise Sugiyama
2001). Narratives are efficient renderings of events, i.e. informational stor-
age devices which are remarkably memorable and easy to spread within
a community. As pointed out by e.g. Dan Sperber, a story such as “Little
Red Riding Hood” is far more complex than a 20-digit number; still, the
latter demands considerably more effort to remember (Sperber 1985; see
also Scalise Sugiyama 2001). Narratives are constructed in order to trans-
mit complex information chunks, involving glue-like ingredients, we might
say, such as (easy comprehensible and memorisable) causal and enabling
connections, universal fitness goals and obstacles, commonly known plot-
structures, and so forth. Storytelling traditions may comprise domains of
information that, from a hominine evolutionary perspective, have had a
considerable survival value. As Scalise Sugiyama (2001, p. 229) puts it:
[f]olklore motif indexes (used by folklorists to classify folk tales by their plot con-
tents) employ classification categories that consistently correspond to adaptively
relevant domains of information: social relations (e.g. kinship, marriage, sex, social
status, plants, geography, weather, and the cosmos…).
Further, to borrow a term introduced by Donald, narratives may be re-

garded as exograms, that is, “external memory record[s] of ideas” or ex-
ternal symbolic devices linked to the present context of remembering that
allow us to extend and enhance our bio-memory systems and significantly
augmenting the working memory capacity. Such exograms are, for example,
quasi-permanent, exceeding one’s life span; they have a virtually unlimited
storage capacity; they are crafted; they are easily retrievable and, not least,
they may be manifested in various media. The oldest known written story,
the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates to the eighteenth century BCE, but of course
we may reasonably suspect that there have been long-standing oral tradi-
tions of storytelling before, in accordance with Donald’s theory. Storytell-
ing did not suddenly “pop up” when written languages were developed.
Furthermore, orally told stories would also seem to fulfil some of the re-
quirements for exograms, or at least more generally, for embodiments if
they are intersubjectively widespread, well-known, and have a historical
continuity or stability (see Sonesson 2007a). But in addition to language and
storytelling, successively other forms of symbolic-representational expres-
sion evolved, such as cave paintings, Venus figurines, etc., dating back to at
least 40 ka (see Chapter 5: Art in this volume). The emergence of language,
storytelling, and pictorial representations became probably increasingly
interrelated. And we should certainly not easily dismiss the possibility that
pictorial representations at an early stage of the hominine evolution were
used as at least narrative props or “gists;” in this respect they also might
have had adaptive functions and survival values, a full discussion of which
lies beyond the scope of this chapter.
6.4. Narratives as Distributed Cognition

In this chapter, we have accounted for research according to which (verbal
and non-verbal) communication seems to start out in the first interactions
between the child and the caregiver or/and other significant others. This
initial differentiation between self and other/Alter, in the infant, develops
and matures in the course of life and yet another differentiation of the other
emerges, Alius, the insight of an absolute other which/who cannot respond
(see Chapter 1 in this volume).
Narratives are strong contributing factors to the formation of our identi-

ties and memories – the child’s, the adult’s and the group’s. Stories appear
also to play a crucial role as cognitive tools or “exograms” for understand-
ing and manipulating the varying environmental conditions which we as
humans encounter. As representational units within a wider network of
“distributed cognition,” narratives help to structure and coordinate social
interaction. In all these respects, then, the impact of narratives on the cul-
tural formation and evolution of the human species should by no means
be underestimated, and they also have an impact on how collective “sense
making” is formed in socio-cultural contexts, since the latter of course are
made up of individuals. In that sense, there is a connection between the
individual as formed on the one hand by the context, and on the other
participating in forming the very same context he or she is a part of. In cul-
tural semiotics we may define the problem as the “Ego’s” interaction with
the “Culture,” both shaping each other. Moreover, the (semiotic) artefacts
produced by the “Ego,” in this case narratives, play an important role in
a wider network of distributed cognition – they contain memories, stories,
worldviews made and produced within the culture they are in “dialogue”
with, for any addressee who is interested to take part in a certain culture
at a certain moment in the socio-cultural evolution of humans. Thus, nar-
ratives viewed as distributed cognition function as generative mechanisms
of culture, in time and space.
Andreas Nordlander
Chapter Seven
Religion: The Semiotics of the Axial Age
“Religion is more than anything a way of making sense of the world.”

Robert Bellah
What would a theory of religion look like if it took with utmost seriousness
the deep evolutionary history of humanity, as well as the cognitive resources
with which this history has equipped our species, but without thereby be-
coming reductionist? This chapter engages such a question in the attempt
to understand some of the intriguing features specifically of the religious
developments of the so called Axial Age – the formative period of many of
the still living world religions, roughly occurring in the middle centuries
of the first millennium BCE – and how these features are made possible by
the unique semiotic skills of human beings.1
7.1. An Evolutionary Cognitive-Semiotic

Approach to Religion
An unobjectionable definition of “religion” is notoriously difficult to pro-
duce, and is for most purposes unuseful. However, we do need a basic idea
of what we are talking about when we are talking about religion. Simply to
get started, then, I shall draw on Clifford Geertz’s notion of “the Problem of
Meaning” (1973, chap. 4) and understand religion as the complex process
and result of the unique meaning making skills of human beings – members
of the species Homo sapiens – both collectively and individually, with respect
to questions of ultimate meaning, such as the “why” of existence, the burden
of suffering, and the quest for moral order. As such, it is by no means to be
understood exclusively as a set of intellectual beliefs about superempirical
realities, even though such are often involved; rather, it is an intricate web
1 I am grateful to my colleague, professor Göran Larsson, as well as to the editors

of and contributors to this volume, for probing comments and helpful discus-
sions on earlier drafts of this chapter.
164 Andreas Nordlander
of practices, rituals, artefacts, symbols, narratives, and concepts that some-

how serve to relate the ordinary world of daily life to non-ordinary realities,
drawing here on Alfred Schütz’s notion of living in multiple and overlapping
realities (see Bellah 2011, pp. 2–11). One immediately graspable example of
what I mean would be the Jewish Sabbath, which is a symbolically imbued
ritual, undergirded by a comprehensive narrative, that uniquely enacts what
it means to be Jewish, that serves to structure the ordinary work week, and
that even indicates the meaning of history as such.
7.1.1. Religion and Evolution

To speak of religion as unique to human beings, and as a human way of being
in the world, is justified from the simple empirical fact that while religious
practice seems to be present from the earliest traces of human civilisation, it
is nowhere in evidence among other primates or among any other animals
(Schloss and Murray 2009; Bellah 2011). This is, of course, an intriguing
fact, for which we must try to give an explanation. Such an explanation does
not at all have to treat the various phenomena of religion as unrelated to the
evolutionary development of our species, as if it popped up out of nowhere
with the emergence on the scene of human beings. Rather, the fact that
religion is unique to human beings is compatible with its having significant
evolutionary roots, or preconditions, in the same way that ethics – assuming
that this is a unique human capacity – is arguably prefigured in some of the
higher primates and other animals as well (De Waal 1996; Coakley 2013;
Zlatev 2014). Indeed, one of the central tasks of a cognitive-semiotic theory
of religion would have to be the investigation of how religion, while be-
ing a distinctly human phenomenon, is nonetheless related to evolutionary
infrastructures already in place, thence to be carried forward in a multitude
of forms by human cognitive and cultural development.
There is clearly a resonance between the approach to be sketched here
and other contemporary approaches which seek to combine evolutionary
and cognitive-scientific theories in the understanding of religion, often view-
ing a set of cognitive mechanisms as the proximate causes of religious belief,
and natural selection as the ultimate explanation. That is to say, Darwinian
selection is understood to explain why certain individuals or groups – and
perhaps humanity as such – have evolved the cognitive mechanisms that give
Religion: The Semiotics of the Axial Age 165
rise to religion (Schloss 2009). However, while the proposal in this chapter
builds upon certain aspects of contemporary theorising about religion from
evolutionary and cognitive perspectives, other aspects seem highly dubious
from the point of view of the present approach, which is why I had better
begin by situating this approach in the larger theoretical context.
It is only recently that evolutionary and cognitive-scientific perspectives
have been seriously applied to the study of religion. The development of
sociobiology, dating from the 1970s, represents one strand of this project
(Wilson 2004 [1978]). But there is also the mainstream cognitive science
of religion, for which the 1990 publication of Thomas Lawson and Robert
McCauley’s book Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture,
is sometimes mentioned as an inaugurating event (Turner 2014), though one
should also mention the early contributions of Stewart Guthrie (1993) and
Pascal Boyer (1994). It is also true, of course, that the attempt to find reli-
gion’s “origin in human nature,” as David Hume put it in his Natural His-
tory of Religion (1757), goes back to antiquity (Sloan Wilson 2002; Hume
2009 [1757]) – an attempt that has, interestingly, not always been a scepti-
cal endeavour; there has been a sustained debate at least within Western
theology about human beings’ natural religious disposition (Porter 2005).
Moreover, scholars of religion have always been interested in the workings
of the human mind, even as psychologists and social scientists have always
studied human religion – from William James to George Herbert Mead,
and from Alfred Schütz to Claude Lévi-Strauss (Wuthnow 2007). However,
with the development of sociobiology, and then evolutionary psychology, as
well as the “standard model” of evolutionary cognitive science of religion
(ECSR), new ways of approaching the study of religion came into being.
7.1.2. Reductionist Approaches to Religion

What many of the current evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion
share is that they work within a reductionist framework, although this takes
different forms. By reductionism I mean here both the methodological claim
to be able to give a reductive explanation of “religion” in terms of one or
a few very basic evolutionary and/or cognitive mechanisms, and the wide-
spread definitional reduction of the explanandum to “belief systems” (as
in belief in superhuman agents). Thus, Edward O. Wilson will claim that
an increase in biological fitness is what will determine the viability of this

or that religious belief system (Wilson 2004). And mainstream ECSR will
hold that the viability or not of religious belief systems can be explained
according to how they mesh with a set of subconscious cognitive “devices”
or “modules” that generate universal beliefs in the absence of conscious
thinking (Barrett 2004).
To be sure, the critique these approaches have drawn, not least from
sociologists and anthropologists (Turner 2014), stems less from a conflict
over actual results than from a clash between two kinds of theory of science –
between the humanities and the natural sciences, where the new approaches
clearly side with the latter to the consternation of many used to working
solely with hermeneutical and qualitative methods. My sense is that this
clash can be abated to some extent simply by clarifying terms and conditions.
For example, the contents of a “thick description” of a religious Lifeworld,
such as engaged in by many scholars in the humanities, can obviously not be
exhaustively “explained” in any adequate sense of the term by invoking two
or three cognitive devices working below the level of consciousness, along
the lines of ECSR. The sheer complexity of religious phenomena makes such
a reduction impossible. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that
the cognitive architecture of the evolved human mind does play a significant
role even in the constitution of such a richly textured human Lifeworld. That
is to say, these accounts need not be mutually exclusive.
Part of the problem, of course, has to do with the treacherous word
“religion,” which is used in so many ways. For what is it that we are trying
to explain by recourse to subconscious cognitive devices? Most often the
discussion does not even directly apply to what scholars in the humanities
mean when they talk of religion, but something far less fleshy, namely the
origin and prevalence of certain concepts and dispositional attitudes to-
wards these. Indeed, part of the reductionist problem of current cognitive
scientific approaches is the fixation on “beliefs” as the very heart and soul
of religion. However, as I say, this does not disqualify the contribution of
ECSR; it merely qualifies it.
In addition to this, we might add that if vast stretches of the religious
landscape are intersubjectively constituted (socially constructed), as seems
evident, then the cognitive-scientific theoretical framework used to study
the phenomena of religion would arguably do well to move beyond the skull
bones of individual religious practitioners towards distributed and enactive

accounts of cognition (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1992; Thompson 2010).
Thus one might at least suggest that one aspect of the reductionism of main-
stream ECSR is that it is still too wedded to a computationalist framework.
7.1.3. Religion as Adaption, Inadaption, or Spandrel

If we focus more on the evolutionary dimension than the cognitive, the
most central question arguably concerns whether to understand religion as
adaptive or non-adaptive (Wilson 2004; Schloss and Murray 2009; Turner
2014). According to the adaptive account, human religion (or what causes
it) is selected because it increases the overall fitness of the individual or
group. Representative of this approach is the sociobiological work of E. O.
Wilson (1998, 2004), but also, from a rather different angle, the bridge-
building work of David Sloan Wilson, who seeks to establish a basically
Durkheimian vision of religion on evolutionary ground, and particularly in
terms of group selection (2002). They both seek to explain religion by its
social utility: religious groups simply increase their biological fitness, lead-
ing in the course of evolutionary time to the prevalence of Homo religiosis.
But David Sloan Wilson allows a much greater scope for cultural evolution
to play a decisive role, thus effectively distancing himself from the more
strident reductionism of sociobiology.
However, cognitive scientists bent on integrating their work with evolu-
tionary theory tend rather to favour non-adaptive accounts (Turner 2014).
That is, they consider religion to lack any direct connection to an increase
of fitness, which means that its origin must be explained differently. The
most common approach understands religion as the by-product of other
beneficial evolved traits – a “spandrel,” according to the influential account
of biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin (Gould and Lewontin
1979). Alternatively, religion may be viewed as caused by cognitive mecha-
nisms adaptive to past environments, but maladaptive to modern envi-
ronments. According to one particularly popular account, religion has its
origin in the cognitive mechanism known as HADD (hypersensitive agency
detecting devise), selected because it provides obvious fitness advantages
to be able to detect agency in one’s environment, such as that of predators
or human others. However, such a mechanism might conceivably also lead
people to read agency into most of what happens – the will of the gods, and
so on – even when there is no agency there (Guthrie 1993; Barrett 2004).
Alternatively, self-awareness may be seen as a direct outcome of evolution –
having it will increase chances of survival and further propagation of genes.
Only, with self-awareness comes the awareness of one’s own approaching
death, and so religion is developed as a coping strategy in the face of this
situation. In this scenario, self-awareness is an adaptation, religion is a by-
product (Deacon and Cashman 2009).
One could finally mention the theory that religion is a cultural parasite –
a meme – that colonises human hosts in order to propagate itself to the
detriment of the overall fitness of its human hosts (Dawkins 1976; Boyer
1994, 2001; Dennett 2006). It is hard to know how to classify this theory.
For the memes themselves religion is presumably adaptive (setting aside the
question of how to cash this idea out), but for human beings it clearly is
not (or, if it is, it nevertheless need not figure in the explanation of religion)
(for a critique of meme theory, see Chapter 1 in this volume).
Adaptive or non-adaptive, the value of evolutionary and cognitive theo-
ries of religion is arguably, at least to a large extent, a matter of how they
are framed. It might at first sight appear that the non-adaptive accounts must
lead to impoverished notions of “religion,” that which is to be explained.
Certainly, if by religion we mean a highly generalised belief in agency, then
its explanation by a HADD, or anthropomorphising cognitive mechanisms
in general, may appear plausible. But it clearly does not explain religion
in any more adequate sense. The “religion” such accounts explain is the
thinnest of abstractions. The problem is exacerbated if the default reduc-
tive framework hinders these approaches from seriously attending to the
culturally creative potential of all the religious traditions to develop new
values and meaning out of their own resources and in response to the needs
of specific situations – a significant part of human cultural evolution.
But it would arguably be possible to take these non-adaptive by-product
accounts of religion in a more fruitful direction by attending, for example,
to the experiential and creative dimensions of religion, such as the role of
non-utilitarian play or enjoyment, which is arguably one of the most signifi-
cant sources of religious development and renewal (Deacon and Cashman
2009; Bellah 2011; Barrett 2014). True enough, non-adaptive accounts
often give the impression that human beings are a bunch of dupes fooled
into religion by subconscious cognitive mechanisms, but this may stem more
from ideological biases of individual researchers than the theories as such.
At the end of the day, a “spandrel” is an area imbued with a significant
aesthetic value even if it does not serve a necessary role in terms of the
construction itself.
7.1.4. A Cognitive Semiotics Approach to Religion

Still, Émile Durkheim’s classic point is hard to get around: If religion as
such does not serve some strictly useful purpose for human beings, it be-
comes very difficult to explain its universal prevalence and staying power.
Perhaps a more promising point of entry, therefore, would be to admit
that religion does have a firmer foothold within human consciousness, that
is to say with the conscious individual and the communal experience of
being human. This is not to deny, of course, the subconscious infrastruc-
ture of consciousness – only that the latter can be wholly reduced to the
former (cf. Zlatev 2008). Indeed, what I am after here is something like
a non-reductive theory of religion in parallel to a non-reductive theory
of consciousness (whereas strictly non-adaptive theories of religion can
be understood as the epiphenomenalism of religious studies). In contrast
to something like “meme theory,” a non-reductive account must return a
measure of conscious agency to human beings, even at the level of religious
meaning-making (cf. Deacon and Cashman 2009, p. 4).
Arguably, cognitive semiotics provides a congenial framework within
which to place such a non-reductive account of human religion. To repeat,
the evaluation of much recent theorising in religious studies hangs upon the
larger framework of these theories. If the framework is reductive, the theories
in question will too often have the form: cognitive mechanism x explains
the origin of religion. If, on the other hand, the framework is non-reductive,
theories would be framed along the following lines: cognitive features x, y,
and z are the necessary conditions out of which religion emerges. What is
the difference, really? For our purposes here, the most important difference
is that the non-reductive approach can give the evolutionary and cognitive
dimensions their full due, while still retaining a significant role for conscious
agency and human creativity vis-à-vis the role of religion, for good and evil,
in cultural evolution. Hence, what is at stake is the general understanding

of cultural evolution as an open-ended and creative process.
In short, whether we think of religion as a “spandrel” or as more straight-
forwardly adaptive – and recent work indicates that the lines cannot be so
neatly drawn anyhow (Richerson and Newson 2009) – the key is to avoid a
full reduction of religion to a set of evolved cognitive mechanisms. It remains
plausible that various cognitive traits specific to human beings were the
prerequisites for religious phenomena to emerge. But this emergence cannot
be linearly traced to these traits alone; they are necessary but not sufficient.
For religion is necessarily related to conscious experience, and conscious-
ness cannot be reduced. For example, the cognitive capacity for mimesis
(see Chapter 2 in this volume) may have been selected for because it made
possible the development, refinement, and dissemination of skills, such as
the making of stone tools (Donald 2012). But mimesis is also the cognitive
prerequisite for religious ritual, which does not mean that it explains its
emergence. Similarly, it might be argued that the existence of a HADD does
not, as is sometimes claimed, explain why people believe in gods; nor does
the tendency to remember “minimally counterintuitive concepts” explain
the cultural prevalence of certain religious concepts (Slone 2014). However,
what is plausible – and what can therefore be viewed as a genuine contribu-
tion of cognitive science to religious studies – is that the cognitive operations
responsible for these phenomena play some role in the constitution of reli-
gious beliefs. They figure, perhaps importantly, in the cognitive structures
from which religion emerges.
Finally, in order to address the question of why religion is a strictly hu-
man phenomenon, something that points in the direction of uniquely human
capacities and needs, that which is particular to the human way of being in
the world arguably needs to be added – after all, animals also benefit from
being able to detect agency in their environment, and they also often need
practices to unify one group over and against another. I shall argue that what
we still need to address are certain specific traits of conscious human beings,
in particular biographical self-awareness and symbolic capacities.
Against the background sketched so far, I would like to trace the line-
aments of a cognitive-semiotic framework for a non-reductive theory of
religion. With the help of these tools, I shall then turn to an investigation of
some of the distinctive features of the religious developments of the Axial
Age, hoping to shed some light, not on abstracted concepts thought to

contain the “essence of religion,” but on the roots of religion as we know it.
7.2. Framework for a Cognitive-Semiotic Theory of Religion

The general cognitive-semiotic approach is able to shed new light also on
the question of religion. Identifying religion as a complex process of human
meaning making, it fully affirms the rootedness of religion in evolution-
ary history and the cognitive resources that history has made available to
humankind. In what follows, I shall develop these resources using Merlin
Donald’s model of cognitive and cultural development from episodic to mi-
metic to mythic and, finally, to theoretic consciousness, and Robert Bellah’s
appropriation of this model for religious studies, which involves mapping
three kinds of religious representation onto Donald’s three stages of the evo-
lution of human consciousness: mimesis makes possible enactive religious
representation, such as ritual; myth makes possible symbolic religious repre-
sentation, such as the variety of religious narratives; and theory, which will
be our primary concern, makes possible conceptual religious representation,
as in the theological and philosophical criticism of the Axial Age (Donald
1991, 2012; Bellah 2011).
7.2.1. Religion in between Mimesis and Myth

According to Donald, it is the transition from episodic consciousness, which
we share with other animal species, to mimetic consciousness that inaugu-
rates the different path taken by members of the genus Homo. The mimetic
stage denotes the crossing of a semiotic threshold, in that it makes more
complex capacities of meaning-making possible, capacities that are still
non-linguistic, but that will serve as the necessary base of proper linguistic
development (see Zlatev 2009, and Chapter 2 in this volume, for a nuanced
development of the evolutionary significance of bodily mimesis). Gener-
ally speaking, the mimetic stage is characterised by capacities of imitation,
skill, pantomime, pointing, gesture, and even vocalisation (Donald 2001,
pp. 263–265). Robert Bellah takes this into the field of religious studies
by suggesting a close connection between such embodied meaning mak-
ing, non-utilitarian play and the enaction of religious ritual (Bellah 2011).
Following Franz de Waal’s suggestion that “ceremony” is to be found even
among chimpanzees, Bellah asks: “Could we see among prelinguistic but

mimetically communicating hominids the emergence of something like this
chimpanzee celebration as a deliberately devised form of serious play?”
(Bellah 2011, p. 93). Such events of non-utilitarian ceremonial playfulness,
Bellah hypothesises, could even in the absence of language have taken ritual
form among hominid groups, perhaps as a way of marking the identity of
the group as opposed to other groups. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest
that a rudimentary sense of the sacred could have emerged from this, in line
with how Durkheim speaks of a sense of the sacred as constitutive of social
identity (Durkheim 2001). In this way, a Durkheimian analysis of the social
origin of religion can be incorporated into Donald’s analysis of mimesis in a
fruitful way, such that we are given a clue to what may be one of the deepest
roots of human religiosity.
For my own part, though, I confess I find it difficult to imagine an explicit
sense of the sacred before the emergence of language as such, depending of
course on what we mean by “sacred.” And when it comes to ritual behav-
iour one must distinguish between animal rituals and human rituals as they
become intertwined with language, narrative, and theory, which again is
not to deny an evolutionary continuity. Be that as it may, the point is not to
locate an explicit sense of the sacred at the mimetic stage, or to distinguish
varieties of ritual; what matters is that we can conceive of a plausible transi-
tion from ceremonial playfulness to this ritual being infused with a sense of
the sacred, along the lines suggested by Durkheim. In other words, religious
ritual proper likely occurred after the transition to mythic culture, which
significantly includes language and narrative, even as the root of religious
ritual is to be found already at the mimetic stage, and possibly even in the
connection between mammalian non-utilitarian play, ceremony, and social
structure (cf. Zlatev’s comments on ritual in Chapter 2 of this volume).
The transition to the mythic stage, in Donald’s model, goes together with
the emergence of symbolic language, itself premised on mimetic capacities,
and consequently allows for a much richer symbolic religious representa-
tion. With language, the possibility emerges of giving a more comprehensive
account of the world in which we live, an account that takes mythic form,
but that certainly includes the attempt to explain, predict, and control.
In Donald’s words, mythic culture involved “a unified, collectively held
system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded
its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic re-
construction of episodes, to a comprehensive modelling of the entire human
universe” (Donald 1991, p. 214). We need not go into the details of what
may have prompted this development in this chapter, except to make the
essentially Durkheimian point, suggested by several scholars as well as by
Donald (2012), that as populations grew there arose the need to solidify the
group in ways that less sophisticated mimetic rituals did not allow – hence
the pressure to develop myths that defined the identity of the group and its
place in the larger schema of things.
In addition, however, it should be noted that with the transition to mythic
culture, human beings begin to live in what the sociologist Christian Smith
calls “moral orders,” defined as “intersubjectively and institutionally shared
social structurings of moral systems that are derived from […] larger nar-
ratives and belief systems” (Smith 2003, p. 10). These are “moral” in so
far as they specify an understanding of what is good and bad, worthy and
unworthy, just and unjust, and so on. Moral orders, then, are always em-
bedded in narrative, which become central to mythic cultures – as, indeed,
they remain central for the constitution of self and society to this day. Nar-
rative, which need not of course be written down, allows the representation
of the temporality of human life and history; it takes the form of a story
with a beginning and end. It is therefore not surprising that we find many
of the most well known religious narratives preoccupied precisely with the
beginning and end of the world and human life within it – there emerges
the possibility of cosmology (cf. Bellah 2011, p. 266; Chapter 6 in this vol-
ume), but also the question of mortality, of what happens when my own
story ends. Terrence Deacon and Tyrone Cashman (2009) even go so far as
to theorise that narrative is the precondition for the development of ideas
of an afterlife, and pushes strongly in the direction of such development.
7.2.2. Religion at the Theoretical Level

Donald’s last transition, which will be our main concern, is from mythic to
theoretic culture, which correlates with the emergence of conceptual religious
representation in Bellah’s schema. Theoretic culture, as Donald understands
it, involves the development of writing systems, making memory storage
external to the individual human mind possible. This was a momentous step
in cultural development and facilitated what Donald calls “modern human

cognition” (Donald 1991, p. 312). At this stage, significantly, the individual
human mind is connected to a vast cognitive network which affords it novel
powers and possibilities. Among the most important of these, for our pur-
poses, is the possibility of developing much more extended and complex nar-
ratives – narratives that could be handed down through generations, intensely
scrutinised by scholars (an emerging new class of people), and eventually be
subject to rational and empirical critique in a way that non-written narrative
and ritual rarely can. Hence, these developments facilitated the in-break of
theoretic consciousness as such, which can be characterised as a way of being
in the world that accentuates the analytic and rational modes of thinking,
and critique and reflection for its own sake, as well as a kind of meta-per-
spective on thinking – thinking about thinking. In short, theoretic culture is
the seedbed of philosophy as well as empirical science (see Chapter 9 in this
volume) – and as we shall see, of an entirely new mode of religious thought.
Before considering the phenomena of “Axial religion,” one point needs to
be emphasised: The transition from one stage to another should not be un-
derstood as a rejection of former stages; rather, a new stage incorporates the
previous stages in new cultural modes, according to the principle of conserva-
tion – nothing is ever lost. In other words, no one is claiming that human be-
ings are no longer mimetic and mythic creatures, only that mimesis and myth
are reconfigured with the onset of theory (Donald 1991). The development
of religious narrative is one of the clearest examples of this. But the point is
that all the dimensions of human consciousness and culture need to be given
their due in any serious account of human religiosity. This appears almost as
a truism and would not have to be pointed out were it not for the fact that
so much theorising of religion, especially within ECSR, forgets this complex
dialectic of levels in favour of all too simple accounts. In contrast, what I take
to be the most important aspect of the Donald/Bellah schema is its ability to
navigate between levels and to give each level its due. And what particularly
needs to be stressed is the conscious level. Human subjects are religious (or
not, as the case may be), not only because of a genetic predisposition, and
not only because they are embedded in this or the other social structure, but
also because they are actively and consciously involved in making sense of
the world and of their own lives within it. Consciousness, as Donald’s work
so forcefully argues, is not epiphenomenally gliding on top of sub-personal
cognitive processes doing all the real work; it is actively shaping the belief
and behaviour of real human beings. Hence, for a theory of religion to be
even remotely plausible this dimension needs to be taken into account. And
with this in mind, let us turn now to the evolution of Axial religion, where
it is evident that certain new features emerge from the possibilities inherent
in theoretic consciousness.
7.3. The Axial Age as One Aspect of Theoretic

Consciousness
The outstanding merit of Robert Bellah’s appropriation of Merlin Donald’s
cultural evolutionary model for religious studies is the way he is able to dem-
onstrate that the Axial revolution in religious thought is one crucial aspect
of the emergence of theoretic culture, an aspect that Donald had not himself
thematised as such. In Bellah’s words: “It will be my argument that the axial
breakthrough involved the emergence of theoretic culture in dialogue with
mythic culture as a means for the ‘comprehensive modelling of the entire
human universe’” (Bellah 2011, p. 273). In order to understand this thesis
we need first to understand what the “axial breakthrough” means, and then
to see more precisely how Bellah connects it to theoretic culture.
7.3.1. The Notion of an “Axial Age”

The expression “Axial Age” was coined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers,
in his book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949), and resurfaced
among philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion in the 1970s
(Joas 2008, pp. 7–8). It is meant to capture the significant transition in hu-
man cultural development that occurred in the middle centuries of the first
millennium BCE in diverse geographical locations, and that is associated
with such thinkers as the Hebrew prophets (Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah,
among others); Greek philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle); early Chi-
nese thought (such as that of Confucius and the Daodejing); as well as the
teachings of the Upanishads and of the Buddha (and by extension the more
recent offspring of these traditions, such as Christianity and Islam). In other
words, this period sees the emergence of many of the still living traditions
that we have come to think of as the “world religions” (Bellah and Joas
2012). These traditions, it is claimed, have enough commonalities for us to
be able to perceive in them something of a shared ethos, or at least shared

core ideas, each developed in their own way in the respective traditions.
Now clearly such claims are fraught with dangers and will rightly give
rise to probing discussion about the legitimacy of notions such as “world
religions” and ideas about privileged moments of cultural breakthrough.
Scholars of religion have long been concerned about the agenda behind
such claims – Eurocentrism and Western imperialism come to mind, not to
mention the interminable discussion about the empirical basis of the Axial
Age theory. To a large extent, this debate has been fuelled by the tendency
of early exponents of the theory to view the Axial Age as the seedbed of
something that finally came to full fruition only in Western modernity, such
that European civilisation could be seen to fulfil all the best impulses of
world history. Such issues and tendencies need to be seriously attended to
(see Joas 2012), but for our purposes here I will follow the large group of
scholars who find the concept useful, and indicative of a genuine phenom-
enon that we need to try to account for, even after all the necessary critical
probing is done. What is it that makes this period in cultural history so
intellectually fecund? What is it that emerges in the Axial Age?
For the concept of the Axial Age to be viable we need to be able to pick
out a number of cultural features that these traditions have in common.
Such a list will obviously also be open to debate, but let me nonetheless
try to explicate two features that are particularly interesting from the per-
spective of a cognitive semiotic theory of religion: (1) the emergence of a
religiously motivated socio-political critique; and (2) the tendency towards
ethical universalism. As I will try to show, these are intertwined with a –
by no means uncontested – definitional notion of religion, transcendence,
and it will be crucial to understand some of the various meanings this
concept has acquired in the Axial traditions. By focusing on transcendence
as one critical factor, I follow a well-established trajectory of interpretation
(Schwartz 1975; Eisenstadt 2008; Joas 2008). What I would like to specifi-
cally elucidate, however, is the close relation between the transformation
of the concept of transcendence and the other two highlighted features,
especially as this appears in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is my
own field of expertise, but also with some reference to Chinese traditions.
7.3.2. Criticism of Politics and Religion

With the figures of the Axial Age, the ancient homology between socio-
political and religious reality was ruptured as thinkers began to criticise
the political (and religious) establishment in the name of a higher justice
or another religious ideal (Eisenstadt 2008). What had previously been
perceived as naturally given political arrangements, written into the very
fabric of reality, began to be denaturalised and therefore questioned. In the
new framework, political as well as religious institutions could be imagined
as reconstructed in light of the transcendent order and ideal. Paradoxically,
therefore, it was the vision of a transcendent or otherworldly order that
made possible the reconstruction of the immanent or present sphere.
Consider the case of ancient Israel, where the prophets continually con-
demned the political and religious leadership for failing to bring justice to
the poor and marginalised:
This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back my wrath.
They sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
They trample on the heads of the poor
As upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.” (Amos 2:6–7)
Or think of the favourite ruler of the Old testament – King David – who,
when he committed the injustice of having Bathsheba’s true husband, Uriah,
killed in battle, did not escape the chastisement of the prophet Nathan
(2 Sam 12:1–23). Clearly, this is no absolute monarchy; even the king is sub-
ject to a superior ethical code. This point is further confirmed if we consider
the critique of monarchy as an institution – even Israelite monarchy – that
occurs in the Old Testament (e.g. 1 Sam 8), and the person of Moses as
something of an anti-king, who appears rather as a prophet and teacher of
the people, and who dies without an inheritance, handing the leadership
over to Joshua rather than his own bloodline (Bellah 2011, pp. 309–312).
But the clearest statement of the critical turn in Israelite religion is to be
found in the book of Deuteronomy, the book which is said to have been
found in the Jerusalem temple in 621 BCE, in the reign of King Josiah
(2 Kings 22). There, Moses is depicted as speaking to the Israelites just
before their entrance into the promised land, where they may, if they so
choose, have a king to rule over them. But the King’s reign should be of a
historically rare kind.
When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of the law written
for him in the presence of the levitical priests. It shall remain with him and he shall
read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, dili-
gently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself
above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment,
either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over
the kingdom in Israel (Deuteronomy 17:18–20).
Such a kingship is clearly limited and subject to a transcendent order, en-

shrined, as the Deuteronomists saw it, in the figure of the law (torah) given
to Moses. In any event, it is very clear in these biblical texts from Israel’s
Axial period that a powerful tradition of political-theological criticism has
emerged.
Similar phenomena can, according to scholars of Asian history and re-
ligion, be found in the other Axial cultures (Bellah 2011; Roetz 2012). In
China, for example, Confucius and his followers present a religious and
ethical teaching that holds even the king responsible to standards of greater
dignity than the king himself. And Daoists mount an unprecedented social
criticism of injustice in the name of a more transcendent order, the Way:
The court is resplendent;
Yet the fields are overgrown.
The granaries are empty;
Yet some wear elegant clothes;
Fine swords dangle at their sides;
They are stuffed with food and drink;
And possess wealth in gross abundance.
This is known as taking pride in robbery.
Far is this from the Way! (Quoted in Bellah 2011, pp. 455–456.)
Or in the pithy phrase of Xunzi: “Follow the Dao and not the ruler, fol-
low justice and not the father” (quoted in Roetz 2012, p. 258). Examples
could be multiplied, but the salient point is that the Axial Age sees the
breakthrough of a new type of ethical social criticism from religious and
philosophical vantage points – there emerges “the age of criticism” (Joas
and Bellah 2012, p. 11).
In the explanation of these phenomena it is important to be cautious, as

the tension between the accounts of Donald and Bellah demonstrates. For
Donald tends, in fact, to emphasise the need of recently emerging vast cities,
states, and empires to find some kind of social cohesion as the crucial factor,
thus implying a kind of social functionalist understanding of the emergence
of Axial religion, whereas Bellah stresses the critical edge of much Axial
religious thinking in relation to reigning social structures, implying at times
the socially malfunctioning consequences of the critique. In any case, the
critical function of Axial religion does not in any straightforward sense
lead to greater social cohesion; rather, the opposite could be expected,
and is indeed historically demonstrated in the trajectories of, say, Chinese,
Israelite, and Greek Axial societies. The civil unrest of Israel’s monarchical
period would be a case in point, as would the accusations against Socrates,
his execution, and the popular opinion on philosophy in ancient Greece.
If, as Donald states, “Axial societies provided their citizens with a means
of connecting with a shared conceptual framework to cope with the intel-
lectual and spiritual challenges of living in a new kind of social context”
(Donald 2012, p. 73), then this coping must have had socially divisive
as well as cohesive consequences. This need not mean that the question
of social constitution is less relevant for understanding the emergence of
Axial religion and philosophy, but it does suggest that we need to be care-
ful not to overemphasise its socially integrative function, without going to
the other extreme of denying it. And in any case, the socially motivating
factor should probably be seen to reside less in the legitimisation of ruling
power, and more in the opposition to ruling power from the side of those
seeking reform, such as the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers.
Against that background, we are prompted to seek a deeper account of
why these traditions developed as critical modes of thinking, rather than
being simply a support function for the ruling classes. And this leads us to
the notion of transcendence. This is not intended as some kind of causal
explanation, but rather as an indication that a conceptual condition of pos-
sibility for the critical potential of Axial Age religion has emerged.
7.3.3. The Emergence of Transcendence

The critical socio-political edge of the religious and philosophical traditions
emerging in the Axial Age is arguably premised on the notion of transcend-
ence. Now, the concept of transcendence can be understood in a number of
interrelated ways, only some of which are pertinent to the present discus-
sion. One crucial aspect of this can be called ethical transcendence, and has
been elaborated at length by Charles Taylor (2007, 2012). He argues that
at the heart of the Axial religions is a redefinition of the notion of human
flourishing, as these religions tend to place the ultimate human good beyond
what is ordinarily perceived as human flourishing, such as wealth, health,
and social standing. Instead, there emerges the conception of a transcendent
good, from which vantage point ordinary human good could be criticised,
and in some instances rejected entirely, or else reformed in various ways.
Closely related to ethical transcendence is transcendence in the sense of
pointing to a reality beyond “ordinary reality.” However, here it is impor-
tant to understand that the Axial traditions do not see this as some sort of
invisible, mysterious or divine reality of this world; indeed, that kind of
non-ordinary reality would be common to religion tout court. Rather, what
is distinctive in the Axial cases is the movement towards a cosmological
context, such that the ultimate reality – to use a theologically loaded con-
cept – is perceived of as somehow beyond the world itself, or at the very
least as the pinnacle of worldly reality. In other words, we are talking about
the emergence of a radicalised notion of transcendence, in which the world
we live in comes forth as the ultimate immanence, and religious reality the
ultimate transcendence: the deity of Israel’s ethical monotheism; the “re-
ally real” (to ontos on) of Plato’s world of ideas; the “Heaven” (Tian) of
Confucius; or the Buddhist notion of breaking through to an understand-
ing of the illusory character of the ordinary world and the true nature of
reality (Schwartz 1975).
But what is the origin of such notions of transcendence? And why do they
occur in the Axial Age? Clearly, all we can do is speculate, but there are
some suggestions that fit particularly well with a cognitive semiotic theory
of human development. They build upon the more mundane varieties of
transcendence encountered in human cognition and conscious experience
itself. Let us consider two such accounts of the origin of a more radical
notion of transcendence, accounts that need not be exclusive: (1) Locat-

ing the origin in the fundamental structure of human self-consciousness,
particularly in terms of a capacity for self-transcendence; or (2) locating
the origin in the emergence of symbolic language itself.
A notable strand of twentieth century scholarship has located the origin
of religion in the fundamental features of human consciousness, features
that have been seen as uniquely human. In light of Donald’s theories on
the origins of the modern mind, a reassessment of these theories is called
for, not least, as I have said, since they appear to be an important comple-
ment to those theories of religion, going back to Durkheim, which connect
the question of religion to social theory rather than individual conscious
experience, as well as mainstream ECSR, which also tends to downplay
conscious experience.
William James would be an early exponent of the kind of theory I have
in mind, although his is an overly individualistic one: “[Religion is] the
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far
as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may
consider the divine” (quoted in Schloss and Murray 2009, p. 13). Later in
the century, however, religion scholars in the liberal protestant tradition,
such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr would take this further (Tillich
2009 [1957]; Niebuhr 2013 [1935], 1948). The latter argued that it is
the phenomenon of self-transcendence that leads to human religiosity. By
“self-transcendence,” Niebuhr has in mind a self-conscious subject who
experiences himself as on the one hand a finite material being in history,
an animal destined to die, and on the other hand as someone asking for
the very meaning of his own life and of history. In other words, because
human beings are able cognitively to transcend their immediate material
surroundings – a capacity that appears to be largely lacking in other animal
species (Gärdenfors 2006; Deacon and Cashman 2009) – they always come
upon existential questions, to which the most satisfying answer implies a
realm transcendent to history and materiality. The very experience of being
human, in other words, already pushes in the direction of the transcendent
and hence of religion. In Niebuhr’s words: “The essential homelessness of
the human spirit is the ground of all religion” (Niebuhr 1948, p. 36; for a
moral rather than existential reading of this tension, see Niebuhr 2013).
7.3.4. Transcendence in Donald’s and Deacon’s schema

Such suggestions could be usefully wedded to certain key ideas in Donald’s
schema of cognitive evolution. In brief, the early transition from episodic
memory, shared with other animals, to human biographic memory is itself a
version of (temporal) self-transcendence: I have been; I am; I will be. More
over, biographic memory appears to be founded on the narrative capacities
of human consciousness (see Chapter 6 in this volume), itself premised on
the basic capacity of representation emerging in the mimetic stage and flour-
ishing in the mythic stage. Thus, the very structure of human consciousness,
as outlined by Donald, in which narrative makes a much richer sense of self
possible, can be seen to imply the experience of self-transcendence in the
temporal sense. And this is of course the result of bio-cultural evolution.
But why would this be a stepping-stone to religion – even Axial Age
religion with its more radical sense of transcendence? Here I will make
two observations. First, if the symbolic capacities of human consciousness
entail narrative as a way of making sense of the world, then arguably the
most comprehensive way of making sense of the world – and of human
life and death – is through religious narrative in its various forms. And this
is Niebuhr’s point. Human beings, simply in virtue of being the kinds of
animals that they are – animals with a sense of a self persisting over time,
and with linguistic and narrative skills – necessarily encounter the question
of the meaning of their own existence and of the world in which they find
themselves. To this we might add that these capacities, together with the
capacity for empathy, arguably lead to a deeper sense of grief at the loss
of our loved ones and the suffering of others, which also gives rise to ques-
tions about ultimate meaning. Answers to such questions obviously come
in many shapes and forms, but if they are truly to be comprehensive – in
the sense that they encompass all these different existential questions in
their one purview – they would tend in the direction of religious, or at least
cosmological, theory.
Second, granted the above we still might want to know what it is that
tilts such answers in the direction of a more radical transcendence, in the
sense of transcending the world itself here taken to be typical of the Axial
traditions, rather than to some “this-worldly” religious system, which could
after all in principle accommodate the kind of self-transcendence discussed
above. Is there something more fundamental going on than the admittedly

rather vague search for an overarching meaning so far considered, some-
thing that pushes in the direction of a hidden reality not explicable in im-
manent terms alone? The beginning of an answer to this may be found if
we add the still deeper point that symbolic capacity is itself indicative of
a certain kind of transcendence – the transcendence of meaning. Not only
does symbolic representation facilitate biographic and religious narrative,
the awareness of symbols qua symbols is arguably already an awareness
of the transcendence of meaning. This is the thesis of Terrence Deacon and
Tyrone Cashman (2009), who advance an interesting theory about the role
of symbolic capacity in the origins of religion that ties in very well with the
evolution of consciousness in Donald’s schema. One of the important roots
of religion, they conjecture, is the unique capacity for symbolic language and
thought, which primes members of our species to always search for a hidden
meaning, something beyond the signifier, the meaning behind the symbol.
A predisposition to the see things as symbols implicitly casts things and events as
comprehensible in terms of some other more fundamental realm, for example, hid-
den spiritual or supernatural realities that underlie the phenomenal world. Further-
more, this predisposition frames these as more fundamental than the phenomenal
world, analogous to the way that the world of meanings and purposes is more real
than overt verbal symbols (Deacon and Cashman 2009, p. 7).
Symbolic language, in other words, is generalised into a way of perceiving

the world as two-layered – there is the surface appearance and the deep
reality behind it, corresponding to the symbol and the reality symbolised.
Human understanding, on this theory, is already primed by the very struc-
ture of symbolic consciousness to search for a transcendent meaning beyond
the mundane order and, by extension, for a transcendent reality beyond
this visible world.
In this way, the classical “existentialist” theories mentioned above that
locate the origin of religion in human consciousness and experience can be
further grounded in more recent work on the evolution of human conscious-
ness and its structures. When the human drive to make sense of life and
history is coupled with the tendency toward transcendent meaning implicit
in symbolic consciousness, the notion that there is a certain natural drift
towards religious narratives with a radical sense of transcendence gains
plausibility.
Note that the prerequisite features of human cognition are possible only
with the long co-evolution of biology and culture, since symbolic systems
are part of cultural evolution, something that sets this account apart from
the more common evolutionary-cognitive accounts, which tend to treat reli-
gion as the result of biologically hardwired mechanisms. This also suggests
an explanation as to why religion is found only among human beings, since
the capacity of symbolic language and thought is found only among humans
(possibly exempting some cases of apes extensively trained by humans, and
even then only in very rudimentary form).
7.3.5. From Ego to Others: Towards a Universal Alter-Culture

In the previous section I focused on “individual” human consciousness
in the emergence of Axial religion, even though I also said that this is not
meant as a rejection of more socially driven Durkheimian explanations, or
of theories within ECSR, only as a necessary supplement in light of recent
work on the evolution of consciousness. While not venturing into theories
of religion as driven by social needs of cohesion or legitimation, then, I do
nonetheless want to bring up an element of Axial religion that is essentially
tied in with social life – the question of the origin of ethical universalism.
The origins of ethical behaviour in general has always been a problem
from a strictly Darwinian point of view. Especially if by ethical behaviour
we mean altruistic behaviour – putting the well-being of others before that
of my own, sometimes even to the point of sacrificing myself for the other.
Or, in less extreme form, the recognition of the other as having equal ethical
status with myself, that is to say an equal right to live. Clearly, if the motor
that drives Darwinian evolution is the thriving and survival of individual bi-
ological organisms at the expense of others, such behaviour is inexplicable.
However, since the 1990s, the notion of group selection has been in-
voked to solve this problem (Sober and Wilson 1998; Wilson 2002; and see
Nowak and Coakley 2013). Though by no means an uncontested concept,
group selection arguably explains in-group altruistic behaviour. That is to
say, in the competition between groups, rather than individuals, the group
that cooperates and attends to the well-being of others within the group
will prevail over a group of egotistical individuals. Hence, we can give an
evolutionary rationale for the development of “ethical” behaviour.
However, what is still lacking is the universalising of ethics, such that

it applies to members of other groups as well, which remains inexplicable
even from the point of view of group selection. I may sacrifice myself for
the well-being of my group, or my kin, but why would I extend this attitude
beyond the group? Clearly, what we need here is some kind of explanation
in terms of cultural evolution, which brings other factors into play than
those of survival and reproduction. Cultural evolution involves discovery
and innovation in the realm of ideas, though always intertwined with the
emergence of social structures and institutions. What we are after, then, is
the emergence of a particular kind of moral order irreducible to biological
evolution, but understandable from a cultural-evolutionary perspective,
and arguably related to the concept of transcendence.
One of the important reasons for cognitive semiotics to study the Axial
Age is precisely that it contributes to our understanding of the origin of
this universalising tendency in ethics, or “Alter-culture,” using the termi-
nology of Sonesson (2000; 2004; 2012a and Chapter 1 in this volume).
From the point of view of Ego-culture (what Husserl calls “homeworld”),
Alter-culture (Husserl’s “alienworld”, or one part of it) is perceived as dif-
ferent yet equal. It is contrasted the Alius-culture (another part of Husserl’s
“alienworld”), which is perceived as so different from the Ego-culture as to
be inferior and perhaps even worth-less. In terms of the history of ethical
consciousness, the emergence of Alter-culture is a stepping-stone to univer-
salism, the extension in principle of Alter-culture to all human beings (cf.
Sonesson 2012 and Chapter 1 in this volume) that is often taken to be one
critical dimension of the Axial transition.
In what follows I shall limit myself to investigating the Judeo-Christian
tradition and its trajectory with respect to ethical universalism, without
thereby denying that similar trajectories can be found in the other Axial
cultures as well. In the popular imagination, universal ethical notions, such
as human rights, are often seen as the invention of modernity, and more
specifically of the Enlightenment. Arguably, however, the origin of legal
codifications of human rights is theologically motivated and appears in the
canon law of the Medieval Church (Bethke Elshtain 2008; see also Joas
2013 for critical discussion). More recently, philosophers have traced the
origin of universal ethical notions back to Saint Paul (Badiou 2003), but
one could arguably find a significant root even in the Old Testament idea
that human beings – qua human beings – are made in the image of God
(imago dei) and therefore worthy of a particular kind of respect. Thus
Genesis 9:6, in the so-called Noahic Covenant, prohibits the killing of an-
other human being with reference to the notion that human beings carry
the image of God.
However, at this point it will surely be objected that if there was ever
an ethical code closely bound to the group, it is that of ancient Israel with
its emphasis on being the people chosen by God, the group – albeit a large
one – specially favoured by God, and as such defined over and against all
others. Indeed, this could be generalised to apply to religion tout court: is it
not primarily in the business of defining and legitimating the group and its
behaviour over and against all the other groups? And is religion, even Axial
religion, thus not what needs to be overcome in order to break through to
a more inclusive notion of ethical responsibility? Even the Christian Jew
Saint Paul, who penned the radical words, “there is neither Jew nor Greek,
slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Letter to
the Galatians 3:28), would seem to share this kind of religious exclusivism,
since he evidently restricts the new status of equality to those within the
Christian fold only (cf. Wilson’s development of Durkheimian sociology,
2002; and Chapter 11 in this volume).
But if we probe this question a little deeper we will discover that things are
more complicated. In contrast to Wilson’s and Sonesson’s (in Chapter 11)
reading of the history of religion, I want to argue that the movement towards
a globalisation of Alter-culture is clearly visible in the Axial development
of the Israelite religion, and then carried further in its Christian variant.
To see this, consider the notion of a unique covenant between Israel and
God, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, the present form of which was
likely put together out of more ancient material after the Jews’ return from
Babylonian captivity (Bellah 2011), that is to say at the very centre of the
Axial transition.
To start with, the covenant God makes with Israel is preceded in the nar-
rative plot by a covenant made between God and humanity, in the figure of
Noah – the Noahic covenant. What God promises – never again to destroy
the earth – is not addressed to the Israelite confederation of tribes, but is
expressed as a promise to Noah, and with him “every living creature […]
all life on the earth” (Gen 9:12–17), that is to say to the world and thus to
humanity as such. Second, even the covenant enacted and re-enacted between
God and Israel, beginning with Abraham in Genesis 15, has as its purpose
the blessing of all the world: “All people on earth will be blessed through
you” (Gen 12:3). This element is intensified in the prophetic literature reflect-
ing the end of the period of Israel’s political power. The prophet Isaiah, for
instance, says of the coming servant of the Lord, “it is too small a thing for
you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob [a task exclusive to the
nation of Israel] […] I will also make you a light for the gentiles, that you may
bring my salvation to the ends of the earth [a universal task]” (Is 49:6; see
also Is 2:3–4; Mic 4:1–4). From this and numerous other passages it is clear
that while Israel is viewed as having a unique task, it is a task with universal
significance (for a fascinating account of this theological development, see
Barth 2009, pp. 22–35).
When we come to the New Testament it is true, of course, that Paul’s
radical egalitarianism is premised on membership in the new social body
of the Church (as argued in Chapter 11). But to make that the basis of a
charge to the effect that Paul is merely recapitulating a general religious
tendency to demarcate between us and them, Ego and Alius, is surely to
miss the larger point. For the fact of the matter is that Paul’s gospel is open
to all and sundry – anyone can become a member of the new egalitarian
social body with no regard for ethnic, social, and gendered oppositions.
And as we have seen, Paul is here merely recasting in Christian terms Israel’s
understanding of its larger mission among the peoples. Granted, this does
not yet aspire to be a universal ethics, but it strikes me as very hard to deny
that we have here a universal extension, in principle, of Alter-culture to
all human beings. That is to say, a readiness to believe that the other can
easily become my brother, my sister, and that what holds for my group –
ethically – can equally come to hold for the others. Ethical imagination is
no longer restricted by an inflexible chasm between peoples.
I have so far focused on the case I know best, that of ancient Israel.
However, as I indicated above, attention to the other Axial cultures sug-
gests that a tendency towards the universalising of ethical notions is not
an isolated Judeo-Christian phenomenon, but is an integral – though never
fully achieved – aspect of the Axial transition, as documented in the work
of Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (2011, 2012). But what is it that prompts
this development in several Axial cultures? A plausible interpretation is
possible by connecting universality directly to the parallel emergence – once

more – of the idea of transcendence. For it is when it becomes possible
to conceive of the transcendent deity, or realm, or principles in a truly
radical way that the transcendent also begins to be relevant beyond one’s
own group, city or society – transcendence becomes relevant to humanity
as such. My argument, in other words, is that the discovery or invention
of radical transcendence was a condition of possibility for the historical
emergence not only of socio-political criticism, but also of the extension of
Alter-culture, in principle, to human beings as such – a truly momentous
step in the evolution of ethical consciousness.
7.4. Homo religiosis

We have surveyed a few of the salient features characteristic of the religious
development of the Axial Age, particularly in the case of the Judeo-Chris-
tian tradition – specifically a new kind of socio-political criticism and a ten-
dency towards ethical universalism. A crucial factor in these developments,
I have argued, is the emergence of a more radical notion of transcendence,
which can in turn be related to the evolution of certain distinctly human
cognitive-semiotic capacities. Among these, I have singled out narrative as
critical to biographical memory and thus to the development of a richer
sense of self, as well as to more comprehensive stories about the meaning of
life and history, tending in the direction of religion. I have also highlighted
the symbolic capacity itself, where a distinction is made between the symbol
and what it stands for, as conducive to a view of the world where a clear
distinction is made between the mundane and the extraordinary, between
the immanent and the transcendent. In other words, while I have placed the
emphasis on conscious human meaning-making, I have also indicated its
deep roots in the bio-cultural coevolution of humankind and the cognitive
repertoire it has made available to our species.
Needless to say, I have only scratched the surface of a vast and complex
field of research. However, I hope it has at least suggested ways of theoris-
ing about religion that take deep evolutionary history seriously without
becoming reductionist, and without implying that the most salient features
of “religion” can be explained exclusively by recourse to some biologically
evolved hardwired cognitive mechanism. The cognitive-semiotic framework
sketched here allows us to root Homo religiosis in evolution – biological and

cultural – without falling into the simplifications of so much recent theoris-
ing about religion from evolutionary and cognitive-scientific points of view.
Nonetheless, it will be clear that these suggestions are open to the theo-
retical frameworks of more mainstream evolutionary and cognitive theories
of religion as well. For example, looking at the Axial Age from the point of
view of a cognitive-semiotic theory of religion would seem to undermine
the question of whether religion is adaptive or not. Clearly, some of the
features that made Axial religion possible can be seen as adaptive, while
other features are less clearly so. More complex semiotic capacities, such
as those found on the mimetic and mythic stage, would be adaptive and
thus enhancing the fitness of the species, but this does not mean that what
such capacities make possible are adaptive in any straightforward sense.
Rather, religion is among those cultural activities that take on a dynamic
and creativity of their own, operating to a large extent above that of bio-
logical fitness. Similarly, finding a cognitive mechanism that produces a
concept of transcendence is only one part of a much larger story about how
religiously significant concepts of transcendence come to be, a story that can
only be told in the context of cultural evolution. In this way, attending to the
Axial religions from the point of view of the unique semiotic capacities of
human beings makes an understanding of religion possible without having
to ignore or downplay the extraordinary achievements – for good and evil –
of religious meaning-making in all its creativity, diversity, and humanity.
Göran Sonesson & Gunnar Sandin
Chapter Eight
Urbanity: The City as the Specifically
Human Niche
In this chapter, we aim to establish that city life, and more specifically, life
in public space such as it can only exist (or so it would seem) in the city,
constitutes an important step on the way to what we today take to be hu-
man specificity. Both Barry Allen (2004) and Raymond Tallis (2011) have
suggested that city life may be, in some way or other, that which has allowed
human beings to become immensely different from other animal species.
Although none of them refer (in this specific context) to the work of Merlin
Donald, it might be suggested that urban experience, and perhaps what
led up to it, has constituted at least part of that specific human evolution,
which, according to Donald, can not be accounted for by purely biological
means. But neither Tallis nor Allen really offer any explanation of what
is so particular about urbanity. This is where we have to turn to semiotic
accounts of the meaning of environmental relationships.
8.1. The Non-Universal Specificity of Cities

The argument according to which the (big) city is the human Umwelt or
niche par excellence cannot mean that it is the environment into which all
human beings are born. Clearly, many human beings in historical times, and
most of their ancestors, have not lived in what we call cities, and many still
do not, although the numbers of the latter group are constantly shrinking.
This diminishing of rural life seems to suggest that the evolution of human
behaviour and culture coincides with the growth and degree of sophistica-
tion of cities. Even in the recent period of augmented telecommunicated
social connections, when the argument has been raised that technological
development could allow people to stay physically distant from each other,
and still be in contact, thus presuming a lesser need of collective life in cities,
the fact is instead that large cities continue to conglomerate and strengthen
their position as important global nodes (see Sassen 1991).
192 Göran Sonesson & Gunnar Sandin
What we have to show, if we want to demonstrate the importance of

urbanisation for humankind from an evolutionary perspective, is that the
city in some sense is human-specific, i.e. it serves to epitomise that which
separates human beings from other kinds of animals, and also, by implica-
tion, that naturalistic metaphors of the city, such as the termitary or the ant
hill, are not very apt for pinpointing what is specific to the city, although
they may spotlight some of is architectonic, communal, or logistic features.
But there is more: Çatalhöyük, which is often acknowledged as one of the
first cities, does not seem to have any clearly defined public spaces located
separately from the dwelling areas, even if smaller meeting places may be
found in close connection to, and intertwined with, spaces for living. On
the other hand, the recently discovered much older site of Göbekli Tepe
is, on the face of it, the inverse case; namely a space for gathering without
any immediately juxtaposed area for habitat. It is, as it were, a public place
without a city. These two cases are clearly relevant to the issue whether
public places appeared as organic parts of larger conglomerations of human
dwelling pertaining to urban or proto-urban specificity.
Just like any other kind of built environment, the city can be described in
basically two complementary (but not necessarily exclusive) ways: as a par-
ticular spatial extent, which may be geometrised, measured and counted, a
number of buildings and connecting paths, organised in a particular fashion;
or as a space of activities, constituted and fomented by the socially invested
nature of different portions of space, as well as, inversely, itself constitut-
ing and fomenting the spatial circumstances at hand.1 One pioneer of the
latter mutualistic view was no doubt Edward T. Hall (1959), who applied
this perspective to one’s own body in interaction with other bodies. As he
famously put it, intimate space is where you fight or make love. Manar
Hammad (1989) extended this action- and proximity-based spatial view to
buildings, notably in his study of the interiors of Le Corbusier’s monastery La
Tourette. The analysis can be pursued in terms of other, more urban, spatial
types: the pedestrian street, the harbour front, or the village square (Sonesson
2003; Sandin 2013). It could be argued that Hammad’s analysis, instead of
focalising on the aesthetics or the history of architecture, specifically those
1 On the semiotic take on this relational space, see Sonesson 2003, 2013a, b. Also
cf. actor-network theories, e.g. Latour 2005.
Urbanity: The City as the Specifically Human Niche 193
of La Tourette, is basically about the spatial type of gathering, exemplified

by the rules of assembling at a conference centre. In any case, he showed the
importance of analysing architecture as a matter of action, material restric-
tion and cultural law (or etiquette).
Someone who definitely was concerned with the activity-based charac-
terisation of typical kinds of spaces was sociologist Georg Simmel (1957),
who, in essays written in the early years of the twentieth century, attempted
to characterise the specifically spatial-dynamical traits of the bridge, the
door, and the window (see Sonesson 2003). Another important figure in
the spatial turn of the social sciences (or the sociological turn of formal
spatial analysis), central for today’s proliferating branches of urban studies
occupied with the production of, and access to places, is Henri Lefebvre
(1991), who pinpointed the importance of the authorising and appropriat-
ing mechanisms activated whenever humans make space and cities.
As a specifically human niche, the city seems to be most usefully studied
in the second way, i.e. as a space of action and interaction. Neverthe-
less, quite different approaches may be taken, still aligned with the second
strategy, but focusing more on the visual, or visible, circumstances of the
human (encounter with) culture and environment. As a pioneer student
of the (modern) city, Walter Benjamin (1982) conceived it both as a place
of displays, in which certain objects are offered up for view, notably the
commodities continuously delivered on the capitalist market place, and as
the scenario, or stage, of the flaneur, the person moving around in the city
just for the pleasure of the experience to which this movement gives rise.
To mark this contrast, it could be said that our movement through city
space may be motivated by two major forces: the interest of experiencing
certain objects, or that of encountering other human beings. If the first
interest is epitomised by the Parisian passages, developed later on into the
department store and, more recently, into the shopping centre, the second
one comes into its own on the boulevard, recently reborn as the pedestrian
street but all along existing as the densely populated sidewalk of the more
public parts of cities.
This description, however, amounts to a severe reduction of the poten-
tialities of the cityscape, because objects also have a more secret life in
the city than simply being offered for purchase or gaze: in various forms
of sidewalks, zebra crossings, turn-pikes and other obstacles on the way
they silently condition, by allowing and restricting movement, the advance

of human beings in the city. These urban artefacts afford, as it were, not
only the transport to specific places but also an orientation about where
we are, how we may proceed, and what it all means. They have, despite
their artificial and engineered origin, become the “natural” preconditions
that immediately speak to humans as suggesting particular types of action,
or what James Gibson (1977) spoke of as “affordances.” Quantitative at-
tempts to capture our experience of such facilities, and their condition-
ing of our urban behaviour, appear in recent research domains such as
environmental psychology (Heft 2012), or more specific branches thereof,
like structured walking studies. These attempts are however mostly tied
to a rationalist, reductive, and schematised understanding of individuals’
experiences; hence they are less apt to capture human interaction and its
complex communal relation to space. However, the notion of “affordance”
as such can be maintained as significantly describing the cognitive semiotic
resource by which space and action are closely and immediately connected.
There is an ambiguity in Hammad’s notion of spaces as being defined by
activities taking place in them. It could, but does not have to, be understood
as a deterministic relationship between space and behaviour. As a matter
of fact, activities are never fully determined by spaces, although spatial
extents and material facts contribute to the total impact. To some extent,
spaces are created by us in order to contain certain kinds of activities. But
the ensuing determinism of the presumed functions of space are constantly
subverted, not only from wear and tear, or from natural disasters, but also
intentionally, as we know well, after more than a century of Decembrism,
Situationism, sit-ins and other activist, political or artistic activities. In fact,
most spaces are not as heavily constrained as is often suggested. Rather,
spaces are customarily associated with what can be done in them. Indeed,
it may be better to understand this in the sense in which Gibson (1979)
says that objects and environments provide affordances such as walkability,
graspability edibility, etc. As Gibson also observes, affordances result from
an interaction between the object and a particular (group of) subject(s).
The boulevard, for instance, affords a particular type of collective and in-
tersubjective strolling to people who are familiar with the culturally biased
schemas of interpretation of that type of city life and activity, but not as
clearly to people who have lived their whole life in the Kalahari desert or
the Lacandon forest, and definitely not to non-human species, like rats, who
clearly are susceptible to quite different affordances of the city.
8.2. The Boulevard Scenario

As already noted, the boulevard may be seen as the precursor to the pedes-
trian street, or to streets with a sidewalk offering fervent public activity,
hence providing for intensive attention to others as well as to situated arte-
facts. As an anecdotal departure, but also an important fact in the history
of modern cities, the boulevard – first constructed as part of a radical, if
not brutal, remaking of large parts of Paris deriving from an omnipotent
welfare vision as well as a need for police control, conducted by the city
planner and politician Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the nineteenth
century – was rapidly imitated around the world, in Saint Petersburg as well
as in New York. Quite apart from Baron Haussman’s intentions, and those
of his fellow boulevard-constructors in other cities, the boulevard, given the
use to which it was eventually put, appears as a significantly more intense,
more convivial, and thus more prototypically urban, experience than the
ordinary, transport-oriented, urban street – as became abruptly apparent
to one of us, having spent eight years of his youth in Paris coming from
a small-scale Swedish context (see Sonesson 2003). However, we do not
have to have experienced this in real life. Perhaps more importantly (but
not unconnectedly), several of us have our primary acquaintance with the
boulevard experience from literature or film, forming expectations of what
it means to live a metropolitan life. Before Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan
Poe wrote about the view from the café table. Nikolai Gogol pondered the
infinite possibilities of Nevsky Prospekt, and Fyodor Dostoevsky surveyed
street life in Saint Petersburg during the white nights.
8.2.1. (Hi)stories of the Boulevard

In the United States “the avenue” took on the modernist role of the boule-
vard, while in time the term “boulevard” came to be applied to a more
motorised, less pedestrian, and less encounter-affording type of fast urban
connections, more similar, no doubt, to what are now the “boulevards pé-
ripheriques” than to the central boulevards of Paris. The more frequented
avenue however showed up in the beginning of the twentieth century, as
Henry James could affirm about New York in his story “An International
Episode,” observing that it is “rather like Paris – only more so:”
Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable
avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travellers advanced—looking
out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-
collared, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering in the
strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings,
banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horse cars, and
other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big
straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the
pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things.
In this quote, the “typical English” street seem to allude to the narrow and
irregular pattern of another typically urban and pedestrian constituent part
allowing you to hear the sound of an individual’s hard leather or wooden
shoes, before the wearer disappears behind a corner or into a gateway. The
possibility to disappear, or hide, from the crowd is another feature of the
city, also tied to the existence of spatial delimiters and openers, like doors
and locks. The increasing density of population also requires an increase
of such possibilities, for the sake of also avoiding the encounters that are
typical for the urbanised human being. This is also why, as we will see, the
boulevard necessarily has its outside space, made up of a network of small
byways, passages, and courts.
The boulevard experience has continued to fascinate numerous writers
and artists who came after Baudelaire, Gogol, and James. Virginia Woolf,
who has gained recognition lately not only for her qualities as a writer, but
as an explorer of the urbanity of London, gave prolific expression to the
magnetic power of urban life in autobiographically grounded works (see
Larsson 2010, 2014). Several films by Eric Rohmer, from “L’amour l’après-
midi” (1972) to “Les nuits de la pleine lune” (1984) are basically about life
on the boulevards. This is also largely the case of Robert Bresson’s “Quatre
nuits d’un reveur” (1971; based on the short story “Belye nochi,” “White
Nights,” by Dostoevsky, but moving the scene to Paris). In films like these,
people typically “happen” to meet others in the street, and these encounters,
also typically, turn out to have life-determining importance for the main
characters. Thus, literature and film confirm our intuitions about the impor-
tance of the boulevard effect for the development of urban human culture.
The boulevard is a public place, as is, of course, the town square. Spatial-
ly, however, the boulevard is mainly a place of passage, while the square is
a meeting place and a place of halt. This could be taken quite literally, even
geometrically, as we shall see: on the boulevard, itineraries run in parallel
(at least partly), but on the square they tend to cross. Another implication
of the same observation, however, is that the square basically affords more
static action, like resting or standing around, even selling things, whereas
the boulevard manifests spatial dynamism: the continuous thrust forward
in the counter-current of foreigners.
8.2.2. The Time Geography of Urbanity

In order to discuss the boulevard as a semiotic device, we have to start by
establishing firmly on the ground a kind of spatial semiotics that takes tem-
poral aspects into account. This can be done by having recourse to “time
geography,” a very abstract discipline invented by the Swedish geographer
Torsten Hägerstrand (1970, 1983). Only slightly paraphrasing Hägerstrand,
time geography is concerned with general rather than special facts, that is,
with invariants representing trivial rather than exceptional time-spaces. The
invariants are conceived as limits of, or restrictions on, the liberty of action
open to individuals or groups, stating what is possible and impossible in
given situations. These restrictions are defined in terms of space and time,
but do not take their origin in natural or economical laws; rather, they result
from the fact that phenomena tend to crowd upon, or affect, each other,
without having any other kind of relation explicable from general rules.
According to Hägerstrand, both space and time are finite; therefore,
they are scarce resources. Space-time is inhabited by individuals, each one
characterised by his/her own trajectory, or life-line, starting at the point of
birth and ending at the point of death (Hägerstrand 1970). Indeed, each
point in the geographic now is best understood as a bundle of processes,
that is, “in terms of its double face of graveyard and cradle of creation”
(Hägerstrand 1983).
Conceived in terms of time geography, the boulevard will here be said
to be a place on which individuals whose lifelines (or trajectories) start
out and finish at very different places permit them to run in parallel for a
shorter or longer duration. This is really the central topic of Gogol’s short
story “Nevsky Prospekt” (1835): the soldier and the painter, who come
from different social classes, and who live in different parts of the city,
walk together for a moment along the boulevard. So much for the different
points of departure. However, they part again, when each one discovers a
woman on the boulevard whom he decides to follow, which brings them
both away from the boulevard and to new parts of the city where they have
never been before. In Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840),
such a lifeline starts out abruptly from the café window, and ends in the
void 24 hours later. The idea of partially joint lifelines, and their capacity
to create meaning and support for those joined, has also been articulated
in film-based art, such as for instance in a video by the Danish artist Katja
Bjorn (2011), where the narrative is reduced to nothing but the continuous
joining and disjoining of the walking paths of several women along one
single road, filmed by a camera from behind their backs as they walk on,
and giving the final metaphorical impression that a life is construed from
temporary walk-along-encounters. Something similar could be said about
Tom Tywker’s 1998 film “Lola rennt”, which also has the advantage of
offering up the virtual trajectories contained each spatial now.
8.2.3. The Boulevard as Public Sphere

Implicit in this description is a second property of the boulevard, which
we hinted at in the beginning: its capacity for giving access to the whole
of the city, for being the stage in relation to which all the rest forms the
behind-stage (in Ervin Goffman’s sense). In Gogol’s story, the soldier and
the painter both leave the boulevard to go to other parts of the city, but the
itineraries that they choose are only two out of many potential ones. In this
sense, the boulevard is the starting point for numerous virtual trajectories.
This explains the sentiment, always expressed in fiction, of infinite possibili-
ties being available along the boulevard. And this choice between streets
is also what Michel de Certeau (1980) emphasises as an emancipatory, or
“tactic,” possibility to exist in an already established, and for him, static
and governed, urban network. Virginia Woolf used the eastern end of one
of the most boulevard-like streets of London, The Strand, in several novels
to represent a place apt for walks giving rise to serious thought rather than
intense emotion, but also a place where uproars went on and where one
could escape into seclusion in the neighbouring quarters (Wilson 1987).

This “affordance” of the boulevard – also allowing uproars, or what we
would today more frequently report as demonstrations – should remind
us about the public sphere, not only as a place to be together, but where
opinion is articulated, as epitomised in theories in which public opinion is
taken to be defined by, and to define, the city.
It turns out that our time geographical definition of the structure of the
boulevard largely coincides with Richard Sennett’s (1977) characterisation
of the coffee house as a place where persons coming from different social
groups and classes, as well as from all parts of the country, can meet on
an equal footing without their individual history or personality having any
importance. Sennett’s characterisation even seems to suggest an explana-
tion to why the coffee house, as already recognised by Jürgen Habermas
(1962), can be seen as the epitome of modernity and/or urbanity. By the
same token, the boulevard is another one. Indeed, of the three criteria for
the “bourgeois public sphere,” cited by Habermas (1989): (ideal) disregard
of status, domain of common concern, and inclusivity, the first and the last
are also contained in Sennett’s characterisation, while all three apply equally
to the boulevard. The difference is that, while the coffee house is a place
where a lot of talking goes on, and encounters are extended in time, the
boulevard is basically a visual affaire effectuated while being on the move.
Urbanity might well be understood as the augmented density of potential
messages made available with each change of position. In this sense, change
of position does not only stand for whole body movements, but may also
involve a change of gaze.
Many authors (published in Calhoun 1992) have pointed out that the
“bourgeois public sphere” was actually not as inclusive as Habermas sug-
gests, shutting out, notably, women (apparently less so in the French sa-
lons, which Habermas mentions along with the all male English coffee
houses as the origin of the public sphere). This again, does not apply to
the boulevard and similar spaces, except, for instance, in cultures where
women are supposed to stay at home, or be subjected to limited visual
access of their face (Hammad 1989, 2002). Nevertheless, it remains true,
on the boulevard, as pointed out in the same volume (by Nancy Fraser in
Calhoun 1992, pp. 109–142) that “deliberation can serve as a mask for
domination.” Domination, nevertheless, as a forced mode of interaction,
in its turn establishes a space for resistance and diversion (cf. de Certeau
1980; Lefebvre 1991; Butler 2011). Conceived in this way, that is, as the
potential offered up by the boulevard, there is much more to flanerie than
meets the eyes of either Baudelaire or Benjamin.
8.3. The Affordances of Lamp Posts and of Human Beings

Another particularity of the boulevard is that it puts emphasis on one of
the fundamental laws of time geography: that two persons cannot occupy
the same space at the same time. When you find yourself on the sidewalk,
in particular on one as crowded as that along the modern boulevard, it is
essential to steer free of other people. As Ervin Goffman (1971) already ob-
served, it takes a lot of largely unconscious manoeuvring to avoid bumping
into other persons. Each encounter on the sidewalk involves a negotiation
about who is to step out of the way or, more ordinarily, the degree to which
each of the participants is to modify his/her trajectory. No matter how un-
conscious, such a transaction supposes a basic act of categorisation; we may
negotiate such spatial actions with somebody whom we have recognised as
a fellow human being, including somebody acting in an unexpected way,
such as a drunken person, as well as with dogs and, perhaps cats, but not
with a lamp post, or a statue, nor with rats escaped from the gutter, or
with bears or other wild animals entering the city centre, as may happen in
some parts of the world. Indeed, when this process of negotiation becomes
conscious, involving more interpretation, and the other is not simply seen
as a stranger, but as an individual person or even as a person of a particular
class or social group, negotiations may break down. This is exactly what
happens to Dostoevsky’s underground man at the start of the story: neither
the protagonist nor his opponent wants to give way.
8.3.1. Affordances from Nature to Culture

An affordance, Gibson (1977, p. 67) tells us, is “a specific combination of
the properties of its substance and its surfaces taken with reference to an
animal” (italics deleted). More informative are some of the examples given:
the affordance may be the graspability, or the edibility, of a thing. Grasp-
ability can be understood as the aptness to be grasped. Edibility must be
interpreted as the susceptibility of being eaten. These are inferences which
might be said, using a phenomenological term, to be “sedimented” onto

an object of the Lifeworld: accordingly, an apple, once it is seen to be an
apple, is also perceived as something which may be grasped and then eaten,
because these are events being known to have taken place (and “properly”
so) with other apples at other times. Therefore, the apple is apt to be
grasped and eaten, both in the sense of normalcy and normativity: this is
what happens most of the time, and it also what we consider the proper
thing to do with an apple (see Sonesson 1996, etc.). The apple does not
stand for its own graspability or edibility. Unlike the case of the sign, there
is not some object here that is directly given without being in focus which
points to something more indirect that is also more emphasised. Rather,
graspability and edibility are properties, in the sense discussed above, of
the apple. However, they are not just properties of the apple, but just as
much of the subject grasping and eating it. We thus end up with some kind
of relational properties of the Lifeworld.
Gibson’s notion of affordance goes a long way towards realising the idea
of active perception: it is a kind of meaning distinct from reference, and
thus from the kind of meaning conveyed by signs, but it is more related
to the act of interacting with the world, than to the world as the realm of
“substances,” in the Aristotelian sense, taken up by Gibson. Affordances
are both mental and physical and depend both on the animal involved and
its environment, as Gibson (1979, p. 129) observes. They are part of what
makes Gibson’s psychology “ecological,” that is, a theory taking into ac-
count the interaction with the environment. Nevertheless, the notion of
affordances should not simply be identified with the cycle going from per-
ception to action, as in Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt (1956). Affordances
would seem to be superimposed on the realm of substances, that is, unlike
the properties of the world perceived by the tick (Uexküll 1956), they
are not there on the level of substances. To (adult) human beings, and no
doubt to mammals in general, affordances are only the glazing of the cake,
which is made up of things in the world (“substances”, in Gibson’s terms),
although human beings do not have to take this into account in all kinds
of everyday transactions.
While it is possible for graspability to be a property of things in some
respect independent of culture, this could hardly be the case with edibility
(which is not to deny that there may be things which are inedible to all or
most human beings). Anthropological studies are full of examples of things

being eaten in some places and considered entirely inedible in other places.
And it is easy to think of other meanings that are clearly of the same kind
as those mentioned and which are yet culturally specific. We just have to
think about the dice as opposed to the cube as a geometrical shape found
in all human Lifeworlds. Suppose there is some human culture where dice
have not been invented: even though this particular kind of throwability can
only be known to those coming from cultures like our own in which it is
an important ingredient of many games, this throwability would normally
be perceived directly, just as any natural affordance, by members of those
cultures familiar with those kinds of games (see Sonesson 1989). Similarly,
for most people in contemporary Western culture, a computer keyboard
has an immediate property of writability (not necessarily less immediately
present than the depressability of the keys). Thus, some affordances may
be defined by our common Umwelt, as Gibson would seem to presuppose,
while other, “cultural” affordances (to coin a term which appears to be
anathema to Gibson, although he mentions the possibility briefly in pass-
ing), must derive from specific socio-cultural Lifeworlds.
8.3.2. The Obligatory Openness of Cities

The boulevard – and its modern avatar, the pedestrian street – is made up of
eminently cultural affordances, but in order to understand why the boule-
vard effect may be thought to be fundamental to urban life, and ultimately
to the cultural evolution of humans, we need to look deeper into the range
and diversity of the action-potential that is afforded by the boulevard when
pedestrians occupy it. Some corporeal actions, such as following the turns of
a winding road, are normally felt as obligatory (simply to avoid the risk of
being run over by cars), while some are more open to choice, such as making
a halt for the sake of getting a better sight of an object displayed in a show
window. If affordances appear as a range of opportunities, or offerings, the
modalities of these offerings by which we are led to action may be differen-
tiated, ranging from open possibilities to more specific necessities. Various
obligations regulate action by offering, allowing, admitting, constraining, re-
stricting, suggesting, inviting, exhorting and dictating it. This graded scale of
opportunities shows the cultural complexity of affordances. The architectural
factuality of corners, the limitation of spatial access delegated to the agency

of fences, the directed symbolic messages of sign-posts, the presence and
actions of fellow passersby, but also of policemen, robbers, beggars, and so
on, all have an impact on how the urban environment invites to action, and
a selection of these affordances also separate human action from the action
possibilities of other living beings.
Furthermore, if we speak of walking in the city, the specifically human
history, tied to the species, to the individual, as well as to the cultural ar-
tefacts, has an impact on how we see and how we judge things. A certain
understanding of phenomenology, according to which some backgrounds
and prejudices are seen as being susceptible to be bracketed away from the
intentional object of study, does not account for the possibility that human
perception, even if made in solitude, carries an inevitable, and unbracket-
able, bias, as pointed out by Aron Gurwitsch (1985) in terms of contex-
tual and marginal effects, and later by Sara Ahmed (2006) as subjective
“orientation.” It is, however, part and parcel of genetic and generative
phenomenology, as described in many posthumous Husserlean texts (cf.
Steinbock 1995; Welton 2000). On the genetic dimension, every object in
our experience results from the layering, or sedimentation, of the different
acts that connect it with its origin, and which give it its validity. On the
generative dimension, all objects acquire their meaning from the layering,
or sedimentation, of the different acts in which they have become known,
which may be acts of perception, memory, anticipation, imagination, and
so on. Genetically, this would mean, in the case of the boulevard, that
each pedestrian is influenced, if he/she knows it or not, by the history
of the boulevard. Generatively, it means that a walker is affected in his/
her consciously or unconsciously noted markers for walking and walking
behaviour not only by the given semiotic and/or physical directives of the
city at the moment of walking, but also for instance by his/her personal
history and earlier experience of pedestrianism, by his/her own condition,
by temporary desires (like hunger or sex) that might distract him or her, or
be in conflict with the intention to transport oneself further, and by atten-
tion to a presumed collective opinion about proper modes of walking and
appearing in the city.
8.4. The Spectacle Afforded and Signified

The boulevard, as it may still be experienced today in Paris and in many
other (particularly Latin) big cities, is not primarily a polyphony of voices,
but a mesh of gazes. Indeed, while there is no doubt a primary function of
interpretation, an affordance operative on the sidewalk, helping us to avoid,
in different ways, bumping into a lamp post, a dog or another person who
is approaching, which works in a quasi-automatic fashion, the whole point
of the movement on the sidewalk is to bring us into position for perceiv-
ing other things and, most notably, other human beings – as well as being
perceived by them. And these changes of position give rise to occasions for
new, and often more active, acts of interpretation. This is not only the case
when the automatic avoidance function on the sidewalk (described by Goff-
man 1971) becomes conscious, and is negated, as in Zapiski iz podpol’ya
(Notes from the underground, 1864) by Dostoevsky, where the hero spends
his time exercising himself to stop giving way to another person claiming
a higher status than himself.
8.4.1. The Moving Feast

Seeing something as a person, a dog, or a lamppost may be a quasi-automatic
function, but seeing the person as being a foreigner, and more specifically
as a person coming from a particular culture, is no doubt often a datum
reaching a more developed level of awareness. For those frequenting the
Paris boulevards in the seventies of the last century, the recognition of so
many persons originating in diverse cultures certainly contributed to the
feeling of being at a place where individuals whose lifelines start out and
finish at very different places permit them to run in parallel for a shorter
or longer duration – to repeat the time geographical interpretation of the
boulevard, which itself mimics the description of the coffee house by Sen-
nett and Habermas, generalising it from different quarters of the city and/
or different social classes to also including different cultures and countries.
In other words, this potentially contributed to the feeling of immense pos-
sibilities opening up along the boulevard (see Sonesson 2002, 2004).
Today, when this mixture of people from all around the globe has be-
come much more common in Europe, as well as in metropolises all over
the globe, this experience most clearly reaches the acme of consciousness
for those who are opposed to the integration of different ethnicities into
the traditional stock of inhabitants. Plato already reflected on those “new-
comers” (see Rancière 2010) who, in different cultures, have stood out on
the street, and elsewhere, being both contained in, and at the same time
disturbing, the democratic order. Similarly, but quite independently, the
term “inner others” has been used in cultural semiotics to label such groups
which occupy a certain space, without being felt, and/or feeling themselves,
to be co-owners of this space, such the Romani (called “Gypsies” in that
role), Jews, or (in the United States) black people, but also servants in rela-
tion to “gentlefolk” (as in Victorian England, but also still in contemporary
Mexico, where the middle classes stand in for the gentlefolk), and even more
generally, women in a society dominated by men (Sonesson 2000). There
is also another kind of inner others, which have a somewhat surer footing,
also in a rather literal sense, because there is some space elsewhere, which
they can call their own, and to which they may eventually return. This is
true of the inhabitants of old-time commercial quarters in Shanghai, as
well as, at an earlier stage, at The Strand in London, which is an ancient
road following the river Thames, mentioned as a main route in the Roman
Antonin Itinerary, and which in the thirteenth century was known as “the
street of the Danes” because this was where foreign communities estab-
lished themselves close to the harbour.
The immense possibilities of the Parisian boulevard in the seventies sug-
gested by the polyglot pedestrian presence was at least in part of this more
benign type. Malmö, where we live, is today, according to some accounts,
the city in Europe where the biggest percentage of people stemming from
other countries stake out their life – that is, as the official term goes, “first-to
third-generation immigrants.” But the pedestrian streets in Malmö city cen-
tre are still, after decades of heavy immigration, perhaps not a fully adequate
showcase for this mixture of people and cultures: for this you would have
to visit some of the less central city parts. In all these respects, nevertheless,
inner others have thus contributed, by their mere presence in the street, to
the way a culture defines itself and is seen by those who are still others.
That the lifelines are there does not mean that the boulevard experience
is always a smooth one. It can certainly be a contested space. Think for
example of the beggar, or the drunken person, or more generally, the inner
other of the culture as it were. Sidewalks, especially the promenades or
commercial tracks that we associate with the classical boulevard, are the
space that we tend to think of as affording public presence with a mutual
sense of right of being there. However it is also a highly regulated space, if
we dismantle it in terms of what engineers see as their task of calculation: to
facilitate circulation but not stand-still. The question can nevertheless also
be formulated from the point of view of the citizen: for who is the sidewalk
there? For the flaneur, for the working citizen busy to get to work, and/or
for the local shop-owner or home-owner no doubt, but for the beggar or
sleeper next to the door of that home or workplace, it is not only a place
in the same smooth sense, but a contested space. As Nicholas Bloomley
has it (2010, p. 103): “Public space is [also] a site of hermetic closure and
suspicion, in which boundaries play a central role. Rather than a site in
which rights can be creatively produced and seized by outsider groups,
rights serve as the shield for the bounded self.”
8.4.2. The Urban Gaze

Another thing that tends to attract attention on the boulevard is the fact of
the other (unknown) person being a man or a woman. Even if this aspect
is not particularly in focus in the previously referred to literature on the
boulevard (except in Gogol’s story, where it is important at the end), it
gains the upper hand in several well-known cinematic accounts of modern
boulevard life. The aforementioned films by Rohmer and Bresson (see Sec-
tion 8.2.1) are to a significant extent narrated around the exchange of looks
between men and women on the boulevard. The gaze, in this case, does not
only pick up information, but also gives it out by conveying messages such
as “I observe you” and “I find it worthwhile to observe you.” The hero
of Eric Rohmer’s film “L’amour l’après-midi,” who spends his life on the
boulevard, expresses this double function of the gaze very clearly when he
says life on the boulevard is basically a question of “trying oneself out on
another.” The gaze of the protagonist, in these French films from the latter
part of the twentieth century, is exchanged primarily, almost exclusively,
between men and women, but can just as well be extended, as is the ever
more frequent case in more recent films, between same-sex subjects with ho-
mosexual preferences. The important thing is that sexuality, even if mostly
in a rather abstruse sense, is involved.
In Paris, as in many other Latin cities, this gazing seems to be unproblem-

atically conceived as a mutual interchange between the sexes, as a gender-
based play on the street. If we can generalise from film analysis, notably
from Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki (1998), the issue of ownership
inevitably arises. Although it may be relevant that the films referred to above
were all made by men (and thus automatically involves a male “gaze”), there
undoubtedly is, or was, a consensus in many cultures for such exchanges
being mutually rewarding between the sexes. In fact, the trajectories of the
boulevard are peculiar in that they do not only allow for movement, but cre-
ate virtual access to looking, and no doubt also to smelling, touching and,
more rarely, at least if we take this term in any deeper sense of exchange,
speaking. There is, however, a traditional way in Spanish culture to pass
into speaking in the street, a formalised system of one-liners for men paying
compliments (“piropos”) to women when passing. According to Natálie
Venclovska (2006, pp. 1, 3) “‘el piropo’ is defined as a piece of flattery that a
man tells a pretty woman who draws his attention when they cross each other
in the street” (our translation).2 As she goes on to point out, however, “as a
result of female emancipation in recent years, we can also observe ‘piropos’
directed by women to men” (our translation).3 Indeed, on the Internet you
can find not only many pages on classical and not so classical piropos, but
they also include piropos that women can use to men.4
In certain public quarters, like the blog-based (unauthorised) Urban
Dictionary, terms of dominance, as penetrating as “eye fucking” and as
violent as “visual rape” have been used (see Anonymous 1999–2014). The
metaphors are adequate, at least in the sense that they describe the cross-
ing of the visual barrier. The examples on this blog, some of them quotes
from films, some appearing as spoken situations, suggest that the active
agent may be of both sexes, and even that a majority of them are female.
2 “El piropo se define como una lisonja que el hombre echa al paso de una mujer
guapa que despierta su interés.”
3 “Con la emancipación de las mujeres en los últimos años también podemos
registrar piropos dirigidos a los hombres.”
4 For the first case, see, for instance, http://www.piropos.net. For the second case,
much less common, see http://amigos.com/blog/33727/post_142042.html (ba-
sically, the author only seems to invert the sexes of the protagonists). Both
consulted on November 7, 2014.
Whether this reflects the minds of the visitors of this particular blog, and
the vocabulary of a male culture, or if it has any bearing on real human
encounters, remains to be investigated.
Which sex is the active agent in these types of situations is not the subject
of doubt in, for instance, a reflection by the Swedish columnist Lisa Mag-
nusson (2014) who writes: “When I lived in Paris men called me all sorts of
things, not because they liked me particularly, but because it is a thing for
them, customarily, to behave like that towards women” (our translation).5
Or, as the British columnist Linda Bates (2014) writes: “It’s a statement of
power. It’s a way of letting me know that a man has the right to my body,
a right to discuss it, analyse it, appraise it, and let me or anybody else in
the vicinity know his verdict, whether I like it or not.” In Latin America,
it is observed that men nowadays tend to address terms to women in the
street that graphically describe the very act of making love to them, and,
at least in Mexico, this is resented by middle class women as an aggres-
sion stemming from lower class men.6 Recently, a video of a woman with
a hidden camera walking for ten hours through Brooklyn, New York, and
receiving more than 100 comments from men went viral on the Internet.
When the same experiment was repeated in Auckland, New Zealand, only
two people approached the woman, one of them simply asking for the
way.7 Curiously, however, all the comments made in the first video are
positive remarks, without any clear sexual references, rather of the kind
that Spaniards would consider piropos. So it is clearly the very act of ad-
dressing (or perhaps rather referring to) an unknown woman in the street
that is felt to be offensive. There is clearly a divide here concerning what is
meant by the publicity of public space. The brute material “solution” to this
5 “När jag bodde i Paris ropade män saker efter mig hela tiden. Inte för att de
gillade just mig, utan för att det är en grej där att män skall vara så mot kvinnor.
Det anses charmigt” (Magnusson 2014).
6 Based on conversation with Mexican women. See also an article on the web:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2014/04/140424_sociedad_argentina_pi-
ropos_acoso_polemica_irm. Consulted on November 7, 2014.
7 For the original video, consulted on November 7, 2014, see https://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A&src_vid=YXyLECydXLQ&feature=iv&
annotation_id=annotation_1788972855. The New Zealand version, consulted
on the same date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXdMAXaMicc.
type of predicament would be some kind of equivalent to the Muslim veil

(cf. Sonesson 2013a, b). But since this is a convention adopted to control
freedom of movement, modes of action and visual appearance, this “lib-
eration” from gazes in public space must at the same time be considered a
restriction, among other things, of access to public space.
8.4.3. The City Jungle

It may be illuminating, from an evolutionary perspective, to look at this as-
pect, and dilemma, of boulevard experience as the culturally evolved version
of (most of the time completely virtual) sexual selection. It is a curious fact
of specifically human bio-cultural evolution, that in the case of almost all
other animals, males seem to get to strut around the stage, showing either
their aesthetic attraction, or their prowess, or both, while the females make
the selection. Already Charles Darwin claimed that the choice was up to the
female animal, and later writers, such as Geoffrey Miller (2000), although
claiming that male choice is also involved among human beings, in actual
fact the latter is hardly taken into account (see Section 8.2.5). Amongst hu-
man beings, however, at least in historical times, this task has been divided
between females, showing off their beauty, and males, trying to produce
an affordance of prowess. And in homosexual relations the tendency that
one partner likes to show off, and the other to be more of an on-looker (or
appear more passive), has been talked of in terms of playing the feminine
and masculine parts of the game, respectively.
If we regard the worlds of other species, one may wonder how much
choice the female chimpanzee has as to making love with the alpha male,
but she can probably pick and choose with which other males she wants
to have sex hidden away in the bush. And, of course, as a member of the
group, she helps establish and maintain the alpha male in his position. A
more typical case of sexual selection, as understood by Darwin, would
seem to be that of the birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), most types and
tokens of which are found in New Guinea. Almost all the 41 species are
highly sexually dimorphic, the males not only having a highly elongated
and elaborate plumage extending from the beak, wings, tail or head, which
is not found in the females (as is rather customary in birds), but also being
in the habit of executing very complex dances, showing off their shapes
and colours on a dedicated stage, while the females assemble to watch and
make their choice (cf. Frith & Beehler 1998). In recorded human history
(until recently), everything seems to indicate that women have taken over
the part of exposing themselves, while men have been in the position of
making a choice, or to reciprocate by showing their prowess (which may
also mean having the means to provide for the woman). Just as in the case
of the birds-of-paradise, there has always been a stage where this selection
takes place.
Among human beings, at the central square of the village or, in island
communities, at the harbour front, more or less the whole population, as
this has been observed in more recent centuries, meets in the evening or
late afternoon, giving the boys and girls a possibility to look at each other.
But as modernisation went on, the boulevard meant that this space became
more public, and, in particular, that it opened up to more diverse popula-
tions less well-established in the community.
In the case of birds-of-paradise, the habitual spot in the jungle where
the dance of the male claimant takes place is no doubt in a sense a public
space to the female birds-of-paradise. Even if there is not a rule for par-
ticular trees forming the stage, there seems for instance to be a regularity
or custom, since certain trees are the repeated scene of these spectacles
(cf. Frith & Beehler 1998). The females round themselves up on the sides,
comparable to the audience of a sports game: that is, there is a clear divi-
sion between spectators and actors, but perhaps no explicit sign structure.
If his consciousness (or, in contemporary jargon, his “theory of mind”) had
had the scope reminiscent of that of humans’, the male bird could well,
because of the setting of the interior rules of spectatorship, had taken this
as a statement of power on the part of the female birds-of-paradise, letting
him know that they have a right to his body. Contrary to the playground
of the birds-of-paradise and to any other conceivable scene, the boulevard
is a space of symmetric interaction, but it is clearly lived, by at least some
women in some cultures, as an asymmetric stage on which they are the
actors – a division which certainly becomes more pregnant if only men are
sitting in the cafés facing the sidewalk, as is still often the typical case in
many (particularly smaller) cities around the world. Indeed, in the Brooklyn
video (referred to in section 8.4.2 above), a lot of men merely seem to hang
around observing the passer-by as if in a scene. A case could certainly be
made, along the lines of Miller’s (2000) derivation of all culture from sexual
selection, although not mentioning this example, that the mating ground
was the first public space.
Nevertheless, in the case of human culture, to understand both the pleas-
ure of the male flaneur, and the qualms of the female object of contempla-
tion (at least in some cultures), we have to dig deeper into the notion of
public space, as it has resulted from the bio-cultural evolution of the human
species. We will do this by way of considering the public space more specifi-
cally as a place of interaction.
8.5. The Anatomy of Crowding and Dispersal

Adding a temporal dimension to Uexküll’s Umwelt, Morten Tønnessen
(in press) suggests that human beings start out in an embryonic Umwelt,
and arrive at the infant Umwelt going through the foetal Umwelt. He goes
on to point out that there are transitions also within the infant Umwelt.
One of these transitions is the “gradually expanding social, enkinaesthetic
interaction and coaction” continuing into another one described as “start-
ing to walk (via sitting and perhaps crawling).” In other terms, there is an
ever-expanding spatial range of the child’s Umwelt, and we know from
other sources (Rogoff 1990), that the degree to which the child distances
itself from the family home grounds augments contiguously with age even
following upon the episodes designated by Tønnessen. One may wonder
at this point whether there is a valid phylogenetic parallel to this ontoge-
netic amplification. In adult life, the city could, in some ways, be seen as
the maximum scope of such an extension. On the other hand, we have
no reason to doubt the common consensus according to which the first
hominines were hunter-gatherers, which would mean they were adept at
spreading out – though only as wholes or groups.
8.5.1. Crowds beyond Dunbar’s Number

Group size, if not group dispersion, is used by Robin Dunbar (1996) as an
explanation for the origin of language: when human groups grow too large
(to more than around 150 individuals, which is the basic human group
according to Dunbar), mutual grooming as practiced by other primates
turns out to be too time-consuming. Language evolved, according to this
theory, as a substitute for grooming, reducing the need for physical and
social intimacy. This is a curious idea. First of all, if we suppose grooming
to be something comparable to caressing, then language certainly does not
produce the same effect, already at the physical level, that is, no obligatory
oxytocin. Indeed, Dunbar (1996, pp. 147–148) himself points out that lan-
guage is bad at emotional communication, and that laughter and music are
more plausible candidates for oxytocin production (Dunbar 2005 [2004],
pp. 126 ff.). Second, if you want to talk with 150 people at the same time,
you need a big auditorium, and whatever the effect, it will be nothing like
grooming, already because grooming could hardly be accomplished with
150 people at the same time, but, more profoundly, because there is little
evidence that it produces the same effect. Of course, perhaps some kind of
collective grooming effect may be produced in a group shouting slogans
and singing battle songs, giving rise to that kind of “group soul” which
so frightened Gustave Le Bon and many other commentators during the
nineteenth century and which later was blamed for Hitler’s success (cf.
Moscovici 1981). In the general case, however, mutual gaze, whatever its
shortcomings, may be a better substitute for grooming. If so, the boule-
vard would be able to offer a social cohesion going well beyond Dunbar’s
number – even if involving in an intense way only one dyad at a time. Add
talk to this (wherever it came from) and you will have the coffee house. But
Dunbar is undoubtedly right in thinking that the kind of talk going on at
this stage – which would include the coffee house – was more in the style
of gossip than being reminiscent of the philosophical, legal, or political
disquisitions anticipated by Habermas and Sennett.
The spectacular function is that semiotic operation which characterises
the auditorium, but also the boulevard and the market place. It is best
described as an operation resulting in a division applied to a group of
people, and separating those that are subjects and objects, respectively, of
the process of contemplation. This should be understood primarily as a
commonly activated separation of function and dominance, not necessar-
ily of permanent sub- and hyper-ordination of persons: in fact, the human
subjects and objects of contemplation are often the same, as they may
constitute the whole stretch of the act in rituals, or only temporarily take
on certain roles, as on the street (see Sonesson 2000b). In the market, on
the square, or along the boulevard, observation is (potentially) mutual, as
well as intermittent. Yet, this is not true of the official parade, or the brute
governmental variants of public punishment acts, such as the dismember-
ment of Damien, as memorably described by Michel Foucault (1975), and it
does not apply to the sporting event or the theatre. The key to the difference
between the boulevard scenario and the parade is the fact of the observers
being, in the second case, on a shared trajectory, in the time-geographical
sense of the term. Unlike the case of the hunter-gatherers, this is a trajec-
tory on which everyone, literally, goes alone, but does it in a way so as to
be part of an overall movement.
Before the tourist boom on the Greek islands at the end of the last cen-
tury, there was a phenomenon which was reproduced every evening in the
small villages: all the inhabitants, including new-born children, assembled
on the central square (which, on the islands, is often the harbour), walk-
ing up and down over and over again. There is a Mexican folk song the
refrain of which consists of telling the girl to go once again around “el
parque” in the hope that this time she will meet someone who will marry
her.8 The trajectories, which are here strictly parallel, although having op-
posite direction, are always the same: they do not open up to other potential
trajectories away from the square; they certainly permit an exchange of
gazes and also often of speech. Indeed, this is what generates the “leakage”
between trajectories known as gossip (though perhaps not so much on the
square), as Johan Asplund (1983) so graphically puts it. But all this follows
a well-known, repetitive, pattern. And it is always more or less the same
people who are there. This is where the boulevard makes a difference. It
involves at the same time dispersal and crowding. Itineraries, as we say,
have different points of departure and arrival, but they all come together in
the middle. All the female birds-of-paradise, it is true, also come together
to watch the male dancing. But, once there, they only sit watching. More
fundamentally, however, they do not bring with them on the trajectory the
human perceptual apparatus and its embedded system of interpretation,
8 More exactly, this is a song by the Mexican singer-writer Chava Flores (1920–
1987) and does probably more directly refer to the small “villages,” that is the
districts (“barrios”), of which Mexico City is made up. In many cases, you can
still see the central square (“el parque”) of these districts, with is own musical
kiosk, though now largely abandoned.
which is what turns encounters and affordances into the complex matter
of the boulevard experience.
8.5.2. Civilising the City

If the important writings of Norbert Elias (1978 [1939]) are to be be-
lieved, the court is really the source of the process of civilisation, which
has changed our society and culture in recent millennia. In those respects
in which we have discussed the public sphere here, nevertheless, the court
is more similar to a village than to a city. On the whole, it is mostly the
coming together of the same personages all the time (although it should
not be forgotten that princes often took their wives – this was a period in
which wives were really taken – from other courts, and also that young men
were sent from one court to another to learn the skills of a true knight).
Commenting on Elias’ work, Allen (2004, pp. 217 ff.) observes that the
“civilising process” must really be connected to civitas, the city, rather than
the court: he argues that the kind of civilisation that was practiced in Europe
during the time Elias considers (900–1700) mainly derived from city life,
even when it was manifested in abbeys and feudal manors:
Civilization is a socializing process set in a city, responding to and presupposing
the effects of the city on whom it shelters. It takes the artifactual innovation of the
city and its architecture to civilize human culture. A city is an immensely complex
and demanding architectural, artifactual, physical actuality, not just a communal
state of mind (Allen 2004, p. 229).
This is an acute observation, as far as it goes, but, to the extent that it of-
fers any explanation for the city being the agent of human specificity, it
seems to take for granted that buildings, and artefacts generally, produce
behaviour and even states of mind, rather than the reverse. Already in the
introduction to this chapter, recalling the tradition from Hall to Hammad,
we suggested that, at least in part, the reverse may be the case – and that,
also given the artefacts, behaviour, not to mention states of mind, are con-
tinuously renegotiated in relation to the artefacts. Another problem with
Allen’s observation (as we will see below in Section 8.5) is that cities, at
least in some sense of the term, existed well before tenth century Europe.
According to Aron Gurwitsch (1957, 1985), every perceptual situation
is structured into a theme, a thematic field, and a margin. The theme is that
which is most directly within the focus of attention. Both the thematic field
and the margin are in contiguity with the theme, but the thematic field is, in
addition, connected to the theme at the level of meaning. When attending to
the theme, we are easily led to change the focus to something within the same
thematic field. Changing what was earlier in the margin into a theme, on the
other hand, may require some kind of outside incitement. In the margin are
normally found some items of consciousness that always accompany us, such
as our own stream of consciousness, our own body, and the extension of the
Lifeworld beyond what is presently perceivable. But the margin also contains
all items that are not currently our theme, nor connected to this theme, but
which are still relevant to us in the present. Thus, while several things can-
not be thematic at the same time, unless they are unified into one item, they
can still be present in the thematic field, or they may appear somewhere in
the margin. As Sven Arvidson (2006) has observed, Gurwitsch offers the
experiential background on which the study of attention finally makes sense.
If we now return to the boulevard experience, we realise that the boule-
vard, as a trajectory populated by other people, is all the time present at the
margin of the pedestrian’s consciousness, some items of it becoming now
and then promoted to thematic rank and then sinking back into the margin.
To every true flaneur, as we have met him (a figure which by default
has been thought of as being male) in literature and in the cinema, the
boulevard, the crowded and heterogeneous city, is part of the thematic
field, although the thematic focus will be continuously shifting. Actually,
the boulevard must be at least somewhere in the margin of consciousness
already for us to observe the Goffmanean manoeuvre of avoidance, allow-
ing us not to collide with other people in the street. In the particular instance
recounted by Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, this very act of
shock avoidance becomes the prominent theme of the field. Considered
more broadly, however, an actual boulevard experience requires large parts
of the boulevard and the things taking place on, and beside, the boulevard
to enter the centre of attention.
That attention in this understanding is not a “pure” perception, but always
a “biased” one, also including assimilated elements of signs, is of importance
for the space that we (like to) conceive of as our own, as opposed to that
which is shared. Our perception is, as it were, important for the partition that
we as human beings set up between private and public space.
8.6. Phylogeny of Public Space

In French, the term “privatisation” is ambiguous: it means to render some-
thing private, but also to deprive somebody of something. Although English
makes use of two words, i.e. “privatise” and “deprive,” the root is clearly
the same. In Hammad’s (1989) work, that which is rendered private is at
the same time robbed from the public. Something like this is in fact also
suggested by the term “appropriate,” present in both languages. When the
visitor at La Tourette installs himself in the guesthouse room (that was
formerly a monk cell), he immediately begins to transform this public space
into a space of his own. More formally, privatisation involves, according
to Hammad’s definition, a person being able to conjoin with a place, while
others are unable to do so. It involves also a superior instance authorising
such admittance to the place. As Hammad (2002) puts it: “privatisation
has something to do with the very general problem involving the control of
processes and the mastery of space.” One is reminded of Rousseau’s phy-
logeny of private property, according to which space was once common to
all until the first person set up a border and declared that what was within
the border was his property (in which case the same person, in Hammad’s
terminology, takes on the parts of conjoined owner and authoriser). In
fact, privatisation may have started out, without the verbal declaration of
ownership, as a mere setting up of a fence, which, just as Hammad’s wall,
is more fundamentally a dissuasive device than it is a once and for all fix-
ated real obstacle. To the extent that the wall is more a normative than a
physical obstacle, it is really not so different from the verbal proclamation.
Or, it may be that the proclaiming subject in question, still without there
being any verbal communication, simply situated itself at the centre of a
set of proxemic spaces and fought off any intruder.
8.6.1. The Positive Character of Public Space

Still, despite this basically dichotomic universe, and despite the contested right
to partitions of the sidewalk, public space can hardly receive an exclusively
negative definition. Public space, as conceived by Habermas (1962) and bet-
ter described by Sennett (1977), as well as it has continued to be discussed,
directly, or indirectly by association, by a number of followers and critics, is
much more than an “amorphous mass” from which private space is spared
out. We have already suggested that Sennett’s characterisation of the coffee

house might be used to define the public sphere in general. Even as a descrip-
tion of the coffee house, a more formal definition would have to go beyond
the simple conjoining of a person, or several persons, with a space, and
take into the account the earlier trajectories of these persons, starting out at
different points in a qualitatively differentiated space and ending likewise.
From a semiotic point of view, it would also have to take into account the
permeability resulting between the different trajectories at the central space
of encounter, where this permeability pertains to the different senses, and to
the production of incentives for the senses of the others, including gesture
and speech.
Elsewhere, we have discussed the permeability of borders, relying, no-
tably, on an example given by Hammad (1989, 2002), the outer walls of
the rooms in Le Corbusier’s La Tourette. They are divided into four sub-
panels: a door, which lets through people, light, air, mosquitoes, warmth
and cold; a metal lattice serving as a mosquito net, which lets through air
and cold, but neither people nor mosquitoes; a window pane which lets
light pass but neither air nor other objects; the concrete basement which
lets through neither heat, nor light, nor air, nor people. Hammad concludes
that all barriers are selective: they let through certain categories of agents
and not others (see Sonesson 2003, 2013, 2014).
Everybody’s trajectory on the boulevard serves to bring the individual
following the trajectory into a position where different spectacles of af-
fordances and signs, some of them produced by other human beings who
follow their proper trajectory, are offered up for observation or, rather, for
experiencing. The term permeability is used here to suggest that movements
bringing subjects capable of interpretation on trajectories which run in
parallel tend to offer up ever new tasks for interpretation, many of them
pertaining to the other subject. The trajectories open up the other to more,
and more focused uses, of different senses, letting in, perhaps light and air,
but in any case people. This could be said to be a deliberation of gazes,
a spreading of shared and/or mutual attention, and a bringing into focus
of selected affordances. It is still not, of course, deliberation in the proper
sense, which cannot be conducted on the level of gazes – but neither is gos-
sip, which is already verbally conveyed.
If we admit that there is a process of privatisation creating the private

domain, then perhaps we should also postulate a process of “publication,”
of turning something into a public phenomenon, which is not simply the
reversal of the former one. Properties do not become public merely by
returning them to the innocence of undivided space before the fall occa-
sioned by acts of privatisation. The transgression of the borders erected by
privatisation is also a positive fact. Indeed, there may be a dialectic spiral
taking us from privatisation to publication and back again, and if we con-
ceive privatisation to be a process, as Hammad does, there is no reason to
think that there cannot be a converse process of publication, which could
be realised by means of other steps. When for instance the occupation of
tables is accomplished before the others arrive, in the small slot of time that
precedes the gathering for a common meal, as Hammad’s (1989, 2002)
experiment implies, we can regard this spatial reorganisation as a matter
of segmentising time. This segmentation shows the possibility to “win”
not only private, but public space as well, and can be seen as a principle at
work also in urban development (Sandin 2003, 2009, 2013). Indeed, it is
not necessary to suppose that publication must follow privatisation. Rather,
there may have been intermittent processes of privatisation and publication
at different moments of human history. In fairly recent history, these pro-
cesses may be exemplified by governmental redistribution of land property,
or recovering spoils of war, etc. On a smaller temporal scale, however, such
rotations of spatial ownership take place all the time.
8.6.2. A New Taxonomy of the Public Sphere

When Habermas first introduced the idea of the bourgeois public sphere,
he contrasted it with the representative sphere, which is a “public sphere
directly linked to the concrete existence of a ruler,” or, more broadly, refer-
ring to “the feudal authorities (church, princes and nobility)” (Habermas
1989, p. 51). An instance of such a public sphere would no doubt be the
dequartization of Damian, with which Foucault opens Surveiller et punir
(1975). So would of course be royal weddings and births, inaugurations of
new monuments, and the discourse of the pope on the Vatican sphere, all
of which are feeble remnants of a unidirectional and once powerful repre-
sentative public sphere. Actually, very little is said by Habermas about this
representative public sphere, and it has not figured much in the subsequent
discussion about public space. Without here attempting to trace this history
of formal representationalism, but still to offer a glimpse of the bits and
pieces by which the public representative realm and its symbolic architec-
ture are formed, we could have a look at the wake of urban pretention in
early modern small-town America, where a typical troika of civic build-
ings – the courthouse, the library and the prison, sometimes in connection
to a courthouse square – stood out as the particular architecture needed
to create “a civic realm” (Cuff 2012). The more genuinely communal, or
Habermasian bourgeois, type of public sphere, represented architectonically
by crowded squares in the traditional European sense, is rare in American
cities, like for instance in Los Angeles, where outdoor generic space is re-
stricted more or less to the little corners formed by the urge to park vehicles
at street junctions.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1972) argued for the existence, be-
side the bourgeois sphere, of a parallel proletarian public sphere, and in
cultural, feminist and postcolonial studies, marginalised groups have been
considered in their capacity of forming their own (counter)public spheres
(cf. Ahmed 2003). It is often neglected, however, that whatever the po-
litical differences between the so-called bourgeois public sphere and other
emancipatory public spheres, they have an extra-governmental intention
in common. Habermas (1992, p. 427) himself says that Mikhail Bakhtin’s
work has made him realise the existence of a “plebeian public sphere,” but
again, he gives no clear indication of this being a formally distinct kind
of public sphere. Although this goes against the conception suggested by
Bakhtin, the “plebeian public sphere” historically has been built around
an asymmetric and enduring spectacular function, whereas all other public
spheres mentioned embody a spectacular function that is symmetrical and
intermittent (see above and Sonesson 2000b). Indeed, as Habermas (1992,
p. 426) observes: in “traditional forms of representative publicness, [---] the
people functioned as a backdrop before which the ruling estates, nobility,
church dignitaries, kings, etc. displayed themselves and their status.” This
would mean that the representative public sphere is formally similar to any
theatrical piece shown on the little stage around the corner, in spite of its
main feature being the expression of power. It would therefore more appro-
priately be labelled a presentative public sphere. And Habermas’ “bourgeois
public sphere,” which is a politically as well as formally problematic term

denoting the basic spontaneous mechanism of gathering for the sake of
expressing and discussing common or urgent matters, should, if we want
to maintain the principal referential line of division, really be rechristened
the interactional or communicative public sphere.
In practice, the communicative public sphere is of course seldom experi-
enced as representing a group, and also groups need to be communicational-
ly organised internally, with spokespersons, decision-makers, etc., that may
have to make presentational appearances. The more recently acknowledged
liberation movements, tied to the interests of sub-groups in society, have
the common feature of standing for different types and degrees of agonism
in regard to how they emerge and constitute their position vis-a-vis the
officially presentative public sphere. Hegemonic change in this sphere, and in
current democratic order, is possible, according to Chantal Mouffe (1993),
who downplays the importance of the consensual civic representation of
Habermas, favouring instead the democratic existence of an agonistic mul-
titude of wills. The possible evolutionary impact (of irreversibility, endur-
ance, long-term sustainability, etc.) of such hegemonic change is a question
seldom in itself addressed by this late modern stream of political thinkers,
but that the effects of democracy are crucial for how we organise our socie-
ties, in the past and in the future, also in spatial terms, cannot be in doubt.
8.6.3. Return to Private Space

There are no secure sources to the deep history of public space, and, even
if we stay within the bounds of traditional history, there is not much we
actually know about the development of the public sphere. Most (hi)stories
about public gatherings, public voice, and public rights, especially of the
kind that presents these as critical instances in relation to the ruling forces,
start with the Greek agora, or, if a religious component is introduced, the
different communities of the Axial Age (see Chapter 7: Religion in this vol-
ume). But a history of private life has been written from the point of view of
the Annales school (Ariès & Duby 1985–1987), and although there is not
a simple symmetrical relation between public and private space, as argued
above, this history cannot avoid telling us something about public space.
Democracy was famously invented in Athens, and perhaps in other Greek
cities, when free citizens got together to discuss matters of common concern
on the agora. Although all women were excluded from participation and,
even more significantly in terms of numbers, all inhabitants, of both sexes,
who were not free citizens, this may well have set the model for a mode of
interaction which we know as the shared public sphere – without prejudging
on the issue whether this exchange consisted more of rational deliberation
than of gossip, as Dunbar calls it, or conversation, which is the more neutral
term used by Gabriel Tarde. Whether this happened in Greece for the first
time in history or not, we cannot know. But is seems to be clear that public
spaces, in this sense, disappeared after the fall of Rome, and that cities,
when they re-emerged during the Middle Ages, were more concerned with
huddling together within walls in order to assure protection from all kinds
of enemies. Only with the Renaissance did the public space re-emerge as a
specific civic idea in need of a specific location within the cities, regaining
some of the functions it had in Antiquity (Ariès & Duby 1985–1987).
This description is compatible with Bakhtin’s (1968) view of the medieval
market square, if we remember that the Middle Ages of François Rabelais
were already bordering on the Renaissance. Perhaps one should consider
the space before the church as the real antecedent of interactional public
space. Although what happened within the church must no doubt princi-
pally be considered to be in the domain of presentative public space (but see
Chapter 7: Religion in this volume), or, at the other extreme, private space,
when confession took place, the square in front of the church may in a sense
have been the first real interactional public space. But, most of the time,
like the central village square, it would be an interactional space for those
already acquainted. In this sense, Bakhtin’s market square comes closer to
realise the ideal of lines normally very much separated at their origin and
their end leaping in parallel for a short space of time. If anything, however,
Bakhtin’s market square, while no doubt manifesting a formational agency
in urban development, is likely to have more to do with gossip than with
actual deliberation. Like the boulevard, as well as many of the coffee houses,
it was thus perhaps more predominantly concerned with private and semi-
private issues than with “the domain of common concerns.”
8.6.4. The New Body of the Public Sphere

In the modern US context, mentioned above (in Section 8.6.2), neither
the square with the city courthouse, nor the typical wide street for cars
could be said to physically represent what we have here discussed as the
boulevard-principle of the public sphere. These types of architecture are of
course frequently used as, but not felt to be, a space of exchange amongst
the commons. Their public importance even diminished over the course
of the twentieth century with the appearance of suburban and shopping
based modes of city expansion, which in the course of time have even
renounced any public commitment, accompanied as they became, in the
outskirts of cities, by the “anonymous leased space that government offices
now occupy” (Cuff 2012). This is a city development trend that is not only
American, but global.9
Dana Cuff points to a tendency among planning authorities in contem-
porary cities, as well as in much theorisation around public space, that has
not fully acknowledged the physical disappearance of the Habermasian Res
Publica, which, as she says, suffers from an obsolete idea of “depending
on the thought of political debate in the open, as if situated in some hybrid
between a Roman forum and a Parisian café.” She points to the fact that
the public sphere nowadays survives in large parts instead in relation to city-
bound transportation and transportation nodes, and believes that we have
not yet realised the full consequence (and potential) of this evolvement and
physical stretching of public space. Cuff seems to unhesitatingly take the large
number of commuting people as a figure also representing the public domain,
and sees travelling by rail (in its late modern technological manifestation)
as an important conjoining urban force for the future. From our boulevard
experience perspective commuting could of course in a way reinforce certain
aspects of urban exchange, such as gaze, bodily confrontation (especially in
rush hours) and the “civil inattention” needed in order to balance the need
for many to have only limited interaction.
Cuff’s emphasis on the representativeness of transportation (and its
nodes) seems to acknowledge to a certain extent, but does not problematise,
9 For a semiotic reflection on contemporary mechanisms of global urban influence,

with a specific focus on Los Angeles and Malmö, see Ståhl and Sandin (2011).
the attempt made by the anthropologist Mark Augé (1992) to redefine the
public realm as a “supermodernity” where the assembled mass of people
also implies a heightened degree of anonymity. In a slightly reductionist take
(Sandin 2012), Augé isolates a “late modern” historical era, typically repre-
sented by communication nodes such as airports, but also by supermarkets,
in need of what he states to be a “sociology of solitude,” meaning that there
is a lack of a traditional sense of community in them, leading to a society
where individuals need identity cards in order to belong. So, even while the
sense of belonging in post-modern societies is addressed differently by Cuff
and Augé, they seem to agree that the interaction and motion of bodies and
minds are not really what they were at some earlier stage. In light of such
anthropological views pertaining to the current re-constitution of the mate-
rial preconditions for a really interactional public sphere, we could say that it
is not necessary to see the agora as a requirement, but rather as a prototype,
and a figure sedimented in generative history, in the phenomenological sense.
Still, Dunbar’s number, or some extension of it, may be more important here
than in relation to grooming: beyond some limit, the interactional public
sphere is not really itself any more, and that may also apply to the public
sphere mediated by airports, supermarkets, and the Internet.
While Cuff (2012) to some extent follows the idea according to which
the public sphere, whatever form it takes, requires a radical rethinking
of the architectural embodiment to hold collectives, Judith Butler (2011)
focuses on the gathering of bodies as such, in for instance demonstrations
(exemplified in recent decennia’s globalised common, without letting go of
the locally anchored political concerns the material constituents of what
is regarded as the public sphere). Butler observes that the public realm is
bound to a necessity of material conditions, and that spatial appearance
is not only an enjoyable right in the city, but something which has to be
fought for by those who are not self-evidently included in the normed
public sphere. This fight, as well as any other public appearance, occupies
not only a physical place, but is constantly, and more or less instantly,
mediated (in what is today sometimes referred to as the Hertzian space)
through public or private channels, which means that there is not only one,
but two or several channels of communication in which urban presence to
others is conveyed (Butler 2011). Even though there are divergent opinions
as regards to where the most important public sphere occurs today, such as
Cuff’s everyday self-transportation and Butler’s political gathering, a basic

fact is that gatherings have to be materially supported in order to both col-
lect foundational societal meaning and to support the formation of human
movements for times to come.
Regardless of what has been the collecting space: courthouse squares,
transport nodes, or spontaneous gatherings at well known places, the way
in which the public realm emerged is not a once and for all settled issue. It
seems however, in an historical perspective, that the specifically human way
of supporting such a sphere needs human-matter interaction of quite com-
plex kinds, and an elaborated architecture is one of them. This architecture,
even if we here consider urban life as a constituent for the development of
specifically human culture, does not follow any agreed line of evolution,
but has looked different “from the beginning.”
8.6.5. A Fairly Deep History of Public Space

According to contemporary consensus in archaeology, the first cities of
humankind emerged around 8000 BCE. One of the earliest was no doubt
Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, which has been thoroughly investigated
by archaeologists since the middle of the last century (cf. Mellaart 1967;
Mellaart et al. 1989; Hodder 1996). Sometimes Jericho is mentioned as
being the first city, but, according to Klaus Schmidt (2012, p. 234 ff.), it
does not qualify, if we apply the criteria set up by Frank Korb and Berhard
Henzel, but Çatalhöyük does. These criteria (which are certainly open to
discussion) are as follows: (1) Size and density of settlement areas; (2) Func-
tion as a central place, particularly in respect to economy; (3) High degree
of professional specialisation; (4) Building organisation and differentiation;
(5) Longevity. From our point of view (not particularly noted by the authors
cited), it is very interesting that in Çatalhöyük individual houses were not
separated by streets and other intermediate spaces, but the whole city was
more similar to a contemporary apartment house – indeed, one without
any common staircases. This means that the houses had to be entered from
the rooftop. One possible interpretation of this fact is that the first cities of
humankind did not contain any large and stable public spaces, at least if the
common space of all the houses put together lacked such a function. It is of
course possible that roofs and semi-public plateaus served as instruments of
common accessibility. The fact that succeeding generations of houses were

erected above and on top of each other, on what was previously the roofs,
nevertheless makes it an intricate task to actually show to what extent such
(semi-)public spaces existed.
If the fabled Maya “cities” were ceremonial centres, as has long been
believed, they only consisted of public space; and if they really are “the
gigantic household facilities of Maya kings,” as has been more recently
suggested (Webster 2002, pp. 150 ff.), they were entirely made up of semi-
private space, perhaps at times in use for the purpose of a presentative pub-
lic sphere. But it is not necessary to go to non-European, or non-Eurasian,
continents, and to another world-historical series, to be confronted with
this issue: we now know that, at the site of Göbekli Tepe, in present-day
Turkey, several thousand years before Çatalhöyük, a ceremonial centre was
constructed, without there being any contemporary living quarters (Schmidt
2012). According to the interpretation of the archaeologists working at the
find, these people started building a ceremonial centre, only later to settle
down to consecrate themselves to agriculture, contrary to what has long
been taken for granted in prehistorical studies. They were thus, at least at
the beginning of this construction, hunter-gatherers.
Even if we accept this interpretation, we still do not know to what extent
this public space was an interactional, rather than a presentational, public
sphere. Habermas (1992, p. 456) quotes, not without approval, the “some-
what overblown thesis” formulated by Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), accord-
ing to which the Internet age brings us back to the hunting and gathering
society, because there is no “sense of place,” and thus, in Habermas’ terms,
no public sphere.10 But the experience of Göbekli Tepe suggests that, in the
real hunting and gathering society, there could at least be a presentative
public sphere. According to Schmidt (2012), who was the main archaeolo-
gist responsible for the dig, the evidence, literally, on the ground, shows that
Göbekli Tepe was first established as a ceremonial centre, joining a network
10 In fact, Meyrowiz (1985) goes on to speak of a bodily anchored phenomeno-

logical presence, involving physically located places, claiming that URLs may
provide, if not a straightforward orientation in a global network, at least a
virtual “sense of place,” Internet and other distant mediation of places relying
on the fact that there is a physical place at the other end.
of hunter-gatherer groups together, in the dedication to the celebration of

abstract forces, rather than personalised gods, and that several thousand
years later, this led into the site being transformed into something more
similar to a city, perhaps contemporaneously, or not, with the agricultural
revolution, which is traditionally thought to initiate the fundamental change
in human cultural evolution, bringing us from pre-history to history.
To be more precise, Schmidt (2012, pp. 229 ff.) actually suggests, again
relying on archaeological evidence, that sites like Göbekli Tepe, being cul-
tic communities, or amphiktyonia (like Delphi in classical Greece)11 were
slowly being abandoned when hunter-gatherers, who came together at
ceremonial places like Göbekli Tepe developed a new subsistence pattern,
which led to them dispersing to small, neighbouring, villages on the plain
below Göbekli Tepe, where they could dedicate themselves to agriculture.
If so, the ceremonial centre was the first specifically human public space,
although a presentational one, which was then shrunk down to the village
square, before it came of its own again, either in it presentational form, or as
being interactional, in emerging cities like Çatalhöyük. Then the story goes
on, from Athens, Rome, and Alexandria, to Paris, London and, eventually,
to Boston, Saint Petersburg and Los Angeles. And then on and on again,
to, among other places, Malmö, in Sweden, the small city from which this
story was written. The story of cities is linked to the story of humanity.
8.7. From Time Geography to Agents of Space

The trajectories of time geography may apply to any object, animate or not,
endowed with a consciousness or not. Also a parcel follows a trajectory
“from the cradle to the grave,” and this trajectory may even be part of a
bundle of trajectories which start out in different spaces, run in parallel for
some appreciable stretch of time, and then diverge again. Indeed, this hap-
pens all the time to a lot of parcels transported by the post. Such a bundle
of trajectories can only be taken to define urbanity, when what is conveyed
along the trajectories are human minds, susceptible of complex strategies of
11 In the classical period Delphi was a ceremonial centre around which city states
were dispersed – but, it is of course possible – though Schmidt does not have
anything to say about this issue – that this reproduces an ancient pattern before
the existence of cities, and even villages.
interpretation, and when these minds are embodied, so as to be presenting

their affordances, signs, and other meanings to other subjects pursuing these
partly parallel timelines – or, at least when what is conveyed is something
which, in time, becomes a human consciousness. Urbanity is a kind of situ-
ated and enacted agency of interpretation. Consciousness, in this case, is of
course, as always, consciousness of something – but it is more specifically
consciousness of overstepping the limits, of experiencing the permeability
of borders – between public and private space, each one being, in its time,
purloined for the other.
Public space, in some preliminary version, may have begun as the mat-
ing ground, which we share, but in enormously varied forms, with many
other animals, and some aspect of this could still persist in the town square,
the boulevard scenario, and even the coffee house. But to become a public
sphere, such a mating ground needs to be enriched by numerous other in-
terests and preoccupations, starting out perhaps, as Schmidt suggests, as a
ceremonial centre, in which publicity is essentially presentational, static, and
asymmetric, becoming later on, perhaps only at the time of the city, inter-
actional, intermittent, and more symmetric, perhaps even rhizometric, if by
that term we want to emphasise the elimination of hierarchical determination
of space in favour of modelling the public as junctions of coming and going
bearers of agency. This in turn will either require, or give rise to, and perhaps
more probably, dialectically engender gesture, language, pictures, and all
other semiotic processes, in particular those requiring the exchange of signs.
David Dunér
Chapter Nine
Science: The Structure of Scientific Evolutions
Scientific thinking is a result of time and history. It has slowly emerged in

bio-cultural coevolution where human beings interact with artefacts and
the surrounding environment. Fundamental conditions for the emergence
of scientific thinking are that the human mind is embodied, environmentally
situated and using external objects to extend its senses and cognition. But
also important is the prerequisite and urge to communicate and have en-
counters with other thinking and living beings. Taken together, this amounts
to the human ability to understand and share knowledge, beliefs and per-
spectives, and to do so in a context beyond that of the intimate group. This
chapter discusses how science emerged through interaction between human
cognitive abilities and changing environmental conditions, in other words,
how it depends on an extensive bio-cultural coevolution. “Science” is here
understood in a broad sense, as the systematic organisation of knowledge
by human beings with the aim of understanding, explaining, and handling
the world around us, as applied to nature as well as to culture and society.
It is a disciplined way of studying the human Lifeworld, by using certain
cognitive and cultural abilities that have evolved through a bio-cultural
coevolution. Even if scientific thought, as we shall see, resembles human
thinking in general, it tries to transcend the subjectively and culturally col-
oured Lifeworld, aiming to an intersubjective, shared Lifeworld, grounded
in universal features of human consciousness.
9.1. The Prehistory of Science

We have good reasons to assume that at the end of the Pleistocene, 11.7 ka
ago, the cognitive abilities needed for scientific thinking were at hand (Mith-
en 1996, 2002; cf. Donald 1991, 2001; Renfrew, Frith & Malafouris 2009).
Modern hominines of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, living in the
Palaeolithic age, were able to make detailed observations of the natural
world around them, they were able to generalise and draw conclusions
230 David Dunér
to make predictions and test hypotheses. They could deal with complex
social relationships and the demands of a changing environment. They
had technology, such as stone flakes and choppers that required an ability
to plan, to coordinate hand and eye, and to imagine a preconceived form.
One of the most crucial cognitive capacities for science was also in place –
probably as a result of increased sociability, tool-using and coordination
of hunting – i.e. the ability to form ideas about other minds, other people’s
thoughts and desires, to understand their actions, to see causal connections
between an action and the effect it may have on others. The ability to im-
agine other people’s inner worlds was an important precondition for the
emergence of language and other communicative abilities. Apart from mak-
ing use of analogies and metaphors to develop abstract ideas and reason-
ing, early human beings could reinforce their thinking by utilising objects
as artificial memory devices to store and transfer knowledge. At around
50 ka, according to Steven Mithen (2002), the first traces of accumulated
knowledge seem to appear.
But there was still something crucial missing. At the end of the last ice
age human beings became resident, grew crops and kept livestock, which
allowed for providing the necessities of life to an increasing number of
people. The communities became larger, which gave rise to more frequent
social contacts, increased trade, and faster exchange of ideas and thoughts
that were shared and distributed. When the products for living were suf-
ficient for more people than those who produced it, some people could put
aside the production of the life-sustaining necessities, and became instead
able to engage in specialised tasks. The knowledge of plant and animal
reproduction increased, as well as that with reference to building con-
struction, chemical processing and handicraft. In fact, social, cultural, and
economic factors led to a cognitive change. The earliest civilisations, the
Indus culture, Egypt, and Mesopotamia at the time around 10 ka, were not
results of an emergence of a new cognitive ability, but of a new way of us-
ing earlier cognitive abilities in a changed social and cultural environment.
Probably the new way of organising human life and living, epitomised in
the communal forms for living that led to city-like environments, had a
great impact on human thinking (see further Chapter 8: Urbanity in this
volume). The first writing systems, which emerge around the same time,
gave rise to an increased capacity to store and transfer knowledge. Thus,
Science: The Structure of Scientific Evolutions 231
at this time, a range of fundamental prerequisites for human rational and

complex scientific thinking was in place. But still we have to wait until the
sixth century BCE for the dawn of natural philosophy of the ancient Greek
Pre-Socratic philosophers, and two centuries later for the systematic, tele-
ological programme of Aristotelian physics, and additionally two millennia
until the sixteenth and seventeenth century CE before the rise of modern
systematic natural science. This needs an explanation.
Human biology and the genetically conditioned evolution of cognition
are necessary prerequisites, but in themselves are not sufficient explanations
for the emergence of scientific thinking. Nor is it satisfactory to explain
scientific change and succession of theories by mere applying – in a sort
of reductionist analogy argument – the theory of natural selection with
interactors, replicators, or memes (Toulmin 1972; Dawkins 1976; Hull
1988; Wuketits 1990; Rosenberg 1992; Vicente 2000). Instead, we have
to search for cultural-evolutionary explanations behind the rise of the sci-
entific endeavour. Culture could be defined as the existence of differences
between groups within a species in terms of behavioural patterns, which are
not directly determined by ecological factors, but taught and passed on to
new generations (Sinha 2009). Culture, in this sense, is a kind of stock of
inherited memories. In the course of human development cultural changes
occurred, which in turn had an impact on our cognitive abilities, that is,
a cultural evolution appears in interaction with the specific environmental
and biological resources. For a complete picture of the development of
human thinking, we must avail ourselves of not only phylogenetic and on-
togenetic explanations, but also of cultural-historical explanations. Modern
adult human cognition is a result of not only genetic events that have oc-
curred over millions of years of evolutionary time, but also cultural events
that have taken place over many thousands of years of recorded history and
personal events during thousands of hours in ontogenetic time (Tomasello
1999, 2005). The cultural process gave rise to unique human material and
symbolic artefacts, which, in their turn, created a cultural niche that has
had an impact on human cognition (Tooby & Cosmides 1995; Damerow
1996; Strauss & Quinn 1997; Cronk 1999; Simpson, Stich, Carruthers &
Laurence 2006). Scientific thinking and human systematic search for knowl-
edge are in other words completely anchored within the theoretic stage, i.e.
the level of cognitive-semiotic skills that, according to Donald (1991, 2001),
232 David Dunér
encompass both verbal and nonverbal extensive external symbolisation, a

large amount of theoretic artefacts and massive external memory storage,
as well as institutionalised paradigmatic thought and invention.
Cultural-evolutionary studies of human history therefore have an impor-
tant role to play in establishing the connection between early hominines
and contemporary human beings in order to achieve an understanding of
the emergence of human thought and culture. Science, which is obviously
a cultural artefact or activity, is a result of a bio-cultural coevolution: it
requires fundamental cognitive skills (that were already, more or less, in
place at least 130 ka ago), but – what is more important – it is a result of
the interplay between the human cognitive skills and the changing socio-
cultural and physical environment. In line with phenomenology (Husserl
1900–1901; Merleau-Ponty 1945; Gallagher & Zahavi 2008) as well as
enactive cognitive science (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991; Thompson
2007), the “scientist” is, as a human being, an embodied, moving, and inter-
active subject. Scientific thinking arises in a dynamic interplay between act-
ing human beings and their environment, between the thinking, interactive
mind, and the experiential world. Our knowledge of the world, as Shaun
Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2008, p. 89) claim, “including our scientific
knowledge, arises from a first-person perspective, and that science would
be meaningless without the experiential world” (see Zlatev 2009). What is
put forward here is an interaction theory of the emergence of science, an
enactive theory of scientific evolution.
9.2. The Scientific (R)Evolution

The long history of the interaction of the human mind with its environ-
ment has given rise to different cognitive tools for interpreting and dealing
with the world. The question here is how these cognitive resources – that
are also found in other human and everyday thought operations – are used
in scientific thought, particularly in seventeenth and eighteenth-century
science, during the so-called “scientific revolution.” The main idea is sim-
ply that the problem-solving strategies in science and technology are not
radically different from other human activities, but can be seen as sophisti-
cated, refined versions of everyday thought processes in interaction with a
specific spatial and temporal environment. Deduction and induction have
traditionally been identified as the most important and distinctive tools of

that activity we call science (cf. Losee 2001). But these are just examples of
a larger set of cognitive tools that are applied in scientific reasoning. Thus,
science cannot be distinguished from other human activities by referring
to a particular cognitive process that is exclusive to science. Instead, “sci-
ence” can be seen as a category, formed by a specific culture in a specific
time, in which certain sciences serve as prototypes, as more typical sciences,
such as physics, chemistry and biology, and other less typical or different
in kind such as art history, literature, and theology. The various scientific
disciplines share many characteristics with each other, have common family
resemblances in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense, but lack a common
essential feature necessary in order to be called a science (cf. Dunbar 2002).
Instead of searching for the one and only unity of science, we should look
for the plurality of scientific practices. Science is not distinguished from
other human enterprises cognitively, but by the specific objectives of its ac-
tivities, i.e. to increase our knowledge in a systematic way about the world
and ourselves, seeking true statements and put forward propositions that
are verifiable, or, according to Karl Popper (1963), at least falsifiable. What
should be regarded as science or not, is also to a large extent a matter of
debate within the scientific community, as a consequence of an agreement
about the nature of “normal science,” the paradigm or episteme, as this
has been put forward among historians of science ever since Thomas Kuhn
(1962) and Michel Foucault (1966).
Philosophers, scientists, theologians, and political thinkers use basically
the same cognitive abilities that ordinary people do in their own culture
(Nersessian 1992, 1995, 2005; Lawson 1994, 2004; Gooding 2000; Giere
1988, 1992; Gentner & Jeziorski 1989). Scientists incorporate concepts
that are available in their contemporary historical context and the general
theories, models and metaphors that are common and typical of the culture
in which they are included, but they also remodel and differentiate these
basic concepts, discover new connections and draw new conclusions. Sci-
ence aims, like literature, art and myths, to manage life, to find order in the
world. Human thoughts and feelings are indispensable tools to find meaning
in what is going on around us. The scientific concepts do not simply repre-
sent immediate things but are expressions of human conceptions of things.
234 David Dunér
Science is largely – like religion, politics and art – about human orientation
in the world, and the organisation of human experiences of the Lifeworld.
The scientific revolution, which is usually associated with the new ex-
planatory models of the universe and the human body that appeared in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, was in fact a result of how people
managed to make use of, in new ways, all those cognitive skills that have
gradually emerged over the past five million years. No fundamental change
in the human brain has occurred during the last tens of thousands of years.
An explanation of the development of science must, of course, be sought
elsewhere. Neither could the explanation be found in the mind alone. The
scientific revolution, a concept that can be traced back to the eighteenth cen-
tury (Cohen 1976), has commonly been described as a period in which new
ways of thinking about the world were introduced, either due to theoretical
factors, such as mathematics and Platonic philosophy, or with an emphasis
on new experimental methods, the introduction of new instruments or a
new social organisation of science (Burtt 1925; Butterfield 1949; Dijkster-
huis 1950; Koyré 1957; Kuhn 1962; Shapin & Schaffer 1985; Shapin 1996;
Gaukroger 2006; Harrison 2007). The debate has focused on internal ver-
sus external explanations, scientific and theoretical factors versus social and
practical-experimental factors. A cognitive perspective defended here may
instead provide a unified explanation of what occurred. Internal or external,
scientific or social factors, references to a new philosophy or new methods,
and so on are each inadequate to explain the emergence of science. We need
a way of avoiding positivist and idealist approaches that exclude the context
and favour the vision of the mind as playing with ideas, or poststructuralist
approaches seeing science as just texts or social constructivist approaches
reducing it to mere social interactions or constructions of power among
social beings. What is missing is an integrated cognitive theory that counts
with both internal and external, scientific and social factors, both mind and
matter in interplay. An explanation for the scientific change that appeared
during some centuries of the early modern era can instead be found in hu-
man cognitive abilities in interaction with a changing environment, that is,
an enactive theory of scientific evolution.
The phenomenon that we call “the scientific revolution” took place
over several centuries, from Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus or-
bium coelestium (1543) to Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia
mathematica (1687), and may extend to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin

of Species (1859) and the institutionalisation of science in the nineteenth
century. From an evolutionary perspective, we learn that completely new
phenomena rarely arrive in one blow. The eye did not convert light into
mental images after a mutation, a single change of one base pair in the
molecules of life. Neither did thinking and consciousness appear from no-
where, but evolved through a process that took many millions of years.
Even science itself rests on an extended evolutionary history. What is called
a “revolution” is in most cases the result of a long series of small steps, the
accumulated experiences gathered by many generations of thousands of
people. In the next section, I will pinpoint some crucial cognitive abilities
or “tools” that are inevitable in the structure of scientific evolution.
9.3. Science and Cognition

The scientific change in the sixteenth century and onwards can be explained
by the new opportunities for, and ways of, using the given cognitive abili-
ties, which occurred during a relatively limited period of time. Among the
cognitive factors underlying this change in scientific activity are:
• E
xternal tools to enhance thinking (distributed cognition and extended
mind)
• The discovery of new worlds (situated cognition)
• Enhanced senses (perception)
• Stronger links between cause and effect (causality)
• New ways of seeing something as something else (metaphors)
• A renewed interest in systematisation and classification (categorisation)
• New opportunities for collaboration of minds (intersubjectivity)
The change is made up of a multitude of different, mutually intertwined,
problem-solving strategies developed during a long period, through sev-
eral generations of scholars (Nersessian 2002). Instead of mainly look-
ing at the choices scientists and philosophers made between this or that
theory, we could study how they, by using their cognitive resources, built
up explanatory models. There were various cognitive abilities in action
during the scientific revolution, in the on-going interaction between mind
and environment. In the following, I will enter more deeply into the seven
236 David Dunér
cognitive abilities (as mentioned above), among a larger set of cognitive

resources, that changed science. After a brief explanation of the cognitive
abilities involved, I will give concrete examples of how those were utilised
in early modern science.
9.3.1. Distributed Cognition and Extended Mind: External Tools

to Enhance Thinking
A number of tools that reinforced the human mind were invented during
the early modern period. The most obvious example of an external tool for
enhancing thinking introduced at the time is the printing press by which
ideas and memories could be stored and distributed to a larger number of
recipients. Another external tool, that had a great impact on future science,
was the formal, algebraic mathematics by which mathematical calculations
could be performed and stored outside the brain, and communicated to,
and controlled by, other subjects. In other words, an important reason for
the development of science was new forms of distributed cognition that
extended the mind, from the brain to the surrounding environment.
According to the theory of distributed cognition (Giere & Moffatt 2003),
thinking is not only something that goes on in the brain and the body.
Neither is the world around consciousness being just a passive framework,
as treated within positivist and idealistic approaches to science. Thoughts
and memories are also placed and stored in the world, in things outside
the head, in images, texts, and objects, and they are manipulated with pen-
cils, books, calendars, maps and machines as external memory banks and
thought processors. We use various tools and the environment around us
to strengthen our thinking. Thoughts are stored in things, can be manipu-
lated and changed outside the brain, and as external memories, they can be
shared with other people. In other words, material culture is an extension
of our bodies and our thinking, and thus also becomes an indispensable
element in our understanding of the thoughts and ideas of a historical time.
The written sources, documents, notes, books, and pictures, which are the
most important sources in historical research for accessing the thoughts of
the past, can be understood as samples of distributed cognition.
We think with books and pens. Reading gives us associations and clues,
force us to come up with interpretations, and give us suggestions and
material for further thinking. When we are writing, we have to concre-

tise our thoughts, we try to find the right words for our mental images.
Communication in that sense may be said to be an attempt to transfer
mental images, via a medium, from one consciousness to another. A key
to the thinking of people in history, how they came up with their ideas,
is how they communicated, read and wrote, how they interpreted texts,
tried to find a meaning in them that they could use for their own think-
ing (Ong 1982; Lotman 1990; Bruner 1991; Chartier 1992; Tsur 1992;
Carroll 1995; Turner 1996; Portis-Winner 1999; Crane 2000; Fauconnier
& Turner 2002; Herman 2002; Jackson 2002; Stockwell 2002; Gavins
& Steen 2003; Boyd 2009; Brône & Vandaele 2009). Reading includes
interpretation, perception, and previous knowledge. The reader engages
his cognitive abilities in order to decode the text, he or she gets certain as-
sociations, establishes personal relationships, gets personal mental images,
interprets texts according to the aesthetic, religious, or scientific norms of
his or her time. The books in the libraries were not the actual sources of
a certain person’s ideas, but rather, the books can be regarded as tools for
his or her thinking, as a part of the distributed cognition. Ideas come not
directly from books and authorities, but from the human mind in inter-
action with things and objects. Thus, by taking into account distributed
cognition, how people used things and objects in their thinking, such as
images, books, tools and technologies, i.e. how they stored memories in
material culture, and how they read, interpreted, and manipulated texts,
one could approach a deeper understanding of human thinking in history.
The printing press with movable types, which was introduced in Europe
by Johann Gutenberg around 1450, led to a strengthening of memory, and
facilitated and increased the dissemination of ideas. Memories could be
stored in external memory holders, such as printed books, and the internal
memory of the human brain could be unburdened. An increasing num-
ber of encyclopaedias and dictionaries flowed onto the market. The new
mathematics, such as analytical geometry and infinitesimal calculus, which
was introduced during the seventeenth century, resulted in a strengthen-
ing of human deductive reasoning. One can consider the art of printing
and mathematics as part of distributed cognition, tools that enhance the
human cognitive capacity, that enable humans to outsource and process
information outside the cerebral tissues, as exograms (cf. Donald 1991,
238 David Dunér
2001), and store memories in more stable storage devices, such as printed
books. Both printed books and formal mathematics were communicative
tools for spreading and transferring information and ideas. With pen and
paper, with mathematical calculations, rational thinking could be mechani-
cally performed in a more powerful way outside the brain. The calculations
were external representations that also could be manipulated, which in itself
basically did not have to use the brain’s thought processes and memory.
Added to this was also the rationalist philosophy of René Descartes and
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and others that partly put forward a new
way of thinking about thinking, a stronger emphasis on the rational mind
as an axiomatic-deductive device. With mathematics as a model, rational
thinking was envisioned as a sort of calculation with symbols. To think
is to count. Logical thinking was basically a mechanical activity, which
opened for the possibility to construct the ultimate mind machine that
could produce all truths.
In both mathematics and thought, counting was considered as a mechani-
cal activity, a game played with signs. Correct thinking follows set rules.
The mind is a machine, ideas are its raw materials, and conclusions are its
products. Step by step, the thinking machine assembles its thoughts into
a finished product, and if everything has worked as it should, it then spits
out a well-fashioned, incontrovertible truth. The knowledge machine had
been a dream ever since the concentric circles of the Catalan Franciscan friar
Ramón Llull over four hundred years previously, and in the seventeenth
century it was developed into the mechanical calculators of Pascal and
Leibniz, who tried in their way to emulate the human calculator. Leibniz
even described a logical calculus, a formal inference machine, calculus ra-
tiocinator, with which one could figure out all logical truths.
Leibniz, who invented the infinitesimal calculus (in a priority contest with
Newton), developed Llull’s idea of a “mind machine” in an early work from
1666, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (Yates 1966; Eco 1997 [1993]).
Leibniz imagined a “characteristica universalis,” consisting of mathemati-
cal symbols not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, which
at the same time would be a new language, a new logic, method, mne-
monic, combinatorics, Kabbalah, and encyclopedia. It would contain all
knowledge, and even all future knowledge. No more controversy, no more
insoluble problems. People just needed to sit down and say to themselves:
“Let us calculate!” The universal mathematics would express relationships

between ideas, like in algebra and arithmetic. In April 1679, Leibniz wrote
to Johann Friedrich, Duke of Hannover, concerning Llull’s Ars magna:
For my invention uses reason in its entirety and is, in addition, a judge of con-
troversies, an interpreter of notions, a balance of probabilities, a compass which
will guide us over the ocean of experiences, an inventory of things, a table of
thoughts, a microscope for scrutinizing present things, a telescope for predicting
distant things, a general calculus, an innocent magic, a non-chimerical cabal, a
script which all will read in their own language; and even a language which one
will be able to learn in a few weeks, and which will soon be accepted amidst the
world. And which will lead the way for the true religion everywhere it goes (Leibniz
1927, p. 168; Eco 1997, p. xii).
Euclidean geometry was a scientific ideal in the seventeenth and eighteenth

century. According to the geometric manner, more geometrico, the axiomatic-
deductive approach in geometry should be the model for all science. In
mechanistic natural philosophy, rational thinking was seen as a mechanical
activity going step by step in the same way as in geometry, where one starts
from some assumed axioms and then arrives at irrefutable, true theorems.
The truths of geometry were objective, universal, infallible, absolutely sure,
and transcendent, independent of human beings and their minds and bod-
ies. Geometry was not only a decisive characteristic of rational thinking, it
also existed in the physical structure of the universe – it was the language of
nature. The search for the underlying mathematics of the universe is perhaps
one of the most prominent achievements of seventeenth-century science,
from Kepler and Galileo to Newton. Mathematics has been hailed since the
Antiquity for being precise, consistently stable in different times and societies,
understandable across cultures, efficient as a tool for description, explana-
tion, and prediction. The objectivist stance means that concepts and thinking
are transcendental and independent of the bodies of the thinking beings, that
thinking is a mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols that are mean-
ingless in themselves but are given meaning through correspondence with
the things in the world. Mathematical concepts seem to be the same from
all reference points, at all times and in all situations. Geometry, as Edmund
Husserl (1939) formulated it, is an “ideal objectivity,” and its origin needs an
explanation from practice in the Lifeworld. George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez
(2000) had questioned the objectivist stance from a cognitive perspective and
240 David Dunér
put forward that mathematics can rather be seen as embodied, as attached

to the body, which may also explain the emergence of human mathematics.
The mathematician and probability theorist Blaise Pascal (1658) sums up
the geometrical spirit of Cartesian natural philosophy in the words: “What
is beyond geometry is beyond us” (Cassirer 1970, p. 143). In De l’esprit
géométrique (c. 1658), he explains that, thanks to natural light, geometrical
science can penetrate nature and its wonderful properties. The true method
consists “in defining every term, and in proving every proposition” (Pascal
1909–1914 [1658], p. 429). In the geometric ideal, which is found in Pascal,
there is a quest for the simple, general, and everyday things, beyond esoteric
and grandiose, puffed-up mannerism. At the same time, the geometrical
method is extremely presumptuous, with a self-assured belief in its ability
to arrive at the unreachable, at what is concealed by nature and reason.
The axiomatic-deductive tradition was taken to its extreme in Baruch Spi-
noza’s Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (1677), ethics demonstrated
by geometrical method, where he proceeds from God, definitions, axioms,
and conclusions in an attempt to build up a system of ethics modelled on
indisputable, eternal geometry. A good example of the incremental progress
of the geometric method is Spinoza’s (2002 [1677], pp. 217–222) evidence
for the existence of God. Begin with axiom 7:
If a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.
Add to that proposition 7:

Existence belongs to the nature of substance.
Which allows Spinoza to prove God’s existence with logic’s binding power
of persuasion:
Proposition 11: God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which
expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.
Proof: If you deny this, conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore
(Ax. 7) his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd (Pr. 7). Therefore
God necessarily exists.
With the printing press, the improved ways of storing and communicating
knowledge, experiences and ideas, and formal, algebraic mathematics, giv-
ing opportunities to calculate outside the brain, in a mechanical infallible
way, the human mind got new powerful tools for doing science. The grand
narrative of human intellectual history is that of the increasing complexity

of distributed cognition, our increasing dependence on other brains (cf.
Hutchins 1995) and external tools for thinking and memory (cf. Donald
2008). The Palaeolithic hunter could, in principle, make all his own hunting
gear, and his knowledge was dependent on a rather limited group of people.
Gradually, people became increasingly more dependent on the knowledge
of a larger number of human beings, from the local community, through
the nation, to the inevitable international cooperation of the contemporary
global world. Today, no single person can produce or understand, for ex-
ample, the technology behind a computer on their own, let alone society
itself, but we are dependent on other people’s knowledge, experiences, and
actions. This knowledge has been distributed to a large number of individu-
als and there is not much we can do and think on our own.
9.3.2. Situated Cognition: The Discovery of New Worlds

The period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century was an era of great
geographical discoveries. New opportunities opened up for travels to other
parts of the world, foreign landscapes, and cultures. Human physical space
and spatial experience widened. The white spots of Earth were slowly filled
with lakes, mountains, towns, and villages. Increased world trade and more
frequent international contacts led to new opportunities for scientific ex-
peditions and explorations of unknown geography, which in its turn led
to new observations, new knowledge about the world, and a new spatial
understanding (see Chapter 10: Encounters in this volume). These travels
and widening experiences of the space around the human being changed
the situated cognition of the human mind. Encounters of other cultures
and the multicultural impacts and exchanges of ideas are certainly major
clues to the scientific change during the age of discoveries (cf. Bala 2006).
Travels awake certain thoughts in the travellers’ minds; memories and
experiences are tied to the physical environment. Human thinking is, ac-
cording to the theory of situated cognition, situated in the world in a very
concrete way, it is not detached from the environment. Our cognitive pro-
cesses occur not only in our minds, in our bodies, but also the world around
the human being is a part of “thinking,” and has an active role in the
cognitive processes (Clark 1997; Clark & Chalmers 1998; Brinck 2007).
242 David Dunér
Thinking occurs in the interaction between brain, body, and world. In other
words, there is a dynamic interplay between the mind and the environ-
ment, which creates a cognitive system consisting of both the subject and
the environment. The experience of the space around us is important for
our thinking, by the sheer fact that the body is related to and conditioned
by the environment through which it moves, the air that is inhaled, the
sounds that vibrate in the auditory canals, what it touches, tastes, smells,
and looks at. Perception, bodily movement, and manipulation of objects
are indispensable for thinking and for the creation of concepts (Lakoff &
Johnson 1999). The experience of the world is a source from which con-
sciousness can draw nourishment. Thinking simply needs the surrounding
world in order to function. Day and night, light and darkness, gravitation,
landscapes, and winds are part of human thinking.
The new long journeys to unknown parts of the world led to new obser-
vations and greater knowledge about the world beyond the well-known and
familiar cultures and landscapes. The travels of the naturalist Pehr Löfling
and other disciples of Carl Linnaeus became an extension of their master’s
powers of observation where new specimens were added to an increasingly
elaborate system of the diversity of creation. One can especially notice what
happened to the human mind in the encounter with the unknown (Dunér
2011, 2013a); how the travellers tried to interpret and understand the un-
familiar environment they came to (see further Chapter 10: Encounters in
this volume). These travels led to a new spatial awareness. The travellers
had to interpret what the senses conveyed, not uncommonly by using past
experiences projected onto the unknown. The encounters with foreign na-
tions changed the travellers, and communication difficulties arose not only
in regard to the strangers they met, but also when they tried to describe and
communicate what they had seen to their countrymen.
9.3.3. Perception: Enhanced Sensory Abilities

New inventions and tools extended the reach of human senses. Besides
the telescope and the microscope, the perhaps most celebrated examples
of expanded senses in the beginning of seventeenth century, one can also
mention new ways of making and distributing pictures, and a new under-
standing of what human perception is. Central for the scientific enterprise
became systematic observations and experimentations. In the new empirical

science emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth century human senses
played a significant role.
We receive, record, and collect information from the surrounding en-
vironment by means of our senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
But that which the senses convey must be interpreted by specific cognitive
processes before it becomes a “reality.” The “reality,” as we experience it, is
in some sense created by ourselves, by our own cognitive processes. We do
not just passively receive images and sounds from the surrounding world,
rather, the mind seeks patterns in what it receives from the senses through a
process determined by both biological and cultural factors. Perception is not
a neutral, objective, faithful recording of reality. Our previous knowledge
and our concepts affect what we see and do not see. Lacking concepts for
a specific phenomenon may lead to difficulties in distinguishing it among
other impressions. The world distorts our concepts, but our concepts also
distort the world. The interpretation of what we perceive rests on cognitive
abilities such as memory and categorisation. Our previous knowledge, which
is contained and mediated in our culture, by such means as stories, myths
and religious beliefs, but also by scientific explanations, creates meaning in
what we encounter. This fact, that our previous knowledge and concepts
change our perception and interpretation of what we perceive, is particu-
larly important for historical studies of cultural encounters, travels, and
experiences of landscapes and environments, but also for studies of scientific
observation. For example, in the optical observations of Venus, especially
during the transits in 1761 and 1769 when the planet passed across the
solar disk, we find instances of how preconceived understanding shaped the
interpretation of what the observers had seen (Dunér 2013e). Through their
senses, they received impressions from outer space, and they collected and
collated information on distant worlds using their sight. Striking examples
of this epistemic perception are the maps of Venus that delineated the surface
of the planet, where it was sometimes interpreted as possessing mountains
and other geological features. Even a dim light, faint spots and lines, and
a companion moon seemed to appear when Venus was viewed through a
telescope. The astronomers interpreted their obscure observations in line
with their prior knowledge, their experiences, and their ideas of the nature
of the world – and they often found what they sought.
244 David Dunér
The most well-known examples of new devices that expanded human

sensory ability are the telescope and the microscope. They enabled the as-
tronomers to look far out into the universe to distant planets and celestial
bodies, and let the naturalists look into a microcosmic world of a previously
unimagined diversity of life. In 1609 Galileo Galilei trained his telescope on
the Moon (see Figure 9.1). In the Sidereus nuncius from 1610, he showed,
based on his telescopic observations and analogical reasoning, that the
Moon had mountains and therefore had the same solid, opaque, and rugged
nature as the Earth (Spranzi 2004), and he discovered never before seen
moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, and the dark spots of the Sun. The
microscope opened up a new unseen world within the human body. Sud-
denly medical doctors could study the finest vessels and fibres of the body.
Figure 9.1. In November 30, 1609, Galileo pointed his telescope at the moon
and found a world of mountains, valleys, and plains. The first
pictures of the moon as seen through a telescope were published in
his book “Sidereal messenger,” Sidereus nuncius (1610).
For example the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi found the capillaries
connecting veins to arteries through his strengthened, “armed” eyes. Other
technical aids, which were part of the enhanced distributed cognition, where
various mechanical instruments, such as Christiaan Huygens’ pendulum
clock from 1656 and other mechanical clockworks that could describe
the time, seconds, the solar year, and the movements of heavenly bodies.
The new optical instruments reinforced vision as something fundamental
in the description of reality. The world had a visible geometric structure.
The scientists and philosophers had to look around themselves, perceive
the world, not just listen to ancient authorities. Philosophy should not have
an audience, but spectators, said the German professor of mathematics and
physics Johann Christoph Sturm (Ornstein 1975).
The strengthened perception gave new empirical material for thought.
Enhanced senses, in other words, had a special significance for the emerg-
ing empirical sciences (Giere 2002). But, apart from the strengthened sen-
sory tools, also new ways of depicting the visual impressions, making and
distributing images, may have had an important impact on the emergence
of modern science. The linear perspective and the art of printing, and the
increased number of images, led to a stronger visual culture that altered the
way of viewing the world, a geometric vision that emphasised the objective,
abstract, non-verbal features. The one-eyed perspective with a focal point
on the horizon line, which had been developed in the Italian Renaissance,
according to the geometrical method of perspective demonstrated in 1413
by Filippo Brunelleschi, deviated from the subjective experience and the
two-eyed, moving and spherical vision. Seeing was forced into straight
lines and into a geometrical Euclidean space. With ruler and compasses
one could draw pictures of the world as it is in accordance with geom-
etry. It resulted in a mathematical rationalisation and abstraction of the
psycho-physiological spatial perception, which led to the perception of a
clear and consistent image of space. From the Renaissance and onwards,
there was a new way of seeing, a highly visual culture, where non-verbal
thinking was strengthened. The art of perspective detracted vision from
subjective to objective experience, to a geometric experience of the world
independently of who had the experience; it vanquished and structured a
chaotic experience of space. We also find a change from reading aloud and
storytelling to quietly reading a book in private (Ong 1982), a change from
246 David Dunér
orality to literacy that in the same time became a movement from auditory
to visual stimuli.
Apart from its use in art, as we can discern it in the art of the Italian
Renaissance, the perspective became soon useful also in science, and gave
new excellent opportunities for medical illustration. With the art of per-
spective it became possible to make objective and realistic renderings of the
human body. During the period, exquisite, lavish and accurate drawings,
engravings and woodcuts were produced of the human body and its internal
organs, from Vesalius to Willis, Bidloo, Vieussens, Ruysch, and Albinus (see
Figure 9.2). The exploration of the human anatomy was performed through
the art of perspective, autopsy, observation, and demonstration. Neverthe-
less, the anatomical images were not actually perfect reproductions of the
“real” human body, but instead representation of what we envision in our
thinking in the confrontation with the outside world.
Figure 9.2. The British surgeon and anatomist William Cheselden used a

camera obscura to get a realistic picture of the skeleton. The torso
is here hanging upside down, to get an upright image in the camera.
Frontispiece to William Cheselden, Osteographia, or The Anatomy
of the Bones (1733).
From the Renaissance onwards, we find an altered vision, which in itself

represented a new way of thinking about vision. In the mechanistic natural
philosophy, in optics and ophthalmology, the human eye was perceived as a
camera obscura. The eye was a dark room where the rays of light from the
outside world intruded through the pupil creating an exact replica of the out-
side world, in exactly the same way as in a camera obscura. In art the camera
obscura, for example in the paintings of Vermeer van Delft and Canaletto,
created an almost magical realism (Kemp 1990; Hockney 2001). The visual
system itself became a camera obscura in the iatromechanical anatomy of
the era. One of the first images that directly compared the eye with a camera
obscura is found in Lodovico Cardi detto il Cigoli’s manuscript Prospettiva
practica (1613), and later also in Christoph Scheiner’s Rosa vrsina sive sol
(1626–1630) and René Descartes’ La dioptrique (1637). A non-verbal visual
thinking in science emerged where imagination created representations of re-
ality. Scientists thought in pictures and created external representations of our
inner images. The mechanical models, as well as the camera obscura, acted as
a kind of distributed cognition, where thinking took place outside the brain
and became strengthened, and was able to come up with new ideas about the
world. Science and thinking is not only an interaction between human beings,
but it is also an interaction between human beings and their surroundings,
between human beings and their machines. What prompted the widened
horizons and knowledge of science, which we call the scientific revolution,
was probably a strong expansion of new forms of distributed cognition by
using and creating artificial objects for enhancing human perception.
9.3.4. Causality: Linking Cause and Effect

Increased, detailed observations of the world, more accurate notes of the
seen, longer trips into the known and unknown geography, more numer-
ous data collected from observers and informants, as well as an observance
for changes in nature, raised concerns about the relationships between
things, a search for the cause of the effect. The causality of nature was not
understood as something arbitrary, but was conceived as being based on
mechanical laws established by a creator. Changes that we observe have a
cause, and cannot happen by chance. The task of the scientist was to find
these relationships in the creation. Through observations of changes, early
modern scientists saw new causal relations that demanded explanation. By
connecting cause and effect in rows of unending causalities, scientists also
endowed nature with a narrative structure, formulated a story about the
248 David Dunér
origin of things and the development of nature to the present state. Scruti-
nising the cause and effect, even though it had been performed in everyday
life and in various knowledge endeavours and sign decoding exercises such
as astrology, science achieved one of its most celebrated capacities, i.e. the
ability to predict the future.
Natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century focused
their attention on changes in nature, discovered connections between events,
tried to understand incomprehensible metamorphoses of nature, and tried
to find the relationship between cause and effect, the causality of things.
Mechanical metaphors became useful for describing causalities in nature,
how the cause leads to the effect, and how they are parts of a larger whole,
a macrocosmic mechanics. Naturalists, geologists, astronomers and others
gathered information about natural phenomena, observed, recorded, and
saw the events not as unpredictable chances initiated by a capricious god,
but as the manifestation of firm principles behind the course of events in the
divine plan. The world is not immutable, imperishable, but rather a scene
of constant metamorphoses, a permanent impermanence. As Sagredo says
in Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632):
For my part I consider the earth is very noble and admirable precisely because of
the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If,
not being subject to any changes, it were a vast desert of sand or a mountain of
jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and
it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever
altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of ac-
tivity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. […] Those who so
greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etc. are reduced to talking this way,
I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death.
In order to deal with the surrounding world, to understand it, and act in
accordance with how it works, human beings try to find and detect connec-
tions between events. The effect cannot occur by chance, but must be pre-
ceded by a cause, and this cause must have meaning. If one could ascertain
these relationships and connections between things, if one could identify
the causes that lead to a certain effect, one would be able to act in accord-
ance with this and be prepared for what is to come. If it thunders, and then
the flash hits the ground, this cannot happen by mere coincidence. There is
meaning and reason behind the phenomena. The search for correspondences
in nature, connections between events, and the subsequent ability to make
predictions about future events is a crucial cognitive prerequisite for human

orientation in the world. To interpret the signs of nature, the astrologers’
interpretations of the constellations and the motion of planets, the predic-
tion of the future based on signs in the present, the attention to portents
that warn humans of approaching events, that accidents are caused by past
actions – that is, ideas of causality are grounded in human cognitive abilities.
During the seventeenth century, however, the view on causality changed.
Natural philosophers, physicists, astronomers, physicians and other scien-
tists, left a causality thinking based on correspondences between things,
in favour of a mechanical causality. The emerging mechanistic worldview
postulated a more material, direct link between cause and effect following
the inexorable laws of mechanics. Temporality, that an event followed by
another, was insufficient in order to understand causality; rather one should
search for the inner mechanical causes that could explain the effect. Instead
of assuming correspondences established by God, which were of a spiritual
nature, one sought for the causality of the extended substance, matter,
aiming at a mechanics of geometry and motion. Strange, unusual events
became therefore elusive problems to solve. They needed an explanation.
Instead of immediately assuming a supernatural or non-natural cause, one
found more and more natural explanations for unusual events. They could
be given a natural, mechanical explanation. The task was to find chemical
and physical explanations to what had so far lacked natural explanations.
The problem became, however, to identify the real, effective signs of nature,
the indexicality of things. What phenomena could be understood as indices
pointing to their causes? What signs in nature stand in a real, effective con-
nection to what they indicate or refer to? Are there connections between
past, present and future events? Can signs in the present point to what has
once happened in the past and what will happen in the future?
Fossilised seashells and other animals were found in bedrock, which
were sometimes interpreted as sports of nature, lusus naturae, but usually
explained as remnants of the flood. In 1665, the Dane Nicolaus Steno found
shark teeth in the Tuscan mountains, suggesting that where it is now high
mountains, had once been a sea (Cutler 2003). Other findings seemed to
have no counterpart in the living species. The Linnaean classification of
plants and animals on Earth, presented for the first time in Linnaeus’ Sys-
tema naturae (1735), was a way of seeing similarities and affinities between
250 David Dunér
species, which led to attempts in the next century to explain the diversity of
species on the basis of a temporal understanding of change, which finally
expanded the narrow time boundaries of Bible chronology. Geological time
spans increased considerably during the late eighteenth century and the
first half of the nineteenth, as geological layers, fossils, and extinct animals
revealed the history of the Earth and past epochs (Dunér 2015). By connect-
ing events in a chain of causalities, science is also endowed with a temporal
narrative structure (see Chapter 6: Narrativity in this volume) of past events
followed by new, and future events. Many grand explanations in science are
in such narratives, for example the big bang of the cosmos, the evolution
of life, the rise of civilisation, etc. Narratives of cause and effect place the
human being in a temporal story of humankind.
9.3.5. Metaphors: Seeing Something as Something Else

New metaphors were introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
by which scientists and natural philosophers could invent new concepts
for describing phenomena beyond the ordinary life, beyond the limits of
the human senses. When dealing with things beyond everyday experiences
our basic concepts do not work any longer. Conceptualising non-everyday
phenomena or abstract ideas requires conceptual metaphors. In order to
capture the abstract, we use our experiences of the concrete world. To get
to know the unknown, we assume the known. In a broad sense, metaphor
can be described as a way to understand and experience something by using
something else, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) put it, that a
structure of a domain is transferred to another, from one source (sensorimo-
tor domain) to a target (subjective experience) that simultaneously preserves
the inferential structure. Metaphorical thinking is to create concepts of
something in terms of something else. The metaphors function as models
for lesser-known things. We transfer knowledge about the known to the un-
known, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the visible to the invisible,
from the everyday world, society, human life, art and crafts, to the inner
structure of matter, to the soul and God. Metaphorical thinking is to find
similarities between things while maintaining their locational difference,
but also to dismiss their deviating qualities, so to generalise and abstract.
Many metaphors have their source in the spatial orientation arising from the
human body’s actions in the physical reality. Seen as an impulsive cognitive
mechanism, the logic of these body-based image schemas is used in language

and abstract thinking, but also in philosophy, science, and mathematics
(Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Lakoff & Núñez 2000).
Characteristic of the mechanistic worldview, as it was formulated in
the Cartesian natural philosophy, is the use of metaphors that describe
nature as following mechanical laws (Dunér 2013c). The new mechanistic
science moved away from anthropocentric, animistic explanations, and
instead turned to abstract explanations that were independent of humans.
Thus, science underwent some radical changes during the scientific revolu-
tion, and left anthropomorphic metaphors and instead adopted mechani-
cal metaphors. It also introduced a more dynamic view in contrast to the
static monumentality of the Renaissance. The technological advances and
the success of physics and astrodynamics in explaining the movements
of celestial bodies became a model for understanding other phenomena
in nature. “The world machine” became the central metaphor in seven-
teenth and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, a root metaphor that
generated new metaphors, new ways of thinking, in particular, spatial and
visual metaphors: space is geometry, matter is geometry, and so on (Dunér
2013d). The human Lifeworld needed explanation, its diversity and hidden
connections and causalities, could be reduced to simpler, more confined ele-
ments afforded by the new technology, mechanics and geometry of the era.
Euclidean geometry gave the world a definite visual metaphorical structure,
a world of relationships between points, lines, and circles. The particles of
matter, the planetary system, animals and human bodies were machines;
even rational thinking became a mechanical process. From a source domain
of everyday experiences of machines, these experiences were transferred to
a target domain of the less known inner structure of the world of matter.
The scientific revolution also appeared in a time of correspondences,
allegories, symbolic, and metaphorical expressions. During the Baroque,
metaphors and allegories were highly popular in art, literature, architecture,
numismatics, music, and science. Metaphors of the mind could of course
be traced back to Antiquity and Middle Ages, to Aristotelian and Christian
thinking. A sentient being is a metaphorical thinker, said Aristotle (Poetics,
21.1457b 6–32), and explained the metaphor as a transfer of a meaning of
a word from one object to another. Religious literature is full of metaphors
like “the keys of heaven,” “the bread of life,” and “the fire of love.” Gender
252 David Dunér
metaphors were common in the political propaganda. The academic litera-

ture utilised metaphors such as the search for knowledge as a journey, the
philosophical debate as a fencing duel or a fight on a battlefield, and the truth
is brought into light similar to how a gardener peels off the bark of a tree to
reach its core, or writing as a textile work that weaves together knowledge.
There are numerous examples of metaphors we live by taken from the human
Lifeworld. However, they made use of metaphors and analogies as something
more than a stylistic, aesthetic decoration. Metaphors could reveal the secrets
of creation. Emanuele Tesauro, one of the foremost scholars of the Baroque
period, stated simply that God wrote the book of nature in metaphors, and so
it shall be read. The philosopher Giambattista Vico identified in the Scienza
nuova (1725) four basic tropes. Human thinking had developed from a way
of thinking in anthropomorphic fables or metaphors, through metonymy and
synecdoche, to reflective thinking or irony. The metaphor was, for him, the
ability of the human mind to link objects and events in the world, a way of
thinking about unfamiliar things.
In iatromechanics, which was the dominant medical paradigm in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, human anatomy and physiology were
described in mechanical, physical, and mathematical terms, taken from con-
temporary technology and craftsmanship. The human body is a machine.
From a cognitive perspective, iatromechanics could be said to be the first
system of thought about the human body that consistently tried to leave an-
thropocentric metaphors. Physics, astrodynamics, statics and mathematics,
with names such as Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, had in the early
seventeenth century been successful in describing the world. It was then not
far-fetched to try to transfer this aura of order, security, and accuracy that
surrounded mechanics, to the chaotic mess of vessels, viscera, and liquids of
the human body. If the physical things around us are possible to describe in
terms of mechanics and mathematics, what prevents us then from also de-
scribing our mortal body in such terms? Important pioneering attempts of a
new mechanistic way of looking at the human body was Santorio Santorio’s
quantitative approach in medicine, the vitalist William Harvey’s discovery
of the circulation of blood, and Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy of nature,
his dualistic philosophy, and mind-body dichotomy. The iatromechanistic
school of medicine was developed especially in Italy, represented by Giovanni
Alfonso Borelli (see Figure 9.3), Lorenzo Bellini, and Giorgio Baglivi. In the
early eighteenth century followers of the iatromechanical school could be

found all over Europe, and it had become the dominant medical school with
the leading name Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden.
Figure 9.3. The human body can be described by mechanical principles. Joints,

arms, and legs act as levers, the muscles as pulling devices. Giovanni
Alfonso Borelli, De motu animalium (1680–1681).
254 David Dunér
Iatromechanics was an important shift in the history of medicine, a transi-

tion from an animistic thinking where a psychological causality of the physi-
ological processes was applied. Former medical thinking took its departure
from a hylozoistic view of nature in which matter was assigned animate
properties, where the body was considered as controlled by psychic forces,
wills, and spirits. Medicine was strongly anthropomorphic in the sense that
the everyday understanding of human actions was transferred to bodily
changes, in other words, in the same way as human behaviour could be un-
derstood through teleological explanations, as having goals and aspirations,
one could also understand the human body. The bodily functions became
animated. The pneuma concept in ancient Greek medicine, particularly
in the medical theory of Galen, was in itself a metaphor, from a source
domain of air, breath, or spirits to a target domain as a living principle in
circulating processes of perfection for the functions of the vital organism
(Galen 1907; Good 1994). In contrast, iatromechanics instead explained
the bodily functions by physical causality independent of psychological
forces. For Descartes (1637) spiritus animalis became small particles, which
mediate sensory impressions through the nerves to the brain, like a liquid
through hollow tubes (Hatfield 1992). But the mechanistic explanations
could still be easily combined with a belief in a teleology of nature. The
divine watchmaker had created everything according to a calculated plan.
The understanding of the human body had thus gone from animism and
anthropomorphism to more impersonal physical forces. This was something
new in medical thinking. Iatromechanics, understood in a cognitive and
cultural-evolutionary perspective, was after millennia of human thoughts
on the body, the first system of thought about the human body that consist-
ently tried to deviate from anthropocentric metaphors. It was not the use of
metaphors that was new, but the use of new metaphors deviating from the
immediate experiences of the human Lifeworld. Iatromechanics tried to find
explanations independent of human, spiritual, and divine influences. It was
a more abstract way of thinking about the human body. Iatromechanical
theory could be a starting point for fruitful scientific inquiry. Mechanical
metaphors could lead to a new understanding of the surrounding world.
Suddenly it was possible to discover new connections and new “truths” of
the natural world.
Metaphors are important in scientific reasoning, and accordingly provide

valuable clues to how scientists and philosophers, but also how ordinary
people in history thought (Dunér 2014a). Analogies, visual models, and
thought experiments seem to be especially common in periods of radi-
cal conceptual change (Nersessian 2002; Crane 2010; Olson 1996; Netz
1999; Andersen, Barker & Chen 2006). The specific metaphors of a time
are culture-bound variants of the basic metaphors derived from human
sensorimotor orientation. The task of the cognitive historian is therefore
to study these trans-historical metaphors and their culture-specific expres-
sions, and to try to find some of the historic people’s central metaphors
from which they tried to create a consistent worldview or a comprehensive
understanding of their Lifeworld.
9.3.6. Categorisation: The Order of Things

A distinctive characteristic of modern science is its systematic approach, its
endeavour to find order, hierarchies, and categories. Not least in seventeenth
and eighteenth-century science could this endeavour be found, sometimes
in the most extreme examples. Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive
skill in human thought and perception (Rosch 1975, 1978; Taylor 2003;
Gärdenfors 2008). Categorisation is about humankind’s eternal quest for
order in chaos – an ordered world is easier to live in than a chaotic one. By
sorting the impressions from the surrounding world into distinct categories,
we are not liable to arbitrary guesses but can benefit from previous experi-
ence. One way to make the world intelligible is to try to make it logical,
mathematical, and geometric. But the systematisation, categories, regulari-
ties, laws, the mathematical description of nature are strictly speaking not
out there, but occur in the human mind in its encounter and interaction
with the world. They are necessary for the human interpretation of the
world, and thus they often tell us more about human beings and their
understanding of the world, than about the “real” world itself. It is about
creating order, conquering the world and the surrounding physical and so-
cial environment with concepts, categories, hierarchies, names, and classes.
By dividing up and connecting categories with each other, one achieves a
higher order in the chaotic reality. Categorical perception makes the blurred
transitions of reality into distinct compartments, adds limits that do not
256 David Dunér
exist, and fills out incomplete patterns. These categories, boundaries and
limitations, are to a large extent learned and culture dependent. They do not
exactly match actual categories out there, but rather arise in the encounter
between human consciousness and its surroundings. They allow us to see
some things and not other things, let us see connections and similarities
between things. As such, categorisation is an essential cognitive tool in the
scientific exploration of the human Lifeworld.
The travels to foreign continents and explorations of the local environ-
ment, the closer observation of the surrounding world and the increasing
number of collected specimens, forced the naturalists to construct a system in
order to handle the new information, to organise the impressions, to catego-
rise and classify, to create order out of chaos. Knowledge of natural things
was gathered with feverish activity. Everything – words, thoughts, plants,
stones, and so forth – should be systematised and placed in their proper con-
tainers. It was a categorisation of reality, consisting of categories of thought
that arise in the interaction between the human mind and the world. During
the seventeenth century and onwards, with names such as George Dalgarno
and John Wilkins, there was a search for an ideal universal language that
could be understood by all humans, irrespective of ethnic origin, culture,
education, or language (Knowlson 1975; Strasser 1988; Eco 1993; Rossi
2000; Dunér 2013b). There was a search for a language with fixed meanings
and immutable concepts, a longing for clarity, an eternal world independent
of humans, a language that reflected the true structure of reality. It was the
dream of the calculus, the computing machine, that the world consisted of
distinct parts that could be combined in countless combinations.
Categorisation of nature, as in Linnaeus’ systematisation and classifica-
tion of plants and animals, is an excellent example of the human ability to
categorise things in interaction with sensory experiences of the surrounding
environment. Linnaeus sought for an inclusive hierarchical system of all
plants and animals in which each species had its specific essential charac-
teristics. By observing the similarities between things, the Linnaean system
paved the way for evolutionary theory. Botany, according to Linnaeus, is
classification and naming, to divide and name categories. Naming is central
to knowledge. Linnaeus writes, referring to the Etymologiae of Isidore of
Seville: “If you do not know the name of things, you lose the knowledge of
them” (Linnaeus 1751, § 210). He therefore sought a connection between
the appearance of a plant (the description) and the name. Linnaean nomen-
clature is in many ways a kind of a universal language: it should be univer-
sally valid, independent of natural languages and cultures, the words should
reflect the things, and they should be placed in a hierarchy of categories. In
Philosophia botanica (1751) Linnaeus organises this classification and cat-
egorisation in an all-inclusive system; everything should be described, placed
in boxes, and named (see Figure 9.4). Without order and categorisation
one can be lost in a terrifying chaos. You need a path, a common thread to
follow. “Ariadne’s thread in botany is the system, without which chaos will
rule,” sounds an aphorism of Linnaeus Fundamenta botanica (1736, § 156).
Figure 9.4. A genealogical-geographical map of the kinship of plants according to

the system of Linnaeus. The orders appear on Paul Dietrich Giseke’s
map as round islands in the ocean of nature. The more genera within
an order, the larger islands. To the bottom left a putto runs after a
barefooted Flora with roses. Carl Linnaeus, Prælectiones in ordines
naturales plantarum (1792). Photo: Lund University Library.
258 David Dunér
The discovery of new worlds, the surprising encounters with unknown

life forms, challenged the existing habitual categories and classification
systems. Exotic objects collected from distant parts of the world, remains
from bygone times, fossils, natural specimens, plants, shells, animals, and
insects were gathered in private curiosity cabinets, in the collections of
academies and universities. The eighteenth century was the century of the
systematic spirit. In the introduction to the Encyclopédie (1751), Jean le
Rond d’Alembert made a distinction between esprit de système, the spirit
of the system, and the esprit systématique, “the real systematic spirit,”
which was a reduction of a large number of phenomena to a few principles.
Eighteenth-century science was to a large extent about the order of
things, whether it concerned the material elements, flowers, animals, words,
or angels. Everything was included in the large chain of creation, catena
naturae, everything was part of the universal clockwork, steps on a cosmic
ladder. Taxonomy was the science of order, where the whole was analysed
into its constituent parts, in order to find similarities and differences, but
also to collect things into higher units in a hierarchical system. Classifica-
tion was a scientific method. Science became a human tool to collect things
and make order, and that involves detecting similarities between things,
what similarities are considered to be the most important ones, and what
things belong together. As Michel Foucault (1966) pointed out, the order
of things was an integral part of Western culture, the episteme of the time.
The division of the world, and the definitions of things, also led to the dis-
qualification of certain phenomena or people from belonging to a particular
category. Through history we can find how people have classified, created
categories and hierarchies between concepts, objects and phenomena, for
example the division of people of different races, ethnic groups and social
classes, or animals and plants in kingdoms, genera, and species. Naming of
plants and animals has also, according to Londa Schiebinger (2007), been
a way to master and acquire new worlds. However, the categorisation was
not merely, as it is often portrayed in social constructivist approaches, an
exercise of power, a human construction for political purposes. From a
cognitive-historical perspective I would add that the human ordering of
things has a much more fundamental cognitive foundation. Human beings
must categorise in order to be able to think. The classifications of plants
and other objects in nature, as well as human categorisations of people and
social groups, are parts of a universal human categorisation of the human

habitat, as a way to cope with the surrounding environment, the Lifeworld,
to orientate in it, and understand it.
Studies of how people classify natural things in history and across cul-
tures can provide inputs to their worldview and way of thinking (Malt
1995; Ranta 2000). The scientific classification is not detached from human
culture, neither from how people actually think. Instead of only dwelling
on the differences between peoples and cultures, the cognitive historian can
also search for similarities in thinking, and study the interaction between
cultural and trans-historical factors. There are, undeniably, important cul-
tural differences in how people categorise, but also similarities. Ancient,
medieval, and renaissance classifications of plants show striking similarities
with those from Central America, the Middle East, China, and India (Lévi-
Strauss 1962; Atran 1990; Berlin 1992). The common denominator is that
the classifications of organisms are composed of hierarchies of classes in-
cluded in each other. Both folk taxonomy and scientific classification assume
that all living things consist of natural “groups within groups.” All cultures
seem to have specific concepts of biological species, they have a sequential
naming based on morphological regularities, they have higher groupings of
animals corresponding to the classes of zoology, as well as higher groupings
of plants which are not consistent with botanical taxonomy, but have an
obvious ecological significance such as grasses and trees (Atran 1990). His-
torically, when grouping animals and plants, people have focused on their
salient features, what they look like, how they behave, what environment
they live in and, not least, from an instrumental anthropocentric perspec-
tive, how useful or dangerous they are. The specialised, scientific classifica-
tion, such as the Linnaean systematics, is in agreement with, and is a further
development of, this common human way of categorising natural objects.
There seems to be some consistency between folk taxonomy and Lin-
naean systematics (Coyne & Orr 2004; Atran & Medin 2008). People, no
matter from what culture or historical period, find specific biological pat-
terns, which roughly correspond to perceptually noticeable species or genera
in scientific taxonomy. The folk taxonomy is an empirical approximation
of the scientific, but, at the same time, it adds greater weight to size and
characteristics that depend on local and ecological circumstances. Linnaeus
also actually dismissed size, dimensions, and occasional local characteristics
260 David Dunér
in his classification, and thus took a step towards a more abstract scien-
tific approach. Linnaean systematics is, one could say, an intuitive species
categorisation based on folk taxonomy extended to a worldwide universal
system in a methodical and rational way. This universal pretention explains
why he also needed a collection of material as rich as possible, from the
most distant corners of the world. A famous example, challenging the cat-
egories of zoological systematics of the eighteenth century, was the platy-
pus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), an egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed
mammal apparently a fusion of distinct, separated categories (Eco 1997).
Linnaeus’ systema naturae should be valid everywhere and for everything.
The human capacity, the one that Linnaeus to a large extent possessed, to
understand and try to categorise and arrange the discontinuous in the living
world, is a cognitive prerequisite for scientific systematics. The hierarchical
Linnaean system, with its five levels from Kingdom to Species, is rooted in
the hierarchical disposition of the human mind, which facilitates memory
and action in the world.
Human beings’ search for patterns, similarities and differences in their
Lifeworld indicate a developed ability or desire to classify and categorise
things, even in that which appears to be a continuum. The human mind
searches for limits, tries to find accumulations or clusters, and to perform a
kind of cluster statistical analysis of the continuous (Ridley 1996). Indepen-
dently of each other, people observe the same species in the wild, suggest-
ing not only that there are “real” clusters out there, but more importantly
that our human brains seem to be adapted for a similar perceptual cluster
statistics. Human classification of species seems to actually correspond to
certain discrete clusters in nature, which may explain the similarities be-
tween various folk taxonomies, but it also points to a common cognitive
capability that have developed in interaction with the biodiversity of our
physical environment. The clusters in the surrounding world have an im-
pact on us, but at the same time our human brains detect and create these
categories. The long evolutionary history of the human being has been a
constant interaction with the surrounding environment, a coexistence with
plants and animals, a life within an immense biodiversity. This fact must
have shaped human cognition (Medin & Atran 1999). How human beings
deal with the world and nature, what is beneficial or needed for human
subsistence, affects how they think about their Lifeworld. For example, folk
taxonomy conforms better with scientific taxonomy when it comes to larger

vertebrates than to species of minor economic significance. Classification
of game that is hunted for food is due to life sustaining necessity better
adapted to the “natural” species of nature than the large group of insects
that is of comparatively little importance for everyday life.
The cognitive ability to categorise is a prerequisite for the scientific con-
ceptualisation of the human Lifeworld. The emerging scientific systematics
decontextualised nature by detaching the species, the animal or plant, from
its environment. It could then be collected, measured, described, and com-
pared with other forms of life exempted from the local ecological context
or subjective human sensory experiences (Atran & Medin 2008). Linnaean
classification of the diversity of plants and animals, its attention to similari-
ties between things, the “kinship” between species, became a prerequisite
for the evolutionary theory of the origin of species presented by Charles
Darwin in the next century.
9.3.7. Intersubjectivity: The Collaboration of Minds

Increased contact between people, the social interaction, the growing popu-
lation, and the urban expansion, travels, trade contacts, social mobility, im-
proved opportunities for the exchange of ideas through books, newspapers,
letters, the establishment of societies and academies, led to new challenges
for human intersubjectivity. The ability to see ourselves in others, to be able
to infer what others feel and think, simply to put ourselves into other inner
worlds and see the world through the eyes of others, are important prereq-
uisites for language, communication, social interaction, and thus science.
Intersubjectivity is a cognitive ability for understanding other living crea-
tures, their actions and minds, their thoughts and feelings. As social beings
we need empathy, without which we would not be able to successfully
recognise others’ thoughts and wishes. Without empathy, altruistic behav-
iour, and intersubjectivity, our social interactions would fail. Creating and
sharing representations of other people’s mentality, i.e. intersubjectivity,
is a crucial ingredient of our inner worlds and a precondition for human
socialisation, collaboration and communication (Thompson 2001; Zlatev
2008; Dunér 2014b; and Chapter 1: Lifeworlds in this volume). Empathy,
compassion, representations of other human beings’ emotions, motives,
262 David Dunér
intentions and desires, their body language, beliefs and knowledge, are
impossible without an advanced cognitive ability to understand and imag-
ine other possible worlds and other minds. Cooperation requires advanced
coordination of individual persons’ inner worlds. Sharing attention, to be
able to turn our attention to a common object, is one of the most impor-
tant prerequisites for the evolution of human thought, language, culture,
and science. We learn from each other, imitating each other, with curiosity
and interest we are drawn to what others observe and are involved in (see
Chapter 2: Mimesis in this volume). Due to this attentional behaviour we
can take advantage of other people’s knowledge, observations, interpreta-
tions, valuations and decisions, but also conform and adjust ourselves to
the prevailing social community to which we have a desire to belong.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth century numerous academies,
learned societies, universities, and journals were established. Meeting places
for exchanging thoughts, such as university buildings, classrooms, seminars,
workshops, conferences, board meetings, and scientific journals, certainly
play an important role for the development of the intersubjective skills of
scientists. Although they have survived since the Medieval period, universities
became increasingly important for the exchange of ideas, through lectures,
seminars, disputations, dissertations, but also as physical environments for
meeting other minds, for quarrels, disputes, conversations, and exchanges of
ideas. The number of universities expanded tremendously during the early
modern period, and many university buildings and colleges were built and
became important meeting grounds for the exchange of ideas. Another impor-
tant novelty in the organisation of science was the establishment of the first
scientific academies, Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1603, Royal Society in
London in 1660, and Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1666, and many oth-
ers that followed in the eighteenth century. The scientific academies became
significant physical and social environments for intersubjective interactions,
for exchanging ideas, for spreading and propagating new theories and knowl-
edge. With printed books that kept the exact wording, letters, circulating
manuscripts, pamphlets, and pictures ideas could be transferred from one
mind to another, provoking interpretations, and aligning thoughts. Particular-
ly important for science is to find fast and reliable media for distributing new
theories and knowledge. In the seventeenth century, the first scientific journals
were established with Journal des sçavans and Philosophical Transactions in
1665, and more than one thousand scientific journals were founded in the
next century. How science is organised, in universities, laboratories, build-
ings, academies, journals, and conferences, that give a playground for inter-
subjective interactions, is an important clue to the expansion and success of
modern science in describing human experience of the world.
The emergence of science can, to a large extent, be explained by how
human intersubjective skills interact with a changing physical and social
environment. Intersubjectivity is needed in order to understand other sci-
entists’ observations, ideas, models, and theories that put the field forward.
But it can also explain the conformity of science, its conservative tardiness,
the “normal science” Kuhn (1962) talked about. Scientists are social be-
ings who are interested in being included in the social scientific community
rather than to risk being excluded and condemned. Various constructivist
approaches, such as the actor-network theory (ANT) and other science and
technology studies (STS) and sociological network theories, for example in
the works of Bruno Latour (1987), have consistently emphasised the social
origin of scientific practice. These social behaviours of scientists, however,
have their ground in intersubjective skills and other social cognitive abilities.
If we want to understand the sociology of scientific knowledge produc-
tion, we have to go deeper into the question of what makes socialisation
possible in the first place, what cognitive abilities we use in socialising, in
collaborations, and in mutual understanding of the other’s mind. The most
fundamental cognitive skill behind this is intersubjectivity. Modern science
is a result of the new arenas for intersubjective interactions that appeared
from the fifteenth century and onwards.
9.4. The Enactive Theory of Scientific Evolution

Science has here been rendered as a collective cognitive ability that extends
biological or neurological changes in human beings, but also rejecting so-
cial constructions independent of the constitution of the thinking subjects’
bodies and bio-cultural coevolution. The explanation of the emergence
of modern science defended here, the enactive theory of scientific evolu-
tion, takes into account the bio-cultural coevolution, i.e. it shows that the
emergence of science rests on given cognitive abilities in interaction with a
changing physical and cultural environment.
264 David Dunér
A coevolutionary history of science concerns human cognitive processes

and their reciprocal encounters with the world. It renders the human be-
ing as an historical creature shaped by its interaction with the surrounding
world. The cognitive-historical approach to the history of science aims at
understanding the cognitive processes behind scientific thinking, not only
explaining the content of the scientific works or unearthing the sociology of
science. In fact, I think, the cognitive approach can give clues to the latter;
various cognitive abilities are used in scientific thinking (as I have tried to
show with my examples), and intersubjectivity and other social cognitive
abilities are fundamental for social behaviour and interaction. People in
the history of science, as well as in the present, use certain cognitive abili-
ties acquired during millions of years of bio-cultural coevolution. Cultural
differences and historical change can partly be explained by the fact that
people use these cognitive tools in different ways in interaction with specific
temporal and spatial environments. Remnants of these thought processes
could be found in the historical sources, in the material culture as written
texts, images, and objects. Consequently, empirical research is indispensable
in order to access how people in history have acted and tried to understand
their particular environment, their time, and culture. There are no shortcuts
to the history of science other than reading and pervading the historical re-
mains hidden in labyrinthine archives and libraries. After reading thousands
of pages, and with some insight into human cognition, how human beings
actually think – a research that we have just seen the beginning of – the
historian can ask new questions, and provide new explanations of the his-
tory of human thinking. And by getting to know our own thinking and its
history, we will understand a little bit more of the world we are a part of.
I think there are at least three outcomes or benefits of a cognitive his-
tory of human thinking that takes into account the bio-cultural coevolu-
tion of human cognition. The enactive theory of scientific evolution put
forward in this chapter is an attempt in that direction. The evolution of
science was a result of the interaction between human cognitive abilities
(such as distributed cognition, situated cognition, perception, causality,
metaphors, categorisation, and intersubjectivity) and a changing physical
and social environment. First, this approach connects human thinking with
its surrounding space, the physical environment, and places the history of
science in a spatial context. Human beings are shaped by, but also shape
the space around them. They have adapted, both physically and mentally,
to certain environmental conditions. But at the same time they have also
adapted the environment to themselves, and have created their own artificial
physical and cultural habitats. This constant interaction, through the mil-
lennia, with the environment and culture, leads up to what we are today.
Cognitive history connects thinking with life. Human thinking and the
intellectual history of the human being are not just products of discourses,
social networking and political ideologies, but concern what it is to live as
a sensible and feeling human being of flesh and blood in a world within
time and space.
Second, a cognitive history of ideas also connects the past with the pre-
sent, and places history in a deeper temporal perspective. Human beings
are shaped by their history, both their cultural and evolutionary history.
With deeper knowledge about how people function, we can obtain clues to
a broader understanding of human life and thoughts in history. Because we
as human beings share the same evolutionary history and the same cognitive
abilities, we are also able to understand people in history, to admire Pal-
aeolithic cave paintings, marvel at the stories of the Old Testament, see the
clarity of the philosophy of Plato, and be emotionally affected by the love
poems of Ovid. People throughout history can speak to us. The similarities
between people in history suggest that there are common characteristics that
are outcomes of an evolutionary history, which contradicts the view that
we are born as completely blank slates (cf. Pinker 2002). It also contradicts
the existence of completely insurmountable gaps between thinking beings
from different times and cultures. The differences that we see are not there
because we think differently, have different cognitive abilities, but because
we are situated in different times and spaces. A cognitive history of ideas
pays attention to what unites people in history, not only what distinguishes
us, i.e. some trans-historical human universals, such as the inevitabilities of
life: that we are born, eat, move, rest, love, and die. Such an approach can
provide a deeper understanding of the universally human, what it means to
be human, and give us keys to an understanding of human thoughts, actions
and feelings in history, both in terms of the long lines and the individual
moments in the changing history. Human beings are historical creatures.
Third, a cognitive history of ideas could connect and reconcile scholarly
historical research with the knowledge production that takes place in other
266 David Dunér
scientific disciplines. By connecting our knowledge, we can arrive at a more

complete description of the history of thought. This is also in line with the
cognitive-semiotic approach, to fend off both biological reductionism and
social constructivism, and find a more fruitful way of understanding the
self-conscious, thinking and feeling human being, with a body and senses,
living in the world. As new data about human cognition is acquired, our
view of the human being will also change. If cognitive science, evolutionary
theory and other theories of the human being are valid, they should also
be valid for historical research. Such a historical research could provide
important and necessary contributions and new empirical data to other
scientific disciplines, specifically regarding human beings situated in dif-
ferent temporal and spatial environments and how this influences human
thinking, behaviour and action. Empirical historical research is needed in
order to get a complete picture of the human cognitive evolution, to fill in
the gap between the Palaeolithic and the postmodern human being. With
the emergence of culture, the cognitive evolution of the human being does
not take place any longer mainly in the brain, but instead within culture
created by human beings, through a cultural-evolutionary process. And
the premier objects of investigation for historians are just these, human
culture and the cultural evolution of the human being. Science is one of
many cultural-evolutionary artefacts created by the enactive human being
for the understanding of the enigmatic human Lifeworld.
David Dunér & Göran Sonesson
Chapter Ten
Encounters: The Discovery of the Unknown
The history of exploration has mostly concerned what travellers actually

saw, who they met, where they travelled, which islands and geographic
locations they visited. The stories of the historians tell about logistical
problems, how the explorers managed to travel from one place to another,
about navigation at sea and how they penetrated trackless terrains, fol-
lowed coastlines, rivers and mountain ranges, and walked through valleys
and forests. Not least the political and sociological dimensions of travel-
ling have caught many researchers’ interest, for example in various studies
of networks, power relations, contacts, collaborations, careers, and how
cultural encounters have led to political and economic change (Campbell
1988; Porter 1991; Pratt 1992; Pagden 1993; Elsner and Rubiés 1999;
Bridges 2002; Sell 2006; Abulafia 2008). There is, however, another aspect
of travelling to foreign locations that has hardly been touched upon in
scholarly studies, but which is the one that will concern us here.
Encounters with new worlds and foreign cultures have also led to cul-
tural and – what we will outline here – cognitive and semiotic change.
Cultural encounters have changed people’s thinking, their categories, and
belief systems. They have altered the ways in which human beings interpret
the world, their own culture, and that which is outside of it. To get a grip of
what happened in the minds of travellers, and how their thinking changed
due to the encounter with the unknown requires us to study the history
of exploration from a new angle, in a cognitive and semiotic perspective.
The cognitive-semiotic history of exploration also pays attention to the
lacunae of human thinking, i.e. what the travellers did not see, what the
selective consciousness sifted away. Among cognitive phenomena that oc-
curred while encountering the unknown, we find, for example:
• that the travellers’ perception of space changed (spatiality);
• that their minds tried to understand and interpret what the senses con-
veyed (perception);
268 David Dunér & Göran Sonesson
• that their preconceived notions and previous experiences guided them

towards certain conclusions about what they saw (experience);
• that encounters with the Other changed the travellers themselves (inter-
subjectivity);
• that they often found it difficult to convey the impressions of the un-
known (communication).
This chapter concerns human encounters with unknown environments and
how the human mind tries to understand the unfamiliar phenomena by
using certain cognitive and semiotic resources. We argue that human en-
counters with unfamiliar things, landscapes, and living beings cannot simply
be explained by social, political, or economic circumstances, nor just by
extrapolating given biological grounds. Instead, we defend the idea that hu-
man encounters must be seen as instances of the bio-cultural coevolution of
human cognition, the incessant interaction between the human mind and its
environment. In the first section of this chapter, we discuss some cognitive
phenomena arising when human beings encounter unknown environments.
In the second section, we go deeper into cultural semiotics and explain the
specific semiotics of cultural encounters, how human beings, in a certain
culture, the Ego-culture, get to grips with the unknown, foreign culture,
the Alien-culture. In this second part, we will also be particularly concerned
with encounters within a long time-span, when one of the cultures has come
to occupy what was formerly the space of the other.
10.1. The Cognitive History of the Unknown

Human explorers, merchants, soldiers, refugees, and other travellers in the
past, as well as in the present, encountered things, natural phenomena,
living organisms, peoples, customs, behaviours, cultures that had to be in-
terpreted, that were not immediately and intuitively understandable. These
unknown and unfamiliar things forced them to use all their former knowl-
edge, experiences, and cognitive abilities in order to understand what they
saw and encountered (Dunér 2011). In the end, these encounters changed
their view of spatiality, perception, experience, cultural encounters, and
communication.
Encounters: The Discovery of the Unknown 269
10.1.1. Spatiality of the Traveller

Journeys investigating the geography of the Earth lead to a wider spatial
understanding and awareness of distances and spatial relationships. They
were explorations of space, extensions of the spatial experience of the sur-
face of the Earth, the topography, and the distance between near and far
(Lefebvre 1974; Crang and Thrift 2000; Schlögel 2003). The logbook of
the Finnish cadet Israel Reinius from a voyage to Canton (Guangzhou)
with the ship “Adolph Friedrich” of the Swedish East India Company gives
the impression of a symbolic, repetitive mood of movement through the
coordinates of space and time:
Tuesday, March 3, 1747, between Mauritius and Java, between 1 and 4 pm,
heading southeast. Wind from northeast. Beautiful weather with strong gale. Saw
a group whales and flying fishes. 4 pm: heavy rain. Nota bene: the Swedish peas
ended. Distance: 146 miles (Reinius 1939, p. 128).
Between long stretches of nautical and meteorological data, the logbook

sometimes gives glimpses of observations of frigate birds, albatrosses, and
gannets that are sailing by, and dolphins swimming along the keel.
Not only texts, ideas, traditions, and cultures lead to historical change,
but also the body and its interaction with the environment, space, and the
things around us, such as dimensions, terrains, logistics, buildings, and com-
munication routes. We relate to home and away, inside and out, existing and
non-existing, define territories and set out limits. Journeys into uncharted
geographies alter our spatial perception and understanding, and adjust the
relationship between the mental space and real space. The mental image of
the geography of Earth became clearer and more detailed due to physical
travels around the world. The discovery of the tropical forests, the deserts
of Arabia, the Pacific islands, the ice shields of Antarctica, the vast Siberian
steppes led to an expanded spatial awareness of the topography of our plan-
et. The medieval charts were endowed with imaginary islands and creatures,
but during the early modern period these white spots of human geographical
experience began to be filled with existing life and real physical landmarks.
10.1.2. Perception as Interpretation

We see certain things with ease, while other things can require more effort to
perceive. Pehr Löfling, a young disciple of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus
who travelled across the Atlantic in the 1750s, through the forests of South
America, and along the Orinoco River, was more attentive to certain things
and phenomena than other members of the Spanish border expedition to Ven-
ezuela, La Expedición de Límites 1754–1761, led by José de Iturriaga. Not
because he had a better vision, but he had a specific system for interpreting
what he saw. The Linnaean systematics and taxonomy gave him a tool to give
meaning to what the senses conveyed, and to incorporate these observations
into his and others’ prior knowledge of natural things. He noticed the small
details of the sexual organs of the plants and the slight colour shifts of the
birds’ plumage. At the same time Löfling’s perception was part of a larger
perceptual and observational enterprise. By using Löfling’s and other disci-
ples’ observations, Linnaeus strengthened his own powers of observation.
Through them, Linnaeus could see more of the world, discover more details,
identify more species in the realm of nature (see Section 9.3.6).
Seeing is an activity by which the perceiving mind can find an order in the
chaotic material world. It is also conditioned by the viewer’s emotions, prac-
tical interests, and associations. Needless to say, there are hardly any neutral
observations that do not demand an interpretation: what we see requires
exegesis based on past experience, concepts, and knowledge. Plants and
animals are certainly two of the primary domains in which human beings
(as well as some other animals) have been adept at assembling knowledge,
already at the hunter-gatherer stage, if not before. Only such knowledge
could have allowed our forefathers to pass to the stage of domesticating
plants and animals (cf. Atran 1990; Diamond 2005 [1997]). Based on the
theories Löfling had already incorporated into his thinking, such as Linnaean
systematics, he could recognise certain shapes and patterns in nature. Al-
though the shapes and patterns distinguished may be distinct, the process as
such is not really different from the way indigenous people make use of their
folk knowledge. Visual perception involves a process in which a person that
perceives something goes beyond the given information by organising and
interpreting the sensual impression, by adding and filling in an ambiguous
impression in order to create an unambiguous perception (Reisberg 1997).
The observer has to divide the sensory impressions into parts and organise
them into background and foreground. These interpretations are not definite
or determined just by the impressions themselves, but to a large extent by
the mind in interaction with the world around it.
Perception of space is characterised by topological and spatial relation-

ships such as containment and proximity. It is also selective, i.e. attention
is focused on certain traits, and it is part of an organising process (Stafford
2009). Similarly to the way that the observer’s visual perception of an object
is changed by the position, also the concepts, knowledge, wishes, needs, val-
ues, and interests are dependent on the biological as well as cultural sensory
equipment, while also changing these sensory experiences. Löfling’s prior
knowledge, cultural background, life experiences, and position in time and
space constituted the perspectives from which he viewed the world. As mod-
ern beings living in a different space and time, it is difficult for us to grasp
how he experienced his environment, even though we basically have identical
sensory abilities. People in history saw, literally, the world in a somewhat dif-
ferent way. The conceptual vision, i.e. how our perception and interpretation
of the impressions are changed by our previous knowledge, reveals that they
actually had other sensory experiences than what we would have had facing
the same object, or perhaps more accurately, they made other interpretations
of what they saw. The interpretations of the sensory impressions rest on cog-
nitive abilities, such as memory, categorisation and perception of patterns.
Culture and cognition influence and schematise certain patterns in the sensory
impressions. The challenge for a cognitive history of exploration is to learn
how people in history perceived and interpreted the light in their eyes, the
soundscapes around them, how the food tasted, how it smelled in the streets,
how it ached in the body after a day walking through uncharted territory.
But there are two further things to note here: as a traveller, Löfling only
had a limited use for the kind of folk knowledge of plants he may have
derived from his own life in a different environment and a different culture.
This knowledge may have served him when explaining his experience to
others at home, as we will see below, and it may have also been an encum-
brance when trying to attend to particularities of the plants at hand, as
will also be suggested (cf. Section 10.1.3). Nevertheless, it should not be
forgotten that Löfling was also something fairly new, namely a scientific
traveller. Linnaean systematics and taxonomy were not only based on thor-
ough studies of plants familiar in Sweden, but already incorporated other
floras of the world; it was also organised, not only for particular purposes
such as agriculture or medicine, but with a wider, theoretical scope; and
finally it was embodied into books and collections, as well as distributed
among a whole class of world travellers with their attention put to plants
(see Chapter 9: Science in this volume).
10.1.3. Experience of Things Unknown

Löfling’s new experiences were incorporated into his prior experiences and
were compared to them. This is true both of his home-grown experience as
a participant in the peculiarly Swedish home world, but also of his training
as a Linnaean explorer. For his parents he explained that manioc was rasped
in Guyana like horseradish back home in Sweden. In this case, the compari-
son may really have served as a bridge between worldviews. The Linnaean
systematisation of things was a way of categorising the unknown in order to
incorporate it into the known. The consciously and unconsciously acquired
prior knowledge induced Löfling to interpret what he saw in one way or
another. The travellers made use of their prior knowledge, the knowledge
that was a part of their culture, kept in stories, myths and religious beliefs,
by means of which they could create meaning in what they encountered.
The result could also be confusing – and lead to confusions that subsisted
for centuries. When Christopher Columbus came to America, he did not see
a new continent, and he did not meet a new nation. He came to “India” and
met “Indians” as they were already modelled in European culture. This did
not impede him from asking these “Indians” to show him to the Chinese
emperor, mixing, as might have been the normal case at the time, another
well-known, but equally erroneous, address into the discovery.
Travel stories always refer back, homewards, to the familiar and known.
In the descriptions of new, unknown things, the travel author used familiar
things in order to explain and understand what he encountered. When the
American colonists saw a red-breasted bird around their houses, Turdus
migratorius, it reminded them of the European robin (Erithacus rubecula),
and they named it American robin, although it is biologically more closely
related to the blackbird (Turdus merula). Such instances are common in
folk taxonomy. As so often, the colonists saw the known in the unknown.
Such identification resulted less from a lack of attention to details than from
a desire on the part of the colonists to recreate a well-known environment
around themselves. Both the early Spanish colonists and those that came
later to what was going to become the United States gave names to their
newly created towns and to geographical features which were generally

derived from their home country. This is why there is a Mérida in Mexico
as well as in Spain, and a Paris in Texas.
Marco Polo may exemplify the passage from the fairly naïve world trav-
eller armed with the folk knowledge of his own culture to the scientific
traveller taking a broader view. As Umberto Eco (1999) tells us, Polo starts
by saying that he had indeed seen the famous unicorn – but then he goes
on to describe it rather like what we would nowadays call a rhinoceros:
They are scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet
like an elephant’s. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead
[…]. They have a head like a wild boar’s [---]. They spend their time by preference
wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at
all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured
by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.
Some centuries later, Albrecht Dürer made a famous woodcut of a rhi-

noceros, which was based on a written account of an animal on show in
Lisbon. Although much more accurate than any earlier depictions made
in the West, Dürer’s woodcut shows an animal with hard plates that cover
its body like sheets of armour, with a gorget at the throat, a solid-looking
breastplate, and rivets along the seams. He also places a small twisted horn
on its back, and gives it scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters. But Dürer
never had a close encounter with a rhinoceros.
10.1.4. Encounters with the Other Culture

Travellers struggle with adaptation and mistrust, prejudice that is contradict-
ed, confluence of cultures, religious beliefs, and worldviews that go apart.
In the meeting with foreign cultures in geography, but also in history, the
traveller faces difficulties in understanding the complexity, to recognise the
differences between the different cultures and ethnic groups. Commonly this
manifests itself as a “dehumanisation” of the other, or the failure to see the
complexity of cultures and instead label them as “primitive” cultures. This
reaction is often interpreted as an instance of an intentional and political
power ambition. But this is not the whole truth. These encounters depend
essentially of the cognitive challenges human thought faces concerning em-
pathy, intersubjectivity, and coordination of the inner worlds (see Chapter 1,
2 and Section 10.2 in this volume).
One way of dealing with the incomprehensible – that one can find many
instances of in the travel literature – is to try to live as the others do, to adapt
to local customs and life conditions, “go native” so to speak. In modern an-
thropology “participant observation” is a well-tested and popular method
to explore cultural and social phenomena, but it has happened, at least once
in a while, that an anthropologist using this method ended up identifying
completely with the foreign culture, and giving up his work as an anthro-
pologist – the epitomised case being the nineteenth century anthropologist
Frank Hamilton Cushing first described as “going native” (cf. Hinsley 1981).
Partly similar things seem to have happened to our travellers. Löfling writes,
after several months in Madrid, that he now counts himself as a Spaniard.
He is “polymorphous,” adapts to the situation, takes different roles, dresses
himself in Spanish fashion, participates in Catholic Church services, and fi-
nally converts to the Catholic faith. The German explorer Carsten Niebuhr,
who in the 1760s travelled through the Middle East and “Arabia Felix”
(present-day Yemen) together with Linnaeus’ disciple Peter Forsskål, tried
to adapt himself to the Arabic culture by making use of his cognitive abili-
ties, such as memory and imitation, in an attempt to learn their language
and customs (Niebuhr 1774–1837). Niebuhr let his beard grow, dressed in
Oriental clothes, and adopted an Arabic name, Kawâdja Abdallah. In Persia
he called himself Abdallah Aqa, i.e. Mr Abdallah, and in Syria Mucallim. In
Anatolia, he got the nickname gâvur (the unfaithful). But there were limits
even to his personal adaptation to the other culture. He refused to convert to
Islam and be circumcised. He is empathic, however, he does not judge: “We
Europeans often come to an verdict too early about the customs of foreign
nations before we have got to know them correctly” (Niebuhr 1772). It is
equally incomprehensible to the Europeans, Niebuhr says, that the Arabs eat
locusts, as it is incredible for the Arabs that Christians eat oysters, crabs, and
crayfish. People are still quite similar. The natural historian and physician
Clas Fredrik Hornstedt who wandered through many countries and climates,
and met the most different peoples, regarded himself as a citizen of the world,
someone who by no means becomes annoyed that not everything is like it is
in our country. “The difference consists merely in modifications” (Hornstedt,
UUB, fol. 149v; Granroth 2008, p. 73).
When interpreting the other culture the traveller uses concepts and experi-
ences drawn from his own well-known culture, that are then imposed on the
different, unfamiliar culture. The traveller projects himself on the unknown

others. We see the other in a mirror image of ourselves. Our “ego-culture”
deforms texts from other cultures and times, the “alien-culture”, in line
with our own needs (Sonesson 2000, 2003; Cabak Rédei 2007). We draw
boundaries between inside and outside, where our culture, being safe and
harmoniously organised, contrasts the outlying other culture, the danger-
ous, chaotic, challenging, and disordered culture (Lotman 1990). The vast
majority of Western travel diaries from the eighteenth century appoint its
own culture as the “ego” and the visited culture as “the other.” In some rare
cases one finds the opposite perspective – a non-European culture is the ego
and the European culture the other – as in a depiction of eighteenth-century
Russia, Hokusa Bunryaku (1793), by the Japanese physician Katsuragawa
Hoshū (Katsuragawa 1978). Or in other cases, such as the example of Yuri
Lotman, Peter the Great seemed to have adopted another culture than his
own culture as the ego-culture (Lotman 1990; Sonesson 2000).
The term “discovery” actually reveals an egocentric perspective on the
understanding of cultures (Todorov 1982). Discoveries and cultural en-
counters are always seen from a local, individual angle, not from a global
perspective, and we can hardly do anything else (Bayly 2004). We need
the other in order to create an image of ourselves, not only in a collective
sense, but also from the individual person’s own perspective. In this way,
the Orient only exists from an outsider’s perspective (Said 1978), but the
same can be said concerning the Occident (cf. Buruma and Margalit 2004).
The ego-perspective of human thought emphasises subjective views. In other
words, travelogues and descriptions of the seen often say more about the
person who moves through the world than about the current “objective”
world. What remains, from a cognitive-semiotic perspective, is foremost
the individual person’s understanding of his or her inner world, not a clear
reflection of the real, objective, external world.
10.1.5. Communication Abroad and at Home

To a large extent, the challenges of travelling involve communication prob-
lems. Misunderstandings are common in cultural encounters, not only
because of a lack of language skills, but also because we have different
Lifeworlds, cultural backgrounds, and experiences. Concepts are formed
by culture and the needs of the social and physical environment. Signs and
categories differ from each other and make communication difficult. The
communicative difficulties arise not only in relation to the other, but also
in relation to members of our own culture.
Descriptions of unknown environments, in travel accounts and letters to
friends back home, are huge challenges to both parts. The traveller has to
transfer and convey his new experiences; he has to describe something he
has never seen before, even though he lacks words or concepts for it. These
descriptions, moreover, should also provoke images in the mind of the other
person. Thus, Löfling describes the Agave (Agave americana) that he saw in
Spain as being similar to the pine trees that can be seen on swampy bogs in
Sweden. Using analogy is a way of translating impressions from unknown
cases to more well-known and familiar experiences. Columbus expresses
the idea that it is not possible for any person to understand something that
he has not seen himself. In his letter from 1493, Columbus tells about the
newly discovered islands on the other side of the Atlantic, about how he
saw high and beautiful mountains, vast fields and forests, fertile plains,
which “surpass one’s perceptions, if you have not seen them” (Columbus
1493). The new and unknown is impossible to imagine and fully describe
to someone else – you have to see it with your own eyes.
A dialogue in Denis Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville
(1772) concerns how precarious, almost impossible, is the communication
between different cultures (Diderot 1772; Fastrup and Eliassen 2010). A
Tahitian does not have the same sounds in his language as in French. He
will therefore, Diderot concludes, never be able to learn French. And since
he does not know this language, he cannot designate and acquire that which
he experiences in France. When he comes home, he would not have anything
to tell. He would not have experienced anything and would not be able to
convey anything, because he has no words to describe what he experienced.
His old friends would not believe him. Everything he is saying would seem
strange and alien to them. Today we may find this identification between
what can be pronounced and what can be understood too simplistic; yet, it
is certainly difficult to learn to pronounce the sounds of foreign languages,
if you are not a child anymore, and it remains difficult to understand the
contents and referents of foreign languages, whether you are an adult or not.
Today, when the majority of Tahitians are bilingual in Tahitian and (some
dialect of) French, it is not certain that this has bred a greater understanding
between the two cultures. The fact that many people born in France now live
in Tahiti may certainly have led to some intermingling of cultures, but not,
as one would expect, as great as in the case of many former French colonies,
as for instance Algeria, whose citizens have a larger presence in France. To
shift to an example that is at least somewhat more clear-cut, Mexico in rela-
tion to Spain, understanding the other culture still remains very demanding,
even if you speak the same language, as Spaniards and Mexicans largely do
today – even though somewhat easier than at the time of Hernán Cortés.
What happens when cultures meet is that human cognitive abilities face
difficult challenges in interpreting and understanding what the senses con-
vey, in order to provide guidance for behaviour in specific situations. In
cultural encounters cultural-semiotic processes occur where the home cul-
ture, the Ego-culture, is transformed by the meeting with Alter and Alius,
leading to a new self-understanding. To be far away from home often stirs
in the travel accounts an undertone of nostalgia and isolation, the painful
longing to return home. In the end of his life Linnaeus caught this feeling
of longing for something lost. “NOSTALGIA – Stenbrohult” he recorded
on a piece of paper and dreamed himself back to his childhood home in
Småland in southern Sweden (Linnaeus 1732). The feeling and the fear that
there is no way back, that you have forever lost touch with relatives and
close friends, is growing during the mind’s journey through the territories
separated from the familiar and known back home. Unknown environments
and creatures are daunting. The anxiety is caused by disorientation, when
the cognitive tools to manage the known environment are challenged.
10.2. Semiotics of Cultural Encounters

When you have been on a trip, you have something to tell coming home, as
the saying goes. So far, we have considered the plights and predicaments of
the traveller, as well as the knowledge he has acquired. But sometimes you go
to another country, or you immerse yourself into another culture, not only for
the relatively short time of a journey (which may not have been very short,
from our point of view, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century), but with
the intention to stay in that country or culture for an appreciable time in the
future, perhaps until you die. There are three main scenarios here. The first
is that of conquest, when you install yourself, normally with a whole group
coming from your Homeworld, in what was until now the Homeworld of
other people, and, for all practical purposes, attempt to transform it into
your own Homeworld (leaving perhaps a residue Homeworld for the popu-
lation that was there before). The second one is that of immigration. In that
case, you are normally forced by outer circumstances to give up your own
Homeworld, and must try, at least to some extent, to integrate yourself into
what was earlier the Homeworld of other populations, without being able
to take over the governance of that Homeworld. The third scenario could
be characterised as involving the exchange of mates, because, originally,
you often had to leave your Homeworld at a certain moment of your life to
find a marrying partner (or you may have chosen to do so), but today, this
scenario could very well apply just as much to those who leave one culture
for another for the sake of finding employment. In any case, without being at
all easy living, this scenario is the one that has, in the historical experience of
humanity, turned out to hold the best chance of occasioning a real meeting
of cultures, in the sense of not necessarily prejudging one part or another.
10.2.1. Three Scenarios and Three Globalisations

Projecting these three scenarios onto deep history, we could also talk about
the three big globalisations – without denying that there have been many
smaller ones, or that these three may only appear to be the important ones
(particularly in the case of the third one) in our present day perspective.
The term “deep history” should be understood here in the sense of Daniel
L. Smail (2008), Andrew Shryock and Smail (2011), and Claude Gamble
(2013): as the idea of there being no limits between evolution, at least from
anatomically modern humans onwards (prehistory), and history (which is
thus not simply defined by writing). At least for the sake of considering these
globalisations, we will go along with this idea. As for the notion of globali-
sation itself, it may not have received any positive definition, but, from the
relevant literature (the items of which are too numerous to be mentioned),
it is clear that it involves, not only the dispersal of different individuals and
groups around the world, but that of their pools of knowledge, as well as
something more than the mere coalescence of these pools of knowledge,
such as some form of their interaction.
The three scenarios do not project neatly onto the three globalisations.
We will consider these globalisations in chronological order, although the
third one is no doubt more well-known to the contemporary reader. The first
globalisation, which brought human beings out Africa and, in the end, to
all habitable continents, may have started out as immigration but it certain
ended up basically as conquest. As far as we know, it first involved Homo
erectus (1.8 mya) and then Homo sapiens (200 tya). We will not have much
to say about this globalisation here, because it is not clear whether Homo
sapiens ever had any encounter with his predecessor Homo erectus, and
while we can be sure that Home sapiens met the Neanderthals (Homo ne-
anderthalensis), at least now that we know that Europeans still possess some
Neanderthal genes, we do not know to what extent, if any, their encounter
produced any mixture of their respective pools of knowledge (cf. Gamble
2013; Pääbo 2014). In our context, the first globalisation is important as a
presupposition for the second one. As a result of this first globalisation, hu-
man beings came to be the only animal species present all around the world
(even in America, at least from 13,000 BCE). This may account for the feel-
ing, noted by Gamble, that there were human beings anywhere you went.
The second globalisation (from the fifteenth century CE) may neverthe-
less be epitomised by the conquest of America, although it involved some
essential preludes taking place on the islands outside of the western cost of
Africa, beyond Gibraltar, once known as the pillars or Hercules, the end of
the Antique world (Fernandez-Armesto 1987). Its scenario was essentially
one of conquest, from the African islands onwards. It is precisely at the level
of knowledge and cognition that the discovery of America can be labelled a
globalisation, in a sense in which this is not true of the connections with the
Middle East, North Africa, India, and China, which have been present in the
Occident as far back as we can go in written history, from Herodotus and
beyond, even if often at a low level of acquaintance. Nor is it comparable to
the case of what was at the time known as The Holy Land, where some con-
quests were undertaken and then lost during several centuries of the Middle
Ages, because, armed with the Bible and the writings of the Church fathers,
the protagonists clearly experienced this as returning to familiar ground.1
1 It may be more difficult to exclude the invasion of Europe and India by the first
Indo-Europeans, or the Austronesian expansion going as far as Madagascar (cf.
As referred to above, Gamble (1995) takes note of the feeling shared by the
conquerors that there would be people everywhere. If they had known about
the first globalisation, they would have been justified in this belief. This is
perhaps not surprising, given the kind of creation myths found, not only in
the Christian Bible, but also in most other mythic narratives. But, perhaps,
more than anything, this was simply an expectancy that the world of common
sense would continue to be as commonsensical as it had so far proved to be.
Still, if human beings expected the common sense world to go on beyond
the horizon, they believed it to continue with a twist. We know from many
historical sources, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and beyond, that these
human beings were thought of as members of “the monstrous races,” also
known, from one of the first chronists, as the “Plinian races” (cf. Friedman
1981). These were beings that were half human and half some other animal,
or whose human anatomy was deviant to an extent of which nature is in-
nocent. To the first group may be counted the Cynocephali, or dog-heads,
Hopopodes, who have horses’ hooves instead of feet, and the harpies, in
the Greek sense of a woman with a bird’s body. The second type comprises,
among others, the Amycturae, whose lower lip protrudes so much that it
can be used as an umbrella, the Blemmyae, with their face on their chest,
the one-eyed Cyclopes, and the Sciopods, who have only one leg but are
extremely skilled using it, although they spend most of the day protecting
themselves from the sun with their foot. In the same group are in fact counted
those who have strange customs, such as the cannibals, those who walk on
all fours, those who imitate the language of any foreigner they happen upon,
those who live in caves, and so on. As late as in Theodor de Bry’s Grand
Voyages, published between 1590 and 1634, and describing real voyages of
discovery to Virginia, Florida, Brazil, and so on, the engravings showing the
customs of the natives include several Blemmyae and Sciopods (cf. Bucher
1977; Sonesson 1989). Whatever prejudices contemporary people may have
Diamond 2002 [1991]; 2005 [1997]) from the notion of globalisation, except by
taking an explicitly Eurocentric standpoint, however provisional. From another
point of view, we may also want to add a “steam age” globalisation from 1850
onwards (Burke 2012, pp. 211–212), when both ships and trains powered by
steam made it easier for academics to meet, and spread their knowledge, at
conferences, and invited courses.
had about foreigners, the feeling of alienness was certainly more graphically
embodied at those times.
Beside the Plinean races, comprising human beings of a monstrous kind,
Antiquity and the Middle Ages also recognised a number of “fabulous
beasts,” combining parts of several known animals into new entities, such
as unicorns, griffins, ant-lions, and the like (cf. Nigg 1999). The question
then becomes whether we can trace any such embodiments of alienness into
deep history. Klaus Schmidt (2013, pp. 200 ff.) tells us that in archaeology,
“beings which, like animals, walk on four legs, are called monsters, those
walking upright like humans are called demons.” Thus our fabulous beasts
would be monsters, and our Plinian races would be demons (though one of
the deviant types of human beings is in fact characterised by walking on all
fours; cf. Friedman 1981). Schmidt goes on to claim that the “Ice Age lacks
the four-legged ‘monsters,’ but doubtless we are confronted with ‘demons.’”
Whether at this time, such “demons” were manifestations of alienness,
in the negative sense, as in later times, or whether instead they represented
gods or shamans according to a more common interpretation, is really
at present impossible to know. In fact, if Jesus himself at times could be
presented as a monster (cf. Bildhauer and Mills 2003, pp. 28 ff.), perhaps
alienness itself is primary, and the positive and negative evaluation only oc-
curs at a second stage. Indeed, Heinz Mode (2005) may be right to disregard
the positive or negative evaluation of such beings, concentrating instead on
the different combinations of animal and human parts, where either the first
or the second dominate (“Tiermensch” and “Menschentier,” respectively),
adding to this a category of beings made up only of human parts, which
are however combined in an anomalous way. Pursuing these types back
to Assyria, Babylon, and Ancient Egypt, Mode as often discovers figures
corresponding to divine being as the more demonical kind.2
2 Whether or not this means, as Mode clearly takes for granted, that some figures
were developed in these countries and then were imported to other cultures,
seems to us vain speculation. Since it all amounts to the recombining of a fairly
small set of bodily parts, these figures might very well have been reinvented
several times. It is interesting, however, that the earliest way of humanising
animals seems to have been simply to depict them upright, that is, standing on
their back feet.
The third globalisation, which is the one we tend to talk about today,
obviously involves the rapid access of new facts and things through the
intermediary of the Internet, but it may much more importantly have to do
with the enormous displacements of populations which have taken place in
recent decades, for instance from Arab countries and Africa and to Europe,
which is to say that it mainly follows the scenario of immigration. The third
scenario (also mentioned above in the introduction to Section 10.2) has not
been accounted for so far. This is because it does not really form part of
any of the big globalisations. It is rather business as usual. In traditional
societies, exchange of mates between cultures must have been a very eve-
ryday kind of affair, though concerning more or less always the same two
societies. Today they are much rarer: most people, according to statistics,
still marry a person born on the same street as themselves (cf. Burney 1973).
On the other hand, exchange of mates may now take place between any
cultures, also those at opposite ends of the earth. Although it is not part
and parcel of any of the big globalisations, the exchange of mates is still a
very formidable agent of globalisation.
10.2.2. Cultural Encounter as Communication

Semiotics of culture was first conceived by Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky,
and a number of other scholars in the so-called Moscow-Tartu school in
the sixties of the last century (Lotman et al. 1975). In the original version,
it concerned the opposition of Culture to Non-culture, construed as a dif-
ference between order and disorder, and between many other binary terms.3
Semiotics of culture constructs models of models of cultures – meta-models
of auto-models (i.e. models of the own culture) – as they are created by mem-
bers of a culture (or are implied by their behaviour). These models mainly
involve relations that obtain (according to a particular model) between the
own culture and other cultures (subcultures, etc.) – that is, the models are
egocentrically defined, in the literal sense of being defined from the point of
3 We here follow the original model, as later elaborated in Sonesson (2000, 2004,
2007a, 2012, 2013a). The notion of “semiosphere” was later used in part for
the same purpose as “culture,” but it was made to do several other duties at the
same time, which left the notion rather fuzzy.
view of who ever says “I.” The mutual models of different cultures may at
least in part determine the way these cultures communicate with each other.
The Tartu school model is, as noted above, about relations between
cultures, and it is also more specifically about communication taking place
between cultures. As most clearly recognised by Jennie Mazur (2012), this
makes semiotics of culture a model of (the difficulties of) communication.
This should actually have been clear already from the contradictory descrip-
tion made by the two protagonists of the encounter between Mme de Staël
and Rahel Levin, as analysed by Anna Cabak Rédei (2007, pp. 105 ff.). If
so, we have to begin by understanding what communication at the inter-
face between two cultures can be – which means we have to take our point
of departure in communication as such. The first task will therefore be to
liberate communication in the sense of presenting signs from the abusive
spatial metaphor deriving from the sense in which it involves cars, trains,
and the like, which change their position in space.
Starting out from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl – or, more ex-
actly, from that of his follower Roman Ingarden – in order to describe com-
munication, in particular as instantiated in a work of art, Jan Mukařovský,
the main figure of the Prague school of semiotics in the 1930s, then added
to this a social dimension. Contrary to other models of communication (in
the sense of conveying information), the Prague school model is not about
transportation or encoding, but involves the presentation of an artefact by
somebody to somebody else, giving rise to the task of making sense of this
artefact. An artefact is produced by somebody, and it has to be transformed
by another person into a work of art going through a process of concretisa-
tion. The term concretisation is used here, not only in the sense of Ingarden
(1965 [1931]), to refer to the set of “places of indeterminacy” present in
a work, many of which are filled in by an individual interpretation of the
work, but more specifically in the sense of Mukařovský (1970) and the
Prague school generally, to emphasise the active, but still regulated, contri-
bution of the receiver or audience to the work, which, moreover, takes place
in a social context. Mukařovský, like Ingarden, formulated this notion of
concretisation with reference to the work of art, but, as shown by Sonesson
(1999), this conception can be generalised to all kinds of communication
processes in which information is shared or perhaps, better, jointly created.
Since, to Mukařovský (1970), this is a social act, the process of creating the
artefact, as well as that of perceiving it, is determined by a set of norms,

which may be aesthetic (and in works of art they would be predominantly
so), but they can also be social, psychological, and so on. The work of art
is that which transgresses these rules. Mukařovský points out, however,
that these norms may be of any kind, going from simple regularities to
written laws. We could conclude that there is a continuum from normalcy
to normativity, without qualitative divisions being left out.
Since this model builds on the phenomenological conception of percep-
tion, it can easily be generalised to the everyday case of communication. All
kinds of communication consist in presenting an artefact to another subject
and assigning him or her the task of transforming it by means of concretisa-
tion into a percept. As should be clear from what was said above, the term
concretisation, instead of simply perception, is used here to emphasise that
when information is shared between subjects, all subjects are present at
the creation. Simply put, what happens in communication, in the relevant
sense, is that some subject creates an artefact, and another subject is faced
with the task of furnishing an interpretation to this artefact (cf. Sonesson
1999). As for recoding, it is sometimes needed, but most of the time, the
same (or at least overlapping repertories of) signs may be used at both ends
of the communication chain.
Figure 10.1. Model of communication integrating the Prague and the Tartu

model, as proposed by Sonesson 1999.
According to the Prague school model all interpretation also takes places
in accordance with a pool of knowledge, more or less shared between the
sender and the receiver, which has two main incarnations: the set of ex-
emplary works of arts and the canon, in the sense of the rules for how art
works are to be made. Again, this double aspect of the pool of knowledge
may be generalised from the special case of art to any artefact offered up
for communication. On the one hand, there are certain exemplary artefacts,
and, on the other hand, there are the schemas of interpretation, which can
be applied to many different artefacts.
In the following, we will desist from using the Tartu school notions of
“text” and “non-text,” since these terms suggest analogies with linguistic
constructs which are clearly misleading, except in the case in which lan-
guage is really involved. Instead we will talk about artefacts and non-arte-
facts (and indeed about Ego-artefacts, Alter-artefacts, and Alius-artefacts,
as will be explained below). The change of terminology is only meant to
avoid confusion. However, a little more will have to be said about our use
of the term schema of interpretation
The notion of schema has a history in phenomenology, particularly that
of Alfred Schütz, as well as in cognitive psychology, from the original work
on memory by Frederick Bartlett (1932) and the genetic psychology of Jean
Piaget to some more recent contributions to cognitive science, where they
are sometimes known as scripts, by the likes of David Rumelhart and Roger
Schank (see Chapter 6: Narrativity in this volume). Summarising this long
and variegated tradition, Sonesson (1988, p. 17) describes a schema or
script as being “an overarching structure endowed with a particular mean-
ing (more or less readily expressible as a label), which serves to bracket
a set of in other respects independent units of meaning, and to relate the
members of the set to each other.”
Bartlett talked mainly about memory schemas, that is, what the schema
was used for, and Schank notably mentions the restaurant schema, thus
referring to the domain of validity of the schema. You may of course use the
restaurant schema to remember what happened during a certain visit to a
restaurant, simply filling in the parts which are not specified in the schema,
and modifying those which deviate from it. The same schema may be used
to help you know how to behave when you go to a restaurant. The restau-
rant schema (or script) entails knowing more or less what you are expected
to do while you are in a restaurant, which may also, no doubt, be different

from one culture to another. Indeed, there may be cultures that have no
restaurant schema, although they have a more general schema for eating
together. Another schema, which has interested Rumelhart, but also a lot
of French narratologists, is the story schema, which would seem to be of a
higher generality. Still, any retelling of a story will depend on a lot of other
interpretation schemas as well. Indeed, Bartlett, whose first book was about
“primitive cultures” (Bartlett 1923), in his later memory research made use
of a story, “The War of Ghosts” (Bartlett 1967 [1932]), which originated
in an American Indian culture, and then presented it, at repeated intervals,
to his British subjects. Not only was the story simplified with each further
retelling, and with greater lapses of time, which is of course the main func-
tion of schemas, but it was also made to conform to the expectations of a
British audience at Bartlett’s time, eliminating parts that seemed redundant
or contradictory from such a point of view. This neatly illustrates the role
of schemas at the meshing of cultures.
According to the original Tartu school model, each culture possesses
“mechanisms of translation,” permitting some “texts” (i.e. artefacts) to be
imported into their own culture, often in a deformed state, while others are
entirely rejected into the domain of “non-texts” (i.e. as non-artefacts to the
culture in question), by means of specific “mechanisms of exclusion.” As
an example, with the arrival of the Spaniards in Mexico, the old gods ei-
ther had to be excluded from the Mesoamerican culture, or they had to be
combined in some way with the new gods and saints promulgated by the
new religion of Christianity. Numerous examples are given in the books
of Serge Gruzinski (1988, 1990, 1999). Such “cultural translation” would
seem to entail substituting the habits of one culture for that of another, and
this substitution does not necessarily include using one language instead
of another, but more generally adopting other behaviour patterns.4 Thus,
for instance, without even changing the language, substituting correct
Mexican behaviour patterns for Spanish ones may mean determining an
equivalence at the level of correctness as referred to the whole of culture,
4 On this problematic use of the term “translation,” see Sonesson 2014.

i.e. a translation, in the sense of the semiotics of culture, while making

use of sequences of action that are at the same time quite different, and
even opposed, in their direct meaning. The general restaurant schema
may not be very different (but there are notable differences between that
of the taquería and the tapas bar), but there are vast differences in other
schemas into which this schema is often embedded, or which are embed-
ded into it, such as those of politeness and courtesy. One may find some
examples of this in the works of Octavio Paz (1986), who, when he sets
out to describe what is particular to a Mexican, implicitly seems to be
contrasting him with a Spaniard.
The clash of cultures thus basically seems to be a clash of schemas of
interpretation. Quite the opposite function, positive from the point of
view of integration, is suggested by an example given by Gruzinski (1999).
How, he wonders, is it possible for native artists to be given the opportu-
nity to integrate the representation of Pre-Columbian gods with that of
Christianity, particularly in such a specifically Christian space as church
frescoes, as can be observed in several places in Colonial Mexico? It may
be significant, according to his interpretation, that this happened at the
same time that, with an appreciable time lag, the European fashion for
Grotesque art came to be introduced into Mexico. Grotesque art should
here be understood in the sense of the late Renaissance and Mannerism,
as the filling up of all empty picture space with a proliferation of figures.
If such an example can at all be generalised, it may mean that there may
be schemas the function of which is to mediate between other schemas,
and thus, allow the transference of values from one culture to another. In
this case, Ingarden’s description of the “filling up of empty spaces” could
be taken quite literally: since Grotesque art, as understood here, precisely
consists in having slots for figures everywhere, Pre-Columbian themes
may be introduced, together with themes of any other origin, without
particularly becoming salient – at least not to part of the public. If there
are meta- or mediational schemas, however, it is not certain that they all
work in this precise way.
10.2.3. The Second Globalisation: Conquering the World

Husserl’s notion of the Lifeworld, “the world taken for granted,” has by
now become so familiar, that it is used by many who might not even know
who first conceived this notion. In his later work, however, Husserl made a
distinction between homeworlds and alienworlds (as referred in Steinbock
1995), which may be understood as a specification of the Lifeworld, that
is, the world taken for granted by us, and the world we think is taken for
granted by others. In this sense, the Homeworld (Heimwelt) is not one place
among others, but a normatively special geo-historical place which is consti-
tuted with a certain asymmetrical privilege (Steinbock 1995, pp. 222–223),
and which can be identified with a family or with a whole culture. In each
case, what is outside of it is the Alienworld (Fremdwelt). This seems to be
the same conception, clearly without there being any influence, as that for-
mulated by the Tartu school. In this model, Culture is opposed to Nature
or Non-culture, as inside is to outside, order to disorder, civilisation to
Barbarism, and so on. Elsewhere, this has been called the canonical model,
because of being defined from the point of view of culture, while implicitly
placing the Ego inside it, and looking out on Non-culture (Sonesson 2000;
and Chapter 1 in this volume). Like the Tartu school, Husserl only makes
a binary distinction here, but, as we shall see, it might be necessary to go
beyond the canonical model.
By definition, there is only one Homeworld, but, according to what
Sonesson (2000, 2004, 2007, and Chapter 1 in this volume) has called
the extended model, there really are two kinds of alienworlds. There are
those you treat as different but equal, with whom you are on speaking
terms, those others that are really other egos to you. These represent the
second person of grammar, or, in other words, the Alter. And there are
those you treat as things, as the third person of grammar, or, in other
terms, as Alius. The first is the kind of other that Ego recognises as being
to himself another Ego (in the sense of Peirce’s “tuism”), the symmetrical
or, to coin a term, Peircean other. It constitutes the axis of conversation.
The second is the asymmetrical or Bakhtinean other, which is not an
other which can be a self. An extreme case might be the Sartrean/Hege-
lian other: the slave who failed to become master (but this supposes an
earlier symmetrical phase, not of dialogue, but of combat). It is the other
of reference or nomination.
Figure 10.2. The translation chain from Cortés over Aquilar and Malintzin to
Moctezuma.
Among the classical discoverers of the New world, Columbus, making lists
of all kinds of resources and including human beings among precious met-
als, animals, and plants, is a good example of somebody conceiving the
American continent as an Alius, while Cortés, employing an interpreter and
using the myths of the Aztecs to integrate himself into their world, adopts
the attitude one has to an Alter (cf. Todorov 1982). In our context, it is
interesting to note that, while Columbus took with him an interpreter who
understood Hebrew and Arabic, apparently expecting to find the natives
speaking some kind of generic foreign language, Cortés managed to set up
a chain of translators, Aquilar interpreting from Spanish to Maya, and vice-
versa, and Malintzin interpreting from Maya to Nahuatl, and vice versa (cf.
Figure 10.2; and Miralles 2004). Given these definitions, it might be better,
following a suggestion by Anna Cabak Rédei (2007), to adopt the terms
Ego-culture, Alter-culture, and Alius-culture. In this context, the distinction
is interesting to us, because sender and/or receiver may be situated in an
Alter-culture or an Alius-culture. This again pinpoints the fact that semiot-
ics of culture is really about communicative events. You may find yourself
within the canonical model at one moment of communication, and within
the extended model at another, and these different models may be distributed
among different participants in the same encounter. Cabak Rédei (2007,
pp. 105 ff.) discusses the quite opposite ways the same meeting between
Mme de Staël and Rahel Levin is understood by the two persons involved,
each of them bringing their culture with them for the occasion. Thus, Cortés,
who in his initial encounter with the natives seems to have treated them as
Alter, later on shifted to an Alius treatment, when he ordered their “idols”
destroyed (cf. Gruzinski 1990). Thus, some of the events involving Cortés
and his culture, on one hand, and the Aztecs and their culture, on the other,
are Alius-encounters, and some are Alter-encounters.
Figure 10.3. Any combination in a communicative situation of Ego-, Alius- and

Alter-culture may occur at different moments, even between the
same cultures.
Semiotics of culture is really about communicative events, in which cultures

are confronted. Of course, a number of such events (perhaps the normal or
normative ones) may then be abstracted to a more general level, presenting
how encounters between these particular cultures normally play out. Cortés
meeting the first natives and Cortés ordering the destruction of all the idols
in Tenochtitlán is not living the same encounter between cultures. It is a
question of projecting the communication model within the model of the
semiotics of culture (cf. Figure 10.3). In this model, any couple of the three
possible kinds of culture may be brought into communication with each
other, occupying one or the other of the two positions.
This brings us to the question whether any translation, in anything like
the proper sense, is really involved in the “mechanism of translation,” as
conceived by the Tartu school (cf. Lotman et al. 1975). Indeed, the mecha-
nism of translation is said to deform the “texts” (artefacts) it helps import-
ing, if it does not send them further to the very mechanism of exclusion.
Thus, in post-Columbian Mexico, old gods like Tonantzin will either be

rejected entirely or, more probably, disguised as (“translated” into) the Vir-
gin Mary. Rather than a translation, we here are met with a disguise: similar
to the scare-crow, which is meant to fool the birds, but not human beings,
this disguise should fool the invaders, but not the original settlers. Whatever
piece of truth there may be in the idea expressed in the saying “traduttore,
traditore,” such is certainly not the point of the act of translation. The
telos or goal of the act of translation is to preserve the meaning of what is
translated as much as possible (cf. Sonesson 2014). At some later point,
the Tartu school recognises that Ego-culture may set up its mechanism for
engendering such “texts” (artefacts) as it has earlier on imported. It is not
clear, however, whether this amounts to setting up a mechanism simulating
the corresponding mechanism in the other culture, or constructing its very
own way of producing these “texts” (artefacts).
But now consider what use the mechanism of “translation” could be in
the case of importing “texts” (artefacts) from Alter-culture, or importing
them to it. Cortés, we said above, wanted himself to be perceived as Quet-
zalcóatl, which is certainly an artefact of Aztec culture. Later on, many
natives of Mesoamerica wanted their depictions of Tonantzin or Coatlicue
to be perceived as representing the Virgin Mary (cf. Gruzinski 1999). This
is not a sign being exchanged for another sign, as in translation, for, in this
case, the sign substituted has to be recognised as being a sign; it appears to
be more like camouflage, which, quite contrary to the sign, can only func-
tion as camouflage when it is not recognised for what it is (cf. Sonesson
2010). This at least seems to describe the kind of cognitive act accomplished
by Cortés in identifying himself with Quetzalcóatl. There is not really any
translation. But, in both cases, an equivalence of sorts is certainly created,
and at some later stage, no doubt, the Virgin Mary really merged with
Tonantzin rather than being simply a camouflage for her. This would then
correspond to a stage in which the culture involved had set up its proper
mechanism for engendering artefacts, which were originally partly foreign,
and partly homely.
In one way or another, both cases involve the cognitive act of understand-
ing (and/or misunderstanding), which has been the subject of much discussion
in hermeneutics (see Ferraris 1996) which is not necessarily to say that it has
been thoroughly elucidated. As it is pointed out elsewhere (Sonesson 2000,
2004), there are at least two different criteria for something being a “text”
of a culture, which should not be confused: being interpretable, and being
highly valued. Sacred language is an obvious case where these criteria do not
coincide. The analysis of this fundamental act, which should not simply be
identified with translation, must be left aside here, although it is an urgent
task for cognitive semiotics.
10.2.4. The Third Globalisation: The Speeding up of

Communication
The third globalisation, and perhaps also the two other ones mentioned
above, may very well be such merely from the point of view of our Ego-
culture, which is egocentric in time as well as in space. The emphasis, thus
far, has no doubt mostly been on the meeting of cultures, and the merger of
their values, being possible without the traveller going out into alien space,
without conquest or immigration, even without the exchange of mates
between cultures, which might have been the original force of integration
and globalisation. Although we physically are located at opposite corners
of the world, we can meet in cyberspace. This computer-assisted utopia
that we are presumably living in today sounds very much like a prolonga-
tion of Marshall McLuhan’s (1962) “electronic age,” inaugurated by what
now seems a very old device, the television, and perhaps going even further
than at the time in the creation of a “global village,” complete with gossip,
mass homogenisation, and all. This was certainly how the old television
age was already interpreted by Neil Postman (1986), who believed that the
dominance of visual media would do away with speaking and writing, and
thus with thinking, although, somewhat paradoxically, he saw some hope
in the then emerging computer culture. But this was a time when computers
were still mainly used for computing, and the Internet was some time away.
Since then, the Internet has no doubt, among many other things, accentu-
ated both the old village culture of gossip and Postman’s “show business
culture” – the latter, notably, in the form of Facebook and Youtube.
Whether it has been mediated by the Internet or if it has mainly followed
the old trajectories of influence from country to country, it is true that knowl-
edge of other cultures has, in some sense, become much more widespread
in recent decades, leading even to the adoption of some “foreign” habits,
echeloned in succeeding decades, each one entering the middle of the scene,
later to fade out lodging itself at the margin or disappearing completely.
There was a time when we were all supposed to live on croissants, delivered,
not from a boulangerie, but bought from the specialist shops called crois-
santerie, which offered these rolls with fillings never heard of in France, and
yet ended up invading also the French capital. Next came the coffee shops
serving espresso, again presenting it in combinations never dreamt of in Italy,
or in other countries, like France and Spain, which were early adopters of
this brew, before it became a fashion (during a much earlier spread of such
a fashion). Then there was so-called Mexican food, which in fact, in the
best case, was really Tex-Mex, offering again ingredients, and combinations
thereof, which would make any Mexican cry of chagrin. It should be clear
that cultural values have here been transformed into market values, and that
they have a sender which is not identical with the culture epitomised: The
United States, which happens to be the main sender culture of our time,
which is the place where these culinary habits first became a fashion, and
where they were deformed, in the sense of the Tartu school, before they were
sent around the world. In the future, of course, the main sender culture of
our world may well become another one, for instance, India or China, but
that will of course not change the essential logic of these cultural deforma-
tions (cf. Sonesson 2002, 2003).
All this should not make us forget a feature of the communicative situ-
ation which, for better or for worse, is rather original to the Internet: that
we are able to communicate from one context of communication, or cul-
ture, to another, without the disparity of presuppositions being immediately
obvious. In a way, this is already true of radio and television (though not
from the original receiver back to the sender), and even more so about the
telephone and the telegraph, though the latter has of course always been
linked to another type of sender situation, the telegraph (in many countries
identical to the post) office. One peculiarity of the cellular phone, in fact,
is that it makes the contexts of sending and reception totally undefined.
And yet, not only the old telephonic device, but also the cell phone, has
a limitation which the Internet does not have: you can only communicate
to one (or several) specific person(s), because you have to know his or her
number to establish the connection, but on the Internet, there is no neces-
sity of knowing an IP-address to be able to intervene in the communicative
world of the other.5 On the Internet, as most clearly epitomised by “chat:”

(i) you can be contacted by a person you do not know, and who does not
know you; (ii) it might be impossible to discover who this person is, even
after having entered into the contact; (iii) not only do you not need to have
any overlapping presuppositions for the act of communication to take place
(cf. Figure 10.1), but you may be unable to discover this fact. Without
denying that this situation could be conducive to some positive encounters
(a kind of digital boulevard, see Chapter 8: Urbanity in this volume), it
is certainly also that which allows the kind of exploitation of children by
adults posing as children themselves which has in recent years been on the
front page of all news reels.
10.2.5. The Third Globalisation: The Hypertrophy of

the Inner Other
And yet, the most salient effect, at least in the long run, of the third glo-
balisation may really be the displacement of whole populations which is
going on at present, and which has had the effect of moving, for instance,
to Europe inhabitants of some Arabic countries whose cultural values could
be seen as rather different from the European ones, causing cultural contacts
which may give rise to frictions, hostility, and misunderstandings – to rejec-
tion and deformation, not only of cultural artefacts but, more importantly,
of the very producers of these artefacts. This is clearly an issue for cultural
semiotics. One obvious negative result of this situation is of course the
increased attraction that right-wing parties have gained among those who
resided beforehand in the areas where these populations have installed
themselves. What is even more serious, however, is that it becomes ever
clearer each day that mainstream politicians do not have any real solution
to this problem either. In this context, we can only try to understand in what
way this is something which has always been part and parcel of cultural
5 Both on the traditional phone, and the cell phone, you may of course receive a
chance call, whether made by children playing, or by some commercial enter-
prise using a list of prospective clients, but once you answer (or even before) you
become aware of this and can choose to discontinue the connection. Something
similar is true of spam mail.
encounters, and why it has now grown into an issue for which nobody
seems to have any cure.
All cultures have had their inner others, that is, groups of people who
possess no territory proper, but occupy that of another cultures (as inter-
preted from within the Ego-culture), although their cultural values are
quite distinct from that of the bigger group. Such radical otherness can by
attributed to somebody who does not (or does no longer) occupy another
space: it may be an inner other, like the Moors in Spain, the Jews, and the
Romani in much of the last two millennia of European culture, and may
even be the servants from the point of the middle classes in contemporary
Mexico, but also in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century (as
seen in some of Ingmar Bergman’s films) – or women in a world largely
defined by men, even though then the inner other is not any longer identi-
cal to a minority (cf. Sonesson 2000, 2013). To take a more topical case,
another example of our inner others are the immigrants (and their children)
in contemporary Europe, in Sweden officially known as “first-to-third gen-
eration immigrants.”
Here otherness is dissociated from space, though it may have a real or
fictive origin in another space. This otherness is not only characterised by
“outsideness,” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1990, 1993; also see Section 1.4.2)
sense, but by some more definitive kind of foreignness. It is not reversible.
This is a non-reciprocal other, that is, an Alius, but it is also something
more specific: an Alius without its own territory, i.e. an Alius that can be
nicknamed Lackland (for a similar distinction, made, however, in quite a
distinct context, see Elias and Scotson 1994 [1965]). The idea of the inner
other lacking its own territory should not be taken too strictly. The ghetto
is an example of a specific territory being assigned to an Alius, though the
territory itself is, at least in part, under the control of the circumambient
space. The first Jewish Ghetto, created in Venice in 1516, as Richard Sennett
(2011) recounts, was built on an island, permitting the bridges to be regu-
larly lifted at night-time, to impede the Jews from mixing with Venetians,
but they could also be lifted to prevent Christian persecution of the Jews.
Interestingly, this seclusion was not something that was only applied to the
Jews, but to all foreigners who, because of their trade, lived in Venice, such
as, notably, Germans, Greeks, Turks, and Dalmatians. As Sennett (2011,
p. 4) observes, “They were permanent immigrants.”
Some such kinds of inner otherness are part of the anthropological uni-
versals present in all societies: women as opposed to men, children as op-
posed to adults. Other divisions are characteristic of particular societies:
slaves as opposed to free men in Ancient Greece, Black and White people,
and lately “Hispanics,” in the United States, servants and their masters in
many historical societies and still in some contemporary ones, rational per-
sons and fools through much of Western history, the “gay” as opposed to
the “straight” in contemporary society, and the “first- to third-generations
immigrants” as opposed to “real Swedes” in contemporary Sweden – which
all manifest the mechanisms of exclusion as described by Michel Foucault
(1971). We are not here concerned with economical differences, or even the
positions occupied in the process of commodity production, as was Marx:
clearly, all present-day existing societies are class societies, but that does
not necessarily mean that there is an Ego-culture of the middle classes for
which the working classes are perceived as “not like us,” as embracing
quite different cultural values, and even at not being quite human. This is
no doubt how servants were considered in Europe until the beginning of
the twentieth century, and as they are still seen today in large parts of, for
instance, Latin America. And there are certainly groups in contemporary
society who look upon immigrants, whether first, second, or third genera-
tion and beyond, as being of this kind – or at least this is suggested by the
growing support for right wing political parties. In this sense, not much
has changed, it seems, from Renaissance Venice.
Even if all societies may have had their inner other, or rather, a series of
differently defined inner others, something seems to be different today. We
can try to understand this here in a rather speculative mode, but no doubt
empirical studies will be necessary to gain a full understanding. Jews and
Romani have always been small groups in the societies in which they are
present, having no necessity of confronting their cultural values with those
of the bigger culture, the Jews because they were in other respects very well
integrated, and the Romani because they were not integrated at all, but
always in principle on the move. This also applies to the kind of immigra-
tion existing in Europe for most of the twentieth century, which was largely
work-related, and involved people at least initially planning to go back to
their own country. An exception to this is no doubt those Chileans and
other Latin Americans who fled right-wing overthrows of their legitimate
governments, for whom the clash of cultures, at least in Sweden, was very
notable. Still, they remained minority groups. As for inner others which
are not minorities, such as slaves, servants, and women, their opposition
was apparently for a long time contained by social structures the values of
which they shared in some recondite sense, even though this was contrary
to their own interest – which means that they were effectively unable to put
these structures in process.
The present situation is different from both these cases, because, first, it
involves the displacement of large parts of populations from their country
of origin, and, second, the displacement affects several different countries,
many of which nevertheless share a traditional Muslim culture, which come
together in the host country, and, third, the values of this culture appear,
from the horizon of the European Ego-culture (and no doubt also from
that of the Muslim Ego-culture) to be radically different from that of the
host countries, bringing these countries into spatial contiguity with societies
whose world views, from the point of view of the European Ego-culture,
appear to be temporally very distant, similar to that of the European Mid-
dle Ages (which was literally the term used by the present Swedish foreign
minister Margot Wallström to describe one Muslim country, Saudi Arabia),
or even unheard of in recorded European tradition.6 This difference of
cultural values concern many different features, some of which can more
easily be historically recovered than others from earlier stages of the Eu-
ropean Ego-culture: the strict observation of religious rituals as a part of
everyday life; the isolation of women from public life, keeping them within
the confines of the homestead, and obliging them to cover themselves in
some kind of “veil” when allowed out of the house; the determination of
marriage partners by the parents, from which boys seem to have more
possibility of liberating themselves than girls; the murder of daughters or
their freely chosen beaux to protect the honour of the family; and so on.
6 From many points of view, there is certainly no homogeneous Muslim Ego-

culture, nor is there, in a similar sense, a European one. However, it will be
remembered that culture, in cultural semiotics, is defined from the horizon of
a given Ego-culture, and from this point of view, the distinction is valid in the
present context.
Several considerations seem relevant here, from the point of view of cultural
semiotics, as we have defined it:
(1) As we have seen above (in Section 10.2.3), a meta-schema of inter-
pretation, allowing the free flow of interpretational schemas from one
culture to another, solved, in colonial Mexico, the issue of integration
between Christian Spaniards and Mesoamerican natives. Why have
our politicians not been able to figure out some kind of meta-schema
for integrating immigrant, and in particular, Muslim, cultural values
with those of the host culture? To tell the truth, nothing indicates that
the meta-schema, which worked in colonial Mexico, was, in any way,
intentionally set up by any of the participants in the encounter. In the
second place, the integration resulting from this meta-schema was not
even partial, but concerned a single feature, and the consequences of this
very limited integration are still part of everyday life in Mexico today.
(2) It may seem that the arrival of the Europeans in pre-Columbian America
should provide a ground of comparison to what has happened in recent
time in Europe. There are several reasons why pre-Columbian cultures
succumbed so easily to a small rag-tag troop of Spanish conquistadores,
some of which are well-known, and others which have been laid bare by
Jared Diamond (2005 [1997]), in terms of “guns, germs and steel,” as
already the title of his book reads. According to such criteria, however,
one would have expected Muslim cultures to be readily absorbed, or
at least dominated, by the mainstream culture. No doubt they are, in
actual fact, dominated by the host culture in many senses of the term,
but not, it appears, from the point of view of cultural values. There is a
difference, of course, in that, at the start, the Spaniards were those who
were without a territory (at least in that part of the world), and who
took up their position in that of the others, while the opposite is the
case in present-day Europe. But this only serves to darken the mystery.
Why are Muslims so good at holding on to their own culture, even in
the face of a massively dominating culture that is keeper of the terri-
tory? Perhaps there is a connection here to the other aspect of the third
globalisation, the speeding up of communications. Unlike the natives of
America, the Muslims were, when living in their own country, already
accustomed to some of the aspects of modern culture, and were thus
able to negotiate them in relation to their own traditional values. When

installed in their host country, they still keep contact with their culture
of origin, not only because they receive news on television from their
old country, thanks to their parabola antenna, but also because trips,
in one or the other direction, between the host country and the country
of origin is now much easier in practical and economic terms, though
often politically hazardous. The Spanish conquerors of America did
not have those facilities, nor did Karl-Oskar and Kristina, the protago-
nists in Vilhelm Moberg’s book series on Swedish immigrants in North
America. Nor did, of course, the native people of the America have any
such advantage, because their own culture, present in the same space,
was already being continuously eroded. It is however hardly possible
at present to say if this is the difference which makes a difference.
10.3. “Traveller, Bring this Message Back to

the Homeworld!”
Much of that which is specifically human, separating us from other animals,
may be due to our repeated encounters with other people, as it first became
widely possible in cities, for those living close together, and identifying more
or less with the same Ego-culture (see Chapter 8: Urbanity in this volume),
and as such encounters were later extended by voyages to territories associ-
ated with other cultures, and by means of information reaching us thanks
to other means of communication from these places. In the first part of
this chapter, we were particularly concerned with the lonely traveller, who
followed a path in a foreign culture, and reported back to his Homeworld,
and then described his experience in terms of the accumulated knowledge
which he or she conveyed, but also applied it in his own progress through
the foreign culture. The Spartan warriors, to whose epitaph the title of this
section refers, were of course unable to report much information back to
their Homeworld (cf. Herodotus 1954, Book 7, p. 494). In the second part
of the chapter, we added a wider perspective derived from the semiotics
of culture, which includes the idea of gathering knowledge and using it
for the interpretation of the other and his or her habits, at the same time
contributing a dimension of identity negotiation, epitomised in the models
joining Ego, Alius, and Alter, and specifying a particular part for Alius
Lackland. Since the negotiations of identity may require a longer exposure

to the foreign culture than is possible during a trip through the land, we
concentrated on cases in which populations have been moved from one
territory to another, which happens in rather different ways in cases we call
conquest and immigration. We also took a “deep history” perspective, sug-
gesting three waves of globalisation, the first one beginning with the path
out of Africa of our forefathers, the second one corresponding to the age of
conquests, and the third one, which conforms to what is commonly given
this name today, involving virtual migrations, as on the Internet, as well as
real ones on the ground – the ground which is the Lifeworld of humankind.
Göran Sonesson
Epilogue
Cultural Evolution: Human History
as the Continuation of Evolution
by (Partially) Other Means
Following Merlin Donald, we have suggested that there is continuity, but

also a qualitative difference, between biological and cultural evolution, the
latter including human history (see, in particular, Chapter 1: Lifeworlds),
but this model leaves many issues unaddressed, notably those stemming
from the reductionism of mainstream evolutionary psychology, and those
involving bio-cultural evolution, and the part played by altruism and col-
laboration in the latter.1 More specifically, there is a problem internal to
the idea of bio-cultural evolution, which concerns the way it can fit in with
evolution as resulting from the survival of the fittest; and there is a problem
that emerges as we project the models of cultural semiotics, particularly the
model of Alter-culture, onto bio-cultural evolution. If, as has been argued
by those defending the part played by altruism in evolution, altruists can
only gain the upper hand in a competition with egoists, to the extent that
they are pitted as a group against other groups, then it seems that the only
possible Alienworld there is must be that according to the model of Alius-
culture. While there have been attempts early on in the tradition of cultural
semiotics to add an evolutionary dimension (notably by Walter A. Koch
1986), these approaches have failed to address any of these weighty issues.
1. Culture as “the Big Mistake” in Evolution

The general aim of this chapter is to situate culture, as a meaningful no-
tion, notably as Ego-culture, Alius-culture, and Alter-culture, on a firm
evolutionary basis. Socio-biology, or as it is nowadays called, evolutionary
1 The author wants to thank Gunnar Sandin and Jordan Zlatev, in particular, for
their very thorough comments on this chapter.
302 Göran Sonesson
psychology, may claim to do something like that, although as an expansion

of nature into culture – which is a way of depriving culture of its specific
meaning. In the following, I do not propose instead to expand culture into
nature. Rather, I want to show that there is both continuity and separation
between nature and culture. Accepting evolutionary theory as a foundation
does not entail embracing socio-biology. Fortunately, we will find some
travelling companions within contemporary evolutionary theory for at least
part of the path on which we are now engaging.2
1.1. Mainstream Evolutionary Psychology

Mainstream evolutionary psychology claims that human beings are adapted
to the environment in which they first evolved, that is, to Pleistocene-epoch
conditions, which is also called the Environment of Evolutionary Adapted-
ness (EEA). Opinions vary as to whether this environment was constituted
of rain forest or some kind of savannah (but see Davies 2012, pp. 86–101,
for some useful remarks, in particular about “biophilia,” the aesthetic ap-
preciation of the ancestral environment). No matter the option taken on this
issue, the conclusion drawn in most textbooks in the domain is that human
beings are badly adapted to present society – where present time started
perhaps some 12,000 years ago, with the beginning of the Holocene.3 Good
arguments for this position could no doubt be adduced: without otherwise
believing in Freud, you can easily agree with his contention, expressed in
the title of one of his books, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), that
we are ill at ease in culture (in whatever sense the latter term is taken). But
must we conclude that history as a whole has been a big mistake? This
is where we can join company with some representatives of evolutionary
psychology: Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005) calls the idea of an
EEA ironically “The Big Mistake Hypothesis,” since it implies that much
2 Whether socio-biology and evolutionary psychology (and a number of other

terms) designate the same speciality or not is a question on which different
scientists involved have variant opinions (cf. Laland & Brown 2011, pp. 5 ff.;
Sterelny & Griffiths 1999, pp. 313 ff.).
3 Contrary to the other textbooks consulted, however, Barrett et al. (2002) suggest
that we are still well-adapted, fitness having simply being redefined in modern
society, so that having less offspring with better future prospects (including
health and education) is being better adapted.
Cultural Evolution: Human History as the Continuation of Evolution 303
of modern human behaviour is erroneous from the genes’ point of view.

They clearly take for granted that the reader will realise the absurdity of
this consequence. It could be added that this also means that part of the
advances described in Donald’s stage model would occur after the period
in which we lived in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and
thus would form part of such as “big mistake.” No matter how ill at ease
we may sometimes be in culture, it is hard to deny that language, writing,
and theory constitute advances, at least from one or another point of view.
Richerson and Boyd (2005) argue that evolution can change things more
rapidly than evolutionary psychologists tend to think, and thus biological
changes may also result from cultural conditions. Some examples they give
are as follows: Modern humans are less robust than other hominids, which
may be a result of having acquired effective projectile hunting weapons.
The human vocal tract has been modified to enhance the possibility to
produce and decode spoken language, which supposes the earlier occur-
rence of (culturally evolved) language. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb
(2005) also mention the spreading of a variant of the lactose gene, which,
following the invention of dairy cattle raising, made certain human beings
capable of absorbing milk even after the infant stage, as well as the sickle
cell gene, which protects against malaria, and which proliferated in human
beings living in deforested areas.4
In this section, I am not out to question evolutionary theory as such,
but a particular conception of evolution, the idea of the “selfish gene.”
The ambition of what we will henceforth call Mainstream Evolutionary
Psychology (MEP) is to fulfil Darwin’s vision of evolution as determining
all of psychology: “the acquirement of each mental power and capacity by
gradation” (Darwin, cited by Buss 2012). The extreme case here is David
Buss (2012), who endeavours to integrate cognitive, social, developmental
(including “Theory theory”), as well as personality, clinical, and cultural
psychology into evolutionary psychology. There is no reason to reject this
overall goal – only the goal of understanding everything from the point of
view of the “selfish gene.” This conception is the ultimate outgrowth of the
so-called “Modern Synthesis,” first presented in the 1930s, which is often
4 For the details concerning these examples, see Jablonka & Lamb (2005).
304 Göran Sonesson
credited with being the simple conjunction of Darwinian evolution and

Mendelean genetics, but which in actual fact implies a lot of other specific
choices, such as the rejection of group selection and of the inheritance of
acquired characters, both playing an important part in Darwin’s original
theory (cf. Grene & Depew 2004; Jablonka & Lamb 2005).
1.2. Darwinian vs. Haldanean Selection

According to MEP, as it is presented not only in popular books (Dawkins
1999 [1989], etc.), but also in university textbooks (e.g. Barrett, Dunbar
& Lycett 2002; Rossano 2003; Buss 2012), we are all more or less uncon-
sciously behaving in a way that will allow as many genes as possible from
our particular set of genes to survive and proliferate.5 This idea is used to
explain many streams of behaviour which otherwise would appear to be
culturally motivated: altruism and empathy, the differences between men
and women, the practice of killing babies of one or the other sex, etc. As
we will see later on in this epilogue, less well known representatives of evo-
lutionary theory have rejected the idea that all selection occurs at the gene
level, but they have not observed that, in relation to classical Darwinism,
mainstream evolutionary psychology amounts to a confusion of causality
and purpose. The only thing necessary for natural selection to work is that
some varieties of a species are more successful in surviving and propagating
their genetic material than others (which is not only the genes, as we will see
presently). It is not necessary, in any way, for these individuals to have the
desire, at any level of consciousness, of being the most successful in surviving
and propagating their genes, as claimed in the above-mentioned textbooks.
As pointed out by Dorothy Nelkin (in Rose & Rose 2001 [2000],
pp. 14–17), this part of the MEP programme is more akin to a religious
doctrine than to a scientific explanation. In fact, it could be argued that it
is reminiscent of the ideas of German Naturphilosophie, and in particular
of the latest avatar of this movement, the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Just
as the latter’s will to live, the desire to proliferate cannot be demonstrated
5 As we will see later on, Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett (2002) has a greater scope than
the other textbooks, taking into account cultural evolution and gene-culture
co-evolution, but it agrees with the other textbooks in the respects discussed in
this section.
to exist, and it cannot be shown to be the cause of any gene pool actually
proliferating. When this idea is expressed in terms of proximate vs. ultimate
causes, and/or as two of Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four ethological questions,
as it often is in the aforementioned textbooks, the upshot only becomes
more mystical. I am not referring to the fact that Tinbergen patterned his
four questions on the model of Aristotle’s four causes, because, from a hu-
manistic perspective, this is often quite reasonable. Nevertheless, when both
causes have to be framed in mind-related terms, we seem to need a primal
mover, which not only moves the behaviour, but even the consciousness,
of the secondary mover.
The only thing that is required for natural selection to work is that
particular gene pools are really proliferating, no matter what the subjects
involved want to happen. A definition of fitness in Darwinian theory may
run like this: “Trait X is fitter than trait Y if and only if X has a higher
probability of survival and/or a greater expectation of reproductive success
than Y” (Sober 2000, p. 71). In this formula, “probability” and “expecta-
tion” are meant to be taken as third person observation statements, i.e. they
are to be statistically evaluated, not as first or second person statements.
Thus, what the subject’s desire is does not count. We should distinguish
two conceptions:
Darwinian selection: those individuals and/or species are fitter which
(1)
de facto turn out to be better able to survive and leave offspring than
others; and
Haldanean selection:6 those individuals and/or species are fitter, and
(2)
will therefore survive and leave numerous offspring, which have a desire
to survive and leave numerous offspring.
This is a difference which makes a difference: without the desire for maxi-
mum offspring guiding us all through life, there is nothing to explain away
altruism, nor justifying the putative differences between men and women.
Only if we admit Haldenean selection can we claim that 1) many sex part-
ners are optimal for males but not for females; 2) the optimal strategy is to
have sex when the female is fertile; 3) women pick men with the same or
higher occupational status, because they can give the best protection to their
6 Named after J. B. S. Haldane. See below.

306 Göran Sonesson
offspring; 4) parents in difficult economical circumstances will choose to

have female offspring (Trivers); 5) It is worth dying to save three brothers,
five nephews, or nine first cousins (according to J. B. S Haldane reviewed
by William Hamilton, who called it “inclusive fitness,” although later on
it has mostly been known as “Hamilton’s rule”).7 This is not to deny that
these or similar precepts have been, and are, current in certain historically
given societies and sub-cultures.
Thus, it is only if we are all trying all the time to have as much offspring
as possible, that the fact of females having a limited number of ova and
males being able to produce any number of sperms must lead to the predic-
tion that females should prefer having only one partner, who can help pro-
tect their reduced number of children, and that males should desire to have
as many partners as possible, to disseminate their sperms the whole world
over. And it is only if we are all geared to desiring maximum offspring, that
the fact of paternity being uncertain and maternity assured predicts that
parents in difficult economical circumstances will choose to have female
offspring. There is no reason to doubt that there have been societies, or that
there will be societies, in which such ideas are the norm, but there appears
to be no justification for taking them to be any kind of human universal.
Indeed, at least in the second case, the opposite norm would seem to have
been more prevalent in historical times. There is, in fact, no evidence at all
for the second proposition, except if we take it to be demonstrated precisely
by the cases (such of those mentioned above), which it was meant to explain
in the first place. But that is circular reasoning.
This is not the place to enter into any detailed discussion of all the issues
involved (first formulated by such luminaries as Trivers, Williams, Tooby &
Cosmides and Hamilton, and reported in Babcock 2000; Barrett, Dunbar
& Lycett 2002; Rossano 2003; Laland & Brown 2011; Buss 2012), but
we should at least pause to ask ourselves at what level of consciousness
this desire to produce maximum offspring could exist, if it had any reality.
Textbooks (e.g. Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett 2002; Rossano 2003; Buss 2012)
actually never raise this question, but, curiously, they sometimes rely on
7 Haldane’s saying (in different varieties) and Hamilton’s mathematical elabora-

tion of it are mentioned in practically all books about evolution, but Nowak &
Highfield (2011, pp. 95 ff.) offer some more detailed background.
explicit surveys, and in other cases argue that we really think otherwise
than is apparent from people’s explicit opinions. If we cannot find this idea
directly given to our consciousness, it is possible that it is not thematic, but
still present at the margins of consciousness, or that it was present there at
some other time but is now forgotten; if so, it should be possible to retrieve
it simply by a shift of the focus of attention (cf. Figure 11.1). Or it is pre-
sent as are the acts of consciousness themselves, i.e. as sedimented experi-
ences (but this seems a strange proposal), and then it should be possible
to recuperate it using phenomenological reduction. Then again it could be
somewhere in the unconscious, and should thus be possible to encounter by
means of hypnosis or perhaps the psychoanalytical talking cure. Finally, it
could be sub-personal, and only observable using brain-scanning devices,
but then it seems strange to call this a kind of desire. No matter how we
put it, it is not clear that such a desire can be found anywhere. This is not
to deny that it can be found, in some individuals or groups, even at the level
of thematic consciousness.
Figure 11.1. Consciousness in the broad sense and the means of making its
different layers conscious in the narrow sense.
When first writing this epilogue, the critique of inclusive fitness I have of-
fered appeared to me to be very much against the current. Since then, how-
ever, I have discovered that the one-time founder of Socio-biology, Edward
O. Wilson, and Martin Nowak (as reported in Nowak & Highfield 2011,
pp. 105 ff.) found each other over the rejection of this notion, Nowak hav-
ing found that it was mathematically unsound, and Wilson that very little
empirical evidence was forth-coming. Indeed, Wilson, who started out as an
expert on the life of insects, noted that insects could not ordinarily recognise
their own degree of relatedness to their nest mates. It can be added that,
308 Göran Sonesson
although human beings may have a somewhat clearer awareness of family

relations, it is not obvious that they obligatorily act on it (and when they
do, our culture has a name for it: nepotism).
So far, we have only addressed the idea of there being some kind of in-
herited will to reproduce, which plays a part in evolution, but more recent
advances in genetics even seem to make nonsense of the whole idea of genes
being the sole carrier of inheritance. With the exception of a few fatal de-
ceases, no trait ever seems to be determined by any single gene, nor does any
gene determine only one trait. Whether genes carry on any inheritance has
been shown to depend on their state of methylation, and those states may
in some cases be acquired by one individual and conveyed to its offspring
(cf. Jablonka & Lamb 1999 [1995); Francis 2011). Indeed, it has been
suggested by Jablonka & Lamb (2005) that there are four kinds of inherit-
ance systems playing a role in evolution: in addition to genetic inheritance,
there is epigenetic inheritance (i.e. situational regulation of gene expression
conveyed, notably, by means of methylation); and there is also information
transmitted by means of behaviour, as well as by signs. Of these, at least
the three last-mentioned may involve inheritance of acquired characters.
2. Culture as Sexual Selection

We have seen that, from the point of view of MEP, culture is a big mistake.
But MEP does not explain how culture is possible. According to Geoffrey
Miller (2000), culture can hardly be justified from the point of view of
natural selection. Instead, it should be seen as a product of sexual selection,
the attempt on the part of males to attract as many females as possible with
whom to produce maximum offspring. This is exactly the kind of thing,
Miller submits, which would be favoured by sexual evolution. Culture,
then, is equivalent to the peacock’s tail. A peacock that is healthy and “fit”
enough to have a long, energy-requiring tail will signal, through its tail,
its high health status (according to Amotz Zahavi’s handicap principle,
referred to in all the above-mentioned textbooks). Most peahens will prefer
the peacock with the long, heavy, bright tail, and will breed with him. More
and more of the offspring will therefore be the offspring of that peacock and
that peahen, and will consequently possess such a long, heavy, bright tail, if
it is male, and prefer peacocks with long, heavy, bright tails, if it is female.
2.1. The Uses of Sexual Selection

According to this conception, culture presents itself as an immense court-
ship ritual. Males compete both by being personally more attractive (and/or,
for instance, by means of the nests they build for the female) and by show-
ing themselves to be stronger than any competitor – more with decoration,
perhaps, in birds, and more with force, for instance, in deer. Like natural
selection, sexual selection is a mechanism that was already described by
Darwin, but Miller makes it play a much bigger part, at least at the level of
culture. Although all textbooks consulted (Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett 2002;
Rossano 2003; Buss 2012) refer to physical differences between males and
females (such as “the waist-to-hip ratio”), they interpret them in terms of
natural, rather than sexual, selection, that is, as indices of health and fertil-
ity. In this respect, Miller offers an alternative.
According to Darwin, males compete and females make their choice.
Miller changes this, in the case of human beings, to there being mutual se-
lection and mutual choice. Indeed, he argues that the breasts of the human
female have become bigger because they have been selected for by males.
In a more classical vein, he also claims that the penis of the human male
has become bigger because it has been selected for by females. It may not
be necessary to conduct interviews with men to confirm the first surmise,
because, at least on the face of it, it is abundantly confirmed by numerous
artefacts of present-day popular culture, such as advertisements and men’s
magazines, which may function in part as a kind of collective (male) uncon-
scious; but there is much less, even anecdotal, evidence to justify the second
one. In any case, none of this goes very far in explaining culture in a deeper
sense, even though it may account for some aspects of pop culture. Miller,
to be fair, also takes up weightier subjects. Thus, he explains morality and
altruism also as handicap principles in sexual selection. Even language is
supposed to have evolved for the sake of courtship, for the illustration of
which Miller offers an in-depth study of rap singing.
From the point of view of evolutionary theory, however, it is important to
ponder why there should be mutual choice and mutual selection in human
beings, if such mutuality does not exist in any other species, or at least not
in any other mammals, as Miller maintains. This in itself requires explana-
tion not easily formulated in terms of either natural or sexual selection.
310 Göran Sonesson
One cannot help wondering whether Miller introduces this postulate simply
out of political correctness. His examples of changes in the human female
due to male choice are very sparse. On the other hand, it could be argued
that, at least in historical times, female choice of mates has not figured
very prominently (although one may be wrong to think male choice has
had a much bigger part to play, at least in the sense of a male being able to
choose his own mate). The least that can be said, however (though never
in textbooks of evolutionary psychology) is that nowadays “competition
between women for male partners is as active as it is among men for female
partners” (Davies 2012, p. 39).
Rossano (2003), on the contrary, argues that there is a “cultural diphorm-
ism” (analogous to “sexual diphormism”) in the cultural sphere, because
most artists, authors, and composers have been males. Curiously, Miller
(2000, p. 275) himself seems to forget his own argument for symmetrical
choice and selection, going on to make the same observation as Rossano.
The classical quip to this observation is of course that women, at least in
historical times (and if we are talking about artists, authors, and composers,
we are clearly talking of rather recent historical times), have not had much
possibility within the given social frames to develop and/or manifest the
relevant abilities. Davies (2012, p. 125) rightly observes that, if we do not
restrict the notion of art to High Art in the sense of the Western pantheon, a
lot of art, such as needlework and weaving, has actually been accomplished
by women. If we take into account that Miller here talks about culture rather
than art (but we may suspect that he confuses the two), a more fundamental
repartee will nevertheless be that all the really important cultural inventions
are collective and/or anonymous, which means we cannot know to what
extent they were initiated by women or men. The point is not only that, even
though most composers may have been men, it does not follow that music
as such was invented by any single man, although Greek myths would have
it that way. More fundamental, from the point of view of the origin of cul-
ture, however, are inventions such as life in society, child rearing, the public
sphere as opposed to the private one, the distinction between Alius-culture
and Alter-culture, etc. A concrete example here might be allo-parenting, the
custom to have all children of a group being cared for by all adults together
(cf. Hrdy 2009). It does not make much sense to ask who invented any of
these cultural instances, let alone if the inventor was a man or a woman.
2.2. Facing Up to History

In historical times, at any rate, both men and women have undoubtedly
made their choice (even though they may have had unequal possibilities of
imposing it). More importantly, however, this means that both men and
woman have had to develop their strategies for being selected by the other
sex. An original trait of human sexual selection, at least in historical times,
is the unequal distribution of the two mechanisms for motivating mate
choice among the sexes. Human beings seem to be the only animals in which
competing with force and competing with beauty has been divided between
the sexes.8 All through our known cultural history, males have competed
for the female’s choice by vanquishing other males, and females by being
more perceptually attractive than other females. It is a rather curious fact
that this division of strategies between the sexes, apparently specific to
human beings, has never been commented on in any study of evolution,
as far as I have been able to ascertain. It is possible, no doubt, that this
particular division of work between the sexes is a result of the original
kind of marriage contract current among human beings, as suggested by
Terrence Deacon (1997), or some similar occurrence, but neither Deacon
nor any other author seems to have made any comment in this sense (see
Chapter 2: Mimesis).
How far back in history and prehistory such a division of strategies
between the sexes goes is impossible to know. It is not clear, for example,
whether the so-called Venus figurines testify to the existence of such a female
strategy at the time of their creation, which would mean between 22,000
and 24,000 BCE in the case of Venus von Willendorf and between 35,000
and 40,000 years ago in the case of Venus vom Hohlen Fels (see Chapter 5:
Art). The male strategy long ago diversified into other ways of showing
prowess than using force, as for instance obtaining a prestigious title or
making a lot of money. For the last century and a half, women have increas-
ingly shown themselves to be very good at doing those things, too, although
nothing suggests they have adopted this behaviour as a mating strategy. If
8 Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett (2002, pp. 93 ff.) are seemingly the only ones of our
authors to note this difference, although they interpret it in terms of health and
thus reproductive success – which it to say, in terms of natural, rather than
sexual, selection.
312 Göran Sonesson
we are to believe (following the general thrust of Miller’s argument) that

men (still) do these things merely as a mating strategy, one would expect that
women’s abilities in the relevant domain would have the effect of rendering
the male strategy void. Whatever its origin, the male strategy in historical
times has no doubt had other motivations than seducing females, even
though the latter may have been an additional benefice. Just like Miller’s
own claims, those just formulated remain merely surmises.
In any case, it is not easy to believe that all of human culture is the result
of sexual selection and thus, by definition, without any use – except to im-
press the opposite sex. On the contrary, the invention of culture seems to
be something very useful – witness mimesis, pictures, language. No doubt
human culture could have developed from sexual selection, later on be-
coming useful for other purposes, as in what Stephen Jay Gould (2002)
describes as “spandrels” (or exaptions): in the literal sense, spandrels are
curved areas of masonry between arches supporting a dome that arise as a
consequence of decisions about the shape of the arches and the base of the
dome, rather than being designed for the artistic purposes for which they
were often employed. Analogously, Gould argued, biological traits may be
useful for other purposes than those from which they originated.9 As Kim
Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths (1999, pp. 217 ff.) judiciously observes, the
relevant distinction is really between what something was adapted for at
some earlier point in time, and what it is adaptive for at present.
Perhaps the problem with Miller’s theory, as with the whole of standard
evolutionary psychology, is the rejection of group selection. The usefulness
of culture becomes more obvious from the point of view of the group.
3. Multi-level Selection Theory

Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson (1998) have claimed that, if the unit of
selection is the individual (or the gene), egoists will always outcompete altru-
ists, but in competition with other groups, altruists will gain the upper hand.
To see what this means, we have to backtrack a little. The unit of selection
9 Strictly speaking, spandrels are a special kind of exaptions (cf. Gould 2002,
pp. 84 ff.), but we do not need to discuss this difference here. See also Davies
(2012, pp. 123–126) for similar remarks.
and “fitness” is that which is struggling to survive and to reproduce. This

could be the individual organism, which was Darwin’s favoured case. It could
be the group. The latter case was invoked favourably by Darwin but has been
treated as being on a par with the perpetual movement machine since the
publication of G. C. Williams’ seminal book in 1966 (as referred to in Sober
& Wilson 1998; Grene & Depew 2004). Still, it is an alternative that has
been newly invigorated from the 1990s onwards, much thanks to the work of
Sober and Wilson (1998; cf. Wilson 1997). A more familiar suggestion, since
the advent of MEP, is that the unit of selection is the gene. According to Sober
and Wilson this is “normal science” (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) in evo-
lutionary psychology today. According to Gould (2002, p. 31) it is even “a
basically conservative adumbration of Darwin’s own spirit and arguments.”
3.1. In Defence of Group Selection

Another alternative, defended by Sober and Wilson, is “multilevel selection
theory,” according to which the unit of selection can be any of the above.
Gould (2002, p. 21) goes even further, suggesting that there are “several
legitimate levels of Darwinian individuality (genes, cell-lineages, organisms,
demes, species, and clades).” Most notably, however, the unit of selection
can also be the group or, in Gould’s terms, the deme, usually defined as
the local populations of organisms of one species that actively interbreed
with one another.
A very particular group is the family, in the extended sense of the term.
Hamilton coined the term “inclusive fitness” (later on “kin selection”) for
the idea of egoism being extended to all individuals sharing (more or less)
the same genes. According to what the textbooks (e.g. Barrett, Dunbar &
Lycett 2002; Rossano 2003; Buss 2012) call Hamilton’s rule, altruism can
evolve if the cost to the self is outweighed by the benefit to the recipient,
multiplied by the probability that the recipient carries the same gene. In this
sense (as Haldane said before him), Hamilton thinks it is worth dying to
save three brothers, five nephews, or nine first cousins, who have an unequal
share of the same genes as the Ego. Textbooks in evolutionary psychology
never recognise the fact that Hamilton later came to the conclusion that
genetic relatedness made no difference – as long as the others could be
recognised as altruists.
314 Göran Sonesson
Sober and Wilson (1998), who mention Hamilton’s change of heart,

claim that in a group of altruists and egoists, the altruists give one fitness
point to themselves and to all the others; and the same time, they lose two
fitness points, and do not receive any from the egoists; and in this sense,
egoists are more fit than altruists. They go on to argue, however, that, when
pitted against a group of egoists, the group of altruists will achieve the
highest fitness points. This could be seen as the evolutionary explanation
of the Canonical Model of Cultural semiotics. If so, the empathy within
the group only comes at the price of a lack of empathy in relation to other
groups. In the version of cultural semiotics presented earlier (in Chapter 1:
Lifeworlds), I supposed that Ego-culture did not have to be forever opposed
to Alius-culture. Alter-culture, in this sense, is an extension of Ego-culture,
with some restrictions, to some other cultures. If globalisation has any real
sense, it would mean the extension of Alter-culture to all other cultures.
But, if group selection theory is right, this can never happen, because altru-
ism and empathy only make sense from an evolutionary point of view in
opposition to other groups. It is possible that genetic-cultural co-evolution
may overcome this obstacle, as it has probably done with many others, but
it is not very clear how this can be done.
3.2. From Group to Society

It is interesting, nevertheless, that David Sloan Wilson (2002), who col-
laborated with Elliott Sober in the book referred to above, has made a very
forceful argument for Culture being Ego-culture (although not in those
terms): using the privileged example of religion to show the development of
social groups, Wilson identifies his theory with that of Durkheim. Religion,
to Durkheim, it may be remembered, is the veneration of society by itself.
As Wilson remarks, this explains the horizontal relation, between mem-
bers of the same religion (and/or society), but leaves the vertical dimension
(to God) more or less unexplained. The latter applies to both Durkheim
and Wilson (see Chapter 7: Religion). For our purpose, which is rather the
explanation of society than religion, the horizontal relation is the essential
one. Unlike Sober and Wilson (1998), however, Wilson (2002), and more
explicitly Wilson (1997), claims to explain, not only altruism, but also
society as such. It will be noted, however, that a social group in this sense
cannot simply be identified with the deme, because social groups, and in
particular societies and/or cultures, in the sense of Durkheim, cannot be
reduced to locally interbreeding organisms, precisely because they are sup-
posed to be “superorganic,” i.e. having an existence of some sort above the
levels of the individuals making it up.
This encounter between evolutionary theory and Durkheimean sociology
is doubly thought-provoking: not only was Durkheim at the foundation of
what Saussure built, and thus of all of structuralist semiotics, but his idea of
society (or “collective representations”) as a reality sui generis (very roughly)
corresponds to the idea of sedimented meaning according to Husserl, as well
as to one possible interpretation of distributed cognition and/or extended
mind as described by contemporary cognitive science. The problem is that
this explains society at the level of langue, not at the level of parole, as
Durkheimean communion, not as Tardean conversation (cf. Tarde (1910
[1901]). As more thoughtful thinkers in the structuralist tradition (such as
Bühler 1934; Hjelmslev 1971 [1959]; Coseriu 1973 [1962]) have demon-
strated, both levels (and perhaps some intermediate ones) are necessary.
Durkheim and Wilson also leave unresolved the issue of those individuals
who do not simply accept to be part of the social consensus. There may not
be as many deviant opinions, and as much “creativity,” around, as post- and
pre-structuralists want to believe, but the general maintenance of consensus
still has to be explained. Following upon their suggestion of an interaction
between natural and cultural evolution, Richerson and Boyd (2005) sug-
gest that culturally evolved norms can affect fitness if norm violators are
punished, e.g. exiled into the wilderness or thrown into prison. Once again,
this sounds very much like the original Tartu model of cultural semiotics, if
we admit that individuals (something which would easily be accepted by the
structuralists) are instances of “texts” being rejected into Non-culture (see
Chapter 1: Lifeworlds). It also presents society in ways that are reminiscent
of Michel Foucault’s (1975; 2008) conception of discipline and governability,
according to which we are all made to conform, without realising it, to the
rules prescribed by society.10 The positive side of the same vision, however, is
that cultural norms for cooperation will favour individuals who are disposed
10 Beyond Richerson & Boyd and Foucault, this of course brings to mind Hobbes
and his Leviathan, to which we will return at the end of this chapter.
316 Göran Sonesson
to cooperate. This may not sound as positive as it was meant, if we think

about the content over which societies often choose to cooperate, such as the
rejection and persecution of other cultural groups, but the idea of coopera-
tion still appears to be essential to what it means to be human.
4. Natural and Cultural Evolution

Embracing the theory of cultural group selection, Richerson and Boyd
(2005) have suggested that “genetic” evolution is not necessarily as long-
winded as is often claimed, and that therefore cultural and “genetic” evo-
lution both may succeed and influence each other. Some examples of this,
mentioned above, are the adaptation of human anatomy to the availability
of effective projectile hunting weapons, and the modification of the human
vocal tract to facilitate the production of spoken language.
4.1. The Dialectics of Nature and Culture

Another case of natural and cultural co-evolution could be the development
of physical attractiveness in human females, and of physical strength in hu-
man males, once their mating strategies changed (as discussed in section 2.2
above). A possible instance of this could be the development of female facial
neotony (as described by Thornhill & Grammar 1999), which then would
be additional to the general neotony that has been claimed to characterise
human beings in relation to other apes.11 Davies (2012, p. 108) observes
that, even if you do not believe gender to be an entirely social construction,
you may “be irritated by the implication that women’s biological destiny
is to primp and pluck themselves and to squeeze into corsets that make
their waist-to-hip ratio lower, for the sake of men’s delectation.” This is a
curious criticism to direct at MEP, whose main claim is that men have to
busy themselves, not, perhaps, trying to be beautiful, but in other ways,
to be chosen by women, just as is the case of most other animal species.
Yet, what Davies’ phrase seems to be a fair description of is the customary
11 The idea that certain proportions, notably of the head, in children and in the
young of many animals, are felt to be “cute,” for which Konrad Lorenz (1943)
coined the term “Kindchenschema,” has since then been experimentally verified;
cf. Hückstedt (1965), referred to in Sonesson (1989), etc.
behaviour expected of women for the last few millennia, or, in other words,
that part of human evolution which is historically known. For the last
century and a half, on the one hand, the cultural interventions of women’s
liberation movements have no doubt tempered the differences between the
sexes, while, on the other hand, the same age-old female ideal has been
culturally acerbated by the usage to which female bodies have been put
in the ever-present advertisements, as well as in men’s magazines and, not
least, fashion as spread by women’s magazines, fashion shows, and the
shops selling fashion wear. Whether these cultural changes will feed into
any natural evolution is probably not something we will have occasion to
discover in our lifetime.
Richerson and Boyd (2005) suggest that cultural evolution depends at
least in part on the same mechanisms as natural evolution.12 At first, this
would seem to bring us back on familiar ground: the notion of “meme,”
as a unit of cultural selection, comparable to the gene as a unit of natural
selection, first defined by Dawkins (1999a [1978]; cf. Blackmore 1999). In
a later definition, Dawkins (1999b [1982], p. 290) describes the meme as
“a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate
gene, and as such naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ conse-
quences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”
Nevertheless, Richerson and Boyd (2005, pp. 69 ff.) proceed to reject the
notion of “meme” (cf. Boyd & Richerson 2005, pp. 420 ff.), stating two
reasons for this decision: First, cultural selection does not involve small,
atomic parts like genes, but holistic structures; and, second, culture is not
faithfully copied, contrary to genes.
As stated, these critiques do not seem to be as weighty as suggested. As
to the first argument, Richerson and Boyd may be right in their surmise
that cultural evolution does not proceed in an atomical way, but by means
of bigger chunks. Indeed, it might make use of schemas, i.e. hierarchically
organised structures of meaning, as suggested by a number of authors from
Frederic C. Bartlett (1932) to Teun A. van Dijk and Walter Kintsch (1983).
12 In the following, we will use the term “natural” or “biological evolution” to

talk about what Boyd & Richerson call “genetic evolution,” to avoid confusion
with the Husserlean term of “genetic phenomenology,” which would ordinarily
involve cultural evolution.
318 Göran Sonesson
On the other hand, genes would also seem to be biologically atomic, but
their content is clearly very complex, as we see from the fact that one gene
may determine several features of a person, and one feature may depend
on several genes. More to the point, Jablonka and Lamb (2005, p. 210)
observe that the idea of a meme “leaping from brain to brain tells us very
little,” because cultural features are really reconstructed by individuals and
groups, in given social and ecological circumstances.
As for the second argument, genes are not always faithfully copied, but
are subject to mutation. Perhaps what Richerson and Boyd really want to
say is that genes are expected not to change, whereas our idea of a tradi-
tion supposes changes to happen all the time. However, the latter may
not be the idea of a tradition in what is often called traditional societies.
Again, Jablonka and Lamb (2005, pp. 210–213) would seem to offer a bet-
ter formulation of the difference, when they claim that, unlike genes and
photocopies, cultural features are dependent on their specific content (and,
it could be added, context) for their transmission: thus, for instance, the
child’s acquisition of a nursery rhyme will depend on the story it tells, its
melody, the child’s musical talent, and so on. Genes are not that particular
about the content and the circumstances.
4.2. Factors in Cultural Evolution

The essential contribution of Richerson and Boyd (2005), however, is to
suggest that, along with a mechanism similar to natural selection, culture
also depends on a number of other impacting factors. The cultural evolu-
tionary forces discussed by Richerson and Boyd (p. 69 ff.) are as follows:
random forces; decision-making forces; biased transmission; and natural
selection. These forces are all of several kinds. Random forces may be dis-
tinguished into two subcategories: first, cultural mutation, where the effects
are due to random individual-level processes, such as misremembering an
item of culture. From a more classical, sociological or hermeneutic, point
of view, this seems to be the stuff of which rumours and, more widely,
traditions, are made.
Second, there is cultural drift, which is the effect caused by statistical
anomalies in small populations. For example, in “simple societies,” as Rich-
erson and Boyd say (meaning, I take it, societies consisting of few members
and/or societies without a state, which are often not so simple in other
respects) some skills, such as boat building, may be practised only by a few
specialists. If all the specialists in a particular generation happen, by chance,
to die young or to have personalities that discourage apprentices, boat build-
ing will die out. The latter is an example given by Richerson and Boyd, but
it should be easy to adduce other examples: thus, following Kuhn’s famous
suggestion about other scientific domains, structuralist linguistics seems to
have died out that way within the tribe known as linguists. It might be ob-
jected, however, that, once we have culture, matters become more intricate:
we still have all the books of the structuralists, and we can always start gloss-
ing them over again. But, even in “simple societies,” it may not be so easy
to get rid of boat building altogether, if the terminology is preserved in the
language (see Chapter 2: Mimesis). It might even be said that boat-building
cannot disappear as long as boats are around. But, the existence of boats
may not be enough to tell you how to make them – and the same goes for
boat-building terminology, which is not necessarily sufficient to mirror tacit
knowledge. Thus, for instance, we know that, during the Classical time, the
Mayas constructed the pyramids in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Guatemala, but,
according to all ethnological testimonies, their latter-day descendants believe
they were constructed by some supernatural stripe of dwarfs.13 Whether it
is a question of boat-building, or pyramid-building, nevertheless, having
access to a written account (and even a series of pictures), and knowing
how to read it, makes all the difference.
Next, there are decision-making forces, which are the kind of impetus for
change that is more familiar to us from ordinary history writing. Richerson
and Boyd describe them all as guided variation and as non-random changes
in cultural variants by individuals that are subsequently transmitted. Ac-
cording to Richerson and Boyd, this force results from transformations
during social learning, or the learning, invention, or adaptive modification
of cultural variants.
13 In addition, this particular example seems to testify to some additional principle

being at play, familiar to the structuralists, according to which the pyramids,
being so immense, and so difficult to climb, must have be constructed by people
even smaller than you and me, which thus had to be supernatural to be able to
do it.
320 Göran Sonesson
Biased transmission is of three kinds. There is content-based (or direct)

bias, in the case of which individuals are more likely to learn or remember
some cultural variants based on their content. Content-based bias can result
from calculation of costs and benefits associated with alternative variants,
or because the structure of cognition makes some variants easier to learn
or remember. This is reminiscent of the schemas determining remembering
posited by Bartlett (1934); also, the example given by Jablonka and Lamb
(2005, pp. 211 f.) of children learning certain kinds of rhymes appear to
be of this kind.
The second kind of biased transmission is the frequency-based bias,
which Richerson and Boyd describe as the use of the commonness or rarity
of a cultural variant as a basis for choice. For example, the most advanta-
geous variant is often likely to be the commonest. If so, a conformity bias
is an easy way to acquire the correct variant. This seems to correspond to
a lot of factors that have been adduced in social psychology, and perhaps
especially mass psychology (Le Bon, Tarde, etc.; see Moscovici 1985).
There is also model-based bias, which Richerson and Boyd describe as
the choice of traits based on the observable attributes of the individuals
who exhibit the traits. In this view, plausible model-based biases include a
predisposition to imitate successful or prestigious individuals, as well as to
imitate individuals similar to oneself. This factor seems to overlap with the
second one, and again it is reminiscent, in particular, of mass psychology.
Finally, natural selection is said to determine such changes in the cultural
composition of a population that are caused by the effects of holding one
cultural variant rather than others. The natural selection of cultural variants
can occur at the individual or group level. Here, it would seem, natural
selection is not really operating at the same tier as the others factors, but
rather is something that may be applied to these factors, and determine their
chances of survival, in other words, a kind of principle of meta-selection.
This idea is explicitly stated by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (2001, p. 178):
“Thus, each cultural decision must pass two levels of control: cultural
selection acts first through choices made by individuals, followed by natu-
ral selection, which automatically evaluates these decisions based on their
effects on our survival and reproduction.”14 Natural selection, as pointed

out by both Sober (2008), and Jablonka and Lamb (2005) can apply to
anything, including culture, which is subject to innovation (variation),
transmission (heredity) and differential multiplication and survival. This
would seem to bear out Gould’s (2002, p. 59) contention that the “one
long argument” which Darwin claims to be making all through his seminal
book is “an attempt to establish a methodological approach and intellectual
foundation for rigorous analysis in historical science” overall, although
biological evolution is the example given. Nevertheless, to the extent that
the selection itself involves what Richerson and Boyd call “decision-making
forces,” it may turn out to be more Lamarckian than Darwinian in kind,
in the received sense of these terms (in spite of Darwin in fact believing in
Lamarckian evolution).
Still, a more general point can be made about decision-making forces,
somewhat in the spirit of the remark about cultural drift above. The fact
that history, contrary to evolution, plays out in the period of mythical and
theoretic memory, in Donald’s sense of the terms, cannot be neglected. Jona-
than Israel (2001; 2006; 2010; 2011) has written several books in which
he tries to show that, not only the French Revolution, but also our present
day ideas of tolerance and democracy, are the result of a long process in
the domain of ideas, originating in the Early Enlightenment, that is, more
in the times of Spinoza and Bayle, than in the period of High Enlighten-
ment, which we associate with Newton, Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.
According to Israel, the former phase was more radical (although the late
Diderot continued this tradition) and it has had more thoroughgoing con-
sequences for our present day Western ideal of equality between citizens,
as well as between different cultures, ethnical groups, and sexes.
According to Israel (2006), no classical social cause can explain the French
Revolution, since the masses had been poor for a long time, without causing
any uproar. The idea that it is possible to overthrow authorities, however,
had gained more and more support since the middle of the seventeenth
century, because of mostly prohibited writings during this period. We can
know this, Israel (2006, pp. 15 ff.) contends, by means of a “history of
14 It is not clear, however, why the choices at the primary stage have to be made
by individuals, rather than groups.
322 Göran Sonesson
controversies,” that is, because of our knowledge about the general reac-
tion to the ideas presented by some contentious thinkers, such as Bayle,
Spinoza, and their numerous followers, particularly in Holland and, later,
in France. Readers of most books about the Enlightenment no doubt carry
with them the impression that Spinoza’s books fell on deaf ears, and that
Bayle’s message was only a very vague inspiration for the Enlightenment as
we know it, but Israel (2001; 2006; 2010; 2011) shows that both authors,
singly or in combination, inspired a lot of followers, as manifested in the
books published at the time, and also provoked a lot of printed responses,
some of them by well-known authors, but many others now forgotten. He
also demonstrates, also from the printed evidence offered by the defenders
of the status quo, that these ideas, in the end, sifted down also to people
who themselves were unable to read.
This, at first, may suggest that mythical memory, in Donald’s sense, is suf-
ficient to explain the change, and, more specifically, moving to a Bakhtinean
terminology, that the presence of dialogue is. At present, obviously, we can
only know about these controversies because books have been preserved
from that period testifying to the controversies. But, unlike what was prob-
ably the case during the Middle Ages, it seems clear that, in this early
phase (viewed from our perspective) of the age of printing, controversies
were also increasingly played out, and not only transmitted, by means of
pamphlets and other publications. Thus, we are already at the Donaldean
stage of theoretic memory. Books and other kinds of prints thus emerged
as the principal kind of organism-independent artefacts or, to use Donald’s
term, exograms.
In the present context, our problem is whether all this shows the preva-
lence of decision-making forces in human history. If Israel is right, there
can be no doubt that each publication of a controversial book, and each
pamphlet answering it, and the answer to that pamphlet, involved several
decisions, especially in a context when, even if you published in Holland,
you could end up being forced into exile (and in other countries put to
death). Indeed, the same destiny often met the printer and publisher, and
no doubt also some distributors, so their decisions should not be counted
as naught. Thus, there is no doubt a continuous chain of decisions being
involved. But, supposing this chain of decisions to be the cause of the
French Revolution, and even of our contemporary ideas of human rights,
then, clearly, the composite thrust of this chain of decisions can hardly be
considered a decision of its own. Rather, it is already part and parcel of
genetic and generative sedimentations, in the phenomenological sense of
these terms (see Chapter 1: Lifeworlds), even if only within a particular
socio-cultural Lifeworld – one which, at the moment of the French Revolu-
tion, widened appreciably, and then grew even wider during the twentieth
century, in particular, it seems, after the Second World War, then it became
equivalent to Occidental values. Of course, each time an individual decided
to participate in the storming of the Bastille, or when somebody at present
decides to fight for human rights, this tradition is reactivated, becoming a
decision-making force of its own.
In conclusion, then, it can be said that there is a reason because of which
evolution, or “deep history” is not history proper: the latter is made up of
a dialectics of memory devices, stemming from mimetic, mythic and theo-
retic stages of evolution, and their reactivation in interaction and dialogue.
4.3. The Roots of Alter-culture

Of course, humans are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together
to do all sorts of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those
inside “the group”. Indeed, recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what
politicians have long known: the best way to motivate people to collaborate and
to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten us
(Tomasello 2009, pp. 99 f.).
With reference to factors such as those distinguished by Richerson and

Boyd (2005), we could look upon Alter-culture as being a kind of cultural
development, which may have its roots in historical time. If we suppose
Sober and Wilson (1998) to be right about the rules of group selection,
Alter-culture (or perhaps even Ego-culture) would reign supreme within the
culture that defines itself in relation to another, but only at the expense of
Alius-culture characterising the relationship between cultures. This poses
the problem of how Alter-culture can be generalised and even globalised, as
it is in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There could hardly be a single
event, and certainly not the Declaration of the Rights of Man, whether we
refer to the version of the French Revolution, or that of the United Nations,
which accounts for such a change, but perhaps there could be an instance, or
perhaps a period in time, that starts a self-perpetuating tradition. If so, there
324 Göran Sonesson
could be both a conformity bias and a model bias serving this tradition.
But these factors only start working from the time of the Enlightenment,
and then are more widely distributed with the declaration of the United
Nations. The Enlightenment is no doubt an important phase in this process,
because it first codifies the ideal of universal Alter-culture, but it seems
hardly feasible for these ideas to come out of thin air in the late eighteenth
century – or even in the middle of the seventeenth century, as suggested by
Israel (2001; 2006; 2010). Rather, the air must have been in the process of
thickening for some time already.
So we still have to account for the origin of Alter-culture. It might be
suggested that religion (and perhaps Christianity in particular) is such an
initiating moment. Even though it clearly did not work that way in the mind
of Columbus, it did so not much later in the argument formulated by Las
Casas, according to which the Indians have souls and thus are human beings
(though even Las Casas did not extend this description to Black people).
Saint Paul tells us, it is true, that we should make no distinction between
Greek and Jew, men and woman, etc., because we are all one in Jesus Christ.
This implies, however, the emergence of a new culture, Christian culture
with its own Alius-culture. Saint Paul extends Ego-culture to all Christians,
but excludes those of other faiths. Using other terms, Wilson (2002) would
seem to suggest that religion rather serves to fortify the opposition between
Ego-culture and Alius-culture. Las Casas, in fact, may be part of a move-
ment away from Saint Paul.
On a more general note, an anthology on altruism in world religions
(Neusner & Chilton 2005) concludes that there is no such thing, first,
because Alter (“your neighbour”) is rarely somebody outside the com-
munity, but in particular because all religions take for granted that good
acts always are retributive, in the other world, or in the Karma account,
etc. In the Middle Ages, when to us black people were counted among
more exotic creatures such as men with dog’s heads, and those having their
faces on their breast, as belonging to “the monstrous races” (see Friedman
1981; and Section 10.2.1), the former (and perhaps also the latter, in an
equivalent fashion) were expected to turn white once they were converted
into Christianity. This no doubt makes more tangible the idea of religion
being the new Ego-culture.
On the other hand, as William Scott Green points out in the conclusion
to the altruism anthology (Neusner & Chilton 2005, p. 191), “the resources
for benevolence, charity, and human caring [are revealed] in the foundation
texts” of most religions (see Chapter 7: Religion, for more support of this
thesis). Nevertheless, as Israel (2006, pp. 135 ff.) observes, while thinkers
such as Spinoza and Bayle argued for the freedom of thinking in general,
including that of atheists, mainstream Enlightenment, as we know it from
Locke, Voltaire, and others, never went further than accepting other reli-
gions (and with some reserves). This was no doubt a big advance in relation
to the position of the Church in earlier periods, but it does not suggest that
the impetus for tolerance came from religion.
A more plausible, and also more concrete, initiating event susceptible of
having been repeated many times in early history could be the exchange of
mates, or, using Claude Lévi-Strauss’ term, which corresponds to the most
common case, the exchange of women, between different ethnic groups.
According to Lévi-Strauss (1958, p. 329), there are three vast, more or less
equivalent, circulations going on in the world: the circulation of words, of
merchandises, and of women. Jakobson (1990, pp. 19–20, 460–461) took
this idea up and extended it: the three circulations concern messages (not
only verbal signs), commodities (which comprise goods and services), and
mates (men or women as the case may be). Elsewhere (Sonesson 2010),
I have criticised these parallels: leaving aside the question about merchan-
dises in this context, it should be obvious that, in the kinship system, women
do not signify at all; it is the act of exchanging them that carries meaning.
Apart from the kinship system as such, however, it is easy to imagine a way
in which a woman, arriving from one tribe to another, carries meaning in
herself: speaking another language, having different customs, etc., she may
appear as a “non-text” (that is, as a stranger), to the members of the receiv-
ing culture. Indeed, she may even carry meaning as the individual person
she is: even after reducing the message to make translation possible, as Yuri
Lotman (1979, p. 91) so nicely puts it, the message may still contain indica-
tions for reconstructing the personality of the other. In any case, this would
make the woman an instance of Alius, and more precisely, an inner other, as
defined in Sonesson (2000): someone living on the territory of Ego-culture,
but not as a member of Ego-culture (see Chapter 10: Encounters). The same
thing could be true, from different points of view, and to various extents,
326 Göran Sonesson
of slaves, of marginal groups such as Jews, Roma people, and others in

historical societies, and even of servants in relation to their masters in the
nineteenth century.
At one level, the exchange of mates may seem to be where human be-
ings are similar to other animals: in many species, either the females or the
males leave the group at some point apparently with the aim of integrating
themselves into another group. The difference, however, may be that, in the
case of human beings, the old network is not given up when the new one is
established, at least in the ideal case. The dialogue between the cultures goes
on first, no doubt, at the mimetic and mythic levels, but then increasingly
at the theoretic level (see Section 4.2 in this epilogue). And this continuing
dialogue brings about genetic and, later on generative, sedimentation (see
Section 1.2.2). A tradition, not only of exchange, but also of (at first rather
limited) understanding, is initiated. And this is the beginning of history.
Contrary to Columbus, Cortés had a stake in this business or, at least,
took stock of being so involved. Malintzin (more famous as “La Malinche,”
i.e. in modern Mexican Spanish, “the traitor”), who was his translator, was
also his mistress. He also set the guardians to converse with the prisoners.
These were some of the reasons that I claimed that Cortés, contrary to
Columbus, embraced an Alter-model of culture (see Chapter 1: Lifeworlds,
and 10: Encounters). But his use of the model was of course incidental to
an overarching goal defined in terms of the Alius-model: to get the most
out of the conquered populations for the sake of (the masters of) his own
culture (see Chapter 10: Encounters). Cortés did not stay on in Mexico, but
others did, and they ended up integrating their networks. This process was
no doubt precipitated because of many frequency-based and model-based
acts of imitation, but, in order to transcend Cortés’ attitude, numerous
minor acts of decision-making would also seem to have been required.
This whole process does not only require memory (which human beings
have more of, and more variegated, than other animals, as we have learnt
from Donald), but perhaps also a sense of what is relevant. In Mexico,
the result was mestizo culture, which is opposed to what remains of the
original inhabitants (a kind of residue concept), not to the universal Alter-
culture – that is, not to the “brotherhood of man,” even in the limited sense
of purposefully (but, at least partially, de facto) merging the values of the two
cultures. In the history of humanity, that may still be an advance (repeated
in many historical variants elsewhere in the world). It is an advance in the

sense of combining, even if mostly without any explicit decision-making,
values of at least two cultures. And it may thus have prepared the way for a
wider notion of tolerance and understanding. And since people like Cortés
and Las Casas lived in a period very conspicuous for exograms, particularly
in the form of prints, their experiences were handed down through the ages,
and thus must have contributed to the validity of the model of Alter-culture.
5. The Paradoxes of Gamesmanship

There is something paradoxical about the defence of group selection presented
by Sober and Wilson: like the work of Richerson and Boyd, it is based on
theoretical models derived from game theory, which, in spite of its name, is
the favoured paradigm for understanding the functioning of capitalist society,
and just marginally some games. More specifically, it is based on zero-sum
games, where it is only possible to win to the exact extent that someone else
loses.15 In other words, they are all involved with variations on a slightly more
complex case, the so-called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which, out of two
prisoners, the one who incriminates the other will receive a lighter sentence,
unless the other also incriminates him, in which case both will receive harsh
sentences, whereas none of them will be imprisoned, if both keep silent (see
Nowak & Highfield 2011, pp. 1–17).
5.1. The Stand Outside the Game

If evolution is about the survival of the fittest, it may seem that this paral-
lel is not fortuitous, as suggested early on by the current known as Social
Darwinism, usually attributed to Herbert Spencer, which is reputedly a de-
formation of Darwin’s view.16 Yet, Gould (2002, p. 60) has claimed that in
actual fact Darwin dedicates much more space in his famous book to defend
15 Game theory allows for other models than zero-sum games, but both Sober &
Wilson and Richerson & Boyd only make use of the latter. We will return to
this issue below.
16 Nevertheless, it also seems to be largely in accord with the more recently popular
view of “Machiavellian intelligence” (Byrne & Whiten 1997 [1988]), which
would seem to acerbate competition, although relying in part on others not
being as “Machiavellian” as oneself.
328 Göran Sonesson
natural selection as “a side-consequence of selfish ‘struggle’ for personal

advantage at the lowest organismal level” than is usually acknowledged.
If so, it seems that, in this respect, Sober and Wilson remain essentially
true to Darwin: to them, the basic unit of selection is still, in a sense, the
individual, and not the group. Their claim is that life within fully altruistic
groups is better for the individuals making up this group than it would be
for individuals in totally egoistic groups. In spite of Wilson’s later overtures
to the Durkheimean side, it is not a question of what is good for the group –
or rather, it is only a question of what is good for the group as a function
of what is good for the majority of individuals taken separately. In other
terms, it does not involve the survival of the group as an integrated whole
of intersubjectively connected individuals, but the survival of the individu-
als making it up.
If empathy is possible, in any of the senses envisaged above (see Sec-
tion 1.1.4), this vision of human society is unfeasible, at least if we take
empathy, even in the most basic sense, to have been around for some time
already – and, if we are to believe Franz de Waal (2006; 2009), empathy, at
least in some sense, is already present in non-human apes. Without referring
to game theory, Sterelny and Griffiths (1999, pp. 151 ff.) early on in their
book consider the claim that groups may be units of selection, generally
accepting the arguments, but stating that the same facts may be alternatively
explained by thinking of any given individual in the background of his/
her relation to another individual, or, more precisely, taking the popula-
tion structure to be part of the environment in which selection takes place
(cf. Sterelny & Griffiths 1999, pp. 166 ff.).17 Nowak and Highfield (2011,
pp. 21–114, 270 ff.), on the other hand, have tried to extend the metaphor
of the Prisoner’s dilemma, supplying some of the features that render it
improbable as a model of society. One obvious problem with the Prisoner’s
dilemma is that both subjects involved are isolated, not knowing about
17 Game theory is discussed in a much later chapter on modelling, suggesting that

to Sterelny & Griffiths (1999, pp. 234 ff.) the use of this model does not have
any theoretical consequences. But this does not make sense: if you are arguing
for group selection, or some alternative explanation of the same facts, using
game theoretical models, you are committed to the presuppositions of those
models, which takes for granted that the individual is the point of departure.
the decisions of the other, which is a rather unrealistic condition in soci-

ety. First, knowledge of the decisions of the other may be added (“direct
reciprocity”). Second, there may be an indirect reciprocity, resulting from
the reputation (given language or some other sufficiently complex semiotic
system) of the other conveyed to other members of society. Finally, there
is also the simple effect of being neighbours. According to Nowak and
Highfield (2011), this is sufficient for collaboration to emerge.18
Without any stake in game theory, Michael Tomasello (2008; 2009)
has repeatedly insisted on the importance of cooperation in the evolution
and development of human beings. On the basis of experimental evidence,
Tomasello (2008, pp. 177 f.) maintains that cooperation is a human speciali-
ty, even when compared to other primates. When cooperation has a concrete
goal, chimpanzees synchronise their behaviour skilfully; however, when the
social game has to be performed for its own sake (e.g. using a trampoline
to bounce up a ball together), they show no interest, unlike 14–24 months
old children. In Brian C. R. Bertram’s (1982) terms, this would seem to
mean that other apes are capable of mutualism (when both individuals gain
from the collaboration) and reciprocal altruism (where the one who helps is
repaid at some later time), but not of helping for helping’s sake (cf. Dunbar,
in Wilson & Keil 1999, pp. 201 f.; Nowak & Highfield 2011, pp. 21 ff.).
In a later book, Tomasello (2009) claims that chimpanzees are as advanced
as we are in the business of helping, but not as far as informing and sharing
are concerned: that is, they would assist another ape in obtaining an object,
but not in conveying the information on how to obtain it to him.19 In this
same publication, and in his most recent one, Tomasello (2009; 2014) goes
on to claim that it is precisely in mutualism that the big difference between
human beings and nonhuman apes consists. In the experimental literature,
he contrasts the case of apes being able to accomplish a joint endeavour
pulling in a basket containing food, but only when the parts of the food
18 Nowak & Highfield (2011) actually list five factors, one of which is group
selection, which is precisely what we are trying to get beyond here, and the
other being kin selection, which they think have a very limited part to play. See
Section 1.4.2 above.
19 Whatever its status, kin selection (“inclusive fitness”), i.e. helping others having
(partly) the same genes, is not what makes the difference here.
330 Göran Sonesson
pertaining to each of them is clearly divided beforehand, whereas children

can accomplish the same feat, even when the food subsequently has to be
divided. At a more ethological level, Tomasello (2009; 2014) claims there
are no real “shared cooperative activities” among nonhuman apes, those
hunting activities look like it’s really a case of other apes following up on
the initiative of the first one, which is seen from the fact that, in the end, the
ape which ends up with the prey only grudgingly lets the other apes share in
it. Human beings, on the other hand, Tomasello maintains, systematically
engaged in such shared cooperative activities, as epitomised by the stag hunt,
from the start, and this is the beginning of collaboration which, by means
of joint and later collective intentionality, leads to society and culture.20
Whether Tomasello is unfair to our fellow apes or not is not the essen-
tial issue at present: it is that game theory must suppose all altruism to be
reducible to mutualism and reciprocal altruism (however much Sober and
Wilson appear to say something very different in the parts not expressed
in game theoretical terms of their book). Interestingly, Tomasello (2014)
suggests that, when turning to game theory, we should really go shopping
for models of collaboration, not competition. Still, not even mutualism may
be sufficient to explain the daily on-going cooperation that we call society
and culture. It is a fact that human beings live in societies, which presup-
pose large-scale cooperation, increasingly between non-kin (especially in
city life), and without specific offers of reciprocity and/or mutualism. This
may, most of the time, be low-level collaboration, but collaboration it still
is, and the possibility of it has to be explained.
5.2. In-between Rousseau and Hobbes

The stag hunt is a Rousseauian ideal; perhaps not a common state in nature (Silk,
in Tomasello 2009, p. 117).
In the end, it all boils down to an opposition familiar from the history of
ideas. Tomasello (2009, p. 3) points out that this discussion partakes in “one
20 In her comments to Tomasello, Joan B. Silk (in Tomasello 2009, pp. 113 ff.) sug-
gests cases of collaboration like the stag hunt are too uncommon as experiences
to help explaining the origin of human society. It is not obvious that there is any
way to decide whether Tomasello or Silk is right here. Undauntedly, Tomasello
(2014) maintains the same theory.
of the great debates in Western civilisation […] whether humans are born
cooperative and helpful and society later corrupts them (e.g. Rousseau), or
whether they are born selfish and unhelpful and society teaches them better
(e.g. Hobbes),” and he professes to “defend a thesis that mainly sides with
Rousseau’s take of things.” Here, Tomasello is clearly thinking about the
Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (first pub-
lished in 1754; see Rousseau 1965), and perhaps less of the author of Le
contrat social (from 1762; see Rousseau 2001), as opposed to the Leviathan
of Thomas Hobbes (published in 1651; see Hobbes 1968). Also Tzvetan
Todorov (1995) criticises those who believe that man starts out alone and
egotistical, and then is forced to adapt himself to a life in society. He pro-
fesses to side with Adam Smith and Rousseau (again the Rousseau of the
Discours) who claim human beings need the other, to the point of creating
the other’s image within themselves. Neither Tomasello nor Todorov really
agree as much with Rousseau as they think, because they clearly do not
believe that society necessarily has a negative influence: indeed, Tomasello
explicitly claims, as we have seen (in Section 5.1 in this epilogue), that so-
ciety adds to the cooperativity with which human beings are born.
Although empathy does not necessarily lead to altruism, our earlier study
of empathy theories (in Section 1.1.4) should predispose us to follow the lead
of Rousseau, Todorov, and Tomasello. The idea can be verified on the level of
ontogeny, from the triad made up of the object observed, the caretaker, and
the child, where attention is distributed among the two participants and the
object, as observed in child psychology from Bates (1979) over Tomasello
(1999; 2009) to Zlatev (2009) and Lenninger (2012). As I have pointed out
elsewhere (in Section 1.1.4 above, and in Sonesson 2013), in this triad we
have the prototypes of the categories Ego, Alter, and Alius, including the
continuous shift in the occupancy of the two first positions. In a similar vein,
Todorov (1995, pp. 15 f., 31 ff., 34 ff.) criticises the Hegel/Sartre kind of
dialectic between Ego and Alter as a combat where one of the participants
must always lose. In this reading of Hegel, Ego can only be recognised as a
person by subduing the other; but once the latter has been subdued she is a
Non-person, and her recognition of the other as a person has lost its value.
Todorov points out that we are always with the other. There is, so to speak,
no moment in time in which the other is not already there. Todorov (1995,
pp. 39 ff.) quotes evidence from developmental psychology, which shows
332 Göran Sonesson
that the first other is not a man met in combat but the mother taking care
of her child. And there is no problem in being recognised as a person: in
fact, already after a few weeks the child tries to catch its mother gaze and
is rewarded by the mother’s attention. In the perspective of evolutionary
psychology, Todorov’s and Tomasello’s claim may appear to reduce to kin-
selection. This is not true, however, if we accept the idea of allo-parenting,
that is, the idea that, in earlier human societies, as also among recent hunter-
gathers, children are taken care of by any and all members of society, male
and female, kin or not (see Hrdy 2009).
This may be the point to return to the idea that selection relevant to
society really occurs at the level of the individual conceived within the en-
vironment formed by the group population (cf. Sterelny & Griffiths 1999,
pp. 166 ff.). Another way of putting this may be to say that the group is
structured, and that each individual makes up a node in that structure. We
are not interested here, however, in the structure as a whole, but in what
results for each individual from being a node connected to all the other
nodes. Like in the functionalist structuralism of the Prague school, the
function is defined as the place of an element in relation to the structure
as a whole of which it is a part, seen from the point of view of the element
(cf. Mukařovský 1978). In the present case, the element is the individual,
which is what is foregrounded, without giving up its connections to other
elements of the structure, that is, it is that which is attended to, the func-
tional part in the structure. To the extent that the element is a subject,
we may also, following the phenomenological tradition, call this relation
intersubjectivity (see Chapter 2: Mimesis; and Zlatev 2008a; 2014b).
As Tomasello (2009, pp. 1 ff.) also says, human beings are both “born
and bred to help.” If we were really born into understanding and collabo-
rating with the other, there would seem to be no need for the elaborate
justification of altruism from the egoistical interests of the others, which is
the basis of the Wilson and Sober scheme. The only way of reconciling such
a fact to Darwinism is to suppose that the survival with which we are con-
cerned is that of the group, i.e. the society, not the individual. Whatever its
interest to the individuals making up the community, the best interest of the
community necessarily lays in collaboration. In this sense, the collaborative
capacities of human beings as a group, into which we are born, according to
Tomasello, are certainly part of the explanation for the resounding success
(so far) of human beings in the survival of the fittest on this earth.
According to Tomasello, however, we still also need to be bred into
collaboration. This means that the cultural development of Alter-culture,
which we have sketched above, taking our inspiration from Richerson and
Boyd, still is relevant. Nevertheless, Tomasello (2009, pp. 99 f.) also ends
up with the same conundrum as Sober and Wilson: he concludes that “the
best way to motivate people to collaborate and to think like a group is to
identify an enemy and charge that ‘they’ threaten us.” In other words, in
order to breed individuals into cooperation, the obvious way is to organise
them into a group dedicated to an (often deadly) competition with other
groups, that is, as an Ego-culture opposed to an Alius-culture. And this
means that, in spite of Tomasello’s claim, competition reigns supreme over
cooperation.
This is where the essentially semiotic aspect of human history intervenes:
it is because we have access to the (genetic) mimetic or mythical memory
of earlier exchanges with other human groups, which are handed down
(generatively) in history, and later because these exchanges are preserved
(generatively) in theoretic memory (see Section 4.3 in this epilogue), that
we are in due course able to take a structural view of different cultures,
comparing them not only in diachrony but also in synchrony, probing their
universals, but also their differences, and thus, by learning from tradition,
arriving at a hermeneutics of cultures, which allows for the existence of
Alter-culture, besides Alius-culture, and, in fact, for everything in between
these two ideal types. The discovery of really alien cultures, particularly
in the Americas, was no doubt a fundamental moment in the history of
this hermeneutical tradition (see Section 10.2), as was the long struggle for
equality and tolerance, which we know as the Enlightenment, occupying
the best scholars from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of
eighteenth (see Israel 2001; 2006; 2010; 2011), then continued, in retro-
spect rather less intensely, in different Marxist and other Leftist movement
during the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This is the kind of history
that irrupted, late in his life, into Edmund Husserl’s (1954) phenomenology
of consciousness, prompting him to diagnose what had happened before,
and reaffirming the Enlightenment creed, yet not offering any real way
forward. But the struggle goes on.
334 Göran Sonesson
In the end, therefore, we have to give both Hobbes and Rousseau their
due. And add to this the teachings of another classical author, Johann Got-
tfried Herder, according to whom, all through history, what goes on is the
continuous education of humankind, as in the title of his book Auch eine
Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774; see Herder
1968).
6. Culture Out of Life

In this book, we have explored parallels between biological evolution and
cultural evolution, while also trying to isolate what is specific to the latter,
particularly as (more or less deep) human history. We have been dedicated
to two intertwining concerns: how to understand human history, as part
and parcel of evolution, and yet as something qualitatively different from
what has gone before, at least from the somewhat precarious standpoint
(as conceived within the whole of evolution) of human beings; and to argue
for the feasibility of group selection, without the limitations set by game
theoretical models, notably those based on competition, and, in particular,
for the possibility of empathy, not only within a culture, but extending
beyond its bounds. When scrutinising the contenders for playing the part
of cultural evolutionary forces, as discussed by Richerson and Boyd (2005,
p. 69 ff.), we emphasised that what makes human cultural evolution dif-
ferent is the presence of mimetic, mythical, and theoretic memory, both
within the life of the individual (genetic sedimentation) and that of the
historical existence of the group (generative sedimentation). Finally, while
considering the possibility for Ego-culture of relating to the other as Alter,
and not only as Alius, we once again pointed to the presence of exchanges
between culture, at both the mimetic-mythic and the theoretic level, and
both as genetic and generative sedimentation. In both cases, in fact, we
have pinpointed the importance of semiotic resources in the emergence and
maintenance of human specificity.
In so doing, we have initiated the quest, not only for bringing the two
contemporary transdisciplinary perspectives of cognitive science and semi-
otics together, but to connect these two modern approaches to the classi-
cal tradition of the humanities, the tradition of tradition itself, familiarly
known as hermeneutics, according to which the understanding of other
cultures and their artefacts takes its point of departure in an understanding

of human beings as human beings, of ourselves as human beings, and of
others as human beings – with the small provision that the human beings
about whom we are talking emerged out of animal life, evolution, and more
or less deep history.
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Index of Subjects
A Art, 14, 17 f., 38 f., 98, 103, 114, 116,

Actor-network theory, 192, 263 121, 123–139, 144, 198, 233 f.,
Adaptation, 16, 63–65, 67, 81, 138, 246 f., 250 f., 283–285, 287, 310
168, 273 f., 316 Art, Institutional theory of, 132
Aesthetic value, 18, 123 f., 132, 136, Artefact, 10, 15, 23, 38 f., 45, 61, 71,
169 84, 86–88, 95 f., 98, 101, 104, 106,
Aesthetics, analytic, 126, 132 108 f., 112, 115–118, 120, 124,
Affordance, 51, 60, 90, 103 f., 110, 128, 133 f., 136, 138, 144, 162, 164,
194 f., 199–204, 209, 214, 217, 227 194 f., 203, 214, 229, 231 f., 266,
Agora, 220 f., 223 283–286, 290 f., 294, 309, 322, 335
Algebra, 236, 239 f. Artification, 134 f., 139, 144
Alien-culture, 20, 268, 275 Artificial Intelligence, 9
Alienworld, 16, 29, 34–36, 61, 185, Artworld, 128
288, 301 Astrodynamics, 251 f.
Alius, 16, 21, 28, 36–38, 40, 47–49, Attention, 13, 27, 66, 70, 99, 101,
53, 57–59, 61, 150 f., 161, 185, 187, 103, 125, 152 f., 158, 195, 203,
277, 285, 288–290, 295, 299, 301, 206 f. 215, 217, 222, 248 f., 261 f.,
310, 314, 323–326, 331, 333 f. 271 f., 307, 331 f.
Alter, 16, 20 f., 28, 36–38, 40, 47–61, Aurignacian, 115–118
150 f., 161, 184–188, 277, 285, Autobiographical memories, 148,
288–291, 299, 301, 310, 314, 323 f., 155
326 f., 331, 333 f. Axial Age, 19, 163, 171, 175–180,
Alter-culture, 16, 20 f., 28, 36 f., 40, 182, 185, 188 f., 220
47 f., 53, 59, 61, 184–188, 289–191, Axiomatic-deductive, 238–240
301, 310, 314, 323 f., 327, 333
Altruism, 16, 20 f., 48 f., 67, 184, B
261, 301, 304 f., 309, 312–314, Baroque, 131, 251 f.
324 f., 328–332 Beauty, 18, 123–127, 135 f., 141, 209,
Altxerri caves, 117 311
Analytical geometry, 237 Bible, 7, 186, 250, 279 f.
Anatomy, 65, 211, 245–247, 252, Bio-cultural, 16, 19–21, 64, 182, 188,
278, 280, 316 209, 211, 229, 232, 263 f., 268, 301
Anthropological, 99, 104, 132, 134, Bio-cultural coevolution, 19 f., 188,
202, 223, 296 229, 232, 263 f., 268
Apollo 11 cave, 139 Biodiversity, 260
Arbitrariness, 64, 73–75, 77 f., 82 Biology, 158, 184, 231, 233
Aristotelian physics, 231 Blombos caves, 108 f.
386 Index of Subjects
Borrowability, 87, 92 f. Commens, 26

Botany, 256 f. Communication, 14, 16 f., 37–40, 45,
Boulevard, 19, 193–200, 202–207, 63, 68 f., 71, 73, 76–78, 80 f., 89,
209 f., 212–215, 217, 221 f., 227, 97, 112, 118, 120 f., 144, 148–150,
294 154, 158, 161, 212, 216, 220,
223, 237, 242, 261, 268 f., 275 f.,
C 282–285, 289 f., 292–294,
Camera obscura, 246 f. 298 f.
Canonical model, 31–35, 288 f., 314 Communicative sphere, 120
Cartesian natural philosophy, 240, Comparative method, 85, 118
251 Computer science, 9
Castillo, El, 139 Conceptual vision, 271
Çatalhöyük, 19, 192, 224–226 Concretisation, 38, 283 f.
Categorisation, 20, 70, 78, 200, 235, Conquest, 178 f., 292, 300
243, 255–260, 264, 271 Consciousness, 11, 18–20, 24 f., 44,
Causality, 20, 147, 159, 235, 247– 52–55, 58, 63, 66 f., 81, 101 f., 145,
249, 254, 264, 304 153, 166, 169–171, 174 f., 181–
Cave paintings, 99, 113, 117, 119, 185, 188, 204, 210, 215, 226 f., 229,
139, 142, 161, 265 235–237, 242, 256, 267, 304–307,
Cellular phone, 293 333
Ceremonial centre, 225–227 Content, 12–14, 24, 64, 66, 68, 74,
Chauvet caves, 116 76, 90, 100, 113, 130, 138 f., 146,
Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, 115, 119 152, 160, 166, 264, 276, 302, 316,
Chemistry, 233 318, 320
City, 19, 29, 188, 191–196, 198–200, Cooperation, 21, 241, 262, 315 f.,
203–205, 209, 211, 214 f., 222–224, 329 f., 333
226 f., 230, 330 Criticism, 14, 51, 56, 85, 131 f., 171,
Classification, 20, 160, 235, 249, 177 f., 188, 316
256–261 Croissanterie, 293
Clock, 245, 258 Cultural artefact, 87 f., 96, 124, 203,
Coffee house, 19, 199, 204, 212, 217, 232, 294
221, 227 Cultural encounters, 16, 20, 243,
Cognitive anthropology, 9 267 f., 275, 277
Cognitive artefact, 101 Culture, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 16–18, 20 f.,
Cognitive history, 264 f., 268, 271 23 f., 28–40, 43, 45, 47 f., 53, 59–61,
Cognitive linguistics, 9 63–65, 67–69, 71, 81–84, 87–91, 93,
Cognitive science, 8–12, 23, 28 f., 48, 95–99, 101, 104 f., 108–116, 118,
61, 145, 165, 170, 232, 266, 285, 120 f., 134, 138, 142 f., 145 f., 149,
315, 334 151, 157 f., 162, 165, 172–175, 178,
Cognitive semiotics, 7–11, 18, 21, 184–188, 191, 193, 196, 199–202,
23 f., 61, 99, 101, 124, 169, 185, 292 204 f., 207 f., 210 f., 214, 224,
Collective memories, 148, 156 229–233, 236 f., 239, 241–243, 245,
Index of Subjects 387
255–259, 262, 264–269, 271–278, Ethno-linguistic group, 86

281–283, 286–293, 295–304, Ethogram, 7
306, 308–310, 312, 314–319, 321, Ethological, 134, 138, 305, 330
323–327, 330, 333–335 Euclidean geometry, 239, 245, 251
Culture-free, 87, 89, 95 Evolution, 7–9, 11, 15–21, 23 f., 28 f.,
37, 40, 42, 44–48, 60 f., 63–65, 71 f.,
D 80 f., 83 f., 87 f., 97, 100–102, 104,
Decembrism, 194 109 f., 120, 123 f., 133–139, 144–
Deduction, 232 146, 156, 158, 160–165, 167–172,
Dehumanisation, 273 175, 182–185, 188 f., 191 f., 202,
Distributed cognition, 10, 20, 29, 209, 211, 220, 224, 226, 229, 231 f.,
86, 161 f., 235–237, 241, 245, 247, 234 f., 250, 254, 256, 260–266, 268,
264, 315 278, 301–304, 306, 308–318, 321,
Dubois collection, 109 323, 327, 329, 332, 334 f.
Evolution, Bio-cultural, 21, 64, 182,
E 209, 211, 301
Early modern, 219, 234, 236, 247, Evolution, Cultural, 7, 15–19, 21, 60,
262, 269 65, 71, 97, 110, 120, 124, 146, 156,
Ego, 16, 20 f., 28, 32 f., 36 f., 40, 162, 167 f., 170, 175, 184 f., 189,
48–50, 52–56, 58–61, 150 f., 162, 202, 226, 231 f., 254, 266, 301, 304,
184 f., 187, 268, 275, 277, 285, 315–318, 334
288–292, 295–297, 299, 301, 313 f., Evolution, Natural, 317
323–325, 331, 333 f. Evolutionary Cognitive science of
Ego-culture, 16, 20 f., 28, 36 f., 40, religion, 165
48, 53, 59, 61, 185, 268, 275, 277, Exchange of mates, 278, 282, 292,
289, 291, 295–197, 299, 301, 314, 325 f.
323–325, 333 f. Exogram, 23, 45, 87, 161 f., 237, 322,
Egypt, 61, 124, 130, 230, 238, 281 327
Embodied mind, 8, 28 Experience, 11, 15–17, 24, 26, 30,
Empathy, 16, 20, 37, 48–53, 55 f., 37 f., 46, 51, 56 f., 59–61, 66, 75,
58–61, 82, 148, 182, 261, 273, 304, 97, 100–105, 107 f., 111, 113 f.,
314, 328, 331, 334 117, 120 f., 123, 126 f., 133, 138,
Enlightenment, 7, 10, 126, 185, 141–143, 145, 147–154, 156, 160,
321 f., 324 f., 333 169 f., 180–183, 191, 193–196,
Episodic memory, 40, 43 f., 66 f., 203–205, 209, 214 f., 220, 222,
154, 156, 182 234 f., 239–243, 245, 250 f., 254–
Episodic stage, 44 256, 261, 263, 268–272, 274–276,
Episteme, 233, 258 278 f., 299, 307, 327, 330
Essentialist definitions, 128, 131, 133 Exploration, 134, 241, 246, 256, 267,
Etchings, 110, 118, 120 269, 271
Ethical universalism, 19, 176, 184 f., Expression, 12–14, 60, 64, 66, 68,
188 72–76, 80, 100, 113, 115, 125, 127,
132 f., 135, 140, 147 f., 154, 161, History, Deep, 46 f., 61, 121, 137,
196, 219, 233, 251, 255, 308 220, 224, 278, 281, 300, 323, 335
Extended mind, 20, 29, 235 f., 315 History of mentality, 47
Extended model, 36, 288 f. Homeworld, 16, 29, 34 f., 61, 185,
278, 288, 299
F Hominine, 18, 84, 86, 89, 115, 133 f.,
Fable, 252 137, 139, 144, 146, 158, 160 f., 211,
Fantasy, 102, 107 229, 232
Figurative, 105, 109, 112, 114–120, Homo erectus, 41, 46, 65, 99, 110,
139 f. 134, 279
Figurines, 117, 119, 139–142, 161, Homo ergaster, 40 f.
311 Homo neanderthalensis, 279
Flaneur, 193, 206, 211, 215 Homo sapiens, 29, 46, 110, 114, 163,
Focal awareness, 117 229, 279
Folk taxonomy, 259 f., 272
Fossil, 80, 109 f., 137, 249 f., 258 I
Iatromechanics, 247, 252–254
G Icon, iconic, 13–15, 46, 64, 70, 73–79,
Game Theory, 21, 327–330 88 f., 100 f., 105, 121, 141, 144
Geology, 243, 248, 250 Iconic order, 100, 105
Geometry, 29, 37, 110, 120, 135, 192, Iconicity, 64, 72 f., 75 f., 81, 84, 88 f.,
197, 202, 237, 239 f., 245, 249, 251, 96, 105, 111, 119
255 Idealism, 14, 234, 236
Gestalt psychology, 9 Identity, 43, 145, 149, 151, 159 f.,
Gesture, 41, 44–46, 68, 70, 72, 81, 172 f., 223, 299 f.
83 f., 95, 143 f., 171, 217, 227 Illusion, 103, 107 f.
Globalisation, 186, 278–280, 282, Imitation, 17, 41 f., 63, 65–68, 70 f.,
287, 292, 294, 298, 300, 314 81, 83 f., 95, 124, 126 f., 133, 158,
Göbekli Tepe, 19, 192, 225 f. 171, 274, 326
Gorham’s cave, 110 Immigration, 205, 278 f., 282, 292,
Graphical manipulations, 109 296, 300
Gravettian, 115, 140 Index, indexical, 13–15, 46, 73 f., 78,
Greece, 124, 134, 179, 221, 226, 296 112, 117, 160
Groupe μ, 100 Indexicality, 64, 72, 111 f., 249
Group size, 211 Induction, 232
Infinitesimal calculus, 237 f.
H Inner other, 205, 294–297, 325
HADD, 167 f., 170 Institutionalisation, 235
Hebrew prophets, 175, 179 Intentionality, 24, 330
Hierarchy, 64, 68–70, 72, 75, 79, 257 Intersubjectivity, 11, 19 f., 48, 63,
Hieroglyphs, 238 67, 70, 81, 146, 156, 161, 166, 173,
194, 229, 235, 261–264, 268, 273, 173, 182, 188, 203, 230, 232,
328, 332 236–238, 241, 243, 260, 271, 274,
Inverted model, 33 285 f., 321–323, 326, 333 f.
Irony, 252 Mental image, 67, 235, 237, 269
Israel, 177–180, 186 f. Mesopotamia, 230
Metaphor, 9, 20, 48, 80, 158, 172,
J 192, 198, 207, 230, 233, 235, 248,
Jupiter, 244 250–252, 254 f., 264, 283, 328
Metonymy, 252
K Mexico, 33, 205, 208, 213, 273, 277,
Kabbalah, 238 286 f., 291, 295, 298, 326
Kinship, 17, 83, 87, 90 f., 160, 257, Microscope, 239, 242, 244
261, 325 Middle Stone Age, 109, 111 f., 120
Mimesis, 16 f., 42, 45, 63–73, 75, 79,
L 81, 87, 98, 124–126, 133, 136, 139,
Lascaux, 136, 139 144, 158, 170–172, 174, 312
Leipzig-Jakarta list, 17, 83, 87 f., 95 Mimesis, Bodily, 16 f., 63–73, 75, 81,
Lifeworld, 9, 11 f., 15 f., 19, 21, 23 f., 139, 144, 171
26–31, 34 f., 57, 61, 86, 97, 101, Mimesis hierarchy, 64, 68–70, 72, 79
105, 107 f., 119, 142, 148–150, 166, Mimetic stage, 41, 44, 69, 83, 171 f.,
201 f., 215, 229, 234, 239, 251 f., 182
254–256, 259–261, 266, 275, 287 f., Moon, 243 f.
300, 323 Moral orders, 173
Linear perspective, 245 More geometrico, 239
Linguistics, 9 f., 64, 84 f., 95, 123, Moscow-Tartu school, 8, 282
136, 319 Multimodality, 65, 72 f., 82, 84
Linnaean systematics, 259 f., 270 f. Myth, mythic, 16, 19, 40, 42, 44, 61,
68, 83, 85, 104, 107 f., 134, 145,
M 158 f., 171–175, 182, 189, 233, 243,
Magdalenian, 115 f. 272, 280, 289, 310, 321–323, 326,
Mainstream Evolutionary Psycholo- 333 f.
gy, 7, 20, 135, 301–304 Mythic stage, 44, 68, 83, 85, 145, 172,
Making special, 138 182, 189
Market place, 193, 212
Mathematics, 234, 236–240, 245, N
251 f. Narrative, 16, 18 f., 42, 44 f., 67–72,
Maya, 33, 225, 289, 319 104, 123 f., 129–134, 136 f.,
Mechanistic natural philosophy, 239, 144–149, 151–162, 164, 171–174,
246, 249, 251 f., 254 182 f., 186, 188, 198, 241, 247, 250,
Memes, 168, 231 280
Memory, 18, 23, 27, 37, 40–44, 66 f., Narrative connection, 123, 129, 133,
104, 134, 145, 151–157, 159–161, 136
Narrativity, 18, 42, 44 f., 83, 145– 235, 237, 242 f., 245, 247, 255, 264,
147, 149, 153 f., 156 267–271, 276, 284
Narratology, 145, 153 Permeability, 217, 227
Natural meanings, 100 Phenomenology, 8–12, 16, 23–26,
Natural selection, 164, 231, 304 f., 28, 30, 38, 44, 53, 55, 58 f., 61, 66,
308 f., 317 f., 320 f., 328 101, 117, 124, 143, 148, 150, 201,
Natural semantic metalanguage, 86, 203, 223, 225, 232, 283–285, 307,
95 317, 323, 332 f.
Neanderthal, 110, 279 Philosophy, 9–12, 14, 26, 48, 125,
Neo-Kantianism, 10 132, 174 f., 179, 231, 234, 238–240,
Neolithic, 124, 136 245 f., 251 f., 265, 304
Niche, 7, 17, 29, 83 f., 86, 89 f., 95, Phylogenetics, 84 f.
121, 191, 193, 231 Physics, 11, 26–28, 231, 233, 245,
Niche, Socio-cultural, 84, 86, 90, 95 251 f.
Ninatic, 85 Physiology, 252
Nomenclature, 257 Pictorial conventionalism, 141–143
Non-figurative, 112, 114, 117–119, Pictorial organisation, 106, 108, 118
139 Pictorial perception, 107
Pictorial representations, 139, 141,
O 143, 147, 161
Objectivity, 239 Picture-object, 102
Ochre, 109 Picture-subject, 102
Other, otherness, 49–59, 149–151, Picture-thing, 17, 97, 102
159, 184, 187, 200, 206, 209, 217 f., Pigment, 99, 111
263, 268, 273–276, 288, 294–296, Piropos, 207 f.
298 f., 313 f., 325, 331 f., 334 Plastic order, 105 f., 108
Ownership, 207, 216, 218 Platypus, 260
Play, 168, 171 f., 207, 209, 294
P Pleistocene, 229, 302
Palaeolithic, 8, 98 f., 109, 111–114, Plinian races, 280 f.
118, 120 f., 124, 139, 141 f., 229, Pneuma, 254
241, 265 f. Positivism, 234, 236
Pantomime, 66, 68, 171 Poststructuralism, 234
Parietal paintings, 109, 114 Pragmatic, 57, 98, 111, 124, 159
Pedagogy, 17, 63, 67, 81 Prague school, 38 f., 129, 135, 283,
Pedestrian street, 19, 192 f., 195, 202, 285, 332
205 Prehistory, 10, 84 f., 98, 109, 115,
Perception, 17, 20, 25 f., 29, 37, 55, 137, 229, 278, 311
67, 76, 83, 87, 93, 97, 100–104, Pre-Socratic philosophy, 231
106 f., 113, 118, 120, 144, 146, 151, Printing press, 236 f., 240
153, 155, 159, 173, 201, 203, 215, Privatise/deprive, 216
Proto-group, 86 148, 155, 173 f., 182 f., 194, 251,

Proto-language, 72, 85–87 285–287, 298, 317, 320, 332
Prototypical pictures, 101, 105 Scholastic philosophy, 10
Proto-vocabulary, 86 f., 89, 95 Science, 10, 16, 19 f., 25 f., 98, 125,
Proximity, 111, 119, 192, 271 166, 174, 229–236, 239 f., 243,
Psychology, 7, 9–13, 20, 26, 47 f., 245–248, 250 f., 255, 258, 261–264,
51, 55, 65, 126, 135, 142, 152, 155, 266, 313, 321
165, 194, 201, 285, 301–304, 310, Science and technology studies
312 f., 320, 331 f. (STS), 263
Public space, 19, 98, 191 f., 206, Scientific evolution, 20, 229, 232,
208–211, 215 f., 218–222, 224–227 234 f., 263 f.
Public sphere, Bourgeois, 199, Scientific evolution, Enactive theory
218–220 of, 232, 234, 263 f.
Public sphere, Interactional, 223 Scientific revolution, 20, 232, 234 f.,
Public sphere, (Re)presentative, 247, 251
218–221, 225 Sedimentation, Generative, 37, 203,
Pyrenees, 117 323, 326, 334
Sedimentation, Genetic, 37, 203,
R 323, 326, 334
Realism, 97, 101, 105, 108, 247 Selection, Multilevel, 313
Reductionism in religious studies, Selection, Natural, 164, 231, 304 f.,
165, 167 308 f., 317 f., 320 f., 328
Re-enactment, 65 f., 68, 70 Selection, Sexual, 209, 211, 308 f.,
Religion, 16, 18 f., 93, 163–184, 186, 311 f.
188 f., 234, 239, 286, 314, 324 f. Self-awareness, 168, 170
Renaissance, 47, 131, 221, 245 f., Semiosis, 10 f., 15, 21
251, 259, 287, 296 Semiotic resources, 9, 17, 20, 44, 97,
Representation, 16 f., 43, 63–68, 99, 105, 133, 156, 268, 334
71 f., 80 f., 87, 89, 92, 97, 101, 103, Semiotics, 7–14, 16, 18–21, 23 f., 26,
111–113, 126 f., 129, 131–134, 29 f., 35–39, 61, 73, 84, 99, 101,
138–143, 146 f., 149, 151, 158, 124, 129, 150, 162 f., 169, 185, 197,
161 f., 171–173, 182 f., 219 f., 238, 205, 268, 277, 282 f., 287, 289 f.,
246 f., 261, 287, 315 292, 294, 297–299, 301, 314 f., 334
Resemblance, 18, 126, 129, 139, Semiotics, Cultural, 8, 12, 16, 20, 23,
141 f., 233 29 f., 35–37, 39, 61, 84, 150, 162,
Ritual, 66, 68, 71, 120, 134 f., 138, 205, 268, 282 f., 287, 289 f., 294,
140 f., 164, 170–174, 212, 297, 309 297–299, 301, 314 f.
Romanticism, 14 Sensory, 75, 87, 153, 242, 244 f., 254,
256, 261, 270 f.
S Sign, 10, 12–15, 17, 41–43, 45 f., 54,
Schema, Scheme, 14, 16 f., 23, 58, 64, 69, 71–74, 76, 79, 81, 88,
31, 39 f., 42 f., 46, 61, 83, 145, 95, 97, 99–103, 111–113, 118, 120,
133–135, 141, 144, 201, 203, 210, Sulawesi caves, 114

215, 217, 227, 238, 248 f., 276, Swabian, 118 f., 140
283 f., 291, 308, 325 Swadesh list, 17, 83, 85–87, 93, 95
Sign expression, 100, 113 Symbol, symbolic, 12–15, 17, 46,
Sign resource, 101 63–65, 68, 70, 73–81, 88 f., 111 f.,
Similarity, 13, 15, 72 f., 76, 97, 100, 134, 138, 144, 158 f., 161, 164,
106 f., 111, 113 f., 117, 121, 126, 170–172, 181–184, 188, 203, 219,
141–143 231 f., 238 f., 251, 269
Simplicity, 87, 92, 131 Symbolicity, 111
Situated cognition, 10, 20, 29, 235, Symbolic language, 158, 172, 181,
241, 264 183 f.
Situationism, 194 Symbolic representation, 161, 183
Skill, 15 f., 21, 64, 66–71, 133, 156– Synecdoche, 252
159, 163, 170 f., 182, 214, 231 f., Systematics, 259–261, 270 f.
234, 255, 262 f., 275, 280, 319 Systematisation, 20, 235, 255 f., 272
Social constructivism, 266
Socialisation, 261, 263 T
Sociobiology, 7, 20, 165, 167, 301 f., Tartu school, 12, 29–36, 283, 285 f.,
307 288, 290 f., 293
Solutrean, 115 Taxonomy, 29, 258–261, 270–272
Sound symbolism, 14 f., 17, 63–65, Technê, 125
73–80, 88 Technocomplexes, 115
Space, spatial, 19, 27 f., 35, 37 f., Technology, 99, 101, 108 f., 111, 230,
45–47, 57, 87, 102 f., 105, 120, 130, 232, 241, 251 f., 263
147, 157, 159, 162, 192–194, 196– Telescope, 239, 242–244
200, 203, 205 f., 210 f., 215–227, Temporality, 173, 249
232, 241–243, 245, 250 f., 264–269, Tex-Mex, 293
271, 283, 287, 292, 295, 297, 299 Text, 31 f., 236 f., 264, 275, 285 f.,
Spectacle, 204, 210, 217 290–292, 315, 325
Spectacular function, 212, 219 Textuality, 32
Square, 192, 197, 210, 212 f., 219, Theology, 165, 233
221 f., 224, 226 f. Theoretic stage, 16, 45, 61, 83, 231,
Stability, 86 f., 90, 93, 96, 123, 126 f., 323
143, 146, 161 Theory theory, 50 f., 55 f., 59 f., 303
Stencil, 114, 116 Time, temporal, 16, 20, 27, 35, 37,
Stilbaai, 139 44–47, 61, 66 f., 75, 85, 87, 91, 129,
Storytelling, 18, 123, 145 f., 152, 145–148, 152, 154, 156 f., 159,
154 f., 159–161, 245 162, 167, 173, 182, 197, 211, 218,
Structuralism, 10, 31, 73, 332 222, 226, 229, 231 f., 245, 249 f.,
Stylistic periods, 115 264–266, 268 f., 271, 292, 297
Sulawesi, 114, 139 Time travelling, 44, 67
Tool-making, 83 f., 87, 95 f. V

Trajectory, 37, 63, 109, 176, 185, 197, Venus (planet), 243 f.
200, 213, 215, 217, 226 Venus figurines, 139–142, 161, 311
Transcendence, 19, 53, 176, 179– Venus of Hohle Fels, 140, 311
183, 185, 188 f. Venus of Willendorf, 140, 311
Transnatural object, 102, 120 f. Village, 30, 33, 91, 192, 210, 213 f.,
Trompe-l’oeil, 108 221, 226, 241, 192
Typology, 12, 24, 30, 61, 85 Visual rhetoric, 108
Visuographic activity, 111
U Vocabulary, 17, 76, 83, 85–90, 93–96,
Umwelt, 27, 29 f., 34, 191, 201 f., 211 208
Universality, 35, 86 f., 92, 119, 188
Upper Palaeolithic, 98 f., 109, W
111–114, 118, 120 f. World views, 157, 159, 297
Upper Palaeolithic cave, 98, 114
Urbanity, 16, 19, 191, 196 f., 199,
226 f.
Index of Names
A Boyd, Robert, 21, 302 f., 315–321,

Ahmed, Sara, 203 323, 327, 333 f.
Albinus, Bernhard Siegfried, 246 Brahe, Tycho, 252
Allen, Barry, 191, 214 Brandt, Per Aage, 11
Andersen, Peer Durst, 11 Bresson, Robert, 196, 206
Ariès, Philippe, 47 Brier, Søren, 11
Aristotle, 65, 125, 133, 175, 201, 231, Brooks, Rechele, 59
251, 305 Brown, Roger W., 77
Arvidson, Sven, 215 Brum, Adam, 114
Asplund, Johan, 213 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 245
Aubert, Maxime, 114 Bruner, Jerome, 147, 154 f., 157
Augé, Mark, 223 Bry, Theodor de, 280
Bryson, Norman, 142
B Bundgaard, Peer, 11
Baglivi, Giorgio, 252 Buss, David, 303
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 52–57, 60, 155, Butler, Judith, 47, 223 f.
159 f., 219, 221, 288, 295, 322
Bartlett, Frederick, 145, 155, 159, C
285 f., 317, 320 Cabak Rédei, Anna, 36, 283, 289
Bates, Elisabeth, 112, 331 Campbell, Donald, 158
Bates, Linda, 208 Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio, 247
Baudelaire, Charles, 195 f., 200 Canova, Antonio, 131
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, Carroll, Noël, 18, 123, 129–133,
125 136 f., 144
Bayle, Pierre, 321 f., 325 Carruthers, Peter, 55
Beardsley, Monroe C., 127, 132, 136 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, 320
Bednarik, Robert G., 114 Certeau, Michel de, 198
Bell, Clive, 131 Chalmers, David, 29
Bellah, Robert, 19, 163, 171–175, Chemero, Anthony, 9
179, 187 Cheselden, William, 246
Bellini, Lorenzo, 252 Chomsky, Noam, 9, 11, 37
Benjamin, Walter, 193, 200 Churchland, Patricia, 55
Bertram, Brian C. R., 329 Churchland, Paul, 55
Bidloo, Govard, 246 Cigoli, Lodovico Cardi detto il, 247
Bjorn, Katja, 198 Clark, Andy, 29
Bloomley, Nicholas, 206 Columbus, Christopher, 36, 60, 272,
Boerhaave, Hermann, 253 276, 289, 324, 326
Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 252 f. Condon, William, 51, 60
396 Index of Names
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 234, 252 E

Cortés, Hernán, 36, 38, 49, 277, Eco, Umberto, 142, 273
289–291, 326 f. Elias, Norbert, 47, 214
Costall, Alan, 57
Cuff, Dana, 222–224 F
Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 274 Farocki, Harun, 207
Floch, Jean-Marie, 100
D Fludernik, Monika, 147
Daddesio, Thomas C., 11 Forsskål, Peter, 274
d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 258 Foucault, Michel, 47, 213, 218, 233,
Dalgarno, George, 256 258, 296, 315
Danto, Arthur C., 136
Darwin, Charles, 7, 209, 235, 261, G
303 f., 309, 313, 321, 327 f. Galen, 254
David, Jacques-Louis, 131 Galileo Galilei, 239, 244, 248, 252
Davidson, Iain, 45 Gallagher, Shaun, 9, 56 f., 232
Davies, Steven, 138, 310, 316 Gamble, Claude, 278–280
Dawkins, Richard, 317 Geertz, Clifford, 163
Deacon, Terrance, 14 f., 71, 173, Gibson, James, 9, 26–28, 30, 51,
182 f., 311 103–105, 112, 194, 200–202
Dennett, Daniel, 55 Giseke, Paul Dietrich, 257
Descartes, René, 238, 247, 252, 254 Givón, Talmy, 89
Diamond, Jared, 33 f., 298 Goddard, Cliff, 86 f.
Dickie, George, 127, 132 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14
Diderot, Denis, 276, 321 Goffman, Ervin, 198, 200, 204,
Dijk, Teun A. van, 317 215
Dingemanse, Mark, 75 Gogol, Nikolai, 195–198, 206
Dissanayake, Ellen, 18, 134 f., 138 f. Goldstein, Kurt, 57
Doherty, Martin J., 56, 58 Gombrich, Ernst, H., 103
Donald, Merlin, 11, 14, 16–19, 23, Goodman, Nelson, 142
29, 40–45, 61, 65–68, 71, 81–84, Gopnik, Alison, 51, 55
87, 104, 133 f., 137, 145, 158 f., Gould, Stephen Jay, 21, 46, 167,
161, 171–175, 179, 181–183, 191, 312 f., 321, 327
231, 301, 303, 321 f., 326 Green, William Scott, 325
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 195 f., 200, 204, Greenberg, Clement, 131
215 Griffiths, Paul E., 312, 328
Drummond, John, 25 Gruzinski, Serge, 286 f.
Dunbar, Robin, 211 f., 221, 223 Gurwitsch, Aron, 11, 25 f., 28 f.,
Dürer, Albrecht, 273 56 f., 59, 203, 214 f.
Durkheim, Émile, 167, 169, 172 f., Gutenberg, Johann, 237
181, 184, 186, 314 f., 328
Index of Names 397
H Jakobson, Roman, 39, 129, 325

Haarlem, Cornelius van, 107 James, Henry, 196
Habermas, Jürgen, 199, 204, 212, James, William, 165, 181
216, 218–220, 222, 225 Jaspers, Karl, 175
Hägerstrand, Torsten, 197 Joas, Hans, 187
Haldane, J. B. S., 304–306, 313 Johansson, Niklas, 76
Hall, Edward T., 192, 214 Johnson, Mark, 250
Hamilton, William, 306, 313 f. Joordens, Josephine, 110
Hammad, Manar, 192, 194, 214,
216–218 K
Harris, Paul, 56, 58 Kahneman, Daniel, 151–154
Harvey, William, 252 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 125
Haspelmath, Martin, 87, 92 Katsuragawa Hoshū, 275
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 195 Kennick, William, 128
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Kepler, Johannes, 239, 252
288, 331 Khatchadourian, Haig, 128
Heine, Berndt, 85, 89 Kintsch, Walter, 317
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 49–51, 55 Kita, Sotaro, 79–81
Henzel, Berhard, 224 Kluge, Alexander, 219
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 334 Koch, Walter A., 301
Herodotus, 279 Köhler, Wolfgang, 77
Hobbes, Thomas, 315, 330 f., 334 Korb, Frank, 224
Hornstedt, Clas Fredrik, 274 Kovic, Vanja, 78
Hubbard, Edward M., 77 Krehm, Madelaine, 78
Husserl, Edmund, 9, 11, 16, 23–31, Kristeller, Paul, 125
34 f., 37 f., 43, 52, 55–61, 101 f., Kuhn, Thomas, 233, 263, 313, 319
123, 148, 185, 203, 239, 283, 287 f., Kuteva, Tania, 86, 89
315, 317, 333
Hutcheson, Francis, 125 L
Hutto, Daniel D., 159 Lakoff, George, 239, 250
Huygens, Christiaan, 245 Lamb, Marion J., 303, 308, 318,
320 f.
I Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 324, 327
Imai, Mutsumi, 79–81 Latour, Bruno, 263
Ingarden, Roman, 38, 283, 287 Le Bon, Gustave, 212
Israel, Jonathan, 7, 321 f., 324 f. Le Corbusier, 192, 217
Isidore of Seville, 256 Lefebvre, Henri, 193
Iturriaga, José de, 270 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von,
238 f.
J Lenninger, Sara, 331
Jablonka, Eva, 21, 303, 308, 318, Leroi-Gourhan, André, 115
320 f. Leunder, Ivan, 57
398 Index of Names
Levin, Rahel, 283, 289 Noble, William, 45

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 165, 325 Nowak, Martin, 306 f., 328 f.
Lewis-Williams, David, 113 f. Núñez, Rafael, 239
Linnaeus, Carl, 242, 249, 256 f.,
259 f., 269 f., 274, 277 O
Lipps, Theodor, 51, 55 f., 58, 60 Oakley, Todd, 11
Llull, Ramón, 238 f. Ovid, 265
Locke, John, 321, 325 Oztruk, Ozge, 78
Löfling, Pehr, 242, 269–272, 274, 276 Pascal, Blaise, 238, 240
Lotman, Yuri, 8, 30, 275, 282, 325 Paz, Octavio, 287
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 10, 12–15,
M 24–26, 48, 52, 54 f., 60, 74, 111,
Magnusson, Lisa, 208 288
Malpighi, Marcello, 245
Mandler, Jean, 59 f. P
Marbach, Eduard, 25 Peter the Great, 33, 37, 275
Marx, Karl, 296 Piaget, Jean, 11, 14, 285
Maurer, Daphne, 79 Pinker, Steven, 138
Mazur, Jennie, 283 Plato, 125, 175, 180, 205, 234, 265
McLuhan, Marshall, 292 Poe, Edgar Allan, 195, 198
Meltzoff, Andrew N., 59 f. Polanyi, Michael, 102 f., 105, 117
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 131 Polo, Marco, 273
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25 f., 28, Popper, Karl, 233
51, 55, 57, 60 Posner, Roland, 34
Meyrowitz, Joshua, 225 Postman, Neil, 292
Mill, John Stuart, 50, 55 Premack, David, 51
Miller, Geoffrey, 138, 209, 211,
308–310, 312 R
Mithen, Steven, 230 Rabelais, François, 221
Moberg, Vilhelm, 299 Ramachandran, V. S., 77
Mode, Heinz, 281 Reinius, Israel, 269
Montesquieu, 321 Richerson, Peter J., 21, 302 f.,
Mouffe, Chantal, 220 315–321, 323, 327, 333 f.
Mukařovský, Jan, 38, 129, 283 f. Ricœur, Paul, 149, 151 f., 159
Rohmer, Eric, 196, 206
N Rossano, Matthew J., 310
Negt, Oskar, 219 Rozin, Paul, 155 f.
Nelkin, Dorothy, 304 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 216, 330 f.,
Nelson, Kathrine, 145, 149, 154 334
Newton, Isaac, 234, 238 f., 321 Rumelhart, David, 285 f.
Niebuhr, Carsten, 274 Ruysch, Frederik, 246
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 181 f.
Index of Names 399
S Tallis, Raymond, 191

Sadowski, Piotr, 89 Tarde, Gabriel, 221, 315, 320
Santorio, Santorio, 252 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 128
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 288, 331 Tesauro, Emanuele, 252
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 9–11, 14 f., Thompson, Evan, 9, 25
73–75, 315 Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 305
Schank, Roger, 152, 157, 285 Todorov, Tzvetan, 331 f.
Scheiner, Christoph, 247 Tomasello, Michael, 21, 45 f.,
Scheler, Max, 51, 55 f., 60 329–333
Schiebinger, Londa, 258 Tønnessen, Morten, 211
Schmidt, Klaus, 224–227, 281 Tulving, Endel, 44
Schütz, Alfred, 11, 25–28, 53, 57, 60, Turner, Mark, 11
150, 153, 164 f., 285 Tywker, Tom, 198
Searle, John R., 26 f.
Sennett, Richard, 19, 199, 204, 212, U
216 f., 295 Uexküll, Jakob von, 27, 29, 43, 201,
Shintel, Hadas, 78 211
Shryock, Andrew, 278 Uspensky, Boris, 30, 282
Silverman, Kaja, 207
Simmel, Georg, 193 V
Smail, Daniel L., 278 Vaesen, Krist, 70 f.
Smith, Adam, 331 Vasarely, Victor, 106
Smith, Christian, 173 Vasari, Giorgio, 131
Sober, Elliott, 21, 312–314, 321, 323, Venclovska, Natálie, 207
327 f., 330, 332 f. Vermeer van Delft, Jan, 247
Sokolowski, Robert, 25 Vesalius, Andreas, 246
Sonesson, Göran, 35 f., 84, 185 f., Vico, Giambattista, 59, 252
282 f., 285, 288, 325 Vieussens, Raymond, 246
Spencer, Herbert, 7, 327 Voltaire, 321, 325
Sperber, Dan, 160 Vouloumanos, Athena, 78
Spinoza, Baruch, 240, 321 f., 325
Staël, Mme de, 283, 289 W
Stella, Jennifer, 155 f. Waal, Franz de, 171, 328
Stein, Edith, 51, 55 f. Wallström, Margot, 297
Steno, Nicolaus, 249 Weitz, Morris, 128 f.
Sterelny, Kim, 312, 328 Wertsch, James V., 156, 159 f.
Stjernfelt, Frederik, 11 Wescott, Roger W., 88
Stueber, Karsten, 56, 58 f. Westbury, Chris, 77
Sturm, Johann Christoph, 245 Wierzbicka, Anna, 86 f.
Wilkins, John, 256
T Williams, G. C., 313
Tadmor, Uri, 87, 92 f. Willis, Thomas, 246
400 Index of Names
Wilson, David Sloan, 21, 167, 186, Z

312–315, 323 f., 327 f., 330, 332 f. Zahavi, Amotz, 308
Wilson, Edward O., 165, 167, 307 Zahavi, Dan, 9, 49, 52, 58, 232
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 131 Ziff, Paul, 128
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18, 27, 129, Zlatev, Jordan, 11, 76, 145, 331
233
Woodruff, Guy, 51
Woolf, Virginia, 196, 198
Wundt, Wilhelm, 10
Authors
Anna Cabak Rédei, Associate Professor of Cognitive Semiotics, Lund

University
Gerd Carling, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Lund University
David Dunér, Professor of History of Science and Ideas, researcher in

Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University
Sara Lenninger, PhD in Semiotics, researcher in Cognitive Semiotics,

Lund University
Andreas Nordlander, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Religious studies, Uni-

versity of Gothenburg
Michael Ranta, PhD in Art History, researcher in Cognitive Semiotics,

Lund University
Gunnar Sandin, Associate Professor of Architecture, Lund University
Göran Sonesson, Professor of Semiotics, Director of the section for Cog-

nitive Semiotics, Lund University
Jordan Zlatev, Professor of General Linguistics, Deputy Director of the

section for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund UniversityNam qui temquia que no-
bite denisimustis moloratas dolorepre lignamus aboria ditae peribusa perro
berum qui voluptatur, conse simpore, sedi omnihillanto esequo di acium
dolores tiaspe et volorem et dolore sus ut is nossincime nis auda sequibus
et derrovitis et aut abor as et re niatios ea prae molut aute doluptati deriam
restis quodia dolectusciae officiatem quis excepe ni quidernatem is estor-
rumquae oditae officia quia aut que non res et et ea cum qui blaccullenda
nulpa doluptat.
Human Lifeworlds
This book, which presents a cognitive- thinking beings, and to transfer experi-
semiotic theory of cultural evolution, ences, knowledge, meaning, and perspec-
including that taking place in historical tives to new generations.
time, analyses various cognitive-semiotic
artefacts and abilities. It claims that what
makes human beings human is funda-
mentally the semiotic and cultural skills by The Editors
means of which they endow their Life- David Dunér, Professor of History of Ideas,
world with meaning. The properties that Lund University, has been concerned
have made human beings special among with the history of sciences in the 17th-18th
animals living in the terrestrial biosphere century, and more recently with cognitive
do not derive entirely from their biological- history.
genetic evolution, but also stem from their Göran Sonesson, Professor of Cognitive
interaction with the environment, in its Semiotics, Lund University, has written
culturally interpreted form, the Lifeworld. extensively on pictorial and cultural
This, in turn, becomes possible thanks semiotics, and more recently on semiotic
to the human ability to learn from other evolution and development.
ISBN 978-3-631-66285-4

Human Life Worlds Final Komp Let T

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David Dunér / Göran Sonesson (eds.

Edited by David Dunér and Göran Sonesson

Published with contribution from

Göran Sonesson & David Dunér

Anna Cabak Rédei & Michael Ranta

Göran Sonesson & Gunnar Sandin

David Dunér & Göran Sonesson

behaviour always already offered to the interpretation of others, semiotics,

1. History and Definition of Cognitive Semiotics

Cognitive semiotics can be conceived as an extension of classical semiotics,

situated cognition, distributed cognition, and so on. Although we are going

Daddesio (1994), cognitive semiotics should, apart from semiotic structures,

2. Phenomenology of the Lifeworld

invariants of the common Lifeworld, there could also be specific invariants

3. On Symbols and Other Signs

4. The content of the present volume

mimetic, linguistic, pictorial, aesthetic, and narrative skills. We also enter

culture possible, including uniquely human (and yet pre-linguistic) features

It takes its point of departure in customary attempts to define aesthetic key

of religion is therefore sketched out, drawing in particular on the work of

grounded in universal features of human consciousness. Scientific thinking

Human specificity emerges in evolution and is reflected in the human brain

1.1. Adumbrations of the Lifeworld

for an experimental approach to cognitive semiotics (Sonesson 2013b), I have

1.1.1. Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology

means of which we vary the different properties of the act, in order to be

1.1.2. The Lifeworld as Naive Physics Plus Folk Psychology

1.1.3. Anticipations of Cognitive Science

students of the Husserl Archive in Louvain. The idea of situated cognition

1.2. Further into the Lifeworld: From Homeworld to

1.2.1. The Original Tartu School Approach

And, as he goes on to say, the third category, “strangers,” about which

1.2.2. The Homeworld and the Double Aspect of the Alienworld

socio-cultural Lifeworld. When Husserl first mentioned the universality

Figure 1.2. The revised Canonical model of cultural semiotics.

Figure 1.3. The Extended model of cultural semiotics.

contain any explicit diachronic dimension. It is nevertheless easy to think of

1.2.3. Communication Between Cultures

regularities to written laws. We could conclude that there is a continuum

Figure 1.4. Model of communication integrating the Prague and the Tartu

Figure 1.5. Communication between cultures. Culture 1 may be Ego-culture,

1.3. The Evolution of History

1.3.1. Merlin Donald’s Evolutionary Schema

ergaster and/or Homo erectus (see Figure 1.6). Contemporary primatology

done, or to convey the idea of a person occupied by the act of hammering.

Figure 1.6. A rendering of Donald’s stages of evolution, with some semiotically

as identity markers, is already part of human specificity, even though we

1.3.2. Some Glosses on Donald’s Schema

1.3.3. Going Deeper into History

Another risk in reducing history to the last episode of evolution, as

1.4. On the Meeting of Minds

1.4.1. Classical Theories of Empathy

Figure 1.7. Empathy as projection.

In the case of inference theory, as classically manifested by Hermann von

Figure 1.8. Empathy as inference.

Contemporary conceptions of empathy, most notably the so-called “Theory

should also be ranged in this category. Nevertheless, “Theory theory” sup-

12 In fact, an instance of this may be the so-called “Kindchenschema,” which

known as “infant mirroring,” as instantiated by newborn children stick-

1.4.2. Two Other Varieties of the Theory of Empathy

13 On the hazards of this confusion, see Sonesson 2012a.

14 Whether or not this is a particular case of what phenomenologists call transcend-

Figure 1.9. Bakhtin’s inversion of the projection theory.

1.2. Further into the Lifeworld: From Homeworld to

Figure 1.4. Model of communication integrating the Prague and the Tartu

Figure 1.5. Communication between cultures. Culture 1 may be Ego-culture,

Figure 1.6. A rendering of Donald’s stages of evolution, with some semiotically

2.4. Language “Atop” Bodily Mimesis: Multimodality and

3.1. Relating Language Evolution to the Evolutionary

3.2. Comparing Language Evolution and Language

Table 3.1. Part of culture list of taxonomic group Plough Agriculture-Europe /

Figure 3.1. Component analysis biplot of individual subcategories in the data set

Figure 3.2. Principal component analysis biplot of individual lexical meanings

4.1.1. Pictures and the Increase of Pictorial Diversity in Human

4.1.2. Studying the Origin of Pictures in Archaeology,

Figure 4.2. The picture is an assembly instruction giving visual instructions on