Niche construction, social cognition, and language: hypothesizing the human as the production of place
New data is emerging from evolutionary anthropology and the neuroscience of social cognition on our species specific hyper cooperation (HC) This paper attempts an integration of third person archaeological and second person, neuroscientific perspectives on the structure of HC, through a post Ricoeurian development in hermeneutical phenomenology. We argue for the relatively late evolution of advanced linguistic consciousness (ALC) (Hiscock in Biological Theory 9:27 41, 2014) as a reflexive system based on the 'in between' or 'cognitive system' as reported by Vogeley et al. (in: Interdisziplinare anthropologie, Heidelberg, Springer, 2014) of face to face social cognition, as well as tool use. The possibility of a positive or negative tension between the more recent ALC and the more ancient, pre thematic, self organizing 'in between' frames an 'internal' niche construction. This indexes the internal structure of HC as 'convergence' where complex, engaged, social reasoning in ALC mirrors the cognitive structure of the pre thematic 'in between' extending the bio energy of our social cognition, through reflexive amplification, in the production of 'social place' as 'humanized space' If individual word/phrase acquisition, in contextual actuality, is the distinctive feature of human language (Hurford in European Reviews 12:551 565, 2004) then human language is a hyperbolic, species wide training in particularized co location, developing consciousness of a shared world. The humanization of space and production of HC, through co location, requires the 'disarming' of language as a medium of control, and a foregrounding of the materiality of the sign. The production of 'hyper place' as solidarity beyond the face to face, typical of world religions, becomes possible where internal niche construction as convergence with the 'in between' (world in us) combines with religious cosmologies reflecting an external 'cosmic' niche construction (world outside us)
Culture and brain