Customer center

We are a boutique essay service, not a mass production custom writing factory. Let us create a perfect paper for you today!

Example research essay topic: Tape Recorder Brother John - 1,658 words

NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote

... ce (external potential intelligence), in a very straightforward and intuitive sense: when you give someone a pair of scissors, you enhance their potential to arrive more safely and swiftly at Smart Moves (Gregory 1981, pp. 311 ff). Anthropologists have long recognized that the advent of tool use accompanied a major increase in intelligence. Our fascination with the discovery that chimpanzees in the wild fish for termites with crudely prepared fishing sticks is not misplaced. This fact takes on further significance when we learn that not all chimpanzees have hit upon this trick; in some chimpanzee "cultures" termites are a present but unexploited food source. This reminds us that tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence; not only does it require intelligence to recognize and maintain a tool (let alone fabricate one), but it confers intelligence on those who are lucky enough to be given the tool.

The better designed the tool, the more information is embedded in its fabrication, the more potential intelligence it confers on its user. And among the pre-eminent tools, Gregory reminds us, are what he calls mind-tools: words. What happens to a human or hominid brain when it becomes equipped with words? I have arrived, finally, back at the question with which I began. 5. What words do to us There are two related mistakes that are perennially tempting to theorists thinking about the evolution of language and thinking. The first is to suppose that the manifest benefits of communication to humanity (the group, or the species) might themselves explain the evolution of language.

The default supposition of evolutionary theory must be that individuals are initially competitive, not cooperative, and while this default can be most interestingly overridden by special conditions, the burden is always to demonstrate the existence of the special conditions. The second mistake is to suppose that mind-tools -- words, ideas, techniques -- that were not "good for us" would not survive the competition. The best general antidote I know to both these errors is Richard Dawkins' discussion of memes in The Selfish Gene Endnote 4. The best detailed discussion I know of the problem of designing communication under the constraint of competitive communicators is by the last speaker in this series, Dan Sperber, and his co-author Deirdre Wilson, in their excellent book, Relevance: a Theory of Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986. ) One upshot of the considerations raised by these thinkers is that one may usefully think of words -- the most effective vehicles for memes -- as invading or parasitizing a brain, not simply being acquired by a brain. Endnote 5 What is the shape of this environment when words first enter it?

It is definitely not an even playing field or a tabula rasa. Our newfound words must anchor themselves on the hills and valleys of a landscape of considerable complexity. Thanks to earlier evolutionary pressures, our innate quality spaces are species-specific, narcissistic, and even idiosyncratic from individual to individual. A number of investigators are currently exploring portions of this terrain. The psychologist Frank Keil and his colleagues at Cornell have evidence that certain highly abstract concepts -- such as the concepts of being alive or ownership, for instance -- have a genetically imposed head start in the young child's kit of mind-tools; when the specific words for owning, giving and taking, keeping and hiding, and their kin enter a child's brain, they find homes already partially built for them. Ray Jackendoff and other linguists have identified fundamental structures of spatial representation -- notably designed to enhance the control of locomotion and the placement of movable things -- that underlie our intuitions about concepts like beside, on, behind, and their kin.

Nicholas Humphrey has argued in recent years that there must be a genetic predisposition for adopting what I have called the intentional stance, and Alan Leslie and others have developed evidence for this, in the form of what he calls a "theory of mind module" designed to generate second-order beliefs (beliefs about the beliefs and other mental states of others). Some autistic children seem to be well-described as suffering from the disabling of this module, for which they can occasionally make interesting compensatory adjustments. (See Further Reading. ) We are only just beginning to discern the details of the interactions between such pre-existing information structures and the arrival of language, so theorists who have opportunistically ignored the phenomenon up till now have nothing to apologize for. The time has come, however, to change tactics. In Artificial Intelligence, for instance, even the most ambitiously realistic systems -- such as Soar, the star of Allen Newell's Unified Theories of Cognition (1990) -- are described without so much as a hint about which features, if any, are dependent on the system's having acquired a natural language with which to supplement its native representational facilities. Endnote 6 The result is that most AI agents, the robotic as well as the bed-ridden, are designed on the model of the walking encyclopedia, as if all the information in the inner environment were in the form of facts told at one time or another to the system. Endnote 7 And in the philosophy of mind, there is a similar tradition of theory-construction and debate about the nature of belief, desire and intention -- philosophical "theories of mental representation" -- fed on a diet exclusively drawn from language-infected cognitive states.

Endnote 8 Tom believes that snow is white. Do polar bears believe that snow is white? In the same sense? Supposing one might develop a good general theory of belief by looking exclusively at such specialized examples is like supposing one might develop a good general theory of motor control by looking exclusively at examples of people driving automobiles in city traffic. "Hey, if that isn't motor control, what is?" -- a silly pun echoed, I am claiming, by the philosopher who says "Tom believes snow is white -- hey, if that isn't a belief, what is?" 6. What words do for us John Holland, a pioneer researcher on genetic algorithms, has recently summarized the powers of the Popperian internal environment, adding a nice wrinkle. An internal model allows a system to look ahead to the future consequences of current actions, without actually committing itself to those actions.

In particular, the system can avoid acts that would set it irretrievably down some road to future disaster ("stepping off a cliff"). Less dramatically, but equally important, the model enables the agent to make current "stage-setting" moves that set up later moves that are obviously advantageous. The very essence of a competitive advantage, whether it be in chess or economics, is the discovery and execution of stage-setting moves. -- John Holland, "Complex Adaptive Systems, " Daedalus, Winter, 1992, p 25. But how intricate and long-range can the "stage-setting" look-ahead be without the intervention of language to help control the manipulation of the model? This is the relevance of my question at the outset about the chimp's capacities to visualize a novel scene. As Merlin Donald points out in his thought-provoking book (p. 35), Darwin was convinced that language was the prerequisite for "long trains of thought, " and this claim has been differently argued for several recent theorists, especially Julian Jaynes and Howard Margolis.

Long trains of thought have to be controlled, or they will wander off into delicious if futile woolgathering. These authors suggest, plausibly, that the self-exhortations and reminders made possible by language are actually essential to maintaining the sorts of long-term projects only we human beings engage in (unless, like the beaver, we have a built-in specialist for completing a particular long term project). Merlin Donald resists this plausible conjecture, and offers a variety of grounds for believing that the sorts of thinking that we can engage in without language are remarkably sophisticated. I commend his argument to your attention in spite of the doubts about it I will now briefly raise. Donald's argument depends heavily on two sources of information, both problematic in my opinion. First, he makes strong claims about the capabilities of those congenitally Deaf human beings who have not yet developed (so far as anyone can tell) any natural language -- in particular, signing.

Second, he draws our attention to the amazing case of Brother John, a French Canadian monk who suffers from frequent epileptic seizures that do not render him unconscious or immobile, but just totally aphasic, for periods of a few minutes or hours. During these paroxysms of aphasia, we are told, Brother John had no language, either external or internal. That is, he could neither comprehend nor produce words of his native tongue, not even "to himself." Endnote 9 At the same time, Brother John can "still record the episodes of life, assess events, assign meanings and thematic roles to agents in various situations, acquire and execute complex skills, learn and remember how to behave in a variety of settings. " (Donald, p. 89. ) My doubts about the use to which Donald wants to put these findings are straightforward, and should be readily resolvable in time: both Brother John and the long-term language-less Deaf people, are in different ways and to different degrees, still the beneficiaries of the shaping role of language. In the case of Brother John, his performance during aphasic paroxysm relies, as Lecours and Joanette note, on "language-mediated apprenticeships." Brother John maintains, for instance, that he need not tell himself the words "tape recorder, "magnetic tape, "red button on the left, "turn, "push" and so forth... in order to be capable of properly operating a tape recorder... (Roche Lecours and Joanette, p. 20) The Deaf who lack Sign -- a group whose numbers are diminishing today, thank goodness -- lack Brother John's specific language-mediated apprenticeships, but we simply don't know -- yet -- what structures in their brains are indirect products of the language that most of their ancestors in recent millennia have shared. The evidence that Donald ad...


Free research essays on topics related to: long term, tape recorder, natural language, brother john, human beings

Research essay sample on Tape Recorder Brother John

Writing service prices per page

  • $18.85 - in 14 days
  • $19.95 - in 3 days
  • $23.95 - within 48 hours
  • $26.95 - within 24 hours
  • $29.95 - within 12 hours
  • $34.95 - within 6 hours
  • $39.95 - within 3 hours
  • Calculate total price

Our guarantee

  • 100% money back guarantee
  • plagiarism-free authentic works
  • completely confidential service
  • timely revisions until completely satisfied
  • 24/7 customer support
  • payments protected by PayPal

Secure payment

With EssayChief you get

  • Strict plagiarism detection regulations
  • 300+ words per page
  • Times New Roman font 12 pts, double-spaced
  • FREE abstract, outline, bibliography
  • Money back guarantee for missed deadline
  • Round-the-clock customer support
  • Complete anonymity of all our clients
  • Custom essays
  • Writing service

EssayChief can handle your

  • essays, term papers
  • book and movie reports
  • Power Point presentations
  • annotated bibliographies
  • theses, dissertations
  • exam preparations
  • editing and proofreading of your texts
  • academic ghostwriting of any kind

Free essay samples

Browse essays by topic:

Stay with EssayChief! We offer 10% discount to all our return customers. Once you place your order you will receive an email with the password. You can use this password for unlimited period and you can share it with your friends!

Academic ghostwriting

About us

© 2002-2024 EssayChief.com