Mythopoetics

Presently we count with two main groups of contrary hypotheses about the origin of human language in relation to animal communicative forms: the one represented by Chomsky and the linguists of generative grammar, which sustains the discontinuity of the origin of human language in relation to animal proto-languages, and the hypothesis of the continuists, sustained by Bickerton, Pinker and others, who from diverse anthropological, linguistic and neuroscientific points of view, although all of them with a common evolutionary motivation, proposes the gradual development of human language. The theory of emotions as the basic semantics of human language that I have presented here is, clearly, continuist, both in relation to the origin of language as well as with respect to the general cognitive processes of the living beings. From this vantage point, human language is the most evolved result of an animal progressive process of communication which culminates in human symbolization but whic...

The survival of the human group precedes in evolutionary terms any other symbolic action, which will always have to assume such a survival as a fundamental final referent. If the content of the organism’s categorizations are the successful processes of adaptation, the valuation referents would be such processes, and the meaning of all other actions would be derived after these. For this reason, basic emotions provide the fundamental semantics of our language, and are cognitive processes that evolutionarily precede what philosophy has called rationality. Both the system of seeking and that of fear perform cognitive functions of induction, after pattern recognition, based on the memory of experiences, which are selectively strengthened by fear. [1] Fear functions as a social regulator when it is coupled with rage, as can be observed in the hierarchical formations of animal communities as well as in the repression that the law in human communities entails. On the other hand, rage comm...