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TWO THE PRIMITIVE MIND: A Vichian Reconstruction Where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter? Jaynes 1976:3 The new scientific framework within which the investigation of language origin and evolution is being conducted is concomitantly leading to a better understanding of what language is and of how it works. Researchers from diverse paths of inquiry are digging up different kinds of information which glottogenetic theorists are piecing together to construct interesting new models and theories of language and speech. In my opinion the time is now ripe for glottogenetics to take a step back in time to 1744 when Giambattista Vico published his third and final edition of the NS. In this fascinating book, Vico put forward the proposition that language originated through the workings of the imagination-the unique faculty that allowed humans to transform the world of sensory experience into a world of mental reflection. The imagination made it possible for protohumans to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste literally "inside their heads." The primordial imagination arose from the brain's ability to produce and retain images of the beings, objects, and events that the senses had captured. It is an epiphenomenal byproduct of brain activity that bestowed upon human beings the species-specific ability to organize the images recorded by the brain into meaningful, or better, "meaningmaking " structures. In so doing, it generated the human mind. As I hope to show in the remainder of this book, this journey back to Vico will be an instructive visitation for the fledgling science of glottogenetics. It is my view that the Vichian perspective is especially capable of providing a The Primitive Mind 31 unique framework for synthesizing the empirical findings that glottogenetics and its cognate sciences have been amassing. This chapter is divided into five main sections: In the first one I will discuss "Vichian science" in the context of mainstream Anglo-American behavioral, cognitive, and social science. In the second section I will schematically survey previous and current work on Vico in English that is germane to the topic of glottogenesis. In the third section I will look at the background to, and the design of, the N5. In the fourth section I will define and explain the basic notions Vico proposed in the N5 to reconstruct the primitive mind. I will conclude the chapter with a reconstruction of this mind. Vico and Anglo....American Science As Bergin and Fisch (1984: xxxi) point out in their introductory remarks to their translation of the NS, if there was a primary objective that Vico attempted to pursue in his book, it was to develop "a theory of knowledge according to which we can know, or have scienza of, only what we ourselves make and do." The verum-factum principle, by which we can only know what we ourselves have made, is in fact the crucial theoretical notion on which any Vichian science of the mind is to be implanted. In my opinion, the kind of research program that a Vichian science implies would allow us to get a meaningful close-up look at the processes by which the mind generated (and continues to generate) our symbolic structures, including language and culture. Although it is not a scientific "textbook" in the usual sense of the term, the NS is nevertheless a treatise that any contemporary science of the mind would do well to consult, given the relevant insights it contains on the interrelation among thought, language, and culture. It was Bergin and Fisch's translation of the NS in 1948 that introduced Vico to an Anglo-American audience. One of the reasons why Vico is still not widely known within traditional scientific circles on the North American continent is because the NS was translated by an Italianist (Bergin) and a philosopher (Fisch). Consequently, it may not have been perceived by most cognitive and social scientists as being pertinent to their fields of inquiry. So, before dealing with the notions that Vico developed to reconstruct the mind of the first humans, it is necessary to consider some of the reasons for the neglect of Vico by mainstream Anglo-American science-a situation which is changing and bound to change even more, as traditional approaches to the study of the mind start to "catch up with Vico," in the words of the psychologist Robert Haskell (1987a: 70). In my view, there are three main reasons...

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