From Gesture to Cooperation. A brief History of Philosophical Debate on Protolanguage

This paper discusses the main stages of western philosophical reflection on protolanguage. The ancient epicurean tradition assumed a period when humans lived like animals and denoted the object by gestures and vocalizations. Later, this position was opposed to the Bible’s assumption of divine origin of human language. Several thinkers of Enlightenment considered protolanguage a human, basic knowledge device to organize the experiences. The social dimension, which was present in the naturalistic lingui stic tradition since the ancient philosophy, became the crucial point in the nineteenth century. In the same years, Charles Darwin considered protolanguage as a communication system already possessed by pre human ancestors. During the 1920s, comparisons be tween human, nonhuman and infants communication systems aimed to reconstruct this protolanguage. Finally, just in the twentieth century, the Marxist tradition first highlighted the coevolution of protolanguage and both work and cooperation.