Linguagem e mente em Terrence Deacon

Abstract

This thesis presents the theories of the cognitive scientist and Berkeley anthropologist Terrence Deacon in relation to language and mind. To this end, it begins by characterizing his language model as a phenomenon originated concomitantly with intentionality and social organization. It then describes the association between this origin and the emergence of a symbolic insight in a hominid brain, an insight that concerns the perception of the iconic and indicial representation structure and the application of this same structure to virtual and shared signs. Next, the processes of interpretation and learning and the cognitive mechanisms involved in the language, highlighted by the author, are presented, mainly in relation to the critics that weaves to Chomsky's innate universal grammar, Pinker's language instinct and non-representationalism of Maturana, Varela and Gibson. To present Deacon's mental model, this thesis first discusses his concept of emergency, with which he claims to have solved the hard problem of the philosophy of mind; then, introduces his theory of information, which treats information as a constraint to be locuted by a cognitively inferred meaning. The work then presents, from these preliminary concepts, Deacon's theory of mind that is characterized, primarily, by the understanding of how homeodynamic constraints foster the emergence of morphodynamic constraints that, in turn, allow the emergence of teleodynamic constraints that, at their highest level, configure subjectivity and intentionality. Deacon gives emotion a prominent place by teleodynamically expressing the incompleteness that moves us. To construct his theories, Deacon enters the philosophical debate on teleology and presents his arguments on how the eliminativist materialists, among them Dennett, can not explain the origin of intentionality from his computational models of the mental phenomenon. The thesis concludes that the models of language and mind in Deacon enrich the current debate, but its unprecedented and potentially revolutionary theories of emergence and information are the most relevant to the author's philosophical contribution.