Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
How Were Intelligence and Language Created in
Human Brain
Setsuo Ohsuga
University of Tokyo, Japan
ohsuga@s01.itscom.net
The final objective of this talk is to make clear the origin of language and intel-
ligence. Since intelligence depends on language, origin of language rather than
intelligence is mainly discussed.
First of all a problem immanent in the current understanding of language is
discussed. The structure and the meaning of languages were analyzed by many
philosophers such as F. Saussure, F.L.G. Frege, B.A.W. Russell, L.J.J. Wittgen-
stein, N. Chomsky and the others, and the characteristics of language were made
almost clear by them. What is to be noted in their discussions is that language
is thought originated from a latent potentiality of human being. F. Saussure
named it language in contrast to real languages, named langue by him, that are
generated from language. Chomsky asserts Universal Grammar as the origin of
language and that it is biologically inherent to human being. But they do not
explain anything about what is this latent potentiality or how language was cre-
ated. If human being came out of an evolutional process of living things, then
language had to be created at some point in this process. There was nothing
before that. How primitive human being could create such complex existence as
language which many philosophers with highest intelligence such as listed above
had interested in. This is a big mystery.
In order to have an insight to this problem it is necessary to study the language
along the time axis, from very ancient time when primitive human being have
no language to today, and investigate the possibility of language having been
created. In this talk, the process of language development is classified into the
following four stages,
1. Before language - forming primitive concept
2. Primitive language - from holistic language to compositional language
3. Social language and symbolic language
4. Visual language - invention of letters and high order expressions
Among these stages, this article discuses especially the first two stages. The
major interest is to find the way a basic structure of language that corresponds to
Universal Grammar of Chomsky could be produced from the biological functions
of human brains.
The first point to be discussed is the way primitive human being created
concepts. The concepts had to be made before language because language is a
way to send existing concepts to the others.
In this talk it is assumed that predicate logic can be the Universal Grammar
because it can be a framework of every language. Then, it is shown that the pro-
duction rules of well formed formula (wff) of predicate logic can be realized by
