ISCID will, from time to time, highlight five books that we think are worth reading.

Context as Other Minds
by T. Givón

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapers of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor’s current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

Language and Species
by Derek Bickerton

Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour
by Laland & Brown

Reviewing a broad swath of the literature related to evolutionary treatments of the causes of human behavior, psychology, and culture, Laland and Brown (both researchers at the Department of Zoology, U. of Cambridge, UK) attempt to evaluate the relative worth of recent research and provide an account of where evolutionary theory holds some promise in explaining human behavior. Chapters individually examine sociobiology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics, and gene-culture coevolution. A final chapter reflects on the possibilities of integrating the various approaches.

Carefully guiding the reader through the mire of confusing terminology, claim and counter-claim, and polemical statements, Laland and Brown provide a balanced, rigorous analysis that scrutinizes both the evolutionary arguments and the allegations of the critics. This is a book for popular science readers, undergraduate and postgraduate students (for example, in psychology, anthropology, and zoology), and for experts in one approach who would like to know more about the other perspectives. Having finished this book, the reader will feel better placed to assess the legitimacy of claims made about human behaviour under the name of evolution, and to make judgements as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

Not by Genes Alone
by Richerson & Boyd

Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics - and building their case with such examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them - Richerson and Boyd demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature.

Eve Spoke:
Human Language and Human Evolution
by Philip H. Lieberman

Eve Spoke presents a compelling case for the pivotal role that speech has played in human language and human evolution. Wrestling with the age-old question of why such a large gulf exists between humans and other animals, Philip Lieberman mines both the fossil record and modern neuro-scientific techniques to chart the development of the anatomy and brain mechanisms necessary for human language as we know it. Eschewing any notion of a language gene or instinct, he pursues instead an evolutionary path in which environment acts on a biological capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of systems that make us most human: precise motor skills, speech, language, and complex thought. Lieberman interweaves decades of research in anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and linguistics into his exposition on the evolution of human speech.