Book Review: The Recursive Mind by Michael C. Corballis

[David Morris]

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece

Mental time travel and theory of mind, Corballis believes, are two
uniquely human ways of thinking that propelled our species to heights
above all others, thanks to what is called recursion.

The concept of recursion became an evolutionists’ darling largely on
the heels of a paper written in 2002 by Marc Hauser, Tecumseh Fitch
and Noam Chomsky. That paper, propelled to international notice by the
participation of its famous third author, claimed that it’s a unique
human trick to communicate by embedding structures within other
structures, as when one noun phrase in a sentence is made to contain
another. An example of such linguistic recursion is furnished by
Corballis. The non-recursive sentences “Jane loves John” and “Jane
flies aeroplanes” may be combined to produce the recursive sentence
“Jane, who flies aeroplanes, loves John”. Less interested in language
than the mind itself, Corballis states flatly that recursion is “the
primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of
other animals”.