Book Review: The Recursive Mind by Michael C. Corballis

[David Morris]

"But familiarity with the primary animal-behaviour literature leads to
an alternative conclusion: some non-human animals are conscious selves
who plan ahead and who carry out theory of mind thinking in a
recursive way."

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 9:45 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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”.
>