Perché mai tante chiacchiere? Dalla comunicazione alla parola: approcci naturalistici al linguaggio come fenomeno biologico

- In his personal Notebooks Darwin clearly maintained, against any metaphysical pretensions, the need for a «sober philosophy» which started from the study of baboons. However, more than twenty years later, he asked the American philosopher and mathematician, Chauncey Wright, to write an essay about the evolutionary origin and nature of human language (published as The Evolution of Self-Consciousness in the North American Review, April 1873). Why did he ask it? Firstly, because Darwin was convinced that all human mental capabilities had to be explained in a naturalistic way and, secondly, because, after the publication of The Origin, an intense debate had emerged in Europe on the analogy between linguistic and biological evolution. In such a debate both Darwin's enthusiastic supporter, Ernst Haeckel, and some prominent linguists, as Max Müller, August Schleicher and Heymann Steinthal were involved. The evolutionary approaches in linguistics were soon defeated and linguistic theory was founded on more autonomous grounds specific to it. More than a century later, however, a target-article appeared in the well known review Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1990, 13). The article was written by Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom and it was about the role of natural selection in solving the problem of the origin of language. The essay gave rise to fierce polemics in which biologists (as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin), theoretical linguistics (as Noam Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff) and philosophers (as Daniel Dennett) took part. In the present paper the historical roots of this never-ending quest (the relationships between language and biology) are reconstructed and the more recent developments about it are briefly illustrated.