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example of cultural primitives consider the host-guest relationship. In India and
Hellas for instance, when a potential host invites a potential guest with an expression
like ‘come at any time’, she expects such an invitation to be taken literally.
Interestingly, if the recipient is an outsider from, say, the Anglo-Saxon culture such
an invitation will definitely not be taken literally but simply interpreted as a kind of
friendly invitation. Finally, smile seems to be a primitive of humans and of some
other primate species only.
To conclude, there is no single definite set of human primitives. Primitives vary
both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. Primitives’ variability applies to both
sense and linguistic ones. Only linguistic primitives can be acquired. Humans and
other animals are born with a range of sense primitives. Sense primitives (i.e., qualia)
are atomic. Linguistic primitives (barring those that are names of sense primitives)
may be atomic but humans have no way to know that. Finally, a human’s
understanding of a particular topic is in terms of a minimum vocabulary for that topic
and human.
2.1.2.3 Summary and the Communication-Understanding Principle
First, understanding is a prerequisite for human communication that, in turn, is at
the very basis of the existence of the human society. Second, there are multiple levels
of understanding corresponding to multiple levels of primitives-based descriptions.
Third, the systematic and structured characteristics of understanding makes it a prime
tool in the acquisition and (re)-structuring of knowledge and consequently of the
shaping of human mental structures. Fourth, the very close relation between
understanding and explanation, the fact that they constitute necessary elements of
human reasoning, and their role in shaping the cognitive structures of both learners
and tutors (Gelepithis and Goodfellow 1992). Fifth, since primitives may, equally
well, be either formal or informal, understanding bridges the formal-informal
interface. Sixth, understanding and therefore communication can operate across both
the conscious/unconscious divide and the linguistic/pre-linguistic stages of human
development providing the integrated characteristic of human behaviour. Finally, the
process of understanding (not its end result) is independent of both any animal
capable of understanding and of time.
Of course, this is not to say that the actual process does not take time; only that
however long it may take its defining characteristics remain invariant. These two
features of understanding: time independence and applicability throughout the
evolving space of understanding entities makes understanding an invariant of that
space. In particular, of course, the process of human understanding is a human
cognitive invariant.37 It is worth noting that the invariance of the understanding
process does not imply that understanding is a characteristic of human nature in the
sense employed by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Tooby and Cosmides 1992). For
the understanding process is not a developmental program. It is a complex brain
process affected by both ontogenetic and environmental factors.
Along similar lines of reasoning, the process of communication should also be
an invariant.38 It is important to be noticed that the proposed invariance of
communication does not entail the claim of the invariance of human nature (e.g.,
evolutionary psychology; Wilson 1998). Whether it is a universal in Brown’s (1991)
sense fall outside the scope of this article.
On the basis of the above, I propose that the processes of communication and
understanding are the fundamental processes shaping the structure of mind both in the