symbiosism · noun — A Darwinian philosophy about the mind and humankind's place in nature, which regards language as a memetic organism residing in the brain.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Why “symbiosism” is a great word
A theory which holds that human language is a memetic, symbiotic organism—a kind of cognitive parasite residing in and evolving within the brain, shaping human thought. From symbiosis (from Ancient Greek συμβίωσις (sumbíōsis), "a living together") + -ism (denoting a system, theory, or doctrine). Unlike nativism (which posits a hardwired, innate language faculty) or cultural transmission (which broadly describes the social learning of behaviors), symbiosism frames language as a distinct, self-replicating entity with its own evolutionary imperatives. It is the ghostly grammar colonizing a child's mind, the ancestral echo pulsing in a dreamer's cortex, the invisible scaffold of all conscious reasoning—a quiet reminder that the thinker may also be the thought, an arrangement so ancient and complete that neither party remembers who first moved in.
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Etymology
From symbiosis + -ism.
noun
- A Darwinian philosophy about the mind and humankind's place in nature, which regards language as a memetic organism residing in the brain.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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