ABSTRACT
This chapter justifies the dual coding theoretical approach to cognition and its evolution on logical and factual grounds. The concept of verbal–nonverbal duality is the focus of the arguments. The duality seems obvious on commonsense and evolutionary grounds. We live in a world of nonverbal objects and events on the one hand and language on the other. They are fundamentally different “substances” that exist out there and in our minds. We recognize the differences but are aware at the same time of an underlying single-mindedness that makes it easy to assume that, deep down, we think about words and things in the same way. Commonsense therefore justifies a monistic view of mind just as readily as a dual-coding view. An evolutionary argument by itself leads to the same impasse. Evolutionists would agree that nonverbal cognition must have evolved long before language but they can (and do) attribute the shift to the evolution of an abstract system that captures the old nonverbal mind in the computational network of the new. The following philosophical, historical, and empirical arguments provide the initial justification for taking a dual coding theoretical approach to mind and its evolution.
