Symbolic Thought

Symbolic thought is the cognitive capacity to use one thing to represent another — to treat a sound, mark, gesture, or object as standing for something absent, abstract, or entirely imaginary. It is the cognitive prerequisite for Language, mathematics, metaphor, and culture in any rich sense.

The archaeological record associates symbolic thought with a cluster of behaviours appearing in the Upper Palaeolithic (roughly 50,000 years ago): personal ornaments, pigment use, figurative art, and musical instruments. Whether this apparent explosion reflects a genuine cognitive threshold or merely a change in the ecological conditions under which pre-existing symbolic capacity was expressed is contested. Some evidence suggests symbolic behaviour — ochre use, shell ornaments — at sites 100,000 years older, pointing to a longer, slower emergence.

The emergence of symbolic thought is not the same as the emergence of Language (which is itself symbolic), nor of Consciousness (which may precede symbolic capacity). What it specifically adds is the ability to detach reference from context: to use the word 'mammoth' in the absence of any mammoth, or to leave a mark that will communicate to someone who was not present. This detachment is the foundation of all human cumulative culture. See also Cognitive Evolution and Prelinguistic Thought.