Editing Terrence Deacon (section)

==Work==
His 1997 book, ''[[The Symbolic Species]]: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain'' is widely considered a seminal work in the subject of evolutionary cognition. His approach to semiotics, thoroughly described in the book, is fueled by a career-long interest in the ideas of the late 19th-century American philosopher, [[Charles Sanders Peirce]]. In it, he uses the metaphors of ''parasite'' and ''host'' to describe language and the brain, respectively, arguing that the structures of language have co-evolved to adapt to their brain hosts.

His 2011 book, ''[[Incomplete Nature]]: How Mind Emerged from Matter'', explores the properties of life, the emergence of consciousness, and the relationship between evolutionary and semiotic processes. The book speculates on how properties such as information, value, purpose, meaning, and end-directed behavior emerged from physics and chemistry. Critics of the book argue that Deacon has drawn heavily from the works of [[Alicia Juarrero]] and [[Evan Thompson]] without providing full citations or references, but a UC Berkeley investigation exonerated Deacon.<ref>[http://terrydeacon.berkeley.edu/plagiarism-investigation-exonerates-terrence-w-deacon Plagiarism Investigation Exonerates Terrence W. Deacon] retrieved 5 January 2014</ref>

In contrast to the arguments presented by Juarrero in ''Dynamics in Action'' (1999, MIT Press) and by Thompson in ''Mind in Life'' (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press), Deacon explicitly rejects claims that living or mental phenomena can be explained by [[dynamical systems]] approaches.<ref>''Incomplete Nature'', pp. 143-181</ref> Instead, Deacon argues that life- or mind-like properties only emerge from a higher-order reciprocal relationship between self-organizing processes.