Cognitive Dynamics and the Language Sciences (original) (raw)
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The cognitive dynamics of distributed language.
2007
This is the introduction to the Special Issue of Language Sciences that launched the "distributed language movement". It stresses that, until the 1990s, cognitive science relied on comparing human cognition to how everyday computers process information. However, with connectionism, neuroscience and robotics, symbol processing fell out of favour. Physical symbol systems are now rarely seen as appropriate models for brains or minds (MacDorman, 2007). Extending the critique of symbolic models to language, David Spurrett and I linked distributed cognition with integrational linguistics. We organized a conference in Durban where participants addressed questions like ‘‘Is intelligent behaviour (and language) based in the dynamical coupling of bodies?’’ and ‘‘Once we reject code models, how can we reconceptualise language and mind?’’ As respondent, Harris (1998: 728) was sceptical about this linking because, he believes, mental activities are best understood in lay terms. Talk of distributed cognition plainly falls foul of ‘‘commonsense lay ways of talking about the mind’’. As editor of the special issue of Language Sciences arising from the conference, Spurrett responds to Harris: "Either we think that science can tell us that we’re wrong with how we think things are with us . . . even to the extent of showing our common sense, or vulgar, self-conception to be deeply mistaken, or common sense is holding some kind of trump so it always beats science, or even that it never has to pay any attention to science" (Spurrett, 2004: 497). In siding with that naturalists on this issue, we gave birth to a new way of linking integrational critique with science: this produced the distributed perspective on language.
2006
Bouzouita (2001). As this array of jointly authored papers makes plain, it is almost an accident of history who turns out to be a listed author. In particular, we have to thank Wilfried Meyer-Viol for his influence on almost every page. A substantial part of chapters 2-3 overlaps with that of Kempson et al. (2001). And the discussion of quantification chapter 3, section 3 relies very heavily on chapter 7 of Kempson et al. (2001), which is largely his work. So our biggest vote of thanks goes to him. He cannot however be blamed for any of the analyses presented here, and he would certainly disavow the particular cognitive stance which we have adopted. So we thank him for the high standards of formal rigour he has demanded of all explanations articulated within the framework, and for the challenge of disagreeing with him almost every step of the way over the cognitive underpinnings of the system as set out. There are many other people over the years we have to thank, for their input, their support, even their disagreement, all of which have contributed to the further articulation of our ideas. These include, perhaps first and foremost our students, since they have had to bear the brunt of hearing our ideas as they have emerged, and so have contributed centrally to the way the framework has developed:
Artificial Intelligence, 2001
For me, this is an exciting time to be a cognitive scientist and a cognitive linguist. Cognitive Linguistics has developed rapidly and with enormous success over the past two decades, providing a cognitively based account of language. When results in cognitive linguistics are taken together with results in the other cognitive sciences, a radically new view of the mind and language-and their relation to the brain-emerges. As a result, the original formalist nativist paradigm of cognitive science as it developed in the 1960s and early 1970s has been stood on its head. I was one of the originators of that paradigm, among the researchers first bringing formal logic as an account of natural language semantics into linguistics in the early 1960s. The hope then was to fit logic and Chomskyan transformational generative grammar into a unified approach to language and mind. The formalist nativist paradigm that subsequently developed tried to fulfill that dream, with the hope of merging Anglo-American analytic philosophy with formal logic, generative grammar, early AI, cognitive psychology, and cognitive anthropology. By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the formalist nativist paradigm did not fit the facts.
A Cultural-Historical Approach to Distributed Cognition
A cultural-historical approach to distributed cognition Michael Cole and Yrjö Engeström Michael Cole and Yrjö Engeström A cultural-historical approach It was supposedly Goethe who observed that everything has been thought of before; the task is to think of it again in ways that are appropriate to one's current circumstances. Whoever made the remark, we have thought of it often in relation to the current wave of discovery that both the content and process of thinking (however those slippery terms are interpreted) are distributed as much among individuals as they are packed within them.
Toward a Bio-Cognitive Philosophy of Language
2002
It will not be an exaggeration to say that modern linguistic science is in a profound theoretical and conceptual tangle. It is especially obvious in semantics as "the theory of meaning'', where the chaos is striking (Devitt & Sterelny). It is because so far linguistics as a science has not succeeded in bringing together in a non-contradictory fashion the two concepts of language, language as a sign system for representing knowledge and language as a communicative activity. This is largely due to the methodological shortcomings of the traditional philosophy of mind based on Cartesian logic with its ontological distinction between mind and body (Priest; Schlechtman; Kim). The mainstream cognitive science approach to intelligence is largely computational: intelligent performance is viewed as certain symbolic processes involving representations (Fodor 1975, 1998; Newell; Pylyshyn; Fuchs & Robert, inter alia). These processes account for such cognitive capacities as perception, language acquisition and processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, learning, and the acquisition, representation, and use of knowledge (Lepore & Pylyshyn). However, the concept of mental representation as used in contemporary literature is so fuzzy and elusive that its more or less consistent use unavoidably invokes one question that has to be answered prior to any productive discussion of the nature of cognition and cognitive capacities: What is a mental representation? In contemporary philosophical theory of knowledge by representations are understood certain mental structures including intentional categories (believe that p, wish that q) which constitute the content of linguistic (semantic) structures at the deep level. In psychology, representations are typically described as conceptual structures individuated by their contents (Margolis & Laurence) and defined in accordance with traditional methods of analytical philosophy, that is, by positing sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that have to be met. However, there is enough empirical evidence that refutes the very existence of rigid categories in a classical sense (Rosch 1973, 1977; Taylor; Margolis). Moreover, concepts, or knowledge structures rooted in intentional categorization, are much more complicated than what the traditional philosophical/semantic analysis claims them to be. Experimental data highlight the role experience plays in perception, categorization, and conceptualization. It has been shown that background knowledge affects categorial decisions (Palmeri & Blalock; Gelman & Bloom) and acquisition of new concepts (Nelson et al.; Matan & Carey), that meaning is specifically related to perception (Allwood & Gaerdenfors) which itself is influenced by categorization processes (Schyns; Albertazzi), and that object recognition and categorization is largely an ongoing process, affected by experience of our environment (Wallis & Bülthoff). It has become obvious that, despite a long history of discussion (Watson), there is no way out of the philosophical dead-end within the framework of the old rationalist paradigm, since traditional analytical philosophy is incapable of providing a reasonably consistent and empirically sound unified theory of mental representations (Stich; Croft; Sandra). Attempts to re
Studii-de-Știinta-și-Cultură, 2018
Cognition is Communication. Abstract On the basis of previous studies on the phylogenic-psychogenetic approach to the pair MIND-LANGUAGE developing the subject's cognitive conceptualizing power with the highly parallel, hierarchical, pattern-discriminating brain this article will concentrate on the evolution of language in its mechanized forms from writing to Artificial Intelligence. With the Internet and AI, the Authority/Other pole of Lacan's subject are minimized. Are social networks the new antisocial anonymous and uncatchable killers of cognition, or the supreme tools of absolute cognition and total freedom of expression? Résumé Cognition = Communication. Sur la base d'études antérieures sur la phylogénie et la psychogénétique du couple MENTAL/LANGAGE générant la conceptualisation cognitive avec le cerveau hautement parallèle, hiérarchique, identifiant de formes cet article concentrera son attention sur l'évolution du langage sous ses formes mécanisées de l'écriture à la langue de l'Intelligence Artificielle. Avec l'Internet et l'IA l'Autorité/Autre du sujet lacanien sont minimisés. Les réseaux sociaux sont-ils les nouveaux tueurs de la cognition, antisociaux, anonymes, intractables, ou bien les outils de la cognition absolue et de la liberté d'expression ? Rezumat Cogniția este Comunicare.
Verbal patterns: taming cognitive biology
Cowley, S.J., Velmezova, K. and Kull. K. (eds.) Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. To appear Springer (2015)., 2015
Linguists classically focus on phenomenologically salient units or verbal patterns. In biolinguistics, these are “explained” by positing a brain that grows a system that identifies / generates linguistic forms (a “language faculty”). The paper offers an alternative: individuals become skilled in linguistic action by using cultural resources to extend their embodiment. Language and languages are heterogeneous and distributed. Although the verbal is salient, its basis lies in coordinated biosemiotic activity. In illustrating this perspective, the paper builds on two case studies of real-time events. These show that people link fine inter-bodily coordination with skills in orienting to utterances as types – they use cultural patterns to constrain biosemiosis. As people become strategic actors, they rely on embodiment (and, of course, brains) to develop skills based on taking a language stance. By imaginatively separating language from activity, they both tame biosemiotic powers and transform the brain’s functional organisation. There is no need for language genes, neural spandrels or undiscovered physical principles. Wittgenstein’s (1958) view that language connects living human bodies within forms of life can thus be extended by means of empirical and observational work.
Language as a part of action: multidimensional time-scale integration of language and cognition
Psychology of Language and Communication, 2018
This Special Issue is devoted to one of the topics present at the 3rd Conference of the International Society for Interactivity Language and Cognition. The title of the CILC3 conference was "Tactility in Thinking and Talking" and the focus was on "the transactional weaving of people, things, and words that reflects a coordination at different time scales and from which language and cognition emerge". In contrast (or rather: in addition) to traditional approaches to cognition as information processing in the individual's minds, we invited participants to consider the ecosystems of thinking and communication. Researchers from fields such as psychology, philosophy, cognitive archaeology, anthropology, semiotics, applied and theoretical linguistics, communication, business and education presented papers concerned with the interactive, dialogical co-creative processes and the role the physical environments and physical aspects of movements, artifacts and words play in enabling cognition as a dialogical and distributed process. The conference attracted over 50 researchers from Europe, Asia and North America. Along with oral presentations, keynote addresses and poster presentations, the conference offered workshops on temporality, Gibsonian information, translaguaging, the genesis of graphic skills, distributed intelligence analysis, organizational cognition, and interactivity (from computers to cultures). These presentations and workshops offered concepts and methods to
Minds and Machines, 2009
The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is 'linguistic' in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the Embodied Cognitive Science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining highlevel cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic 'language' we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself.