Opinion
Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche

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Embodied agents use bodily actions and environmental interventions to make the world a better place to think in. Where does language fit into this emerging picture of the embodied, ecologically efficient agent? One useful way to approach this question is to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche: a persisting but never stationary material scaffolding whose crucial role in promoting thought and reason remains surprisingly poorly understood. It is the very materiality of this linguistic scaffolding, I suggest, that gives it some key benefits. By materializing thought in words, we create structures that are themselves proper objects of perception, manipulation, and (further) thought.

Introduction

What is the cognitive role of language? Are words and sentences merely vehicles for the communication of pre-formed ideas, or are they part of the process of thinking itself? In what follows I suggest that words and sentences form part of the process of thinking, and that they do so not merely in virtue of their contents but also in virtue of their very materiality: their physical existence as encountered and perceptible items, as sounds in the air or as words on the printed page. For by materializing thought in words, we structure our environments, creating ‘cognitive niches’ that enhance and empower us in a variety of non-obvious ways. By treating language as (in part) real external structure created and maintained by situated niche-constructing agents we begin to bring together the study of language and thought, and the emerging body of work increasingly becoming known as ‘embodied cognitive science’ 1, 2, 3, 4. This work highlights the transformative effects of bodily form, bodily activity and material environmental scaffolding on mind and cognition.

At first, much of this work targeted quite simple forms of adaptive behavior. But in recent years suggestive links have begun to emerge between basic themes in embodied and situated cognition and new ways of understanding the learning, evolution and cognitive role of language 3, 4, 5, 6. In this article I focus on one such emerging theme, the role of language (and material symbols more generally) in providing a new kind of thought-enabling cognitive niche 7, 8, 9. By a cognitive niche I mean an animal-built physical structure [10] that transforms one or more problem spaces in ways that (when successful) aid thinking and reasoning about some target domain or domains 11, 12, 13. These physical structures combine with appropriate culturally transmitted practices to enhance problem-solving, and (in the most dramatic cases) to make possible whole new forms of thought and reason.

I present three ways in which to begin to flesh out this idea, and sketch a computational (connectionist and dynamical) framework in which to embed it. I end the argument by suggesting an additional (non-essential but potentially important) refinement: that linguistic activity might turn out to be a mode of cognition-enhancing self-stimulation in a system with no ‘Central Meaner’ orchestrating the whole 14, 15.

Section snippets

Pure translation models of language understanding

There is a popular view stemming from the work of Jerry Fodor 16, 17 that says that knowing a natural language is knowing how to pair its expressions with encodings in some other, more fundamental, and at least expressively equipotent, inner code (‘Mentalese’ or the Language of Thought). Language influences thought, on such accounts, in virtue of a process of translation: one that fully transforms the public sentence into the content-capturing inner code. This is a prime example of what might

Words as targets in the material world

Central to this vision of language as a complementary resource is an appreciation of the power of added worldly structure (in this case, perceptible material symbols) to transform the tasks that confront an intelligent agent. Insofar as these effects involve, as they often do, an agent's appreciating the meaning assigned to the material symbols, it can be easy to overlook or underplay the continuing role of the perceptible material structure itself. Yet it is the visible, audible or

Beyond translation

What more general model of language and its relation to thought do these various illustrations suggest? A good place to begin is with the conception of language as complementary to more basic forms of neural processing 7, 9, 14, 22, 23. According to this conception language works its magic not (or not solely) by means of translation into appropriate expressions of ‘Mentalese’ or the ‘Language of Thought’ [16] but by something more like a coordination dynamics 6, 39, 40 in which words and

Anarchic self-stimulation?

One obstacle to appreciating the full cognitive potency of self-produced language (whether overt or covert) is the temptation to posit a powerful Central Executive – the ‘Central Meaner’ to use [14] – which ‘uses’ linguistic self-stimulation as a means to its own (pre-formed, fully thought-out) cognitive ends. In place of such an all-knowing inner executive, we should consider the possibility (Box 3) of a vast parallel coalition of more-or-less influential forces whose largely self-organizing

Conclusions

Embodied agents encounter language first and foremost as new layers of material structure in an already complex world. They also come to produce such structures for themselves, not just for communicative effect but as parts of self-stimulating cycles that scaffold their own behaviour. These layers of structure play a variety of cognition-enhancing roles. They act as new, perceptually simple targets that augment the learning environment, they mediate recall and help distribute attention, they

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited enormously from the helpful comments of several anonymous referees, and from the TICS editor, Shbana Rahman. The project was completed thanks to teaching relief provided by Edinburgh University and by matching leave provided under the AHRC Research Leave Scheme (grant reference number: 130000R39525).

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