Volume 20, Issue 3, Septiembre 2005
Andy Clark
Pages 255-268
Word, Niche and Super-Niche
How Language Makes Minds Matter More
How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be 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. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space of anitnal minds.