Elsevier

Cognitive Systems Research

Volumes 29–30, September 2014, Pages 31-39
Cognitive Systems Research

The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.06.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Language is conceived as an intersubjective engagement enabling shared cognition.

  • Experimental studies highlight ways in which language enables intersubjective informational and behavioural synergies.

  • We therefore argue for language as skilful joint activity leading to dialogically extended minds.

Abstract

A growing conceptual and empirical literature is advancing the idea that language extends our cognitive skills. One of the most influential positions holds that language – qua material symbols – facilitates individual thought processes by virtue of its material properties (Clark, 2006a). Extending upon this model, we argue that language enhances our cognitive capabilities in a much more radical way: the skilful engagement of public material symbols facilitates evolutionarily unprecedented modes of collective perception, action and reasoning (interpersonal synergies) creating dialogically extended minds. We relate our approach to other ideas about collective minds (Gallagher, 2011, Theiner et al., 2010, Tollefsen, 2006) and review a number of empirical studies to identify the mechanisms enabling the constitution of interpersonal cognitive systems.

Introduction

The intimate relation between language and cognition has been long recognised across a broad range of scientific and philosophical disciplines. However, the exact nature of the relation is still widely debated, cf. the different perspectives in Clark, 2006b, Clark, 1996, Fodor, 1975, Fusaroli, 2011, Geeraerts and Cuyckens, 2007, Tylén et al., 2010. One of the more recent developments considers language from the perspective of active vehicle externalism. In this perspective, language is regarded as an external culturally evolved tool that interacts with our biological cognitive systems facilitating and actively supporting certain cognitive processes (Clark, 2006a, Clark, 2006b). Language is thus portrayed as ‘a mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding: a persisting, though never stationary, symbolic edifice’ (Clark, 2008), which – thanks to its materiality and freedom from the immediate context – gives a more stable structure to thought. Internalist positions, for instance Fodor (2008), posit an innate language of thought to explain the symbolic structure of certain human cognitive processes. A. Clark on the contrary argues that it is the actual use of external material symbols – which in some cases can be internalized – that enables individual cognizers to think symbolically by constraining and focussing their perceptual and attentional strategies more effectively.

However, Clark’s position tends to neglect a crucial aspect of language, which radically extends its description as an instance of active vehicle externalism: language as a social activity. In most cases, humans do not simply engage the material symbols per se, but employ them in interaction with other individuals, for instance in contexts of regulation of social relations, or coordination of complex actions and problem solving activities (cf. H.H. Clark, 1996; Brennan et al., 2010, Vygotsky, 1978; Habermas and Cooke, 1998, Fusaroli and Tylén, 2012, Pickering and Garrod, 2004, Hasson et al., 2012). Extending upon A. Clark’s proposal, we stress how language enables skilful intersubjective engagement, that is the coordination of individual cognitive systems giving rise to composite units that exceed the capabilities of their parts (cf. the notion of interpersonal synergies (Riley et al., 2011, Fusaroli et al., 2013). Rather than a simple cognition-enhancing external resource for individual cognition, language thus constitutes a new and evolutionarily unprecedented mode of socially extended cognition (Donald, 2001)1. Linguistic activity is a means by which individuals come to jointly apprehend and manipulate information to create informational and behavioural interpersonal synergies, which potentially outstretch the cognitive abilities of any of the individuals were they on their own. Thus, language as a skilful intersubjective activity de facto constitutes dialogically extended minds.

We introduce our proposal by discussing A. Clark’s idea of language as a tool. From Clark’s perspective of active externalism, we argue that the bodily basis of language provides an initial step towards liberating linguistic meaning from the confines of purely internal neural processing, making language into something we do. However, since language use and development importantly anchors cognition into the social world, we will take the claim a step further: language is something we do together. We thus propose that language is a ‘doubly-extended’ cognitive phenomenon: not only is it robustly grounded in the agent’s bodily engagement with the world, as hinted by Clark, but it also further extends this engagement into the social world through embodied social dynamics. We support this claim with reference to empirical findings on linguistic coordination, and point to possible mechanisms for the creation of interpersonal synergies. Finally we will discuss in which way our proposal complement other work on collective minds and respond to some possible critiques.

Section snippets

Cognition beyond the boundaries of skull and skin

A. Clark’s work introduces the notion of language as tool in order to challenge one of the fundamental assumptions in the contemporary philosophy of language and cognitive science, namely that innate internal linguistic representations are the necessary presupposition for the development and use of language as well as for human thought (Fodor, 1975, Fodor, 2008). In opposition to such strongly internalistic conceptions, A. Clark develops the extended mind hypothesis: an active externalist

Language as a tool for interacting minds

Focusing on linguistic activities, we notice how Clark’s solitary individuals employing linguistic actions – repeating instructions, taking notes, talking to themselves, etc. – seem rather the special case than a representative example of linguistically mediated cognitive processes. A clue to the core cognitive nature of language is to be found in the way we evolve, learn to produce and interpret material symbols in the first place. A growing number of studies (Donald, 1991, Galantucci, 2009,

Conclusions

In line with A. Clark, we consider language to be a prominent case of extended cognition. However, we claim that the true power of language cannot be grasped by focussing primarily on its material properties, nor on how they facilitate individual reasoning. Language is first and foremost intersubjective engagement. Its material and symbolic aspects thus constitute the public arena for dynamical, interpersonal synergies. Language enables individuals to coordinate their cognitive processes in

Acknowledgements

Research was funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research - Humanities (FKK) project “Joint Diagrammatical Reasoning in Language”, and the EUROCORES grant EuroUnderstanding “Digging for the Roots of Understanding”.

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