How to Do Things Without Words: Infants, utterance-activity and distributed cognition

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact

Interview on Open Access with Dr. Stevan Harnad

In light of the recent Conyers bill that would remove the NIH mandate on Open Access, LISTen (LISNews.org) talked to Dr. Harnad about Open Access so that librarians may learn more about it

Thinking in action

“The original publication is available at: www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]While computers can be used to model human competencies, formalization has its limits. Sensori-motor dynamics are probably necessary to intelligence. Applied to language, verbal patterns become constraints or, in Elman’s (2004) terms, cues to meaning. Unlike symbol processors, humans act, mean and use the feeling of thinking (Harnad 2005). While language has an artificial (or formal) aspect, human intelligence is embodied. In spite of widespread belief to the contrary, brains do not need to generate sets of sentences. In challenging code views of language, we find parallels with the complex systems we call cells. Given DNA code-makers, formal features constrain protein synthesis. Life, Barbieri (2007) argues, can be traced to natural artifacts.1 This parallels how culture enables us to bring biodynamics under the control of physical and non-physical (or cultural) patterns. In turning from physical symbol systems, weight falls on DEEDS: human thinking is Dynamical, Embodied, Embedded, Distributed and Situated (Walmsley 2008).Peer reviewe