Stephen J. Cowley

Taking a Language Stance

Linguists tend to view language in terms of forms and their use. For historical reasons, speaking and listening are often ascribed to knowledge of a language system. Language behavior is seen as the production and processing of forms. Others contrast language to man-made codes (see Kravchenko, 2007; Love, 2004). Instead of focusing on forms, language can be conceived of as action and, as such, both dynamic and symbolic (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2009). History places us in a meshwork where public resources of language, among other things, contribute to games, mashing beans, and watching television. Speaking-while-hearing draws on cultural products (e.g., axes, social roles, pictures, and wordings). As we collaborate, we orient to wordings or repeated (and systematized) aspects of vocalizations that, within our community, carry historically derived information. Pursuing this view, it is argued that hearing “words” is like seeing “things” in pictures. This is described as taking a language stance. To defend the position, it is argued that, first, we learn to hear wordings and, later, to use “what we hear” as ways of constraining our actions. Far from depending on individual knowledge, orienting to wordings makes language irreducibly collective.

Long-term relationships as a benchmark for robot personhood

The human body constructs itself into a person by becoming attuned to the affective consequences of its actions in social relationships. Norms develop that ground perception and action, providing standards for appraising conduct. The body finds itself motivated to enact itself as a character in the drama of life, carving from its beliefs, intentions, and experiences a unique identity and perspective. If a biological body can construct itself into a person by exploiting social mechanisms, could an electromechanical body, a robot, do the same? To qualify for personhood, a robot body must be able to construct its own identity, to assume different roles, and to discriminate in forming friendships. Though all these conditions could be considered benchmarks of personhood, the most compelling benchmark, for which the above mentioned are prerequisites, is the ability to sustain long-term relationships. Long-term relationships demand that a robot continually recreate itself as it scripts its own future. This benchmark may be contrasted with those of previous research, which tend to define personhood in terms that are trivial, subjective, or based on assumptions about moral universals. Although personhood should not in principle be limited to one species, the most humanlike of robots are best equipped for reciprocal relationships with human beings

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]

Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice

Cognition Beyond the Brain challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking. The systemic view steers between extended functionalism and enactivism by stressing how living beings connect bodies, technologies, language and culture. Since human thinking depends on a cultural ecology, people connect biologically-based powers with extended systems and, by so doing, they constitute cognitive systems that reach across the skin. Biological interpretation exploits extended functional systems. Illustrating distributed cognition, one set of chapters focus on computer mediated trust, work at a construction site, judgement aggregation and crime scene investigation. Turning to how bodies manufacture skills, the remaining chapters focus on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination. The feeling of doing is crucial to solving maths problems, learning about X rays, finding an invoice number, or launching a warhead in a film. People both participate in extended systems and exert individual responsibility. Brains manufacture a now to which selves are anchored: people can act automatically or, at times, vary habits and choose to author actions. In ontogenesis, a systemic view permits rationality to be seen as gaining mastery over world-side resources. Much evidence and argument thus speaks for reconnecting the study of computation, interactivity and human artifice. Taken together, this can drive a networks revolution that gives due cognitive importance to the perceivable world that lies beyond the brain. Cognition Beyond the Brain is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners and graduate students within the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time

Using radical embodied cognitive science, the paper offers the hypothesis that language is symbiotic: its agent-environment dynamics arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints. As a result, co-action grants human agents the ability to use a unique form of phenomenal experience. In defense of the hypothesis, I stress how linguistic embodiment enacts thinking: accordingly, I present auditory and acoustic evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk, first, in fine detail and, then, in narrative mode. As the parties attune, they use a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings. The latter arise in making and tracking phonetic gestures that, crucially, mesh use of artifice, cultural products and impersonal experience. As observers, living human beings gain dispositions to display and use social subjectivity. Far from using brains to “process” verbal content, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources. On this distributed-ecological view, language can thus be redefined as: “activity in which wordings play a part.”

Cognition Beyond the Brain

It was long assumed that thinking goes on ‘in the head’: indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, many would have regarded it as absurd to examine thinking with reference to events beyond the brain. The chapters in Cognition Beyond the Brain adopt a different perspective: In thinking, people use dispositions from both sides of the skull. Readily observed phenomena—including neural activity— constitute the object of thinking, which relates conceptually to the construct ‘thinking’. Like all folk concepts, ‘thinking’ is a second-order construct used to ‘explain’ observations or, specifically, how action is—and should be—integrated with perception. As attested in each of the chapters, bodies co-orient to cultural resources while using bidirectional coupling. The focus thus falls on what can be learned about thinking by studying world-side activity. The chapters report empirical, observational and theoretical studies of how people use circumstances (and objects) to act alone, in dyads and in groups. People manage and track attention as they integrate speech and action with gestures, gaze and other bodily activity. In making interactivity part of thinking, a broad range and assortments of parts, procedures and modes of operation are invoked.

Human Agency and the Resources of Reason

The evidence shows that human primates become (relatively) rational actors . Using a distributed perspective, we identify aspects of human agency that raise important questions for sociocognitive science . In humans, we argue, agency does not centre on individual agents . Cognitive, social and linguistic outcomes depend on skills in moving in and out of aggregates that bind people, artifacts , language and institutions. While recognising the value of symbol processing models, these presuppose the embodied events of human symbol grounding . At a micro level, humans coordinate with others and the world to self-construct by cognising, talking and orienting to social affordances . We trace the necessary skills to sense-saturated coordination or interactivity . As a result of perceiving and acting on the environment , human individuals use the artificial to extend their natural powers. By using verbal patterns , artifacts and institutions , we become imperfect rational actors whose lives span the micro and the macro worlds.

The Codes of Language: Turtles All the Way Up?

Linguistic signalling is compared with using artificial and organic codes. Based on Barbieris (2003) work, I begin by showing parallels between organic processes and how language prompts conscious attitudes and micro-semantics. Hypothetically, organic coding may shape the neural and interactional dynamics that subtend language. Turning to development, I then compare the organic process of DNA transcription with Trevarthen and Aitkens (2001) intrinsic motive formation (IMF). This shows that the organic process model can throw light on the emergence of self. As in protein manufacture, embodied adaptors use the closure of a world to promote functional change. Rather as cells synthesise proteins, IMF prompts neural reorganization. By constraining how action and perception impact on neural activation, proto-artefacts (expressions, emotions, and attitudes) gradually insinuate themselves into how we act, feel, and speak. Human customs connect intrinsic motivation and displays of affect that, over time, prompt infants to believe in words. Parallels between organic coding and language dynamics are thus consistent with a distributed view of language. As artefacts and organic codes coevolved, our bodies became dependent on an ability to take the language stance.

Language, interactivity and solution probing: repetition without repetition

Recognition of the importance of autopoiesis to biological systems was crucial in building an alternative to the classic view of cognitive science. However, concepts like structural coupling and autonomy are not strong enough to throw light on language and human problem solving. The argument is presented though a case study where a person solves a problem and, in so doing relies on non-local aspects of the ecology as well as his observer’s mental domain. Like Anthony Chemero we make links with ecological psychology to emphasize how embodiment draws on cultural resources as people concert thinking, action and perception. We trace this to human interactivity or sense-saturated coordination that renders possible language and human forms of cognition: it links human sense-making to historical experience. People play roles with natural and cultural artifacts as they act, animate groups and live through relationships drawing on language that is, at once, artificial and natural. Thus, while constrained by wordings, interactivity is able to fine-tune what we do with action-perception loops. Neither language nor human problem solving reduce to biological sense-making.

Systemic Cognition: Human Artifice in Life and Language

Rather than rely on functionalist or enactivist principles, Cognition Beyond the Brain traces thinking to human artifice. In pursuing this approach, we gradually developed what can be deemed a third position in cognitive science. This is because, like talking, doing things with artefacts draws on both biological and cultural principles. On this systemic view, skills embody beliefs, roles and social practices. Since people rely on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination, action also re-enacts cultural history. Bidirectional dynamics connect embodiment to non-local regularities. Thinking thus emerges in a temporal trajectory of action that takes place within a space populated by people and objects. Utterances, thoughts and deeds all draw on physical, biological and cultural constraints. Even plans are shaped as first-order activity is shaped by second-order structures. Intentions and learning arise as dynamics in one time-scale are co-regulated by dynamics in other scales. For example, in ontogenesis, interactivity prompts a child to strategic use of second-order language. By linking cultural scales to inter-bodily dynamics, circumstances are coloured by resources that serve in using simulation to manage thought, feeling and action. The systemic nature of cognition connects now, the adjacent possible, implications for others and, potentially, social and environmental change.