LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY

LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY Marcelo Dascal Tel Aviv University

DEFINITION OF CT A cognitive technology is any systematic means – material or mental – created by humans that is significantly and routinely used for the performance of cognitive aims. A cognitive aim is either a a mental state of a cognitive nature or a cognitive process that leads to cognitive states or helps to reach them.

ARE NATURAL LANGUAGES CTs? Unlike formal language, they are not artifacts. But their naturally evolved features may have been appropriated for cognitive aims. The question whether certain features of NL are CTs is independent of the current technological progress.

MERCEDES AND OXYGEN • OXYGEN: “Get me the big red document that came a month ago” • DAIMLER-BENZ: • A) “Language is the picture and counterpart of thought” • B) “And the machines will understand the words and respond. They will weld, or drive screws, or paint, or write – they will even understand different languages”.

TYPOLOGY OF CTs Strong and weak. Integral and partial. Complete and incomplete. Constitutive and non-constitutive. External and internal.

STRONG & WEAK CTs • A STRONG CT has as its aim a strong cognitive modality and as its means a hard form of rationality. • A WEAK CT has as its aim a weak cognitive modality and as its means a soft form of rationality.

INTEGRAL & PARTIAL CTs • ‘Integral’ technologies are those that provide for the full execution of a given cognitive aim, without requiring any human intervention. • ‘Partial’ technologies are those that provide only ‘helps’ for the performance of a given cognitive aim.

COMPLETE & INCOMPLETE CTs One should further distinguish between the pragmatic notion of an ‘integral’ technology in the above sense and the notion of a syntactically and/or semantically ‘complete’ technology. Completeness has to do with the ability of a technology to ‘cover’ completely a given domain or ensemble of ‘objects’ with respect to some desired property. For instance, if one creates an ‘alphabet of traffic signs’ in order to express through the combinations of its signs all the instructions to be given to drivers, and if the alphabetical system in question has no means to express one of these instructions, it is incomplete.

CONSTITUTIVE & NON-CONSTITUTIVE CTs • A CT is ‘constitutive’ if without it a certain cognitive operation cannot be performed. • A CT is ‘non-constitutive’ if, although extremely useful for the facilitation of the achievement of a certain cognitive aim, it is not a sine qua non for that.

EXTERNAL & INTERNAL CTs • An ‘external’ CT consists in physical devices or processes that are instrumental in achieving cognitive aims. • ‘Internal’ CTs are mental procedures thanks to which we can improve our cognitive activity.

NATURAL LANGUAGE AS ENVIRONMENT RESOURCE TOOL OF COGNITION

AS ENVIRONMENT OF THOUGHT… NATURAL LANGUAGE, THROUGH ITS SHEER OVERWHELMING PRESENCE IN THE MIND, INFLUENCES COGNITION INDEPENDENTLY OF OUR AWARENESS OF WILL.

AS ENVIRONMENT OF THOUGHT… NL AS ANALYTIC-COMBINATORIAL SYSTEMS NL AS RULE-BASED SYSTEMS THE SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF SPEECH NL AND OTHER EXPRESSIVE NEEDS THE POSSIBILITY OF RULE-VIOLATION NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL REASONING

THE LANGUAGE-MACHINE ANALOGY modern “analytic” languages stand to ancient “synthetic” languages, as far as their simplicity and systematicity is concerned, as early machines, which are “extremely complex in their principles”, stand to more advanced ones, which produce their effects “with fewer wheels and fewer principles of motion”. BUT “The simplification of machines renders them more and more perfect, but this simplification of the rudiments of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper for many of the purposes of language”. Adam Smith

AS RESOURCE OF THOUGHT … ASPECTS OF NL THAT ARE REGULARLY AND, FOR THE MOST PART, CONSCIOUSLY PUT TO USE FOR COGNITIVE PURPOSES, WITH MINIMAL ELABORATION

AS RESOURCE OF THOUGHT … INFORMATION GATHERING, STORING, ORGANIZING AND RETRIEVING THROUGH WORDS THE USES OF NL’S SEMANTIC NETWORK EXPRESSING INDETERMINACY NL’S READY-MADE PATTERNS META-LANGUAGE AND META-COGNITION DANGERS OF NL’S COGNITIVE USES

IS LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY ALWAYS A LIABILITY? • syntactic, semantic and pragmatic means they have for expressing indeterminacy: indefiniteness, ambiguity, polysemy, unspecificity, imprecision, vagueness, etc. • a resource for cognitive processes that begin with a foggy initial intuition which they undertake to clarify in a stepwise way, or vice-versa, for those processes that seek to sum up the gist of a theory, an argument, or a story. • essential for conceptualizing those situations in which the mind hesitates between alternatives, none of which seem to fall clearly into well-defined categories.

AS TOOL OF THOUGHT… A LANGUAGE-BASED CT CAN BE VIEWED AS A TOOL WHEN IT IS THE RESULT OF THE ENGINEERING OF LINGUISTIC RESOURCES FOR A SPECIFIC COGNITIVE TASK.

AS TOOL OF THOUGHT… • CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL MODELS OF DEFINITION • INDETERMINACY SHAPING AS A COGNITIVE TOOL • FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS: HOMER, EUCLID, AND MANTRA • LITERARY RESOURCES BECOME COGNITIVE TOOLS • DIALECTICAL STRUCTURES AND REASONING

DIALOGUE AND DIALECTICS • To expound one’s ideas for a specific interlocutor and to defend them against her specific objections – even if both the character and the objections are fictional creations of the writer – requires techniques of persuasion, argumentation and justification other than those used in a linear text that addresses a generalized, non-present, and unknown reader. • From dialogue to dialogical logic and the ‘new rhetoric’. • CTs for debating and for deliberating.

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION • THE EXAMPLES DISCUSSED ILLUSTRATE CTs, WHERE LANGUAGE IS DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN COGNITION • MOST OF THESE EXAMPLES ARE, SO FAR, “INTERNAL” CTs • MOST OF THESE EXAMPLES ARE “PARTIAL” CTs • SOME ARE USEFUL FOR “STRONG”, OTHERS FOR “WEAK” COGNITION, AND SOME FOR BOTH • VERY FEW PURPORT TO BE “COMPLETE”, AND ONLY A FEW HAVE BEEN CLAIMED TO BE “CONSTITUTIVE”. • THE ‘EPISTEMOLOGY OF CT’ AND PSYCHOPRAGMATICS • TECHNOLOGY AND MEANING

MEANING IN TECHNOLOGY • “human relationships and human purposes may have a closer connection with technological progress than sometimes seems possible” (Pacey). • a participatory approach to technology, in which we “feel ourselves to be involved in the system on which we are working” (Pacey). • “we have an intimate participatory relationship with language in general and language-based cognitive technologies in particular; such technologies are, ultimately, the technologies of meaning par excellence” (Dascal).

LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY