Material Symbols

Abstract

What is the relation between the material, conventional symbol structures that we encounter in the spoken and written word, and human thought? A common assumption, that structures a wide variety of otherwise competing views, is that the way in which these material, conventional symbol-structures do their work is by being translated into some kind of content-matching inner code. One alternative to this view is the tempting but thoroughly elusive idea that we somehow think in some natural language (such as English). In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the “complementarity” view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The “cognitive bonus” that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of “thinking in a given natural language” or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the “extended mind”) of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources.

Keywords:

• Language
• Mind
• Thought
• Extended Mind
• Hybrid Systems
• Symbols
• Materiality

Acknowledgements

This paper grew out of material produced for the workshops on Memory, Mind and Media organized by John Sutton at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia in December 2004. Thanks to John Sutton, Rob Wilson, Mark Rowlands, and all the speakers and participants at those meetings for their invaluable input and criticism. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for important and thought-provoking comments. This project was completed thanks to teaching relief provided by Edinburgh University and by matching leave provided under the AHRC Research Leave Scheme.

Notes

Notes

[1] Note that the suggestion here is not that processes of abstraction always or even typically require the loop through public tokens or symbols. Rather it is that such loops, when present, can play a distinctive cognition enhancing role. For some important explorations of the nature, scope and possible limits of such roles, see Schwartz and Black (1996), and Schyns, Goldstone, and Thibaut (1998).

[2] A possible worry (thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue) is that the kinds of rich interaction between different resources posited by hybrid accounts may first require the translation of the various different elements into a “common code,” thus undermining any claim of genuine hybridity. A possible analogy here is with cases of intermodal interaction, also sometimes said to require the existence of a common code. But in both cases a possible response, it seems to me, is simply to deny the requirement. Potent coordinated interaction need not require a common code. Consider the case of coding in the dorsal and ventral visual streams. The two streams (see Milner & Goodale, 1995) look to trade in highly distinct representational forms, yet in daily life (in uncompromised subjects) they work together seamlessly in the service of goal directed behaviour.

[3] See work on “tools for thought,” the “extended mind,” “wide computation,” “vehicle externalism”: Clark (1997, 2003); Clark & Chalmers (1998); Dennett (1991, 1996); Hurley (1998); Rowlands (1999); Wilson (1994, 2004).

[4] Perhaps there are effects on learning trajectories (see the grade one examples) that resist the dilemma but for here and now thinking (so the argument goes) the options are as stated.

[5] From this point on, whenever I speak of ‘hybrid representational forms’ I shall mean forms that include both standard kinds of internal representation (mentalese, neuralese, perceptual symbol systems, …) and, as proper parts of a kind of distributed encoding, either the material symbols of some public language, or shallow imagistic encodings of those very forms.

[6] A second reason (for Fodor's downplaying the power of hybridity) flows from his (in)famous views concerning concept learning. For given those views, the meaning of hybrid representational forms could not be learnt unless the learner already had the resources to represent that very meaning using more biologically basic (indeed, innate) resources. This, however, is not the time or place to engage in this important discussion (for some countervailing thoughts, see Prinz & Clark, 2004).

[7] It is a moot point exactly what constitutes “profound” reorganization. But in essence, the most radical version of the view I am defending holds that although the brain must learn to deal with the special class of linguistic structures, in so it need not reorganize its neural coding routines in any way that is deeper or more profound than might occur, say, when we first learn to swim, or to play volleyball.

[8] A further question is exactly how the hybrid view defended in this paper relates to that of Carruthers (2002). The relation here is hard to determine, as the starting points of the two accounts are very different. Carruthers buys into large-scale mental modularity and sees natural language as cognition enhancing in virtue of being the sole medium of all module-integrating thoughts. The notion of hybrid cognitive vehicles defended here seems to me to be attractively weaker than this. It is indifferent to the truth or falsity of modularity.