Artifacts, Symbols, and the Socio-cultural Dynamics of Niche Construction

Abstract

Abstract Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in the biological and socio-cultural sciences that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Language itself can be considered as a biocultural niche and evolutionary artifact. An analysis of the cognitive and semiotic status of artifacts, based upon a distinction between the fundamental semiotic relations of “counting as” and “standing for,” reveals that language as a social and semiotic system is not only grounded in embodied engagements with the material and social-interactional world, but also grounds a sub-class of artifacts of particular significance in the cultural history of human cognition. Symbolic cognitive artifacts inherit their representational function from language. They materially and semiotically mediate human cognition, and are not merely informational repositories, but co-agentively constitutive of culturally and historically emergent cognitive domains. Examples of this constitutive role of symbolic cognitive artifacts are drawn from the author’s research with his colleagues on cultural and linguistic conceptualizations of time, and their cultural variability. The implications of conceptualizing cognition as the co-agentive intermeshing of intersubjective and interobjective processes, lead to a distinction between the notion of “extended embodiment” as labeled here and other “extended mind” approaches.