Abstract
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can a person’s thoughts about absent, abstract or counterfactual states of affairs also be accounted for in such terms? We argue such a question will seem pressing so long as one fails to appreciate how richly resourceful the human ecological niche is in terms of the affordances it provides. The explanatory work that is supposedly done by mental representations in a philosophical analysis of cognition, can instead be done by looking outside of the head to the environment structured by sociomaterial practices, and the affordances it makes available. Once one recognizes how much of the human ecological niche has become structured by activities of talking and writing, this should take away at least some of the motivation for understanding linguistic thinking in terms of content-bearing internal representations. We’ll argue that people can think about absent, abstract or counterfactual because of their skills for engaging with what we will call “enlanguaged affordances”. We make use of the phenomenological analysis of speech in Merleau-Ponty to show how the multiple affordances an individual is ready to engage with in a particular situation will typically include enlanguaged affordances.
Highlights
Cognition has been understood in terms of computational operations carried out on internal mental representations
We suggest Merleau-Ponty’s category of spoken speech should be thought of as expressive of the regular ways of doing things made available within the landscape of affordances of a form of life
We’ve shown how the capacity for linguistic thought admits of conceptualisation in terms of skilled intentionality, i.e. in terms of coordinating with multiple affordances at the same time
Summary
Cognition has been understood in terms of computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. (3) The affordances the environment offers are relative to the abilities available in a form of life It follows from these three theses that the concept of skilled intentionality should apply to cases of higher-order cognition, such as imagination, long-term planning, language understanding, taking into account the perspective of other people, and mathematical and logical reasoning. Among the skills and abilities people develop in the human form of life are skills for expressing, either in the activity of speech or in writing, ways of thinking about the world. Our aim in this paper is to show how linguistic thought is made possible not by internal mental representations but by a person’s skilled engagement with enlanguaged affordances. Linguistic thinking is made possible by the enlanguaged affordances our sociomaterial environment makes available
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