TY - JOUR
T1 - Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
AU - Kiverstein, Julian
AU - Rietveld, Erik
N1 - Funding Information: European Research Council Starting Grant 679190 (awarded to Erik Rietveld) Publisher Copyright: © 2020, The Author(s). Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/1
Y1 - 2021/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Affordances
KW - Ecological psychology
KW - Enactive cognitive science
KW - Expressive theory of linguistic meaning
KW - Gibson
KW - Linguistic thought
KW - Merleau-Ponty
KW - Radical theories of cognition
KW - Skilled intentionality
KW - Speech
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079240511&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02540-3
DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02540-3
M3 - Article
SN - 0039-7857
VL - 198
SP - 175
EP - 194
JO - Synthese
JF - Synthese
ER -