COGNITION DISTRIBUEE

Sutton, j. (2004). Representation, Levels, and Context in Integrational Linguistics and Distributed Cognition. Language Sciences 26 (6), 503-524.

"Distributed Cognition and Integrational Linguistics have much in common. Both approaches see communicative activity and intelligent behaviour in general as strongly context-dependent and action-oriented, and brains as permeated by history."

Distributed cognition :

- "On Clark's view, we are intricately psychologically tangled with, and our minds projected out into, a range of cognitive objects such as instruments, media, and other people".

- "To stress the 'leakiness' of the human mind is to focus on its tendencies both to co-opt and to incorporate external resources. Cognitive processes sometimes constitutively involve multiple loops between brain, body, and world, where 'world' includes
both the physical and the social environments with which embodied brains couple, the 'scaffolding' on which they lean. Cognitive states, like the processes in which they participate, are thus sometimes hybrid biological and non-biological states. So, in certain circumstances, things have a cognitive life (Sutton, 2002b). Claims like this can be put more or less strongly, and have methodological as well as metaphysical readings. And of course there is much more to say about the relevant circumstances and conditions: what's critical is the context in
which external resources are assimilated, parasitised, or internalised in some contingent 'dynamical singularity' spanning brain, body and world (Hurley, 1998a)".


Integrational linguistics :

- "To make sense of any episode of human communication we have to recognize an integration of activities being carried out by particular individuals in a particular set of circumstances. Signs are created in the course of this integrational process".

- "In Integrational Linguistics, then, analysis must focus on the context in which action-oriented symbolic activity arises. The integrationist urges us to focus on ordinary embodied skills and habits, on practical strategies of communication rather than on any set of context-free inner models of reality. [...] There is no abstract, permanent set of meanings and messages in either language or thought, prior to episodes of thinking and communicating".

- "Brains, for Cowley, are 'biosocial organs permeated by history' (Cowley, 2002, pp. 73, 75). Symbol-manipulation is unlikely to be either internal or innate in any interesting sense, but is rather an external or relational capacity learned in developing the capacities to do what feels right. What we call 'language' is then 'insinuated into developing neural organization as an individual exploits symbol-mediated activity to develop social skills and capacities"(Cowley, 2002, 85)."

- "we should not seek to categorize an abstract and general 'language system' but instead investigate the complex and diverse practices that drive changes in 'contextualizing'. Contextualizing is the use of previous experience 'to integrate activities so that, in future, their effects are likely to benefit' the agent (Cowley, 2004, especially Section 2.3). Cowley puts this perspective into practice himself in strong empirical studies of (for example) conversational turn-taking and embodied interactivity in dialogue (see Cowley, 2002, p. 87–89) and by bringing an integrationist perspective to bear on developmental linguistics and psychology (Cowley, 2004). Microstudies of the properties of talk and silence in prosody, gesture, and facial expression can combine, from an integrational point of view, into a rich picture of the development of utterance activity, the contextual exercise of utterance capacity, and the propensity to exploit external symbols."

"we should accept the inevitability of multiple contextualization and still get on with the work of seeing which contexts matter, and why, rather than remaining squeamish about the whole project of generalizing across contexts."