LANGUAGE AS A
COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY
Marcelo Dascal
Tel Aviv University
DEFINITION OF CT
A cognitive technology is any systematic means –
material or mental – created by humans that is
significantly and routinely used for the performance
of cognitive aims.
A cognitive aim is either a a mental state of a
cognitive nature or a cognitive process that leads to
cognitive states or helps to reach them.
ARE NATURAL LANGUAGES CTs?
•Unlike formal language, they are not artifacts.
•But their naturally evolved features may have
been appropriated for cognitive aims.
•The question whether certain features of NL
are CTs is independent of the current
technological progress.
MERCEDES AND OXYGEN
• OXYGEN: “Get me the big red document that
came a month ago”
• DAIMLER-BENZ:
• A) “Language is the picture and counterpart of
thought”
• B) “And the machines will understand the words
and respond. They will weld, or drive screws, or
paint, or write – they will even understand
different languages”.
TYPOLOGY OF CTs
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Strong and weak.
Integral and partial.
Complete and incomplete.
Constitutive and non-constitutive.
External and internal.
STRONG & WEAK CTs
• A STRONG CT has as its aim a strong
cognitive modality and as its means a hard
form of rationality.
• A WEAK CT has as its aim a weak
cognitive modality and as its means a soft
form of rationality.
INTEGRAL & PARTIAL CTs
• ‘Integral’ technologies are those that
provide for the full execution of a given
cognitive aim, without requiring any human
intervention.
• ‘Partial’ technologies are those that provide
only ‘helps’ for the performance of a given
cognitive aim.
COMPLETE & INCOMPLETE CTs
One should further distinguish between the pragmatic notion
of an ‘integral’ technology in the above sense and the
notion of a syntactically and/or semantically ‘complete’
technology.
Completeness has to do with the ability of a technology to
‘cover’ completely a given domain or ensemble of
‘objects’ with respect to some desired property.
For instance, if one creates an ‘alphabet of traffic signs’ in
order to express through the combinations of its signs all
the instructions to be given to drivers, and if the
alphabetical system in question has no means to express
one of these instructions, it is incomplete.
CONSTITUTIVE & NON-CONSTITUTIVE
CTs
• A CT is ‘constitutive’ if without it a certain
cognitive operation cannot be performed.
• A CT is ‘non-constitutive’ if, although
extremely useful for the facilitation of the
achievement of a certain cognitive aim, it is
not a sine qua non for that.
EXTERNAL & INTERNAL CTs
• An ‘external’ CT consists in physical
devices or processes that are instrumental in
achieving cognitive aims.
• ‘Internal’ CTs are mental procedures thanks
to which we can improve our cognitive
activity.
NATURAL LANGUAGE AS
•ENVIRONMENT
•RESOURCE
•TOOL
OF COGNITION
AS ENVIRONMENT OF
THOUGHT…
NATURAL LANGUAGE, THROUGH
ITS SHEER OVERWHELMING
PRESENCE IN THE MIND,
INFLUENCES COGNITION
INDEPENDENTLY OF OUR
AWARENESS OF WILL.
AS ENVIRONMENT OF
THOUGHT…
•NL AS ANALYTIC-COMBINATORIAL SYSTEMS
•NL AS RULE-BASED SYSTEMS
•THE SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF SPEECH
•NL AND OTHER EXPRESSIVE NEEDS
•THE POSSIBILITY OF RULE-VIOLATION
•NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL
REASONING
THE LANGUAGE-MACHINE ANALOGY
modern “analytic” languages stand to ancient “synthetic”
languages, as far as their simplicity and systematicity is
concerned, as early machines, which are “extremely
complex in their principles”, stand to more advanced ones,
which produce their effects “with fewer wheels and fewer
principles of motion”.
BUT
“The simplification of machines renders them more and more
perfect, but this simplification of the rudiments of
languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less
proper for many of the purposes of language”.
Adam Smith
AS RESOURCE OF THOUGHT
…
ASPECTS OF NL THAT ARE REGULARLY
AND, FOR THE MOST PART,
CONSCIOUSLY PUT TO USE FOR
COGNITIVE PURPOSES, WITH MINIMAL
ELABORATION
AS RESOURCE OF THOUGHT …
•INFORMATION GATHERING, STORING,
ORGANIZING AND RETRIEVING THROUGH
WORDS
•THE USES OF NL’S SEMANTIC NETWORK
•EXPRESSING INDETERMINACY
•NL’S READY-MADE PATTERNS
•META-LANGUAGE AND META-COGNITION
•DANGERS OF NL’S COGNITIVE USES
IS LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY
ALWAYS A LIABILITY?
• syntactic, semantic and pragmatic means they have for
expressing indeterminacy: indefiniteness, ambiguity,
polysemy, unspecificity, imprecision, vagueness, etc.
• a resource for cognitive processes that begin with a foggy
initial intuition which they undertake to clarify in a
stepwise way, or vice-versa, for those processes that seek
to sum up the gist of a theory, an argument, or a story.
• essential for conceptualizing those situations in which the
mind hesitates between alternatives, none of which seem to
fall clearly into well-defined categories.
AS TOOL OF THOUGHT…
A LANGUAGE-BASED CT CAN BE
VIEWED AS A TOOL WHEN IT IS THE
RESULT OF THE ENGINEERING OF
LINGUISTIC RESOURCES FOR A
SPECIFIC COGNITIVE TASK.
AS TOOL OF THOUGHT…
•CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL MODELS OF
DEFINITION
•INDETERMINACY SHAPING AS A COGNITIVE TOOL
•FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS: HOMER, EUCLID, AND
MANTRA
•LITERARY RESOURCES BECOME COGNITIVE TOOLS
•DIALECTICAL STRUCTURES AND REASONING
DIALOGUE AND DIALECTICS
• To expound one’s ideas for a specific interlocutor and to
defend them against her specific objections – even if both
the character and the objections are fictional creations of
the writer – requires techniques of persuasion,
argumentation and justification other than those used in a
linear text that addresses a generalized, non-present, and
unknown reader.
• From dialogue to dialogical logic and the ‘new rhetoric’.
• CTs for debating and for deliberating.
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
•THE EXAMPLES DISCUSSED ILLUSTRATE CTs, WHERE
LANGUAGE IS DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN COGNITION
•MOST OF THESE EXAMPLES ARE, SO FAR, “INTERNAL” CTs
•MOST OF THESE EXAMPLES ARE “PARTIAL” CTs
•SOME ARE USEFUL FOR “STRONG”, OTHERS FOR “WEAK”
COGNITION, AND SOME FOR BOTH
•VERY FEW PURPORT TO BE “COMPLETE”, AND ONLY A FEW
HAVE BEEN CLAIMED TO BE “CONSTITUTIVE”.
•THE ‘EPISTEMOLOGY OF CT’ AND PSYCHOPRAGMATICS
•TECHNOLOGY AND MEANING
MEANING IN TECHNOLOGY
• “human relationships and human purposes may
have a closer connection with technological
progress than sometimes seems possible” (Pacey).
• a participatory approach to technology, in which
we “feel ourselves to be involved in the system on
which we are working” (Pacey).
• “we have an intimate participatory relationship
with language in general and language-based
cognitive technologies in particular; such
technologies are, ultimately, the technologies of
meaning par excellence” (Dascal).