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LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY

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Title: LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY


1
LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGY
  • Marcelo Dascal
  • Tel Aviv University

2
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.

3
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.

4
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.

5
TYPOLOGY OF CTs
  1. Strong and weak.
  2. Integral and partial.
  3. Complete and incomplete.
  4. Constitutive and non-constitutive.
  5. External and internal.

6
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.

7
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.

8
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.

9
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.

10
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.

11
NATURAL LANGUAGE AS
  • ENVIRONMENT
  • RESOURCE
  • TOOL
  • OF COGNITION

12
AS ENVIRONMENT OF THOUGHT
  • NATURAL LANGUAGE, THROUGH ITS SHEER OVERWHELMING
    PRESENCE IN THE MIND, INFLUENCES COGNITION
    INDEPENDENTLY OF OUR AWARENESS OF WILL.

13
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

14
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

15
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

16
AS RESOURCE OF THOUGHT
  • INFORMATION GATHERING, STORING, ORGANIZING AND
    RETRIEVING THROUGH WORDS
  • THE USES OF NLS SEMANTIC NETWORK
  • EXPRESSING INDETERMINACY
  • NLS READY-MADE PATTERNS
  • META-LANGUAGE AND META-COGNITION
  • DANGERS OF NLS COGNITIVE USES

17
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.

18
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.

19
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

20
DIALOGUE AND DIALECTICS
  • To expound ones 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.

21
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

22
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).
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