Language, thought and the ecological approach; A Purple Peril

As part of a class on cognitive psychology, I give a seminar in which we talk about the research on the relationship between language and thought. In particular, I show this great talk by Lera Boroditsky as a starting point. She talks about the kind of research in this area, and talks about results such as how we linguistically interact with space and time affecting how we physically interact with these things. For example, some languages like English use an egocentric frame of reference when talking about space (e.g. describing things as being to the left or right, where the origin of this space is the speaker). Other languages use a geocentric frame of reference (e.g. describing things as being to the south of you). In order to be able to speak and understand the language, you therefore have to be able to remain oriented in space, and speakers of these kinds of languages have been shown to be capable of impressive feats of dead reckoning previously thought impossible in humans. 

The reason this is all interesting is in the context of how the field is changing how it thinks about language; is it magical, or merely interesting? If the former, language becomes a unique human cognitive capacity that requires specific neural mechanisms that serve language and nothing else. If the latter, language becomes an integrated part of our cognitive systems and we should expect it to show these connections to other capacities. 

The weight of evidence right now I think favours the latter view. In fact, one whole strand of embodied cognition (Shapiro’s ‘conceptualisation’ hypothesis strand) explicitly pursues these connections between language and other capacities, for example Lakoff’s work on metaphors being grounded in action. Language, while still phenomenal in what it can do, is not different in kind to the rest of cognition. 

The field is still very much at the ‘functional model’ stage of developing explanations, however. The research mostly just catalogues linguistic differences and cognitive differences and works to map those onto each other in a fairly metaphorical, word-association kind of way (e.g. politics is talked about in terms of left and right wing so this should connect to physical movements to the left and the right). Our ecological questions has become, what kind of mechanism might allow this kind of cross-talk, and as I’ve been chatting to students I’ve been connecting a few dots for myself. This post sketches the outline of a mechanistic, ecological research programme for attacking the fascinating problem of the relationship between language and thought.

From Specification to Convention (A Purple Peril)

I previously laid out how specification works and why it's important to the ecological approach. Read that first, because I build on it a lot here. I also laid out the corollary of specification, that it allows that information to come to be something an organism can actually use to coordinate and control functional behaviour. Here, I think out loud about how convention might be able to do similar work, because of Sabrina's work (here, and published now here; read that paper for the extended detail on this) expanding ecological information to handle tasks such as language where specification is not always an option.

This is in part an attempt for me to get my head around some implications of Sabrina's analysis. My plan here is to develop an analogy to specification. This analogy will detail the work specification does to make information informative, then try to lay out how conventions fills this role. The goal is to see if conventions can support behaviour without needing representational help. The answer will be yes, because all the differences between law based and convention-based information are 'behind the curtain', only visible from the third-person perspective. From the first person perspective of the organism, all it gets is structures in energy arrays it can try to use to organise behaviours. Conventions place no special learning burden on the organism (Golonka, 2015) and this means that convention can support behaviour with any representational enrichment the same way specification can. (The hidden differences do have consequences, however, so I will map that out a bit.)

There are many things I have not attempted to explain and as usual this reflects my current thinking, not necessarily my final thinking. I look forward to hearing what questions this leaves unanswered for the reader as a way to move this discussion forwards.