Simplexifying: harnessing the power of enlanguaged cognition

Abstract

Abstract Looking beyond the internalism–externalism debate, we offer a distributed view of how experience can garner linguistic and mental content. To make the case, first, we challenge the idea that cognition is organism-centered and synchronistic. Instead, we use Berthoz’s principle of “simplexity” to open up the multiscalarity of cognitive ecosystems. In exemplifying wide cognition, we track how the eyeball’s neurophysiology is transformed by simplex tricks. As learning was integrated with seeing, looking evolved. Later, we argue, lineages gained social use of gaze. In primates, gaze was integrated with cultural techniques like nut-cracking and termite dipping. Individual perceptual experience thus came to build on enculturated behavior. We then turn to the case of modern humans who make use of things with “meaning attached.” Their cognition, we argue, is not only enculturated but also enlanguaged. In this connection, we show how simplex mechanisms disclose aspects-in-things, thus allowing individuals to attribute practical significance to selected parts of their surroundings. In harnessing articulatory skills, human judgements draw on cultural and practical expectations: as a child perceives, she also learns to observe and say things. In this connection, we argue, people come to act ostensively and give rise to descriptions. In terms proposed here, humans learn to simplexify.