Language. Yo. What is THAT? (A social perspective)

Okay, and we're back...

Now, the only problem with the ideas of the cognitivist domain is that, according to more socially oriented theory, they have placed cognition in the wrong place. Cognition, mind, is not a process of the brain--the way the a computer (brain) supports a program (mind)--rather, mind and cognition are social processes, socially situated, socially distributed.

Those claims may sound strange or wrong, but if you look at what they're saying, they make a lot of sense. The cognitive school is based on the idea that the computer is the proper model for mind and consciousness--but there's a major difference between the human mind and the computer program in respect to context: computers are purely individual, decontextualized, ahistorical, unsituated, lacking enrivonment and ecology; the human mind is never in existence outside of all of these. Much of modern linguistics, anthropology, social psychology--among other sciences--believe these are the very foundations of mind, not just its habitat.

In this way, language, even when playing a role in cognitive development, is social because cognition itself is seen as socially distributed. One could say that language is the means through wich all of these constructs exist--history, society, ecology--and therefore that mind itself is a linguistic/social construct, even though it appears as an individual entity--at least in our setting.

This discussion started when I made a claim so familiar to me that I hardly think about it anymore: that communication is but one--and a minor one at that--function of language. And therefore that language educational that focuses only on this element is not real education. Here is more support for that claim on the social level:

John Searle points out that language can be shaped by the world, but that it can shape the world socially; for example, the declaration "I now pronounce you man and wife," when spoken by the right person in the right setting, changes the social structure of the world: where once there were two singe people, now there is a married couple. That is language used to create social reality, not to communicate an already-existing reality.

Searle uses a classic example of three old school baseball umpires arguing. One says, "I calls 'em and I sees 'em"; the second says, "I calls 'em as they is!"; the third says, "They ain't nothin' till I calls em." The third guy is probably the closest to the truth. No matter how far, on a level of physics, the ball is from the plate, the right person with the right social position can MAKE it a strike, not by physically moving in, but through language.

This is a great metaphor is many ways! First, it raises the debate, Does an umpire use language to communicate the fact that the ball was a ball, OR does he use language to create the social reality that that mass of electrons was a ball or strike? This is the debate over the purpose of language. Sure it may have both elements, but what is the crucial element of human language? Someone like Searle will argue that the real power is the ability to create social institution, power, privilege, etc., through linguistic declarations. [Another thing I love here is the dialect of English used. Clearly it's nonstandard; but it shows the very important point that Standard English isn't privileged because it's in any way more intelligible--we can say things in many ways and communicate them just as effectively or ineffectively. The words/language may not be where the communication exists. Think of someone who's never seen baseball; none of the lines communicates a thing to this person because they don't have the context through which to understand the utterances...]

Actually, I shouldn't have bracketed that last point, because in it we also see the power the gets supported and reproduced through language. None of these guys speaks "correctly," and in another context, they would be viewed as all kinds of less intelligent, poorly educated, poor in general, etc. Again, the notion that issues of "standard dialects" do more to reproduce power than they do to help communication is another idea to known to me and people in my field that we forget that most people outside of language studies may not have considered it this way. But that's my point here in this blog.

I'll try to stop writing so this is readable. These claims are big and unsupported--ready for a battle! What do you think? Is this all just bullshit?