Linguistic formulae as cognitive tools

Netz, Reviel

doi:10.1075/pc.7.1.07net

Cited by 11 publications

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“…So, too, are gestures; they are typically an integral part of a complete multimodal message (e.g., Engle, 1998). In much diagrammatic communication—think of maps, science diagrams, assembly instructions—the visual-spatial features of meaning form the core of the message; the words and symbols annotate (e.g., Netz, 1999). There are parallel cases for gesture; that is, the sequence of gestures form the core of the communication, and the words serve to annotate the gestures (e.g., Emmorey et al, 2000; Kirsh, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From hands to minds: Gestures promote understanding

Kang

Tversky

2016

Cogn. Research

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Gestures serve many roles in communication, learning and understanding both for those who view them and those who create them. Gestures are especially effective when they bear resemblance to the thought they represent, an advantage they have over words. Here, we examine the role of conceptually congruent gestures in deepening understanding of dynamic systems. Understanding the structure of dynamic systems is relatively easy, but understanding the actions of dynamic systems can be challenging. We found that seeing gestures representing actions enhanced understanding of the dynamics of a complex system as revealed in invented language, gestures and visual explanations. Gestures can map many meanings more directly than language, representing many concepts congruently. Designing and using gestures congruent with meaning can augment comprehension and learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From hands to minds: Gestures promote understanding

Kang

Tversky

2016

Cogn. Research

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“…Written text is spatially arranged to reflect the organization of thought, spaces between words and sentences, larger spaces between paragraphs. Greek text describing mathematics was written formulaically, fixed orders of semantic forms, often in rows, that formed tables for reasoning (Netz, 1999). Even babies do it; many discover ''in your face'' early on.…”

Section: Place In Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing Thought

Tversky

2010

Topics in Cognitive Science

291

227

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Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal ⁄ up-down, vertical ⁄ left-right) and the marks on it (e.g., dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram.

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“…A remarkable example, analyzed by Reviel Netz (1999), is the role of linguistic formulae in ancient Greek mathematics. Netz shows that, in contrast to deduction in modern mathematics, where one resorts to typographic symbols, thus opting for exploiting a visual resource, Greek mathematics made use of formulaic expressions of a linguistic resource presumably of oral origin.…”

Section: Language As Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as a cognitive technology

Dascal

2002

IJCT

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Ever since Descartes singled out the ability to use natural language appropriately in any given circumstance as the proof that humans -unlike animals and machines -have minds, an idea that Turing transformed into his well-known test to determine whether machines have intelligence, the close connection between language and cognition has been widely acknowledged, although it was accounted for in quite different ways. Recent advances in natural language processing, as well as attempts to create "embodied conversational agents" which couple language processing with that of its natural bodily correlates (gestures, facial expression and gaze direction), in the hope of developing human-computer interfaces based on natural -rather than formal -language, have again brought to the fore the question of how far we can hope machines to be able to master the cognitive abilities required for language use. In this paper, I approach this issue from a different angle, inquiring whether language can be viewed as a "cognitive technology", employed by humans as a tool for the performance of certain cognitive tasks. I propose a definition of "cognitive technology" that encompasses both external (or "prosthetic") and internal cognitive devices. A number of parameters in terms of which a typology of cognitive technologies of both kinds can be sketched is also set forth. It is then argued that inquiring about language's role in cognition allows us to re-frame the traditional debate about the relationship between language and thought, by examining how specific aspects of language actually influence cognition -as an environment, a resource, or a tool. This perspective helps bring together the contributions of the philosophical "linguistic turn" in epistemology and the incipient "epistemology of cognitive technology". It also permits a more precise and fruitful discussion of the question whether, to what extent, and which of the language-based cognitive technologies we naturally use can be emulated by the kinds of technologies avialable presently or in the foreseeable future.

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Linguistic formulae as cognitive tools

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

From hands to minds: Gestures promote understanding

From hands to minds: Gestures promote understanding

Visualizing Thought

Language as a cognitive technology

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