Page:The World Within Wikipedia： An Ecology of Mind.pdf/2

Information 2012, 3

1. Introduction

Miller offered the term informavore to capture our tendencies as cognitive agents to devour the information that we encounter in our environment. Miller’s notion places emphasis on the agent as recipient of this information. Yet human beings are also actively constructing this information. In the past few millennia, the cultural institutions of human beings have produced a vast wealth of artifacts, and since the onset of written language, much of this creation has been linguistic in nature. Humans both devour, and construct, the informational culture around them, thus producing a dynamic that some have termed niche construction in biological systems. In niche construction, the behavior of an organism transforms its environment in a manner that can then facilitate the survival of the organism itself, thus producing a feedback loop. Just as beavers’ dam construction modifies its immediate ecology in which it lives, or particular species of trees can alter the nutrient content of a forest floor around them, human cognition and its external linguistic products affect each other through mutual influence: Over a short time scale, a single human extracts information from and adds information to this environment (e.g., linguistic input, reading, etc.), and over a longer time scale, the cumulative impact of the linguistic behavior of many humans produces change in that environment itself, creating an inherited linguistic and cognitive ecosystem.

To some cognitive scientists who focus solely on internal mechanisms, this may seem like a strange theoretical agenda. It may be useful to note, however, that there are a multitude of explanatory goals in the cognitive sciences, and these goals lie at different timescales. If a cognitive scientist is interested in the immediate influences on language behavior—communicative goals, lexical knowledge, and so on—it may make sense to focus on cognitive theories that best explain the rapid deployment of such knowledge and processes. However, if a cognitive scientist is interested in understanding longer-timescale phenomena—such as cultural or linguistic change, or language evolution and origins—then a broader set of variables becomes relevant. Many theorists have argued that an understanding of longer-timescale biological phenomena is incomplete without attending to the ecological conditions in which these phenomena function (e.g., recently ). This notion of the cognitive agent and its environment suggests a mutuality that defies the conventional internalist/externalist dichotomy sometimes framed in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. The linguistic environment and the cognitive agent are, from this perspective, parts of the same system, mutually constraining and shaping each other over a range of time scales.

Some effects of our linguistic environment are enormous and unfold gradually. For example, a child raised in an English speaking community will learn to speak English natively and will not spontaneously start speaking Chinese. However, many effects of our linguistic environment are quite subtle. It is well known that exposure to certain kinds of sentence structure will temporarily facilitate participants to produce language with the same structure, a phenomena called structural priming. In addition, prior exposure to particular sentence structures can also cause grammaticality judgments of greater acceptability for new sentences with the same structure. This effect persists at least seven days after exposure and increases when participants read for comprehension. These research efforts indicate that subtle sentence structure effects are long enough in duration to be an influential part of our cognitive-linguistic environment.