Abstract
The paper offers a critical reflection, inspired by the insights of integrational linguistics, on the conception of thinking and action within the distributed cognition approach of Edwin Hutchins. Counterposing a fictional account of a mutiny at sea to Hutchins’ observational study of navigation on board the Palau, the paper argues that the ethical fabric of communication and action with its ‘first person’ perspective must not be overlooked in our haste to appeal to ‘culture’ as an alternative to the internalist, computer metaphor of thinking. The paper accepts Hutchins’ own critique of the ‘meaning in the message’ illusion but goes beyond this critique to argue for a view of communication, thinking and action as creative, ethically charged and morally accountable acts of engagement.
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Notes
It is interesting to note that other socio-culturally oriented approaches to the understanding of human activity and thinking are also wrestling with the problem of how to give the individual his or her due within their analyses. Anna Stetsenko, for example, argues that A N Leont’ev’s ‘Activity Theory’ places too great an emphasis on the socially determined character of activity, thereby ‘positing society above the individual and seeing the latter as produced by, subordinate to, and molded by reality, and especially society, at the expense of emphasizing individual agency—the ability to produce, create, and make a difference in social practices’ (2005, p. 78). See Halverson (2002) for a comparison of ‘Activity Theory’ and ‘distributed cognition’.
See Love (2007) for a recent discussion of the view of language as a ‘digital code’.
Bert Hodges, too, has insisted on an ecological position according to which ‘realizing values is central to language’ (Hodges 2007, p. 585) and has explored the implications of that position for linguistics, language learning and psychology.
On the relationship between ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis see Schegloff’s ‘Introduction’ in Sacks (1995).
The movie was released in 1995 by Hollywood Pictures. The dialogue is taken, with some of my own alterations, from the website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112740/quotes
On the creativity of conformity see Hodges (2007).
For a demonstration of the distinctive moral fabric of such mundane practical-communicative acts as carrying children versus carrying bags of groceries, see Hodges and Lindheim (2006).
I’m not sure I completely understand this definition, partly because, having stated that culture is ‘a human cognitive process’, Hutchins argues in the very next sentence that ‘a major component of culture is a cognitive process’ (1995, p. 354).
The reduction in ‘culture’ to ‘cognition’ which this passage implies is apparently central to the ‘distributed cognition’ approach, as this more recent formulation from Halverson (2002, p. 246) shows: ‘For me, the many phenomena of human society and activity are the result of human cognition. Much of their power arises from how cognition instantiates itself in the material world’. With such a position we have pretty much returned to the ancient, ‘idealist’ view of thought or logos as the source or creator of reality.
Cf Harris’s comment on papers written from a ‘distributed cognition’ perspective: ‘I note the frequency with which the catch-all term representation is bandied about without any serious attempt to pin it down’ (2004, p. 736).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Stephen Cowley for inviting me to the symposium and for encouraging me to write this piece. I therefore hold him morally responsible for the consequences. My thanks also to Fred Vallée-Tourangeau for his support and to Bert Hodges and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and constructive criticisms which I have tried to take onboard.
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Jones, P. You want a piece of me? Paying your dues and getting your due in a distributed world. AI & Soc 25, 455–464 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0271-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0271-9