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Writing as an extended cognitive system

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Abstract

This paper presents writing as an extended cognitive system comprised of brain, body, and the material form that is writing. Part I introduces the theoretical framework used for the analysis, Material Engagement Theory (MET), and the initial insights into writing systems gained by applying MET to Mesopotamian artifacts for numbers and writing. Part II discusses how writing as a material form has changed over time and why this material change reflects, accumulates, and distributes change in the behaviors and brains of generations of writers. Part III explains why forms of writing used today are a visible form of language in being comprised of contrastive graphic features. Part IV argues against the idea that writing should be excluded from being considered as an extended cognitive system. On the contrary, considering writing from this perspective can provide new insights into the ways we use material forms—not just in writing but more broadly—to change our behaviors and brains, and their roles in intensifying and perpetuating those changes.

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Notes

  1. I distinguish three types of written numerals. The first is associated with both early writing and unwritten precursors like fingers, tallies, and tokens. Each numeral is a collection of elements that mean through repetition and bundling (e.g., the cuneiform numerals ; Egyptian numerals , , ; and Roman numerals V, VI, VII). The second descends from the first type but no longer involves repetition or bundling (e.g., 5, 6, 7). These conventionalized or “ciphered” forms emerged through processes associated with handwriting (e.g., topological recognition, standardization, and automaticity). The third type visually depicts the sound values of words for numbers (e.g., “five, six, seven” in English or View ” in Thai). Because their visual complexity destroys the conciseness that is an advantage of the first two types, phonetic forms emerge only under specific circumstances. For example, in Mesopotamia, Akkadian scribes recorded the sound values of the Sumerian words for small numbers in the third millennium (Edzard, 1980; Pettinato, 1981), in the much the same way we might record the Latin words for the Roman numerals or the Hindu or Arabic words for the so-called Western numerals.

  2. In writing systems research, it has become commonplace and even obligatory to avoid any hint of promoting the alphabet as the most “evolved” or “refined” type of writing, as this is deemed Eurocentric and denigrating of non-alphabetic writing systems. Nonetheless, alphabets followed logographic and syllabographic writing in the historical chronology of emergence. Further, writing for words and syllables, training effects on behaviors and brains, and formalized instruction had been in place for two thousand years or so before the first alphabetic letters emerged, and the topological recognition and lexical associations of combinations of signs for sounds would not have been possible without the prior availability of these resources.

  3. Once available, alphabetic letters continued to undergo change through the same processes outlined here; changes include simplification of form (Kelly et al., 2021), the inclusion of spaces between words, and the development of silent reading (Saenger, 1997).

  4. While the discussion that follows focuses on the alphabet, the principles also apply to logosyllabic scripts like Chinese kanji and syllabic scripts like Japanese katakana.

  5. The term “poverty-of-stimulus” as used here is narrowly defined here as the (relatively small) number of utterances to which the learner is exposed before language competency develops compared to the (much larger) number of utterances the speaker can potentially generate once competency has been attained; poverty-of-stimulus does not address the rich environment of social mechanisms (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, physical exemplars) that accompany and supplement language during acquisition.

  6. Although the term “mark of the cognitive” seems to be falling somewhat out of fashion, I am tempted to apply it to the change that occurs in the material form that is writing, while the complementary neurological change might be called a “mark of the material.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Shaun Gallagher, University of Memphis, for inviting the talk on which this paper was based. Thomas Wynn, Rex Welshon, Corijn van Mazijk, and James Hicks made helpful comments on early drafts. Finally, I would like to thank Claudio Paolucci and Silvia Ferrara, University of Bologna, for their critique of Material Engagement Theory (Paolucci & Ferrara, 2023), though I reject their conclusion that it cannot and should not be applied to writing or numbers.

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Overmann, K.A. Writing as an extended cognitive system. Phenom Cogn Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09955-6

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