How Words Help Us Think - Nancy Salay (Queen's University, Canada)

There is general agreement that a capacity to act for reasons is a mark of intentionality. Views differ widely, however, on how ‘acting for reasons’ unpacks.

According to the cognitivist tradition in which individuals are the central units of investigation, intentional agents make sense of their world via internal representations variously construed as neural, mental, or, on some reductive accounts, both. On these views, to act for a reason is to be responsive to some representation of the how the world is, was, or could be. How behaviour is guided by explicit use of representations—e.g., deliberation between whether to pick answer A or B on a multiple-choice exam—is taken to be continuous with the way that implicitly representational processes such as perception guide behavior.

For 4E theorists, in contrast, intentional agents are not individuals so much as they are continually shifting agent-situation couplings to and from which responses develop, often reciprocally. Intentional agents learn to cope within their world as they move and act within it; their needs and wants develop in accordance with their capacity to skillfully “operate” within ongoing situation landscapes. To ‘act for a reason’ here is to be agentive and responsive in a codeveloping agent-situation.

In the context of a comprehensive account of cognition, both views offer important insights. The representational approach brings attention to the cognitive power of explicitly deliberative activity but 4E views explain how operative intentionality grounds actions. In How Words Help Us Think, the book on which this talk is based, these insights are merged. Representations do have a powerful role to play in deliberative processes but not as internal structures that agents “recur” on; rather, they are external tools for spatiotemporally extending the ongoing situations in which intentional agents are always embedded. On this view, a deliberative capacity, what I will be calling “representational intentionality,” is a strongly scaffolded skill rather than a fundamental capacity: while neural activity plays a critical role here, the development of representational intentionality requires in addition a certain kind of environment—one in which there are language practices—and a particular skill with it. My task in this book is to give an account of how representational intentionality develops when the requisite endogenous and exogenous factors are present. In this talk, I will present the arc of the view along with some of the key arguments that support it.