Monday, April 13, 2009

Human Cognition Ch. 6

A lot of what I got out of this chapter had to do with the construction of language. Tomasello explains, "Given that languages work mainly categorically...the categories and schemas immanent in language enable children...to take multiple perspectives on the same entity simultaneously" (166-67). This was fascinating to me. Tomasello stresses that language does not create categories. Humans had to come up with these categories before they could use language to describe them. Still in a child's development, language allows their minds to develop categories; like Tomasello says, something can be both a rose and a flower. It seems apparent that language is a system. It has been constructed and changed by humans since it came into existence. There are rules and these rules begin to govern how young children organize their thoughts.

What I began to wonder was how humans began to organize, or categorize, their worlds in the first place. According to Tomasello, if an infant were on a desert island with no contact with anyone, it would not categorize its world. Would Tomasello suggest, then, that categorization first came about when humans first began interacting with one another while understanding the intentionality of the other? Was it a necessity at this point in order to express a desire or some other feeling?

What I also found interesting in terms of this idea of language as a cultural system was when Tomasello explained that when asked to explain something, children (after a while) give a certain type of explanation "once they have caught on to the types of explanations  that adults normally give and value" (184). There seems to be this whole way of speaking and organizing the world that is determined by society. This is why there are some metaphors that make sense to us and some that do not. Tomasello claims that our cognition is shaped by society, and I wonder if he is also claiming that language shapes how we view the world.

Finally, what I found to be Tomasello's major point was what he discussed at the end, the idea of representational rediscription. He explains that the mind can internalize information and then the individual may do what they want with it once it is in their mind. This seems like such a basic idea, but it seems to be a major thing that separates us from all other animals. This also reminded me of the three types of knowledge we have discussed previously. Taking in knowledge and changing it to do something else with it seems to be in line with proactive knowledge, though I think Tomasello calls it declarative knowledge. Still, the idea that our brains are complex enough to take in ideas and make them our own in a way is pretty remarkable.

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