Tuesday, June 09, 2020

Communication


Communication
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition_in_the_Wild



The fact that the navigation team distributes computational procedures across a social organization raises the possibility that there may be better and worse ways to arrange the distribution.  One way
in which the distribution of computational procedures can be better or worse concerns the relation between the kinds of structure that can be passed between computational elements and the kinds
of structure with which the passed structures must be coordinated in the performance of the task .

Verbal descriptions typically fail not because they don't provide enough structure but because they provide the wrong kind of structure.  The difference between the right and the wrong kinds of structure is determined by both the nature of the task and the other structural resources that are available .

First , the amount of information that is conveyed by a given utterance is not a simple function of the
volume of structure in the utterance.  Information and coding theory define the minimum bandwidth required to encode a given set of alternative messages.  From the perspective of information theory ,
natural language is not an efficient code.

Second, the expressiveness of the code may determine the cognitive properties of the larger system.  Whether a team of planners can mount a successful amphibious landing may depend on the range of distinctions that can be made in the language spoken by the mission planners.

The properties of language change with the register of the speech and with the medium in which the utterances are carried. The mandated language on the intercom is almost telegraphic.

Viewing language as one of the structured representations produced and coordinated in the performance of the task highlights the information -bearing properties of language.  In cognitive science, language is usually thought of primarily as a human computational capacity that should be understood in terms of the processing that individuals must do to produce or interpret it .

Shifting attention from the cognitive properties of an individual to those of a system of socially distributed cognition casts language in a new light.  The properties of the language itself interact with the properties of the communications technology in ways that affect the computational properties of the larger cognitive system.

Does the structure of language determine the structure of thought? " seems to be " Sometimes and sometimes not ."

When the structure of language is not useful as a mediating resource in task performance , then task performance does not seem to be affected by the structure of language.  When cognitive activities are distributed across social space, the language or languages used by task performers to communicate are almost certain to serve as structuring resources, and the structure of language will
affect the cognitive properties of the group even if they do not affect the cognitive properties of individuals in the group.