Symbolic processing as the result of social interactions

According to Edwin Hutchins (in Cogn Sci 19:265–288, 1995a; Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, 1995b), cognitive science should explain how humans became skilled processors of symbolic structures, rather than assuming that the architecture of cognition is symbolic. He suggests that the origin of symbolic processing should be traced back to human interaction in sociocultural systems. Developing Hutchins’ ideas, the distributed approach to language grounds linguistic abilities in proto-symbolic exchanges that can be observed in early child–parent interactions (Spurrett and Cowley in The Extended Mind. The MIT Press, 2010). Here, the parent’s adoption of a language stance (i.e., the assumption that children’s gestures and utterances have a symbolic content) leads to the reinforcement of the child’s linguistic behavior, which in turn leads the child to adopt a linguistic stance toward other people, and so on. In this view, the parent–child pair forms a dual system from which the language stance emerges. In order to envisage an explanation to human’s symbolic processing abilities in a distributed perspective, we propose to add a further step to this hypothesis. Once language is adopted as the privileged vehicle for interaction, a symbolic stance, in which symbols are understood as if they were well-codified objects of a specific language, emerges on a multiple system composed of (at least) a cognitive subject, the social community of users of certain symbolic systems, and the conventions and norms associated with the use of these symbolic systems.