The organism-in-its-environment is recognized as the basic unit of analysis when dealing with living beings. This paper seeks to define the fundamental implications of the concept of the organism-in-its-environment in terms of the biosemiotic concept of human distributed cognition. Human distributed cognition in a biosemiotic context is defined as the ability of a self-referencing organism-in-its-environment to interact with its environment to satisfy its physiological (internal and external) and social needs to survive and sustain itself. The ontogenetic development of the organism-in-its-environment serves as the backdrop to discover the implications of distributed cognition that have general applicability in organisms, but in this paper, are made relevant to human beings.

Key words: organism-in-its-environment, distributed cognition, ecology.

Principled by the Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition paradigm, the study investigated the impact of using a research-based curriculum that employs multiple modalities on the performance of grade 5 students on 3 subscales: concept of unit, fraction equivalence, and fraction comparison. The sample included five schools randomly selected from a population of 14 schools in Lebanon. Eighteen 5th grade classrooms were randomly assigned to experimental (using multimodal curriculum) and control (using a monomodal curriculum) groups. Three data sources were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data: tests, interviews, and classroom observations. Quantitative data were analyzed using two methods: reliability and MANOVA. Results of the quantitative data show that students taught using the multimodal curriculum outperformed their counterparts who were instructed using a monomodal curriculum on the three aforementioned subscales (at an alpha level =. 001). Additionally, fine-grained analysis using the semiotic bundle model revealed different semiotic systems across experimental and control groups. The study findings support the multimodal approach to teaching fractions as it facilitates students’ conceptual understanding.

Key words: embodied, situated, and distributed learning, fractional knowledge, multimodality, solution schemes, theorems-in-action.

Excerpt: In inviting me to write this chapter on philosophical issues in mathematics education, the editor has given me the leeway to present a personal perspective rather than to develop a comprehensive overview of currently influential philosophical positions as they relate to mathematics education. I invoke this privilege by taking as my primary focus an issue that has been the subject of considerable debate in both mathematics education and the broader educational research community, that of coping with multiple and frequently conflicting theoretical perspectives. The theoretical perspectives currently on offer include radical constructivism, sociocultural theory, symbolic interactionism, distributed cognition, information-processing psychology, situated cognition, critical theory, critical race theory, and discourse theory. To add to the mix, experimental psychology has emerged with a renewed vigor in the last few years. Proponents of various perspectives frequently advocate their viewpoint with what can only be described as ideological fervor, generating more heat than light in the process. In the face of this sometimes bewildering array of theoretical alternatives, the issue I seek to address in this chapter is that of how we might make and justify our decision to adopt one theoretical perspective rather than another. In doing so, I put philosophy to work by drawing on the analyses of a number of thinkers who have grappled with the thorny problem of making reasoned decisions about competing theoretical perspectives.

Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to – not categorizing speech sounds – but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. The caregiver of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’

Key words: agency, distributed cognition, distributed language, early child development, epigenetic robotics, intersubjectivity, language acquisition, symbol grounding

Human thinking uses other peoples’ experience. While often pictured as computation or based on the workings of a language-system in the mind or brain, the evidence suggests alternatives to representationalism. In terms proposed here, embodiment is interlaced with wordings as people tackle the integration problem. Using a case study, the paper shows how a young man uses external resources in an experimental task. He grasps a well-defined problem by using material resources, talking about his doings and switching roles and procedures. Attentional skills enable him to act as an air cadet who, among other things, connects action, leadership and logic. Airforce practices prompt him to draw timeously on non-local resources as, using impersonal experience, he interlaces language, action and perception. He connects the cultural and the metabolic in cognitive work as he finds a way to completion of the task.

Key words: cognitive science, distributed cognition, ecological psychology, enactivism, integration problem, interactivity, problem solving, river problem, systemic cognition, thinking

Recognition of the importance of autopoiesis to biological systems was crucial in building an alternative to the classic view of cognitive science. However, concepts like structural coupling and autonomy are not strong enough to throw light on language and human problem solving. The argument is presented though a case study where a person solves a problem and, in so doing relies on non-local aspects of the ecology as well as his observer’s mental domain. Like Anthony Chemero we make links with ecological psychology to emphasize how embodiment draws on cultural resources as people concert thinking, action and perception. We trace this to human interactivity or sense-saturated coordination that renders possible language and human forms of cognition: it links human sense-making to historical experience. People play roles with natural and cultural artifacts as they act, animate groups and live through relationships drawing on language that is, at once, artificial and natural. Thus, while constrained by wordings, interactivity is able to fine-tune what we do with action-perception loops. Neither language nor human problem solving reduce to biological sense-making.

Key words: enactivism, ecological psychology, distributed cognition, distributed language, problem solving, sense-making, interactivity, organism–environment system

Taking a unified view of life, language, and cognition, the Special Issue contests linguistic (or enactivist) models that grant “reality” to symbolic entities. Rather than focus on texts, utterances, or communication, language is traced to living in the extended human ecology. On a distributed view, languaging arises as, alone or together, people act while orienting to denotata and (physical) wordings. Languaging requires, not linguistic bodies, but skills based in common ways of understanding. While verbal entities are of immense value, they draw on a history of reflecting on languaging from a language stance; people need only imagine “symbols.” Accordingly, languaging is part of acting, observing and imagining. Using a language stance suffices for reflecting on human practices and written marks as if linguistic entities were “real.” The deflationary view extends to semiotics. As Ho and Li (2019) document, languaging-and-action enables a learner to grasp a Chinese character as a sign. While, in principle, semiosis might draw from physics or life, signs are also likely to derive from human practice. Coming to read Chinese may require not a semiotic ontology, but a human ability to self-fabricate new powers. By deflating linguistic models one can avoid appeal to observer-independent signs.

Key words: distributed cognition, distributed language, enactivism, language use, semiotics, understanding.

Kravchenko (2007) suggests replacing Turing’s suggestion for explaining cognizers’ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by ‘autopoiesis’, Maturana’s extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms, environments, and various subordinate and superordinate systems (‘autopoietic systems’) therein. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation.

Key words: autonomy, distributed cognition, robotic capacity, symbol grounding, turing test.

Excerpt: My focus is this essay will be somewhat different than in How We Became Posthuman. Whereas there I emphasized connecting embodiment with information, here I will be concerned with the role of metaphor and constraint in re-envisioning agency within posthuman contexts. If the posthuman implies distributed cognition, then it must imply distributed agency as well, for multiplying the sites at which cognizing can take place also multiplies the entities who can count as agents. I will take as my tutor texts Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Enacting the posthuman primarily through speech acts, these two texts mirror each other. One is a work of popular science that occasionally looks as if it is trying to do philosophy, the other a work of philosophy that occasionally looks as if it is trying to do popular science. Both propose radical reconfigurations of agency, Dawkins through the selfish gene and Deleuze and Guattari through “desiring machines” that engage in a ceaseless play of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. What can their mobilizations of metaphor tell us about the cultural significance of the posthuman, and what does their use or neglect of constraints imply about the viability of their respective projects? What is at stake in redefining agency, and how do these redefinitions of agency fit together with distributed cognition? Perhaps most significantly, what do these projects imply about our ability to exercise agency? Should we count as conscious human subjects capable of meaningful action, or are we rather assemblages of selfish genes and mutating desiring machines?

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognitive” and is bereft of other adequate means for individuating cognitive activity. It also argues that giving proper attention to the way the folk use their psychological concepts requires questioning the legitimacy of commonsense functionalism. In place of extended functionalism – empirical or commonsensical – we promote the fortunes of extensive enactivism, clarifying in which ways it is distinct from notions of extended mind and distributed cognition.

Key words: enactivism, functionalism, embodied cognition, mental representation, extended mind