Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2014

Participants in cognitive psychology experiments on reasoning and problem solving are commonly sequestered: Efforts are made to impoverish the physical context in which the problem is presented, decoupling people from the richer and modifiable environment that naturally instantiates it outside the lab. Sense-making activities are constrained, but this conforms to the strong internalist and individualist commitments implicit to these research efforts: Cognition reflects internal computations and the scientists’ toils must focus on the individual and what she is thinking, decoupled from the world. We contrast this position with one that identifies cognition as the product of a cognitive system that is configured and enacted by, minimally, an agent and the world in which she is embedded. We review work on the psychology of hypothesis testing and problem solving and argue that refocusing research efforts on the dynamic agent-environment couplings that generate cognitive products — such as a problem representation, a hypothesis or a problem solution — offers a much richer set of methodological opportunities to unveil how people actually think outside the cognitive psychologist’s laboratory. We conclude by exploring the ontological implications of a systemic perspective on cognition.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction.

We explore the crucial role of diagrams in scientific reasoning, especially reasoning directed at developing mechanistic explanations of biological phenomena. We offer a case study focusing on one research project that resulted in a published paper advancing a new understanding of the mechanism by which the central circadian oscillator in Synechococcus elongatus controls gene expression. By examining how the diagrams prepared for the paper developed over the course of multiple drafts, we show how the process of generating a new explanation vitally involved the development and integration of multiple versions of different types of diagrams, and how reasoning about the mechanism proceeded in tandem with the development of the diagrams used to represent it.

This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then consider how iconic signs tend to become simplified and symbolic as the communication system matures and argue that this process is driven by repeated interactive use of the signs. We then consider evidence for iconicity at the level of the system in graphical communication and finally draw comparisons between iconicity in graphical and gestural communication systems and in spoken language.

Many types of everyday and specialized reasoning depend on diagrams: we use maps to find our way, we draw graphs and sketches to communicate concepts and prove geometrical theorems, and we manipulate diagrams to explore new creative solutions to problems. The active involvement and manipulation of representational artifacts for purposes of thinking and communicating is discussed in relation to C.S. Peirce’s notion of diagrammatical reasoning. We propose to extend Peirce’s original ideas and sketch a conceptual framework that delineates different kinds of diagram manipulation: Sometimes diagrams are manipulated in order to profile known information in an optimal fashion. At other times diagrams are explored in order to gain new insights, solve problems or discover hidden meaning potentials. The latter cases often entail manipulations that either generate additional information or extract information by means of abstraction. Ideas are substantiated by reference to ethnographic, experimental and historical examples.