Clark Andy
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JX, UK.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2006 Aug;10(8):370-4. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.06.012. Epub 2006 Jul 14.
Embodied agents use bodily actions and environmental interventions to make the world a better place to think in. Where does language fit into this emerging picture of the embodied, ecologically efficient agent? One useful way to approach this question is to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche: a persisting but never stationary material scaffolding whose crucial role in promoting thought and reason remains surprisingly poorly understood. It is the very materiality of this linguistic scaffolding, I suggest, that gives it some key benefits. By materializing thought in words, we create structures that are themselves proper objects of perception, manipulation, and (further) thought.
具身智能体通过身体行动和环境干预，让世界成为一个更利于思考的地方。在这种新兴的具身、生态高效智能体图景中，语言处于什么位置呢？解决这个问题的一个有效方法是将语言本身视为一种增强认知的动物构建结构。从这个角度来看，语言是一种自我构建的认知生态位：一种持久但并非静止不变的物质支架，其在促进思维和推理方面的关键作用仍令人惊讶地未得到充分理解。我认为，正是这种语言支架的物质性赋予了它一些关键优势。通过用言语使思维具现化，我们创造出本身就是感知、操作和（进一步）思考的合适对象的结构。
