Prof. Robert Logan, the author of The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture, got in touch with me, offering to provide a synopsis of his book. I thought it was well worth putting up, even if frequent readers of this blog will recognize from the things I’ve written — well, not lately — that I disagree with Prof. Logan on a couple of things (like the fact that I think Chomsky’s idea of innate grammar doesn’t help us to deal with culture). I find Prof. Logan’s way of talking about language and culture really intriguing and productive. He is in the Physics Department at the University of Toronto (his university homepage is here), but his writing ranges over a wide variety of topics. This posting is really his contribution (except for this part in the block quote box).
Logan started using the phrase ‘extended mind’ independent of Andy Clark and Andy Chalmers (for more on the concept, here’s Wikipedia’s discussion of ‘extended mind’). If you’re interested in his book, it was published in 2007 from the University of Toronto Press (here’s a preview on Google Books, the book’s listing at U of Toronto Press, and Amazon).
By Robert Logan
The origin and evolution of human language is one of the great mysteries confronting contemporary scholarship and science. I became interested in this problem because of my work in media ecology in which I studied the evolution of notated language, namely, writing, mathematics, science, computing and the Internet. In a book entitled The Sixth Language (2004 Blackburn) I showed that speech, writing, mathematics, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of six languages. The thesis that was develop was that a new form of language emerged as a bifurcation from an older form of language each time an information overload was created that the older form of language could not handle.
That study in which it is posited that the notated forms of language emerged from speech led naturally to the question of how speech, the first form of verbal language, emerged. So I must confess that I virtually stumbled into the origin of language field as a result of my earlier research with notated language within the context of media ecology, a field of study pioneered by Marshall McLuhan with whom I collaborated.
My goal in the book was threefold. First, I presented the model I developed, the Extended Mind model, to explain the emergence of language. Secondly, I supplemented my simple model with other models that I felt were consistent with my approach. In achieving the second goal I reviewed the extensive literature that had emerged in the past 15 years critiquing it from the perspective of my approach. I believe that the Extended Mind model sheds some light on a number of controversies raging in evolution of language field. Finally my third goal was to use the insights in my work and that of others to draw parallels between language and culture and develop the notion of Universal Culture, which is to culture what Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is to language.
Neuroanthropology 