Simplexifying: harnessing the power of enlanguaged cognition

1 Introduction

Linguistic utterances specify content that, in some unspecified sense, is “known” to minds. In striving to clarify this enigmatic claim, some start with cognition, some with semiosis, and some turn to linguistic forms. Taking a cognitive track, we focus on how evolution contributes to the development of experience in primates and, above all, humans. In so doing, we trace conventional construal of talk and action to how cultural practices constrain the unfolding of an ontogenetic history. Linguistic skills are traced to not knowledge of languages, but rather language-activity or, as empirically described, experience of languaging (e.g. Becker 1988; Kravchenko 2007; Linell 2009; Love 2017; Swain 2006; Juffermans 2015; Cowley 2019). Using such observation, we posit that people link talking, writing, reading, thinking, singing etc. with ways of perceiving as they act (and vice versa). Practices are actualized by a history of talk about things, situations, and actions/events of various types. In terms clarified below, people harness the power of enlanguaged cognition.

Many debate whether neural processes carry the mark of the cognitive (Adams and Aizawa 2010) or if cognition draws on the 4 ‘E’s that are known as embodied, extended, embedded, or enacted (Menary 2010). In seeking to reach beyond this debate, we stress that living systems make their way in the world by drawing on multiscalar control. Given evolutionary history, life cannot rely on synchronous processes. While multiscalarity applies to how bacteria, cacti, and fungi exchange genes, explore habitats, or find host-lineages, the evolution of learning grants new scalarites to insects, birds and mammals. In primates, tool use led to cultural ways of acting: development was reshaped by play that uses tools and techniques. In hominins, collective influence led fire-management, cooking, and rituals (e.g. Gowlett 2016) and, in modern humans, tool use relies on trace-making and practices modulated by, say, the seasons or the quality of rock and clay (see, (Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Malafouris 2019; Sterelny 2011)). Further, human powers changed with languaging which, in a few thousand years, has been further extended by literacies, technologies, and socio-economic organization.

Our multiscalar view of cognition builds on Alain Berthoz’s (2012) notion of simplexity. Unlike much work in the cognitive sciences and linguistics, we stress that, in mammals, cognition is wide (Wilson 2004, 2005): in many primates, including humans, culture links experience with place. Turning from synchronic models of mind and language, we begin with the evolutionary interplay of brains, bodily habits, and cultural practices. Hence, the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 shows how work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science pivots on assumptions based on an internalism–externalism debate. Countering, we suggest that because primate cognition is wide and multiscalar, there is no need for metaphors of inner and outer. Section 3 uses the wide view of cognition to focus on not isolated individuals or synchronistic agent-environment dynamics, but how agents manage multiscalar events in cognitive ecosystems. In so doing, we use the concept of simplexity (Section 3.1) to rethink how experience and embodiment inform lived histories (in individuals as well as collectives). Section 3.2 provides a concrete example of a simplex phenomenon in the form of control of the eyeball and, specifically, how primates use gazing to unite their body-based powers with sociocultural practices. In Section 4 we use simplex principles to sketch how human languaging extends primate abilities. Then, in Section 5, we consider how simplex mechanisms enable the ostensive action that transforms the human life-world: we suggest that new simplex use of enlanguaged cognition ensures that content is anchored to practice. Metaphorically at least, content comes to be shared across social groups who enact historically derived ways of languaging and knowing.

2 Cognition in trouble

Cognition is traditionally associated with brains. Philosophy and psychology of mind replaced appeal to mind–brain identity with computational models of how cognitive functions supervene on neural states. As in seventeenth century philosophy, cognitive phenomena were placed strictly brain-side. They invoked a mental “thing” which, for Descartes, enables conscious modes of cognition. A mind was a res cogitans or “thinking substance” that appears in the “I think.” Later, while vehemently rejecting the thinking substance, empiricists like Locke and Hume traced cognitive powers to a neural process that allowed associations to connect action and perception. For many, what Hume called “sense impressions” became a necessary basis for mental powers. Given a reduction of experience to the sensory, first-person knowledge was ascribed to a history of “learning.” Even today, such views dominate much thinking about mindful activity. Yet, problems arise when the brain’s activity is taken to be the seat of cognition. However, if one also rejects the spiritual (Noë 2009), many see no alternative to treating the life-sustaining brain as the seat of cognition.

While internalism remains dominant, neurocentrism and the classical computational theory of mind have long been in deep trouble. Over at least 40 years, ever more have turned to a cognitive externalism by granting more to experience than is allowed by Hume’s “sense impressions.” For the Stanford Encyclopedia, externalists contend “that the meaning or content of a thought is partly determined by the environment.” If one ascribes the meaning (or content) to a knower, just as in internalism, knowing will draw on conscious experience. To unlock synchronic externalism, Hilary Putnam (1973) offered a view of meaning whereby individuals use a linguistic division of labor in deriving reference from engaging with the world. While looking beyond mere individual experience, the approach nonetheless retains the classic view of synchrony and reference. The same applies to Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) hypothesis of extended mind and, thus, active externalism. A person is said to actively bring forth mental states as he or she consciously engages with selected aspects of the material world. By treating this as a synchronous process, one faces the “hard problem of consciousness” or, in short, how conscious states are possible at all. Like Descartes and Hume before them, the views of Putnam and Clark and Chalmers all make cognition a real-time phenomenon or, in Clark’s (1998) phrase, “organism-centered.”

Other externalists trace the workings of bodies to a history of engaging with the world’s material properties. Most notably, the embodied mind (Varela et al. 1991) inspired some proponents of 4E views to reject organism-centrism. Like Varela, enactivists posit that cognitive powers are derived from body–world coupling through sense-making(Thompson 2007). Such models appeal to “autonomy” or how cognition draws on synchronous processes of operational closure (for critique, see Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen 2015). Further, while all organisms are said to draw on sense-making, in humans this is said to take on participatory (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) and linguistic dimensions (Di Paolo et al. 2018). As such, the enactivist opposes internalism, extended mind, and other 4E views (Stewart 2010). Like a bacterium, each person uses operationally closed systems to construct a world in time and place. In Varela’s (1986) terms, individuals “lay down a path in walking” (p. 15). Similar views are shared by sensorimotor enactivism (Noë 2004; O’Regan 1992), classic enactivism (Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007; Varela 1986; Varela et al. 1991), and radical enactivism (Hutto and Myin 2012) and have parallels in both Deacon’s (2011) semiotics and Mark Bickhard’s (1980) interactionalism.

Both sides in the debate trace cognition to synchronous workings while also challenging how cognitive internalists overplay the brain. Unsurprisingly, the same debate appears in the study of language. Proponents of orthodox linguistics (e.g. Saussure and Chomsky) appeal to synchrony, place linguistic meaning in the head, and seek explanations in structuralist, generative, and cognitive models. Countering, others take an externalist view by reducing language to communication that uses social, cultural, and conventional forms. In approaches like systemic functional linguistics, conversation analysis, and practice theory, meaning is ascribed to intersubjective ways of grasping socially constructed processes. In linguistics as in cognitive science, the result is impasse. In cognition, internalist appeal to a mark of the cognitive manifestly fails to solve the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) or, better, how neurophysiology grounds experience. In the study of language, a focus on the semantics of words, sentences, or discourse has the effect of separating accounts of meaning from lived experience. It is our contention that the impasse can be overcome only by abandoning debates about the locus of the mind.

On both sides, knowing is seen as a “process” that is guaranteed by a correspondence relation. For internalists and externalists alike, a knower “refers” to the known: debate pivots on whether this is to be explained by a brain, mind, social actors, or linguistic bodies. However, there are many reasons to challenge the primacy of reference. In the language sciences, there is a whole movement which denies that language builds on correspondence relations akin to those of code-based communication (e.g. Reddy 1979; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Love 2004; Kravchenko 2007). Internalists and externalists alike, it is argued, overplay linguistic forms and functions. They are said to be prey to written language bias (Linell 2004), to presuppose telementation (Harris 1981), to underestimate listeners (Andresen 2013), and to ignore how language functions as part of action (Borchmann 2019). Others propose a multiscalar or distributed alternative (Blair and Cowley 2003; Cowley 2011a; Gahrn-Andersen 2020; Hellermann and Thorne 2020; Thibault 2020). On this view, language is based in neither processing nor sense-making: rather, it sustains an evolving meshwork of practices where persons develop skills by integrating linguistic activity with ways of acting and perceiving. Language thus becomes a multiscalar resource that is distributed across the human world.

3 Starting over: radicalizing embodiment

Multiscalar views emphasize not minds, but the world’s richness. In turning away from synchronic “processes,” they connect the phenomenological tradition with the best of ecological psychology (Gibson 1966). Arguments about the locus of cognition are replaced by pursuit of how perception and experience are enriched by language and cognition. Chemero’s methodological proposals for a radical embodied view offer a useful starting point (Chemero 2009). First, as in biology, all human powers can be traced to how organisms draw on evolutionary history to engage with ecosystems. Second, rather than pursue “synchronous” processes, one can strive to avoid appeal to a priori mental representations and models of in-built content. While the radical embodied view applies generally, our focus is on how primates (including humans) evolve culture and social practices. Indeed, as argued below, languaging too arose in historically evolving networks where individuals use cultural practices to become skilled actors (cf. Cowley and Kuhle 2020). As primates, we used experience of a collective world to develop skilled ways of acting and, as humans, add skills in perceiving, observing, and talking. Content uses a history of orienting to objects where other individuals bring their functional potential to life. In chimpanzees, therefore, tool use characteristically shows patchy distribution across time and space (McLennan et al. 2019). For example, individual skills in, say, honey digging or dipping for termites draw on collective practices and ways of acting. Individuals link techniques, artifact guided skills and lived experience: they mesh the evolution of development, techniques, experience and individual history. In hominins, skilled behavior scaled up as agents came to use vocalizations as part of collective practices that constrain individual skill-making.

In cognitive science, the study of multiscalar behavior can be traced to work on navigating canoes in the South Seas (see, Hutchins 1983). Later, methods of cognitive ethnography were applied to how a cockpit manages its speed (Hutchins 1995a) or how a ship is navigated into a harbor (Hutchins 1995b). Human activity uses cultural means that connect people with artifacts over both space and time: while originally ascribed to the “propagation of representations,” Hutchins later emphasized how practices arise in cognitive ecosystems (Hutchins 2010, 2014). In organized activity, people manage behavior not by representing the world, but by aligning perception within a co-regulated common world. In turning to culturally distributed systems, one gains an overview of human cognition. However, given multiscalar complexity, work in distributed cognition comes at a cost. First, as in much cognitive science, little attention falls on lived experience. Second, for Hutchins, tasks arise in cognitive ecosystems where expert use of equipment is integrated with talk and action: no attention is given to bodily or linguistic mechanisms. Whether pursued around navigating canoes or in flying planes, the focus falls on expert use of distributed systems. While of immense value, this overlooks how languaging is bidirectionally integrated with action and perception. To do this, we contend, one must acknowledge that, as primates, we use wide systems or an ecology (Wilson 2004, 2005). Further, it is within such a world that humans evolved to grasp “content” in species-specific ways. Ronald Giere shows how one pursues the image as one connects up quite different systems. Having presented the use of images from the Hubble telescope as a distributed cognitive system, he considers how human cognitive agents fit the picture:

A distributed cognitive system is a system that produces cognitive outputs, just as an agricultural system yields agricultural products. The operation of a cognitive system is a cognitive process. There is no difficulty in thinking that the whole system, no matter how large, is involved in the process. But there is also no need to endow the whole system with other attributes of human cognitive agents. (Giere 2004: 771)

Having abandoned mental representations, subjective experience is the only possible basis for construing pixelated material signs. Far from supervening on a brain, seeing stars depends on the astronomer as a cognitive agent. Hence, in looking at what appears (Figure 1a), an astronomer can link the pixelated image, experience, training, and, crucially, expertise with relevant norms and practices. In Hutchins’ (2010) terms, he draws on a cognitive ecosystem. Consider a case of looking at an image while seeking out red shift. The astronomer makes judgements based in what Wittgenstein (1957 §§48ff.) would identify as a language game.

Figure 1:

Red shift and enlanguaged cognition (a and b). Source: (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-team-breaks-cosmic-distance-record).

The two stills (2 s apart) are taken from a 2016 NASA video about detecting the farthest galaxy ever seen. In the first, a distant object emanates what a trained astronomer can see as red shift if active looking is used to evoke enlanguaged cognition. The second still shows a closer image of the “same” domain: photographic literacy now suffices to see the distant object – it appears in a blue circle. Crucially, to see it as red shift (not just as an object), a viewer necessarily relies on enlanguaged cognition.

As soon as an astronomer perceives a hint of red shift, he draws on enlanguaged cognition: this applies even if nothing is said (cf. Gahrn-Andersen 2020). In so doing, his perceiving is influenced by how the seen evokes the language and practices of a community. While drawing on a history of linguistic reflexivity (van den Herik 2017), perceiving hones in on what can be rightly said of a cue. To see the blob as red shift, the astronomer uses distributed resources (viz. concepts) that, in this case, are cued by a “thing” that appears (cf. Gahrn-Andersen 2019, 2020). Seeing possible red shift arises in orienting to what one is looking for, what can be seen, and experience of a language game. An aspect of an image can thus trigger practices that draw on enlanguaged cognition – this is a much more economic view of the process than is appeal to establishing “reference.”

Without multiscalar processes, no-one could detect, imagine, or see red shift. In our view, the relevant whole-bodied cognitive activity arises as an astronomer integrates looking and acting with a life-history of languaging. Although the results can be reported in linguistic terms,^[1] the key lies in linking past experience with active attending based on scientific skills (Kiverstein and Rietveld 2018). What happens is not to be explained as a real-time process because the astronomer is bound to mesh expertise, development, and bodily use of evolutionary history. Rather than focus on the locus of cognition, therefore, we propose asking how mechanisms and principles allow language to inform acting and perceiving in wide domain. To pursue this, we begin with Alain Berthoz’s use of neurophysiology to develop the concept of simplexity.

4 Tracing languaging to simplexity

Languaging is movement that is perceived as it is enacted. While based in learning to talk, its simplex roots include coming to treat articulatory movements as repeatables (“wordings”). In literate communities, skills of reading rely on saccading at aggregated patterns on a page or screen (Cowley 2020). Further, just as in seeing red shift, visible types trigger enlanguaged cognition. On this view, reading combines active looking, practical experience, and anticipative seeing. Thus, while based in movement, languaging generates wordings that can be rendered as patterns (i.e. what we describe as words). Languaging thus becomes activity in which wordings play a part (Cowley 2014; Gahrn-Andersen 2020). People draw on skilled movements to evoke wordings that fit local practices and dispositions (e.g. individual habits). In Love’s (2004, 2017 terms, languaging draws on two orders and, as Cowley stresses (2017), each is irreducible to the other. As such, it brings phonetic gestures into actional flow: people mesh interactional experience, utterings, affect, and social action. Modern humans also use nonvocal means of evoking wordings such as sign-language, watching TV, dreaming and thinking. Linguistic activity is verbally constrained – usage draws on a history of sensitivity to normative, cultural and material contingencies.

In ontogeny, languaging arises as infants coordinate with caregivers (Cowley et al. 2004; Halliday 1975; Trevarthen and Aitken 2001). Languaging is, at once, natural – based in expression – and artificial or historically derived. Acts of utterance are thus symbolic, iconic, and indexical (see Deacon 1997). Once these acts are traced to simplex tricks that open up an infant’s epistemic world, one finds an evolutionary corollary. The rise of languaging uses primate ontology and, specifically, how indexical abilities enable infants to grasp practices (see Cowley and Kuhle 2020). Hominins extended primate cultures by using vocal gestures in tool-like ways. They evolved skills that appear as babies use intrinsic motivation to control babbling that becomes culture- and practice-oriented (Oller et al. 2019). In evolution, as with the eye, individuals use ontogenesis to gain vocal control. By vocalizing while perceiving and acting, they come to master whole-body functions. Since the results are perceived as iconic and indexical, wordings arise as events that shape coordination. Gradually, co-action is transformed by a history of acting and attending. Whereas, in soothing a newborn or getting a nine-month-old to show off, wordings are marginal, in science, they take on symbolic values (cf. Cowley and Kuhle 2020). In ontogeny, as an infant self-expresses, she extends her epistemic horizons. By four months, she uses signs of culture – using shared expectations – and sometimes gathers what is wanted (Cowley et al. 2004). While often aligned to a caregiver’s wordings, attunement builds on rhythmic modulation. Languaging centers not on individuals, but rather on practices that constrain the rise of skills. An infant’s coordinating is, from birth or before, associated with adult languaging. The infant relies on meshing rhythms, gaze, attention, the emulating brain, perception, movement, and gesture – the sound of voices is part of experience. As part of the world beyond the body, the infant uses statistical learning (e.g. Arnon 2015) and, in time, what Halliday (1975) calls learning how to mean. As she gains babbling skills, she enacts perception and action. Gradually, she connects perceived space and other peoples’ experience with what Berthoz calls the “mental tools” of wayfinding. Languaging thus unites attending, co-attending, and, in Maturana’s (1988) phrase, learning to orient to the orienting of others. As a result, spatial reference serves in doing things, interacting, feeling, and, crucially, learning by looking (and otherwise controlling concerted experience). The same simplex mechanisms used in managing the eyeball thus sustain whole-body activity. On this view, the child’s gradually increasing control over vocal and gestural movements is an indexical extension of powers that arise in a socially defined domain.

Making and hearing wordings draws on familiarity with situated languaging. Children sensitize to recurrent phonetic gestures and the phonology and phonotactics of a community. A child learns to talk in a culture-saturated world (cf. Trevarthen and Aitken 2001): hence, once a child babbles “word-like” syllables, these can be encouraged and reinforced (Oller et al. 2019). The child can be nudged to entrench the rhythmic control of phonetic gestures that adults hear as wordings. Although these appear symbolic (to a linguist), the child relies on sound and its effects in meshing skills with seeing. Thus, entrenched use of phonetic gestures enables children to use eyeballs to manage indexical attending by drawing on a caregiver’s orientations. Later, mimetic activity grants children techniques that incorporate sound in phenomenal experience. By 18 months a child can use aspects of what she hears – repeatable patterns – in taking what Cowley (2011b) terms a language stance. During social activity, she acts with wordings in more “linguistic” ways: In pretending, for example, a child may put a banana to her ear and, as she does so, say “Hello” (Leslie 1987). On a cognitive view, this is ascribed to a theory of mind based on acquiring or constructing a “language.” However, far from “learning” language or theorizing “mind,” the child may rely on simplex tricks. It may modulate vocalizing around repeatables (e.g. versions of [hələʊ]) while using social sensitivity and gazing (cf. Baron-Cohen et al. 1997; Kobayashi and Kohshima 1997). Like looking (and other ways of perceiving), vocalizing unites attending with social reach or indirect social orienting (Lempert and Kinsbourne 1985: 659). In this way, children attune perceiving to how cultural expectations lie “behind” appearances. As persons, children observe, develop certainties, and make judgements: in drawing on simplex tricks, a child increasingly brings enlanguaged cognition to practices. S/he talks as s/he moves, speaks, and acts to set off material, social, and ontogenetic consequences. S/he relies on learning to act within a historically specific matrix or social order. As s/he moves around her world, its parts are grasped by a person. Together, they constitute happenings and, in this wide system, things are encountered with concepts attached. Just as an astronomer learns to see red shift, a child learns to see certain animals as cats. As she gains skills in languaging, enlanguaged cognition serves to extend her epistemic horizons.

5 Humans can also simplexify

Having rejected synchronic views, we placed life in ecosystems where simplex tricks enable lineages and ecosystems to co-evolve. Once one recognizes the power of wide systems, one can pursue how enlanguaged cognition transforms action and perception. Far from relying on reference, simplex tricks shape the course of ontogenesis. Just as the world is extended by coordinating eye and hand in honey digging or fishing for termites, in humans, practices come to include use of a tongue whose movements mimic those of others. The simplex trick of “imitation” enables skills to be honed around criteria for complex judgements. Over time, self-motivated action creates solutions (and mechanisms) based on aligning judgements and perceptions with practices. Having learned to babble, with adult help, children enter community life. Far from learning words or grammar, they integrate looking and other ways of perceiving with languaging or activity in which wordings play a part.

Yet the argument faces objections. First, sheepdogs and trained parrots seemingly draw on enlanguaged cognition. Second, and remarkably, cases like Kanzi show that domesticated bonobos can participate in languaging practices: he shows the skills of a three-year-old in construing novel utterances like “go to the potty and get the sparklers” (Savage-Rumbaugh and Rumbaugh 1993: p. 41). If our argument is to go through, we also need to clarify how children master ostensive action. Indeed, Kanzi makes the case: he rarely used his keyboard merely to say things or, indeed, to describe what he could see. We therefore turn to how enlanguaged cognition is harnessed to such modes of action.

In children, the relevant ostensive behavior is ubiquitous: it appears in, say, showing off by “pretending” to pick up a banana and use it as a telephone. Such activity demands use of a language stance or, in other words, a remarkable ability to treat wordings as things. In the case of the banana, a shape prompts holding the object to the ear and saying “hello.” The child must detach a wording from talk and control the tongue like a tool to articulate what can be heard as akin to [hələʊ]: willful speaking meshes with skilled action in acts of saying. Hence, children can become observers: they learn to simplexify.

The trick is crucial: By learning to treat wordings as things – by learning to simplexify – one can learn to present a public picture or make a model. Its ostensive basis lies in the flow of action and, for this reason, simplexifying also applies to ways of acting. For example, a child may pile up bricks to make a “house” or treat an empty bowl as a hat. These too are ostensive actions. However, if repeatedly combined with wordings, the results take on conceptual meaning for the actor. Far from needing linguistic knowledge, a child can use products of ontogenetic history in coming to orient to what others say. As Kravchenko (2011) emphasizes, languaging enables a person to integrate what can be said with the perceived and, thus, to become an observer. Often, one gains from linking pre-reflexive experience with repeatables: as cultural constraints these can bind experience into action. The neurophysiological basis of such events can derive from a developmental history of using the tongue as a tool whose use is sharpened by a history of attending to cultural constraints. Like other willful action (e.g. honey dipping), simplexifying allows a person to develop techniques. As the results transform a person’s horizons, perceiving falls under multiscalar constraints. It connects the skillful use of artefacts (cf. Kee 2020) with how other people talk and orient to enlanguaged cognition. Given simplexifying, people bring descriptions to practices and, thus, what is treated as knowledge. In other words, they master what, loosely speaking, is said to be content known to “minds.”

6 Conclusions

A distributed or multiscalar perspective can replace internalism–externalism debate. Denying that cognition is synchronistic, we track how perception and experience garner linguistic and mental content. Building on how eyeball control uses simplex tricks, we show how, in primates, knowing unites seeing, attending, and cultural expectations that, given a history of play, give rise to skills. Knowing uses evolution’s simplex tricks as individuals learn to co-regulate bodily movements by using materials and circumstances. Simplex tricks enable individuals to use the history of a lineage in local ecosystems. Within a wide cognitive domain, lineages and individuals repurpose the eyeball in linking gaze with techniques such as nut-cracking and termite dipping. Later hominins add vocal/auditory skills such that, for moderns, things come into view with “meaning attached.” Today perceptual judgements draw on cultural expectations: cognition is enlanguaged.

In development, a child begins by acting out (or behaving mimetically) and, later, comes to detach wordings from talk to say things: she generates descriptions. Just as a child uses practices to identify cats, an astronomer uses a pixelated image to detect red shift. The basis lies in, not reference, but how languaging sustains human ways of life. As people simplexify, they draw on a history of languaging in practices that link artifacts, external memories, multiscalar coupling, and the pre-reflective. Judgements link what is seen to individual certainties and familiar outward criteria (Wittgenstein 1957: §580). In so doing, a setting or language game occurs within an epistemic horizon that links wordings with ritual, beliefs, laws, technologies, etc. Once sent into space, a telescope’s deliverances can be integrated with pre-reflective experience and scientific training to pursue the mysteries of the universe. This is possible because, in the last million years or so, hominin niche construction (Sterelny 2011) established rich and networked cultural practices: human cognition became ecologically special (Ross 2007). People came to draw on words and tools in managing activity under material and virtual constraints (Latour 1996). Using enlanguaged cognition, they link perception with skills and modes of expression that can attain objective validity. Further, given writing systems, the results can even be mapped onto propositions. There is nothing enigmatic about saying that content is known to minds: rather, the claim is purely metaphorical. Appeal to “mind” is itself a case of simplexifying. In fact, simplexifying arises as people do things that mesh external memory, individual certainties and the pre-reflective. Given skills with a language stance, they can use ostensive expression. Like Alain Berthoz, they find themselves using the results of simplex tricks to anchor innovative ways of understanding.