Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed.  For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question.  We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us.  We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.

What is language for?  Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas.  In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”  

Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.”  Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action.  For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks. 

Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways.  According to Clark, we …