Clark (1998) argues for a sort of intermediate-strength variant of the
Vygotskian idea, defending a conception of language as a cognitivetool.
According to this view – which he labels thesupra-communicative concep-
tionof language – certain extended processes of thinking and reasoning
constitutively involve natural language. The idea is that language gets
used, not just for communication, but also to augment human cognitive
powers. Thus by writing an idea down, for example, I can oV-load the
demands on memory, presenting myself with an object of further leisured
reXection; and by performing arithmetic calculations on a piece of paper, I
may be able to handle computational tasks which would otherwise be too
much for me (and my short-term memory).
The main diVerence between the supra-communicative account and the
kinds of stronger view to be considered later in this chapter, shouldnotbe
expressed by saying that for the former, sentence-tokens serve to augment
but do not constitute thought, whereas for the latter the sentence-tokenis
the thought. For no one should want to claim that a tokened natural
language sentenceis(or is suYcient for) a thought. (Consider a monolin-
gual speaker of Russian uttering a sentence of English, for example.)
Indeed, defenders of all forms of cognitive conception of language should
accept that the content of an inner tokened sentence will depend upon a
host of more basic connections and sub-personal processes. Rather, the
stronger claim will be that the sentence is anecessary component ofthe
thought, and that (certain types of) reasoning necessarily involve such
sentences.
The diVerence between the two sorts of view can be put as follows.
According to stronger forms of the cognitive conception, a particular
tokening of an inner sentence is (sometimes) an inseparable part of the
mental episode which carries the content of the token thought in question;
so there is no neural or mental event at the time which can exist distinct
from that sentence, which can occupy a causal role distinctive of that sort
of thought, and which carries the content in question; and so language is
constitutively involved in (certain types of) cognition, even when our focus
is on token thinkings. For the supra-communicative account, however, the
involvement only arises when we focus on an extendedprocessof thinking
or reasoning over time. So far as any given token thought goes, the account
can (and does) buy into the standard input/output conception of language.
It can maintain that there is a neural episode which carries the content of
the thought in question, where an episode of that type can exist in the
absence of any natural language sentence and can have a causal role
distinctive of the thought, but which in the case in question causes the
production of a natural language representation. This can then have
214 Forms of representation