About

A distributed community

As a community we concur that human cognitive and communicative abilities arise during a history of doing things together while, at times, drawing on linguistic resources. Language activity is thus constrained by biology, circumstances and collective ways of life. While bodies sustain social coordination, our lived realities are extended by the resources of a partly shared or collective world. This distributed perspective challenges the mainstream view that what we do with language can be explained by individual competencies and, thus, denies that human thinking can be reduced to how we ‘use’ languages. To ascribe ‘language’ to individual organisms is, we believe, an error. Building on cognitive science, the distributed perspective thus challenges cognitive centralism by presenting language as a prime case of embodied, culturally embedded cognition.

Language is inseparable from the artifacts, institutions and behaviour used by humans who undertake complex tasks. Given our interdisciplinary openness, therefore, our work opens up many questions. We are geographically distributed and, using the resulting diversity, embrace varying beliefs and expertise. Our shared goal is that of transforming the language sciences by replacing linguistic ‘schools’ with a pluralistic view of language. Since our beginnings at a 2005 conference on the cognitive dynamics of language at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, we have come to number about 120 members. Most of us are scholars who work in disciplines that include cognitive science, linguistics, phonetics, psychology, philosophy, sociology and biology. We concur that people, mind and society depend on the heterogeneity of human languaging.  Language is not to be described (let alone explained!) by a single theory. In pursuing the distributed perspective, we undertake research both singly and in groups, have organized more than a dozen academic meetings and, drawing on these, many publications. If you are interested in becoming part of the self-organizing DLG community, the first step is to e-mail Stephen Cowley.