Language as an Interaction System

The standard information flow view of cognition and language has environmental information being transduced at sensory surfaces, the encodings thereby generated being processed in internal cognition (whether of symbol manipulation or connectionist or neural net form, or all of the above), and further output encodings being generated for action, such as walking or eating. A special case of output encodings are those for language: these must appropriately control various muscle groups, but they crucially also involve encodings of mental contents, particularly representational mental contents, which are thereby transmitted via speech or writing to be decoded by an audience of one or more receivers.