05.05.2026 Stephen Levinson

This talk offers a sideways look at language and its evolution. It will suggest that there is a neglected ‘silver bullet’ behind the evolutionary success of our species – namely the development of ‘mind tools’, artefacts that externalize thinking and in so doing amplify our cognition. The notion of ‘mind tool’ is easily clarified by some obvious canonical examples, like tallies, abaci, navigation aids, time reckoners, measuring aids, writing, etc. But the earliest mind tool was probably gesture (as in counting on the fingers), which likely played a role in the genesis of language. Simple mind tools abound in both the ethnographic and paleolithic record. We enquire how mind tools work psychologically, by transducing a cognitive problem into an alternative format, so that brain and external device mutually adapt to make what Andy Clark has called a ‘coupled device’, with profound cognitive consequences.

Despite the more abstract nature, languages are also mind tools, locally adapted thought extruders as it were, sharing the same kind of psychological and partially externalized properties as material cognitive artefacts. The development of mind tools like number and writing systems initiated their own technological streams, and it is the confluence of these tools with language that has given us the LLMs of current AI. This perspective offers not only a different take on language but also on current AI, which of course is also a mind tool and shares the general properties and limitations.