"The irony here is that the avowedly prelinguistict/sublinguistic account of cognition explored in the preceding chapters allows us to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the truly transformative event that was the development of human language. Indeed, it may be the single most important development in the evolutionary history of the entire hominin line."

"A language allows its possessor to do a great many things, but perhaps foremost among them is the steering, or the guidance, or the modulation of the cognitive activity of one's fellow speakers. With a single sentence, one can 'artificially' index any one of their antecedent conceptual maps, without their having any of the sensory activities that would usually bring that about. ..."

"More importantly, if such mutual steering on one another's cognitive activities becomes frequent and widespread, then the process of cognition becomes collective. It then involves a number of distinct brains - at least a handful, and perhaps millions - engaged in a common endeavor. Their consensual understanding of the world's general structure, of its local and present configuration, of its immediate past and expected future, is then shaped, not by the activities of an sensory inputs to a single brain, but by the activities of and inputs to a larger number of different brains, similarly but not identically situated. This increase both the quantity and reliability of the of the singular information fed into the singular cognitive process.

Slots and Values
ref	p251-2
source	Unnamed