The shared know-how in Linguistic Bodies

Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics, 1976

Noûs, 2008

Is linguistic understanding a form of knowledge? I clarify the question and then consider two natural forms a positive answer might take. I argue that, although some recent arguments fail to decide the issue, neither positive answer should be accepted. The aim is not yet to foreclose on the view that linguistic understanding is a form of knowledge, but to develop desiderata on a satisfactory successor to the two natural views rejected here.

When a newborn comes to maturity, the first faculty that he needs to develop is the faculty to communicate. Learning to talk and teaching the child to talk are the two of the conscious efforts that are observed and followed through. These efforts are fundamental in the impartation of knowledge, although there are many modes of knowledge dissemination aside from linguistic means.

Semiotica, 2000

How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental "platonic" ideality independent of individual cognition and language use . Another stresses immanent linguistic relations , and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will substantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental pragmatics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve cooperative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and appraising subjective experiences.

The idea that natural languages are shared by speakers within linguistic communities is often taken for granted. Several philosophers even take the notion of shared language as fundamental and that allows them to use it in further explanations. However, to justify the claim that speakers share a language, it should be possible to demarcate the shared language somehow. In this paper, I discuss: A) the explanatory role which the notion of shared language can play, and B) a strategy for demarcating shared languages from within the linguistic production of speakers. The aim of this paper is to show that the indeterminate nature of meaning in natural languages problematizes the intuitive idea of natural languages as shared.

in Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-making. Massamiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese, eds. Palgrave McMillan. forthcoming.

This chapter considers the ethical and epistemological consequences of the enactive notion of 'languaging' as whole-bodied, intersubjective sense-making. Making sense in language is defined as a process of moving from stable, shared sense, through idiosyncratic non-sense, to a locally produced, co-available or interactively afforded sense. Enactive concepts of autonomy, autopoiesis, adaptivity, and precariousness imply radical idiosyncrasy in how individuals incorporate the means and moves needed to cope in enlanguaged environments. Differences in sense-making styles predict misunderstanding in social interactions. How do participants of linguistic sense-making share meaning? Presenting meaning as a consequence of mindfulness and misunderstanding, this chapter attempts to include the interiority and variety of experience in descriptions of linguistic participatory sense-making. It gives semantic weight to particularity without losing sight of interactional sources of normativity and intentionality.

2017

The article undertakes the new emerging perspective of language as a dynamic form of activity between interacting human agents and redefines it as “an activity in which wordings play a part” (Cowley). Drawing on the views of Maturana, Bottineau, Harris, Thibault, Cowley and others, the author situates the concept of language in the vast field of ecology, agency and interactivity. Language thus conceived is not a code-like denotational structure but an aspect of sense-saturated communicative coordination and a result of human actions and co-actions. On this view we describe a conversation as an unfolding process of two or more interactants entering the cognitive dynamics which allows them to connect to each other and to their environments thus pursuing their individual and shared goals. This can be referred to as sense-making through dialogicality.