Co-Speech Gesture in Communication and Cognition

xv, 256 p. : ill.This dissertation stages a reciprocal critique between traditional and marginal philosophical approaches to language on the one hand and interdisciplinary studies of speech-accompanying hand gestures on the other. Gesturing with the hands while speaking is a ubiquitous, cross-cultural human practice. Yet this practice is complex, varied, conventional, nonconventional, and above all under-theorized. In light of the theoretical and empirical treatments of language and gesture that I engage in, I argue that the hand gestures that spontaneously accompany speech are a part of language; more specifically, they are enactments of linguistic meaning. They are simultaneously (acts of) cognition and communication. Human communication and cognition are what they are in part because of this practice of gesturing. This argument has profound implications for philosophy, for gesture studies, and for interdisciplinary work to come. As further, strong proof of the pervasively embodied way that humans make meaning in language, reflection on gestural phenomena calls for a complete re-orientation in traditional analytic philosophy of language. Yet philosophical awareness of intersubjectivity and normativity as conditions of meaning achievement is well-deployed in elaborating and refining the minimal theoretical apparatus of present-day gesture studies. Triangulating between the most social, communicative philosophies of meaning and the most nuanced, reflective treatments of co-speech hand gesture, I articulate a new construal of language as embodied, world-embedded, intersubjectively normative, dynamic, multi-modal enacting of appropriative disclosure. Spontaneous co-speech gestures, while being indeed spontaneous, are nonetheless informed in various ways by conventions that they appropriate and deploy. Through this appropriation and deployment speakers enact, rather than represent, meaning, and they do so in various linguistic modalities. Seen thusly, gestures provide philosophers with a unique new perspective on the paradoxical determined-yet-free nature of all human meaning.Committee in charge: Mark Johnson, Chairperson; Ted Toadvine, Member; Naomi Zack, Member; Eric Pederson, Outside Membe

Deixando a linguagem ser: reflexões sobre o método enativo

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how.Impulsionados por nossos comentadores, consideramos esta resposta uma oportunidade para esclarecer as premissas, atitudes e métodos de nossa abordagem enativa da linguagem humana [human languaging]. Ressaltamos a necessidade de reconhecer que qualquer investigação, particularmente sobre a linguagem, é sempre uma atividade concretamente situada e auto-fundamentada; nossa atitude como pesquisadores é do saber como engajamento com nosso tópico. Nossa tarefa, formular as categorias ausentes que podem unir a ciência cognitiva incorporada à pesquisa sobre linguagem, requer evitar abstrações prematuras e esclarecer as múltiplas circularidades em jogo. Nosso método escolhido é dialético, o que suscitou várias observações interessantes às quais respondemos, particularmente com respeito ao que esse método significa para a epistemologia e ontologia enativas. Também esclarecemos a importante questão de como melhor conceber as várias habilidades sociais que progressivamente identificamos com nosso método e que estão em jogo na linguagem humana [human languaging]. Essas habilidades são socialmente constituídas ou apenas aprendidas socialmente? A diferença, novamente, leva a um esclarecimento de que atos, habilidades, atores e interações devem ser concebidos como categorias co-emergentes. Ilustramos alguns desses pontos com uma discussão de um exemplo de aspectos do modelo em jogo em um estudo sobre a entrega de presentes na China.Palavras-chave: Epistemologia enativa, Ontologia enativa, Dialética, Linguagem, Saber-como compartilhado

“Bringing new life in”: Hope as a know-how of not knowing

We offer a theoretical and empirical exploration of parental or guardian hope through an enactive, ecological, and reflective lifeworld research framework. We examine hoping as a practice, or know-how, by exploring the shape of interviewees’ lives as they prepare for lives to come. We pursue hoping as a necessarily shared practice–a social agency–rather than an individual emotion. One main argument is that hoping operates as a kind of languaging. An enactive-ecological approach shifts scholarly conversations around hope, in part by including voices of non-scholars and considering lifeworld factors like class privilege. We aim to identify particular impediments to or facilitators of hope, which may be thought of as classes of restrictive and generative thought-shapers, respectively. Results from our qualitative study indicate that uncertainty is deeply salient to hoping, not only because hope as a concept entails epistemic limits, but more vitally because not knowing, when done skillfully and when supported through education and some degree of socio-economic security, leaves room for others to reframe utterances, and so for the family or community to resist linguistic enclosure

Keep Meaning in Conversational Coordination

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination

Intentions as interactional and interspecies achievements: enactivist contributions to language evolution

Philosophy drawing on studies of animal behavior has paved a middle-way path regarding natural and non-natural meaning (Bar-On, 2021; Bar-On & Moore, 2017; Green, 2019; Moore, 2018). Elaborating the question of communicative intention goes hand-in-hand with growing appreciation of the reaches of non-human animal mindedness (Andrews & Beck, 2018; Merritt, 2021), pushing the plausible bounds of higher-order cognitive capacities beyond the singular province of homo sapiens. The question of relating human languaging to non-human languaging is enriched through a dialogue between enactive philosophy of social cognition and post-Gricean discourse. Speaker meaning presupposes coherent, stable, individual, internal, and prior intention as a cognitive or mental state. The enactive theory of social cognition, participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), calls all of these premises into serious question. Prioritizing the role of interactions in cognition brings attention to the multitude of possible partners humans had and have in communication and sense-making engagements

Autonomie und Relationalität

Mit Blick auf unseren alltäglichen Umgang mit Musik und ihre massenmediale Omnipräsenz, trotz derer sie die Zuschreibung eines Kunstcharakters nicht zwangsläufig einbüßen muss, erscheint die pauschale Rede von der Autonomie der Kunst – beziehungsweise der Musik – doch zumindest als diskussionswürdig. Auch innerhalb kunsttheoretischer Überlegungen steht die Autonomiethese zur Disposition. Die Kritik richtet sich dabei gegen unterschiedliche, wenn auch aufeinander bezogene Aspekte, die mit dieser Vorstellung verknüpft sind