This book emerged as a happy coincidence. Or was it perhaps a matter of unplanned, but non-accidental "distributed cognition"? In retrospect it seems that it was something that was just waiting to happen. Based on our edited volume The Shared Mind , Tim Racine, Chris Sinha, Esa Itkonen and myself proposed a theme session with the title "Intersubjectivity and Language" to the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, held in Krakow, Poland, in July 2007. At the same time, Ad Foolen and Ulrike Lüdtke independently proposed a session on " Language and Emotion". Both proposals were accepted, but we were urged to combine them, and the outcome was the stimulating whole-day workshop "Intersubjectivity and Language: The Interplay of Cognition and Emotion".The first fruit of this, at first glance coerced, synthesis was the linking of the topics of intersubjectivity and emotion. While Zlatev et al. (2008: 1, 3) had defined the first of these notions as "the sharing of experiential content (e.g. feelings, perceptions, thoughts, linguistic meanings) among a plurality of subjects" and had stated that such "sharing of experiences is not only, and not primarily, on a cognitive level, but also (and more basically) on the level of affect, perceptual processes and conative (action-oriented) engagements" -emotion was not explicitly thematized in that predecessor to the present volume. This was clearly a blind spot in the programmatic attempt to frame the concept of intersubjectivity as an alternative to the cognitivist perspective of "theory of mind", which still dominates large parts of the field of social cognition.A second, and equally important, insight that emerged from the workshop was the close link between (inter)subjectivity and bodily motion, or movement. Again, it is not that 3) had neglected the essential role of the body and its various forms of "movements" for the understanding of self and others: "Such sharing and understanding are based on embodied interaction (e.g. empathic perception, imitation, gesture and practical collaboration)." Similarly, various traditions I wish to thank my co-editors for several rounds of feedback on this text, which was initially intended to serve as a joint introduction. However, since I wrote it myself, and allowed myself in the capacity of "coherence manager" to make some critical observations, to which not all co-editors could subscribe, it was decided to re-organize it as a single-authored Prologue. I also wish to express my gratitude to the authors for the discussions on their chapters, and my sincere hope that even if they disagree with my comments, they would not take this negatively, but as an attempt to add to the coherence of the book and to open up the discussion on the topics that we all care about so deeply. Finally, I need to acknowledge the six year program Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (2009-2014) at Lund University, for financial support and for providing an intellectual environment aiming at the development of a non-reductive, synthetic "mind science".
