Content in languaging: why radical enactivism is incompatible with representational theories of language

Harvey, Matthew

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2014.12.004

Cited by 26 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 157 publications

(135 reference statements)

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“…Accordingly, the Adiabatic Principle upholds a sharp distinction between two unrelated concepts of "meaning:" linguistic meaning is a property of words and sentences, giving language a communicative function. Ecological meaning is a property of relations between living organisms and their environments (see Harvey 2015;Trasmundi and Steffensen 2016;cf. Chemero 2009;Thompson 2007).…”

Section: The Adiabatic Separation Of Ecological Meaning From Linguistmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The loggerhead example builds on a definition of meaning as "the way that some medium appears from the perspective of a living system" (Harvey 2015). However, if indeed meaning arises as organisms pick up information about relations among their parts or relations to the environment, how are we to understand the concept of linguistic meaning?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Steffensen

Harvey

2018

Cognitive Semiotics

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Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee’s conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee’s symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.

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Section: The Adiabatic Separation Of Ecological Meaning From Linguistmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Steffensen

Harvey

2018

Cognitive Semiotics

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“…In light of these observations, we suggest that the organizational function served by wordings is best captured by theorizing them as a variety of 'attentional techniques' (or 'technologies', where we are concerned with inscription rather than vocalization), which is more accurate than treating them as material scaffolds for action or as undifferentiated coordinated activity (see Harvey, 2015). This reconceptualization of wordings builds on recognition that biological systems are always distributed, in that they are constituted partly from systems and processes outside the spatial bounds of their bodies (Di Paolo, 2009).…”

Section: The Ecological Functions Of Wordingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The illusion of common ground

Cowley

Harvey

2016

New Ideas in Psychology

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“…This observation is based on two important assumptions: (1) that the only scientifically respectable notion of information is that of nomic covariance of some sort; and, (2) that nomic covariance isn't any kind of content. Even diehard representationalists readily admit this, but they fail to draw the full consequences of that admission (see Harvey 2015 for a detailed discussion). What follows from acknowledging that covariance isn't any kind of content?…”

Section: Why Noc?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here it is important to note a number of authors have expressed suspicions that, given certain REC assumptions, any positive attempt to explain content would be inherently flawed and simply doomed to fail. Harvey (2015), for example, claims that REC embeds an apparent contradiction:…”

Section: Why Noc?mentioning

confidence: 99%