Musicality as material culture

Abstract

From an enactive perspective, one should be able to explain how perception and actions, constituted in patterns of interactions with the world, evolve into the capacities for social coordination and social understanding distinctive of human beings. Traditional accounts of our social understanding skills, focusing on the role of intentionality as the ''aboutness'' associated with the use of symbolic language, make this sort of explanation difficult to articulate. A satisfactory explanation should start with the recognition that intentionality is not a monolithic phenomenon and that more basic kinds of intentionality embodied in material culture have played a crucial role in allowing for the complexity of human social cognition. We argue for the importance of kinds of bottom-up intentionality, which arise from the world as it is experienced, dynamically structuring and directing our cognitive capacities toward possibilities of (joint) action. Musicality (our capacity for being musical) is a particularly rich kind of cultural expression, in which intentionality embodied in material culture can be studied and its significance for the structure of our deeply social cognition can be explored.

La estructuración social del razonamiento en nichos de desarrollo

“…Nuestra propuesta se alinea con esta idea, pero aporta una elaboración que Norman no aborda: consideramos de manera más detallada el papel de los procesos de desarrollo, tanto biológicos como sociales, en la generación, estabilización y diversificación de los procesos que permiten esa coordinación. Además, en otros escritos (Martínez, 2014;Martínez y Villanueva, 2018), hemos señalado que existen diversos tipos de intenciones que se distinguen precisamente por los nichos de desarrollo en los que se Novaes (2021) ha defendido que el razonamiento, en particular el razonamiento deductivo, surge como un producto de procesos culturales (p. xii). Para esta filósofa, las prácticas de deducción se originaron como un fenómeno cultural confinado en su mayor parte a nichos de especialistas como matemáticos, científicos y filósofos.…”

Grounding 4E Cognition in Mexico: introduction to special issue on spotlight on 4E Cognition research in Mexico

“…Martínez and Villanueva (2018) give an enactive perspective to explain how patterns of perception and interactions with the world evolve into the capacities for social coordination and social understanding distinctive of human beings. Taking as an example the origin and development of musicality, as human capacities for being musical, and focusing on the role of intentionality associated with the use of symbolic language, they propose that intentionality is not a monolithic phenomenon.…”

Simondon and enaction: the articulation of life, subjectivity, and technics

“…Uses and values are not given from the start, out there in the objective world as if objects possessed and displayed their own meaning independently from organisms, neither are they to be found “in the subject,” as if subjectivity and meaning existed before individuation, manipulation, and invention, as a priori conditions and independently from external mediations. Undoubtedly the object has its intrinsic, socially constituted and shared normativity, calls for a specific behavior, and shapes the subject’s intentional structures (Martinez & Villanueva, 2018; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Simondon himself thematizes the idea that technical normativity is irreducible to vital normativity.…”