From Participatory Sense-Making

to LanguageThere and Back Again

Elena Clare CuffariEzequiel Di PaoloHanne De Jaegher

IAS-Center for Life, Mind and Society

UPV/EHUUniversity of the Basque

Country

Overview• How and what the enactive emphasis on

adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction contributes to new sciences of languaging:

• A philosophical framework: languaging as a manner of living, i.e. adaptive social sense-making

• Two models improving upon the Maturanian view of languaging

• Linguistic bodies, boundaries, and meaning• Consequences for ethics and for

understanding experience

• “We operate in language as our manner of being as we live in the present, in the flow of our interactions, in our domains of structural coupling” (2002, 27)

• “…notions of communication and symbolization are second to actually existing in language” (ibid)

• “…as the circular processes of the brain become coupled to the linear flow of ‘languaging’, that brain becomes a ‘languaging’ brain” (1995)

• Coordinations of coordinations

Maturana (the good stuff)

“Language as a biological phenomenon…• Takes place in the relational domain as a manner of

living• and not in the brain as a phenomenon of the

operational and structural dynamics of the nervous system” (1995)

• Non-intersecting domains: metabolic-physiological & relational

Maturana (the not so good stuff)

• Enaction starts with autonomousautonomous cognizingcognizing (sense-making) agentagent, “the normative engagement of a system with its world” (Di Paolo 2009)

• Cognition is sense-making in interaction sense-making in interaction (Di Paolo 2009)

• Agency seen in the asymmetrical modulation of the coupling between the autonomous entity and its environment.

• This is a post-Maturanian view:– Adaptivity– Agency– Experience– Meaning– Time : homeostasis and sense-making are both dynamic

temporal phenomena

Enaction

Participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007)

• The sense-making of two or more agents is mutually modulated as they engage in an interactive encounter.

• The dynamics of social interaction form an autonomous self-sustaining identity (for a time) in the common space of coordinated and uncoordinated relational moves.

• There is a double influencedouble influence between interaction autonomy and individual autonomies of agents.

• Agents come to participate in each other’s sense-making; this also generates a deep basic tension.

Adaptivity and PSM in conversation

• What is at stake for biological-existential selves?

• What does it mean for a conversation to threaten one’s homeostasis?

• What does it mean to improve the conditions of one's self-production when the self is socio-linguistically mediated?

• What kind of account of language and embodiment do we need to answer such questions?

Approaching language: two models

• What is the What is the logical structurelogical structure of of languaging as a manner of living? languaging as a manner of living? – Similar to Wittgenstein’s slabs– But with special resources from the theory of

PSM– Dialectical structure of negotiating tensions

• What is the What is the observable and lived observable and lived experienceexperience of languaging as a manner of of languaging as a manner of living?living?– Circular relations of coping, incorporating, and

creating: Wheel of languaging– Applies and supports the definition of

languaging from the first model

Enactive languaging Languaging is a special

style of social agency

a double regulation of self and interaction that integrates the tensions inherent in PSM - dialogical organization and the creative, exploratory use of codified, in-common coordinating moves

Sense-making at the level of emergent horizons of normativity and significance

Wheel of languaging

Linguistic bodies• Individual beings that incorporate

sensitivities and powers pertaining to living in enlanguaged environments

• Not discursive bodies, not ephemeral, but perhaps excessive (potentialities, tuning to the virtual)

• Language is not a faculty or an instinct.• All bodies are not the same.• Pre-given sameness does not secure

meaning.

Linguistic borders

• Expanding circle within PSM• Questions for further research will include:– Are we ever outside of languaging?– Border collies, great apes, babies (“no pre-

linguistic infant” – Raçzaszek-Leonardi et al 2013)– How can we isolate and examine the contribution

of linguistic behavior in dynamic and distributed social interaction, and the sense made there?

• Experiential consequences of coordinations raises another question of boundaries: between self and other

Ethics of co-coordination

• Languaging involves coordinating others and being coordinated by them.

• We do not just do languaging with others, we do it to them, and have it done to us.

• And we do it to ourselves – diets, plans, judgments.

• Call for mindfulness and cultivated practices of listening to and speaking out of experience to improve our shared living in languaging.

Summary• What can enaction bring to language?–Meaning– Agency– Sensitive and powerful bodies, unique yet

intelligible– Normative and referential horizons of co-enacted

lifeworld– Ethical consequences in co-coordinating experience

• These core features of the enactive approach to cognition and social cognition offer a natural framework for investigating languaging as a manner of living.

Thank You!

Thanks to Thomas Wiben Jensen, Yanna Popova, Jon Stewart and Tom Froese for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper!!