Taking a language stance

HECO #591272, VOL 23, ISS 3 (June 21, 2011) Ecological Psychology, 23:1–25, 2011 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1040-7413 print/1532-6969 online DOI: 10.1080/10407413.2011.591272 Taking a Language Stance Stephen J. Cowley School of Psychology University of Hertfordshire Hatfield, UK 5 Linguists tend to view language in terms of forms and their use. For historical reasons, speaking and listening are often ascribed to knowledge of a language system. Language behavior is seen as the production and processing of forms. Others contrast language to man-made codes (see Kravchenko, 2007; Love, 2004). Instead of focusing on forms, language can be conceived of as action and, as such, both dynamic and symbolic (Raczaszek-Leonardi, ˛ 2009). History places us in a meshwork where public resources of language, among other things, contribute to games, mashing beans, and watching television. Speaking-while-hearing draws on cultural products (e.g., axes, social roles, pictures, and wordings). As we collaborate, we orient to wordings or repeated (and systematized) aspects of vocalizations that, within our community, carry historically derived information. Pursuing this view, it is argued that hearing “words” is like seeing “things” in pictures. This is described as taking a language stance. To defend the position, it is argued that, first, we learn to hear wordings and, later, to use “what we hear” as ways of constraining our actions. Far from depending on individual knowledge, orienting to wordings makes language irreducibly collective. 10 15 20 DYNAMICS AND LIVING BODIES Twentieth-century linguists typically identified language activity with the use of language systems by invoking theoretical entities known as linguistic forms and functions. Following de Saussure (1916/1983), they adopted naïve realism by Correspondence should be addressed to Stephen J. Cowley, School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK. E-mail: [email protected] 1 2 COWLEY describing languages as verbal systems. This assumes a psychological view in which individuals “use” a language system to do things with “linguistic forms.” For theoretical reasons, language is taken to center on an organism, brain, or mind that is alleged to send and receive messages. Behaviorists and cognitivists are thus equally prone to adopt what R. Harris (1981) called the language myth. Like Morse operators, they view people as producers and processors of verbal strings called “utterances,” “verbal behavior,” “sentences,” or “discourse.” Given that language has a bodily basis, such code views are increasingly challenged (e.g., Kravchenko, 2007; Love, 2004). It is emphasized that, unlike Morse, language is embodied activity that is intrinsic to real-time coordination and cognition. However, given a history of similar expressive dynamics, language is also nonlocalizable or symbolic (Raczaszek-Leonardi, ˛ 2009). Language is embodied and virtual or, more simply, it is distributed (see Cowley, 2007b, 2007e, 2009b). Taking a distributed view, the basic question becomes how, together, individuals manage linguistic coordination. Investigation begins not with language systems but with real-time events (e.g., Cowley, 1994; Linell, 2009; Linell, Gustavsson, & Jovonen, 1988). We integrate language, action, and perception as we play games, pound wheat, talk, or use computers, for example. Skills in managing vocal and nonvocal expression give us what Love (2004) calls firstorder language or a “contextually determined process of investing behaviour or the products of behaviour (vocal, gestural, or other) with semiotic significance” (p. 530). Linguistic behavior has effects (e.g., Cowley, 1994) that include phenomenological experience of wordings that are defined as readily repeated aspects of vocalizations that, for speakers of a community, carry historically derived information. Wordings thus contribute to interaction while also lending themselves to description as verbal patterns. Given the cultural importance of such patterns, readers of this article will hear isiZulu speech as quite unlike that of Australians or Scots. Whereas isiZulu will sound musical, hearing varieties of English will call up verbal associations. In the linguistic tradition, wordings become “forms,” which, it is assumed, are merely accompanied by visible expression and “tones of voice.” Although wordings can be ascribed formal properties, such descriptions mask our rich experience. At times, wordings sound predictable, strange, erroneous, conventional, trivial, misleading, and so on. Transcription thus reduces language to inscriptions by masking realtime, between-person activities. Worse still, by reducing language to pattern we can be fixated by its codelike aspect. In the distributed view, in contrast to codes, language is full-bodied coordination. Among other things, we learn to use wordings as we orient to what is said and done. During conversations, skills in hearing, evoking, and construing contribute to how we move and vocalize. As circumstances vary, we give more and less attention to wordings that frame what we and our interactive partners are doing. Though always 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 3 reliant on first-order expression, we make extensive use of historically derived information, which Love (2004) links to second-order cultural constructs. We do things, react to other people, and, as we do so, orient to expectations and wordings. First-order language shapes talk, playing football, criminal proceedings, using computers, thinking, and much besides. While focusing on dialogical events, this article examines how conversation and its vocal, gestural, and other products display “overt” semiotic significance. Unlike in opening Wikipedia, dreaming, or shouting for a ball, how we perceive wordings can be crucial. In poetry as in religious, legal, or scientific talk, these are artfully combined with vocal dynamics. This is called taking a language stance or treating speech as if it consisted of verbal patterns. The distributed view thus offers an alternative to theories that ascribe a language “faculty” to persons, minds, or brains. Instead, language becomes a mode of coaction used in social life. In learning to talk or to engage in human symbol grounding (Cowley, 2007a), babies integrate vocalizations with activity and, only later, with wordings. It is by learning to listen as a member of a community that they discover the value of verbal resources. There is a close parallel with vision. Taking a language stance is like learning to see pictures. As is explained later, this links phonetics with Gibson’s (1979/1986) view of picture perception. As we come to hear wordings (or see pictures), we adopt new social roles. Further, by learning to do different things, we transform our perceptual powers. In various timescales, as Anderson (2008) suggests, humans redeploy their neural resources. A DISTRIBUTED VIEW OF LANGUAGING AND LANGUAGE 70 75 80 85 90 Like Pictures, Wordings Are Secondary No one denies that language is human activity. However, for many, this is trivial: explanation is to focus on knowledge of languages (plural) and their forms. If most rigorously endorsed by Chomsky, similar assumptions arise in any framework that identifies language with units qua formal patterns. This is because abstract textlike entities can only function when bound to what an organism is said to know. Theorists generally posit a system that gives meaning to “forms.” It appears self-evident that individuals use (or possess) a system that construes forms and meanings. In the distributed view, this confuses description of sense making with its underlying dynamics. In fact, language is already integrated with perception, activity, and feeling. It is unlike Morse precisely in that it needs no central executive or language faculty. Rather wordings arise in linking verbal patterns with lived experience. 95 Q1 100 4 COWLEY Like everything we do, first-order language is action. It influences how we engage with each other, think, feel, and act. Far from being autonomous, language enacts bodily dynamics as we draw on the local affordances. This sets up a parallel between wordings and Gibson’s (1979/1986) view of picture perception. As explained later, both modes of action use discrepant forms of awareness. When looking at a picture, we see both an object (e.g., a painted piece of canvas in a frame) and a “thing” depicted. During interaction, by hypothesis, discrepant awareness captures the invariants of interaction as well as invariants in the interaction (e.g., wordings). Just as pictures are not constituted by a visual array but by invariants in the array, vocalizations are integrated with invariants in coordinated events. In relation to language and vision, we reject naïve realism: neither the environment nor language consists of objects. Like art or photography, language links feeling with shared forms.1 Social actors integrate affect and self-expression with wordings that display both judgments and modes of thinking. We draw on second-order cultural constructs or the naïve realist’s “words.” Our sensitivity to wordings develops as we learn from engaging with the world. We need rely neither on knowledge of a language system nor of the things depicted. As with pictures, dialogue rests on perceptual skills that develop in the service of action. Thus, whereas linguistic forms serve to describe language, bodily dynamics sustain coordination with people, objects, and events. Human activities depend, only in part, on what we come to utter, hear, see, and imagine as wordings. 105 110 115 FN1 120 125 What Is the Language Stance? The concept of stance-taking arose from Dennett’s (1969) attempt to rethink Ryle’s (1949) concept of mind. In so doing, he began by interrogating “the relation is between the physical sciences and the truths expressed in our mental language” (Dennett, 1969, p. 19). How do people express truths, beliefs, and desires? Presupposing a standard view of language, Dennett (1969) points out that people take a physical or design stance. They link principles of physics or design to practical and cognitive skills that inform observations. In turn, these serve to formulate descriptions and (valid) predictions about processes and machines. In this article, the question turns to how we can say anything at all. Stance taking is thus extended to how we understand talking people. The language stance serves, among other things, to predict what people will do, think, and feel. It links experience of bodily coordination with wordings that are heard as, together, people use the constraints of a cultural tradition. Although 1 Harnad (2005) invokes the feeling of thinking this echoes, say, Heidegger’s (1975) experience of language. 130 135 Q2 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 5 grounded in moving bodies, wordings are integral to feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and displays of who we are. We learn to hear, and hear ourselves repeating, verbal patterns that call forth response. Of course, in literate communities, training extends this mode of perception. In dealing with books, we use wordings in coming to read aloud and, later, silently. With education, we exploit complex contexts in inferring what is wanted. Just as with other stances, the language stance gives predictive power (and much besides). In historical time, it has shaped the practices and customs that generate, above all, usage patterns. Stance taking thus replaces hypothetical individual knowledge. Instead of treating forms (or meanings) as a priori, they arise as, using different timescales, we integrate our behavioral dynamics.2 Stance taking makes agents into observers who construe and shape the lived environment as they integrate perception with action. By 18 months, the relevant skills are well developed. Children integrate vocal skills with aspects of the perceived world in what adults treat as “intentional” utterances. Unknowingly, caregivers take a language stance that guides the child’s changing expectations. This encourages the repetition that underpins discovery of wordings. In Taylor’s (2000) terms, children explore linguistic reflexivity as, for example, questions become invitations to do things about language with language. They come to produce answers and, indeed, to develop such skills as formulating opinions and stating facts. Everyday life becomes organized around events, practices, and things. As dialogue is influenced by wordings, new activities emerge (e.g., looking at books). Whether or not taking a language stance is facilitated by “reading” pictures, detaching wordings is needed for skills that shape, say, autobiographical memory or planned action. In historical time, the language stance can drive cultural change. Not only does it underpin lay linguistics (second-order constructs can be used to talk about firstorder language) but also the invention of writing systems is possible. Once writing exists, we can create grammars, dictionaries, and a language “object” based on descriptions of wordings. In turn, this allows for the invention of language machines (from the printing press to information technology). Thus, much is gained by separating wordings from coordination. Yet, in spite of these advantages, the focus on forms blinds us to how language is anchored in human life. 2 Lyons (1977) cannot doubt that “there is some degree of correspondence between the way we speak and the way we think we speak” (p. 27). Later we identify “the way we think we speak” with taking a language stance. Invoking virtual conventions, this challenges reduction of the “external world” to entities (persons, animals, plants, etc.) that can be “characterized by, or possesses, certain perceptible or otherwise intelligible properties” (p. 110). On a distributed view, we are part of the world whose properties are inseparable from action (and perception). 140 145 150 FN2 155 160 165 170 6 COWLEY Against Mainstream Linguistics Rejecting linguistics based on naïve realism, this article traces language to a history of coordinated action. Because verbal patterns can map experience to “reality,” they resemble “objects” in classical physics or “features” of design. Although young babies use contingencies to coordinate, they soon discover how adults orient to such regularities. Not only is this of value in coming to hear wordings but also the results change their developing vocal skills. As children begin to hear wordings they can notice vocal patterns and, later, explore pretending, remembering, and planning. The language stance can thus contribute to thinking (but not speaking aloud). Later, it serves to construct and construe inscriptions (through an ability to read and write) and understand practices such as law, religion, poetry, and science. The social development of stance taking uses inscriptions in redefining (and standardizing) languages. In literate societies, it sustains the view that individuals have knowledge of words and rules. When taken as describing a person’s mental “state,” wordings become inner entities. Although often harmless, this tempts us to forget the embodied basis of language. Thus, the distributed view contrasts to seeing language as a “great conduit.” Echoing Locke (1689/1975),3 many still adopt beliefs like the following: 1. Thinking centers on an individual who can make his invisible ideas known; 2. Expression consists of external sensible signs (or determinate linguistic forms); and 3. To the extent that we grasp other people’s ideas, we rely on linguistic forms. Let us examine these three Lockean beliefs in turn, starting with the first. Today, few see forms as expressing ideas. Nonetheless, behaviorists and cognitivists alike ascribe intelligence to habits, minds, or brains. Taking what Järvilehto (2009) calls a two-system view, they separate the world from the known by ascribing thoughts to individual users of external signs (language forms). Overlooking dynamics, they take the view that knowers (or their brains), in a “yet to be discovered” sense, master a language system. Naturally enough, language is traced to an individual’s language faculty. Thus, the first Lockean assumption shapes a 300-year debate. On the one hand, some posit habits that allow us to recognize, repeat, and utter “forms.” Not only does this focus on utterances (or 3 Locke (1689/1975) writes, “The Comfort and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of Thought, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external, sensible Signs, whereby these invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be known to others” (III, II, p. 1). True to naïve realism, Locke does not ask what is meant by viewing “external, sensible Signs” as wordings. 175 180 185 190 FN3 Q3 195 200 205 Q4 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 7 verbal behavior) drive work by Bloomfield (1933) and Z. Harris (1951) but also it has recently taken on new forms. First, Dennett’s (1991a) alternative to the physical symbol system model treats utterances as output from a serial, virtual language machine. Second, to avoid such metaphors, Clark (1998, 2008) offers a habit view where utterances are strings of material symbols (i.e., like “written words”). Those on the other side of the debate begin by challenging “behaviorist” views. As “rationalists,” they either ignore how language is possible or, on other cases, suggest that it depends on genes. Taking its a priori nature for granted, they posit that an individual language faculty stores, processes, and generates linguistic forms. If mentalists invoke inner grammar, others appeal to how we embody linguistic symbols (e.g., Glenberg, De Vega, & Graesser, 2008; Lakoff & Johnston, 1999) or claim that intention reading begets social conformity (Tomasello, 1999). The point is simple: Once one rejects code views, language becomes a mode of coordination. One is therefore bound to reject the second Lockean belief. 210 215 220  Expression consists in external sensible signs (determinate linguistic forms). If language is coordination, linguistic forms cannot be sufficient to explain acts of meaning. This is because, if these are identified with sensible signs, they are separated from their dynamics or how they are produced. Given their view of science, at this point, mentalists and behaviorists depart from Locke (1689/1975). Turning from how these come to be sensible, they invoke the words that are actually spoken. Theories posit that forms are “realized” (or “instantiated”) in utterances, texts, and mental or neural states. By so doing, they rely on naïve realism about “words.” Although difficult to reconcile with biology, this claim is more robust than Locke’s third doctrine: 225 230  To the extent that we grasp other people’s ideas, we rely on linguistic forms. Appeal to linguistic forms leads to the symbol grounding problem (Harnad, 1990). In the computational tradition, it was recognized that, without consideration of action, forms inevitably lack meaning for a system. Although easy to make what machines do meaningful to an outside observer (e.g., Cowley, 2008; Hsaio, Tellex, Vosoughi, Kubat, & Roy, 2008), it may be impossible to design a machine that makes analogous observations. Although debate continues, if the problem can be solved, it depends on engaging with the world. Some invoke embodied symbols (Glenberg et al., 2008), some physical grounding (Vogt, 2002), and some the feeling of thinking (Harnad, 2005). On a distributed view, however, meaning must also be anchored in a social domain (Cangelosi, 2006). As in Peirce’s (1940) work, effects are inseparable from 235 240 245 8 COWLEY sense—events become signs only if the results (interpretants) exert systemic functions. Although some resist, conduit views are giving way to semantic externalism.4 Thus, challenging epistemic views, many concur with Putnam (1975) that meaning “water” presupposes water (or identifiable aspects of the world). A division of linguistic labor links “water” to what we describe as “H2 O.” What the expression identifies (H2 O) is part of what “water” means. One source of externalism lies in Wittgenstein’s (1958) view of how propositions picture states of affairs. Over time, he saw that “picturing” implies human bodies and forms of life. As children grow, their natural history shapes certainties that, in a social context, prompt them to understand and think. Oddly, concepts “force themselves on us.”5 In Heidegger (1959/1971), related ideas emphasize the experience of language, which he traces to “what questions grant” or, in our terms, how our perceptual (and actional) powers draw on a history of engaging with each other and the world. Human sense making occurs within a language meshwork or linguistic home. What Reddy (1979) calls the conduit metaphor has no merit in explaining language. Nonetheless, it does serve to describe what language (and texts) make possible. In terms of this article, wordings give rise to future utterances, which, in a given social context, are likely to count as valid (e.g., “One common form of water is H2 O”). Such claims, however, depend on both the world and how, together, we language. Pursuing this view this article is concerned with showing how our shared world can stand in for a language faculty. No inner lexicon or grammar is required because, like meanings, wordings arise during coordinated activity. Beyond Reification There are good reasons not to reify verbal units. Not only does science warn us off naïve realism but it shows that code models wrongly explain “meanings” by knowledge. In spite of this, many posit a faculty that permits use of “forms.” It is surprisingly hard to overthrow code models. One way forward is to argue that reification supposes that tokens are represented for the system (a Morse operator or program) just as they function in the system. In language, therefore, 4 For Ross (2005), semantic externalism holds that a propositional attitude of scientific importance “must be trying to pick out triangulated regularities among a subject, features of her environment, and patterns of expectation in her interpreters” (p. 48). This “nearly universal doctrine” holds that, to construe an utterance of “water,” we need a thought or observation of water, a world with what we call H2 O, and a capacity to track the relevant associations. 5 The private language argument is a philosopher’s shorthand for part of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1958, §§ 243–264). The claim that concepts force themselves upon us (1958 204e) occurs in the context of discussion of how even simple images can make us see and not see. FN4 250 255 FN5 260 265 270 275 Q5 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 9 brains must map phonological features onto inner forms.6 Because no neural alphabet exists, a system must process types “used” in speech perception and production. Because this view has been challenged by others taking an ecological perspective (Fowler, 2010; Worgan & Moore, 2010), in this context, it is emphasized only that any such approach ignores timing and coordination. In fact, events link circumstances, experience, and expectations. Biomechanical phenomena like accommodation (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991) make dialogue or languaging other-directed (Linell, 2009). Languaging is continuously modulated; among other things, it is a play of voice dynamics. Fowler (2010) proposed that, as we listen, we “are attempting to extract information about phonetic gestures, the very actions that cause informative structure in the signal” (pp. xx). Brains represent neither phones nor phonemes; instead, they connect speech with life history. In the terms presented here, utterance acts can be heard as context-sensitive wordings. In Love’s (2004) terms, we hear utterances “of an abstract linguistic unit of some kind” (p. 539). Given the tracking described by Fowler, types need not be represented in the system. Rather linguistic description (and the language stance) may derive from meshing organic memory with action (as we perceive). Types arise for the system in dealing with circumstances. For Fowler too, “public language use” is embodied and embedded. To understand is thus “a whole body achievement” that is “embedded in a human social niche” (p. 295). Whereas phonetic gestures are individual, perception is polyphonic and, at times, wordings are peripheral. In terms of the distributed view, this connects with how we link “rich auditory patterns of speech” to “coupled visual, somato-sensory and motor patterns” (Port, 2010, p. 43). Because, in Port’s terms, “people actually employ high-dimensional, spectro-temporal, auditory patterns” (p. 43), phonetic gestures shape felt reactions that modulate real-time response. Investigating this language flow, Cowley (2009a) observed the exquisite timing of voice dynamics that allows two people, in harmony, to gently mock a third. This occurs when an Italian father and daughter ridicule their wife/mother when she suggests that her husband cut 2 m long pea poles. Not only does the husband anticipate the final pitch of his wife’s voice but also his daughter matches his changing voice dynamics (to within 4Hz) for over 300 ms. Further, the lived harmony evokes both audible response (a laugh) to how it feels—and a strong retort from the wife/mother. Experience of dynamics, not just forms, makes conversation meaningful. As we hear wordings (and exclamations), discrepant awareness points to a particular sense. Given manifest skills in coordination, the resulting 6 Although determinate (inner) meanings could (in principle) anchor phonological types, the contrary is suggested here. Because brains lack determinate meanings, they need no determinate types: they prompt infants to take a language stance. FN6 280 285 Q6 290 295 300 305 310 10 COWLEY experience can stand in for off-line representation of phonological types, lexical items, or grammatical processing. Theoretical Attacks on Code Views Many have denied that languages have psychological reality (e.g., R. Harris, 1981, 1995, 1998; Linell, 1979; Matthews, 1979; Moore & Carling, 1982). Indeed, arguing that there are no determinate forms, R. Harris can make theoretical linguists seem foolish.7 In spite of forceful rejection of the language myth, R. Harris has no interest in an ecologically plausible alternative. Although recognizing that language is part of action and, as such, conditioned by circumstantial, macrosocial, and biomechanical factors, R. Harris (1998) relies on the intuition that we contextualize utterances in the circumstances. This is consistent with work by, among others, Wittgenstein (1958) and Maturana (1978). Indeed, the latter makes a biocognitive argument against formal strings by arguing that many living things use structural coupling to language together (Maturana, 1988). In independent work, Becker (1988) invokes languaging to explain the particularity of meaning. Embodied dynamics shape language and, of course, evoke wordings. As Port (2010) and Fowler (2010) show, although repetition uses phonetic gestures, we also use rich phonetic memory. Though constituted by dynamics (or physical events), language evokes wordings. Therefore, to reduce language to “forms” is, in Ryle’s (1949) sense, a category mistake. It makes language into a medium that renders understanding, speech, and thought independent of living human beings. Languages and forms are sustained by descriptions with a history. In development, we hear wordings during activity that is partly constrained by what is said. Second-order constructs thus link phonetic gestures with a history of talking about language. The distributed view rejects Harris’s lay-oriented linguistics by seeking a view of wordings that is consistent with naturalism. Emphasis falls not on how people describe language but on how languaging is possible. As with Ryle’s (1949) view of their mental counterparts, linguistic concepts are descriptive. The question, as Dennett (1969) saw, thus becomes how can this be? Yet, by stressing real-time dynamics, one can avoid the individualism of Ryle’s and Dennett’s theories. The language stance is thus traced to how we learn to coordinate events across timescales. Although grounded in the tens-ofmillisecond scale of language flow, we also use slow phenomenological expe7 Often R. Harris is seen as challenging the discipline of linguistics. In a recent issue of the Times Higher Educational Supplement, Salkie (2009) mounts a savage attack: “Harris has produced virtually nothing that is recognisable as linguistics: instead, he has attacked the discipline for resting on illusions, written ill-tempered reviews of other people’s work, and continued to write tendentious and embittered studies in intellectual history.” 315 FN7 320 325 330 335 Q7 340 345 Q8 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 11 rience and, of course, working memory. Given integrative processes, embodied coordination transforms human action and perception. As members of Homo sapiens become human subjects, they coconstruct cognitive powers.8 Because language is hybrid, hearing wordings arises from vocal and auditory habits based in coordination between infants and caregivers. As a result, we draw on what Steffensen (2009) called ecologically extended cognition. First-order language connects world, body, and brain (see Cowley, 2007a) with what is being said. Thus, in the example of language flow described earlier, the gentle ridicule is set in motion by hearing a wording as an accusation: “A certain person is too lazy to cut pea poles.” In linking this with circumstances, beliefs, and the dynamics of bodily expression, in Hodges’s (2007) terms, the parties realize values. Further, given a capacity to hear wordings, real-time events resonate with cultural patterns to invite overt interpretations of what people do, say, and display. In Ross’s (2004, 2007) terms, we are ecologically special or, in Maturana’s (1978), structural coupling opens up consensual domains. Values structure human ecosystems by drawing on history as we orient to how and what people display. Coordinating gives strategic use of artifacts, wordings, and other second-order constraints. How we speak, feel, and act shapes social life and, at the same time, becoming social actors restructures perceptually informed modes of action. People come to draw on not just normative patterns but also wordings. FN8 350 355 360 365 ENGAGING WITH VIRTUAL REALITY Second-order constructs use dynamics that call up virtual patterns with a social history. To understand wordings, therefore, I reject the anthropogenic principle that cognition is individual centered. Turning to the study of biology, cognitive capacities can be traced to organism-environment systems. In Lyon’s (2006) terms, the approach is biogenic: organism-environment systems (see Järvilehto, 2009) derive all their complex capacities from primitive forms. Cognition evolved from how bacteria or fungi first communicated and can thus be traced back further than brains. In social events, brains rely on bodily coordination that appears with, say, the wheeling of a starling flock. Even with learning, neural (and intraneural) systems are sculpted in timescales that underpin action. Language, by extension, must be based on social coordination. Although often repressed, a similar view grounds Peirce’s (1940) ontology (Favareau, 2007). 8 For Bechtel, Abrahamsen, and Graham (1998), although we do not know what cognition is, we do know that it gives animals flexible, adaptive behavior. We ask how, using coordination, our capacity to feel, think, and act is changed by languaging. 370 375 380 12 COWLEY Rejecting cues and signals, Peirce invokes “nonphysical” forces or formal causation: : : : a philologist may have a fine ear for language-sounds; but it is by no means close physical resemblance which determines whether a given sound is or is not “the” Italian close o, for example, as it is naïvely called: it is a psychical habit. In any simple physical sense the sounds not distinguished from that differ much more from one another than almost any of them do from sounds which would not be tolerated for “the” close o. So, this fine phonetic observation of the linguist is a knack of understanding a virtual convention. (p. 67, emphasis added) For Peirce (1940), it is not knowledge of form that enables a person to hear the close o but, rather, familiarity with Italian life. Humans use virtual conventions based on semiotic habits. Hearing is individual, phenomenological, and social. The linguist perceives a “close o” because, given familiarity with Italian, this can be named. Though Peirce does not say so, the same logic applies to wordings and their senses (e.g., gliro).9 Given experience with Italian life, for example, we familiarize ourselves with relevant conventions. Because these use neither genes nor learning, it is sufficient that they be collective and nameable. In the Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson (1979/1986) argues in parallel. Without mentioning semiotics, he compares perceiving pictures with use of verbal descriptions.10 He places these on an ecological cline: 385 390 395 FN9 400 FN10 Perceiving ! seeing a picture ! verbal description Although perceiving can be direct, we also use other modes of awareness. Thus, seeing a picture is “somehow more like perceiving an object, place or person than is verbal description” (Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 280). Like a picture, a verbal description “preserves what its creator has noticed, and considers worth noticing” (p. 274). Each is a record that “specifies something other than what it is” (p. 273). Whatever they are, verbal descriptions specify more than we notice or take for granted. Here there is a parallel with languaging in that, in the terms used earlier, a wording becomes a language picture. It is a sound surface where phonation “treats” vocal gestures.11 As with a picture, we use “discrepant kinds of awareness” (Gibson, 1979/1986, p. 282) or what might be called awareness of vocally gestured sound surfaces and acoustic surfaces. Not only does this 9 For phonetic reasons English-speaking monolinguals are unlikely to recognize this as a wording (in spite of its form). In fact, it is the “word” for dormouse. 10 Gibson (1979/1986) does not distinguish visible and real-time auditory “verbal descriptions.” Later, the focus is put on utterances. 11 Peirce (1940) does not explain phonation; presumably he means the ensemble of habits that, in specific circumstances, give rise to an act of utterance. 405 410 FN11 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 13 clarify how character, tone, and style contribute to coordination but also it echoes Fowler (2010) and Port (2010). In pictures, as was noted earlier, invariants of a picture co-occur with ones in the picture. We may see a canvas that is brown and blue or we may see a “dog.” Whereas rich semantics use the sound surface of the utterance, vocal gestures treat the sound surface in an utterance.12 We hear sense in the circumstances of the saying. Pursuing how depicted images affect seeing, Gibson (1979/1986) turns to Rorschach inkblots. These, he suggests, may contain information for not just (say) “bleeding hearts and dancing bears but for dozens of other events” (p. 282). Like a child’s scribbles, invariants of the picture are mixed up and “mutually discrepant” (p. 282). Ambiguity is common in talk. No principled distinction separates a photograph from Rorschach blots: “What are we to call the tree in the photograph, or the bleeding heart in the inkblot? Neither is an object in my terminology. I am tempted to call them virtual objects” (p. 283).13 Although Gibson’s (1979/1986) “virtual” objects differ from Peirce’s (1940) “virtual” conventions in being separable from communities, neither reduce to invariants (or physical patterns). Thus, hearing virtual patterns, as with seeing pictures, may rely on “dual experience.” In Gibson’s terms, pictures are “not perceived and yet they are perceived” (p. 283). By analogy, indirect perceiving of vocal gestures can co-occur with awareness of the virtual surface—a “perceiving, knowing or imagining as the case may be” (p. 283). Wordings do not depend on physical resemblances (or physical symbols) but, rather, what Peirce calls the “closest variant that can be naively named.” Far from having to be installed in the mind (as Dennett, 1991b, argues), acts of perception generate virtual objects (based on one’s own experience with phonetic gestures). In distributed terms, these derive from a history of coordinating activity in which language has a part. Although directly perceiving invariances (using exemplar memory), another kind of awareness picks out language forms. People use voice dynamics to attend to the sense of wordings; hearing is overtly semiotic. In this way, physical gestures evoke social experience and, yet, that is not all. Whereas pictured objects are invariants in the depicted surface, wordings depend on how virtual conventions exploit real-time dynamics. Although most people can see objects in pictures, hearing wordings presupposes a stance taker. It therefore follows that babies need to discover verbal listening: only when they become observers of virtual objects will they understand wordings. 12 In our terms, the sound surface of the utterance consists in temporal (pico-scale) dynamics, and vocal gestures constitute invariants in the utterance. 13 I do not claim to know what Peirce (1940) or Gibson (1979/1986) intended by using the adjective “virtual.” However, it seems clear that both were invoking detectable nonphysical features of the world. In Peircean terms, virtual objects (like “bears” in a Rorschach image or photograph) can be named. 415 FN12 420 425 FN13 430 Q9 435 440 445 14 COWLEY The Value of Virtual Objects We use physics in design and, conversely, machines to interrogate physics. Languaging makes each person a context for perceiving others. Using a discrepant mode of awareness, perceptual acts link design to physics (and vice versa); in the cases of mind and language, stance taking exploits verbal (and other) description. As stance takers, we alter what people feel, think, and know. As groups develop forms of life, descriptions take on specific values. For Hacking (1999), humans rely on interactive kinds—social products that shape experience. For example, computers and the computer metaphor altered how we learn and think. Stance taking affects both how we act and our view of human agency. Ideas that are prevalent in the community where we live (what Hacking calls our “matrix”) shape who we become. To evoke a disposition for behavior X is often a poor way to explain X.14 Contra Ryle (1949), Dennett (1969) sought to deal with “mental” phenomena by using a “centralist hypothesis.” This linked “nonreferentials” like voice with both causal processes and coded information. By turning to virtual objects, Dennett (1969) replaced Ryle’s dispositions with stance taking.15 This has two advantages: 450 455 460 FN14 FN15 465 1. World, machines, and brains can be modeled. 2. Models of physics, design, and intention are independent of actual systems. Using a stance shapes observations consistent with perspectives that tradition derives from a history of body–world interaction. In what follows, however, my concern is not with Dennett’s intentional idiom. Rather, in considering virtual patterns, I focus on what they offer to stance takers. Where these are human, they allow individual (or experience-based) perspectives to be meshed with historically derived patterns. This has a surprising consequence. Rather than attribute stance taking to a serial virtual machine in the brain, it can be hypothesized that, using a history of coordination, populations collectively enact such a “machine.” Indeed, Dennett suggests that stance taking uses a system that makes predictions about physics, design, intentions, and so on. Although never doubting linguistic dispositions are internal, this “system” might be seen as arising as people engage with language. On the distributed view, language is thus situated, embodied, and culturally spread. Functionally, little changes: expertise in tracking actions serves in ascribing an intention of doing 14 Although clear in Searle (1969) or Grice (1989), the Maturana-Kravchenko view is also dispositional. Structural coupling gives an individual (neural) dispositions for acting in a changing consensual domain. This originates in an organism’s capacities to use interactions to self-organize. 15 In Consciousness Explained, these become virtual, verbal patterns that Dennett (1991a) identifies with human consciousness—they depend on a neurally installed language machine. 470 Q10 475 Q11 480 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 15 X to an intentional system. Stance takers formulate hypotheses. For a cognitive centralist, computers represent aspects of the world (e.g., three-dimensional shapes) and, given programs (contingencies for the system), simulate action. For example, SHRDLU obeyed instructions about moving objects in a closed world (Winograd, 1972). Physical systems used compressed information that links nonreferentials (e.g., “X’s voice”) with an interpreting system and realworld counterparts (e.g., the invariants of X’s voice). The physical world uses nonmeasurables when, say, a center of gravity determines balance.16 For biological systems, such patterns are crucial. Sensitivity to compressed information gives access to functionally valuable real-patterns (Dennett, 1991b).17 Unlike inanimate objects, animals perceive calls and voices. Perceptual systems alert them to virtual objects that connect body with world. No central nervous system is needed as is shown by robots who learn about (what we call) colors (Steels & Belpaeme, 2005). Without seeing, they use human languaging (and programs) to connect physics, design, and simulated intentions. If stance taking uses compressed information, perceptual systems track invariances of the world. Whereas animals take perspectives, humans also perceive an Italian “close o” or a depicted bear. This is semiosis based on invariances in an utterance or picture. Stance takers link perspectives with the common world of, say, physicists or designers. Integrating wordings with observations and voice dynamics is unexpectedly important.18 485 Q12 FN16 490 FN17 495 500 FN18 Ecologically Extended Individuals To understand the value of stance taking, it is crucial to grasp how coordination opens up discovery of the virtual resources of a cultural world. This challenges the organism-centered view of not only mentalists and behaviorists but also some who take ecological and extended views of human cognition (e.g., Clark, 2008). Stance taking arises as, using second-order language, we manage languaging. 16 One referee objected that centers of gravity can be measured: This mistakenly assumes that what is measured—a set of coordinates—is identical to the source of the effects. 17 These too are virtual. For Ross (2000), to be is to be a real pattern (RP) if and only if (a) the RP is projectable under at least one possible physical perspective (i.e., can be differentiated by some kind of possible instrument) and (b) the RP encodes information (about the structure of E, an object or event) where the encoding is more efficient than a bitmap encoding of E; moreover, for at least one of the possible physical projections under which RP is projectable, at least one aspect of E can only be tracked when the encoding is recovered from the perspective in question. On this externalist view, real patterns presuppose triangulation between an instrument, an aspect of the world, and a function. 18 Dennett’s interest in universal grammar leads him to miss this point. Once nonreferentials become real patterns (Dennett, 1991a), he turns his focus to consciousness (1991b) described as the brain’s installation of a serial virtual system. Reversing this, we may be installed in the language meshwork—a virtual system that Steffensen (2009) likens to a set of airborne synapses. 505 16 COWLEY Given body–world relations, biology gives rise to stance takers. As a result, living with others in a physical, social, and cultural environment makes human organisms into persons. In a human world, people use affect to sensitize to stance taking (above all, beliefs and knowledge). Because babies are expected to learn to language, they receive training. Unlike dogs, they grasp how routines covary with circumstances. As they sensitize to local norms, they use other people’s values and beliefs to become subjects as local expectations give rise to preferences. In MacDorman’s (2007) terms, they solve the person problem: although starting out as organisms in an environment, its resources enable them to become people. As argued here, this depends on both engaging with others and, learning from this coordination, attuning perceptual systems to wordings. Indeed, “selves” emerge with skills in connecting experience with a history of wordings. Although strangers elicit use of second-order constructs and norms, affect dominates familiar settings. The dynamics of language flow serve to gauge how people feel and understand. In focusing on coordination, we rediscover affective dynamics and evolutionary history. Although relationships use words, they also draw on shared experience. Intimate settings give us the skills of social actors. Indeed, as Melser (2004) argues, these promote actions that we call thinking. Using wordings, we adopt social roles based on anticipating events. Dual awareness of language serves to modulate (or modify) how we speak, display affect, and act. Taking a language stance alters what we feel and value. Using audible wordings makes language into a matrix for caring (Hodges, 2007). It becomes a collective means of controlling how we resonate to (and dampen) social displays of values. 510 515 520 525 530 Discovering Virtual Objects Taking a distributed perspective, one can track how human infants become stance takers. In parallel, Thibault (2000, 2006) and Cowley (2003, 2007a, 2007c; Cowley, Moodley, & Fiori-Cowley, 2004; Spurrett & Cowley, 2004) trace development to encounters with the world (Reed, 1996). As a baby becomes a person, she begins by aligning to others in abstraction amenable behavior (Spurrett & Cowley, 2004). Later, she uses routines to develop the motor and perceptual skills needed for the language stance. Babies discover meaningful ways of tracking valued contingencies that link wordings with the world. They elicit imitation and reward. From birth, they pick up information that prompts discrimination. Newborns show bodily response to languaging and, when days old, preferences for stress-based or syllable-based rhythms. Thus, babies in an English-speaking environment will, on rhythmic grounds, “prefer” Dutch over Russian and, conversely, babies in a French environment will make the opposite choice (Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998). They draw on language flow and, soon, vocalizations come to resemble canonical syllables. When one seeks the 535 540 545 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 17 neural basis of coordination, one finds that motivations arise (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001) as infants are moved by movements of others (Bråten, 2007). By 3 months, children behave intersubjectively (Trevarthen, 1979). Speech partners feel children’s feelings as coordination uses enkinaesthesia (Stuart, 2009, 2010) or how shared feelings are integrated with biomechanics and habits. Cowley et al. (2004) find that 12-week-old isiZulu-hearing infants make strategic use of calls for ukuhlonipha, or respect. Far from being frightened by harsh vocalizations accompanied by gracious movement, these serve as felt signs. As babies inhibit their crying, caregivers orient to “understanding.” Babies sometimes anticipate, say, when ukuhlonipha is called for. Rewards display how caregivers assess circumstances. For example, languaging can prompt the anticipation needed to enjoy “this little piggy went to market.” Later, fullbodied coordination comes to be associated with canonical syllables. As the baby masters these, he or she will elicit parental evaluation. She may also discover vocal gestures that, in her local world, represent, say, her name or her bottle. By the end of the 1st year the child treats voice and gesture as familiar. This has been described as secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979), social referencing (Campos & Sternberg, 1981), and a 9-month revolution (Tomasello, 1999). As in evolution, triadic action permits thought to coemerge with wordings: The primitive triangle, constituted by two (and typically more than two) creatures reacting in concert to features of the world and to each other’s reactions, thus provides the framework in which thought and language can evolve. Neither thought nor language, according to this account, can come first, for each requires the other. (Davidson, 1997, p. 27) Linguistic immersion enables children to use vocalizations (e.g., “more”) to manage parts of the world. Simultaneously, they learn to hear aspects of languaging. As skills in perspective taking develop, directive expression increasingly contributes to behavior management. Whereas Tomasello (1999) invokes speciesspecific intention reading, the simpler view (Cowley, 2007d; Cowley et al., 2004) is that contingencies in the flow of events prompt children to anticipate what adults think they want, feel, and desire. Whatever the origin, social behavior and languaging develop as adult and child act with objects as they share attention. In Peirce’s (1940) aforementioned terms, they gain a “knack” of using “virtual conventions.” Routines ground the skills needed for the language stance. By 12 months, the child’s repertoire (e.g., pointing, displaying wants, eating with a spoon) evokes second-order constructs (and artifacts). In this second phase of human symbol grounding, first-person phenomenology acquires new uses. Drawing on changing perceptual skills, children come to hear sound patterns. With pretending, for example, these are integrated with actions based in experience. Gradually, they become wordings with the potential for separation 550 Q13 555 560 565 Q14 570 575 580 585 18 COWLEY from circumstances and, as a result, in prompting or anticipating events. By 24 months, children use formulae like, “What’s that?” Especially when scaffolded by literacy, this opens up verbal descriptions. By the age of 4, in Love’s (2004) terms, utterances become “utterances of something.” Even alone, a child time travels by recalling and improvising; autobiographical memory develops (Nelson, 1996). As a sense of agency emerges, the baby is less bothered by wordings than what she can (and cannot) do. The language stance links communicative and cognitive powers. Although brains ground language, even 3-month-olds make appropriate actions. By 9 months, children display to others and the world as we evoke and discover values. If the first phase is brain based, the next is cultural. Later, second-order constructs are co-opted in getting people to do things, play games, and change the context. Virtual objects link action with experience. Human skills are triply grounded into brain, culture, and first-person phenomenology. 590 595 600 THE FOREST NOT THE TREES Many are reluctant to abandon languages as the basis for language. Tradition affirms that, like texts, talk consists in arrangements of verbal units. After all, this shapes not only the grammatical tradition but also information technology and theories as diverse as those of de Saussure, Skinner, Chomsky, and Lakoff. Accordingly, in challenging the view that words are the building blocks of language, I have echoed R. Harris’s (1981) challenge to linguistics while also attacking the psychologism that reduces language to “use” of forms. Not only is this written language bias but also it supports the conduit view where determinate units are used in sending verbal messages from person to person (or brain to brain). To escape from the fly bottle, language is reconceptualized as part of social coordination. It extends the ecology through picturelike perception that gives us the wordings used to take a language stance. There are benefits in tracing language to action and perception. The thesis of the article leads to the stronger claim that, by using wordings, we can link action and perception by displaying values. Indeed, as we coordinate, embodied action calls up collective conventions. The process is distinctly human and, given linguistic reflexivity, we come to name values that shape experience. Without hearing wordings as we react to others, this would be impossible. In fact, however, the process starts at birth; in human presence, action (or inaction) calls forth interpretation. Even formulae (e.g., C10H8 C 12 O2 ! 10 CO2 C 4 H2 O) lead us to acknowledge, say, subtlety, ingenuity, or ignorance. This speaks against reducing language to processing entities like physical symbols (or the dots and dashes of Morse). Acknowledgment of the language stance has many implications. In principle, it offers alternative explanation for the 605 610 615 620 625 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 19 phenomenological experience that accompanies first-order language (Harnad’s 2005 feeling of thinking). Strikingly, this would result from making and tracking phonetic gestures while attending to rich phonetics (and gesture). Of course much depends on “repeating” what people say and it is plausible that this is a necessary condition for hearing an utterance as an utterance of something. Can our ability to repeat and paraphrase wordings be based on anything other than knowledge of language? The claim here is just that: a discrepant kind of awareness enables infants to use the fact that, from birth, language is already there. Drawing on contingencies, they use interaction to realize values. Infants come to hear wordings by using them to anticipate how people will feel and act. Just as the physical or design stance permits predictions about material systems, we use a tradition of practical and cognitive skills in stance taking. This connects first-order experience with a collective history of talking about speech and texts in terms of words, grammars, and meanings. However, far from being “internalized,” knowledge depends on using one’s experience by linking it to one’s grasp of how others describe such matters. Although this may seem radical, the approach can be justified in other ways. First, unlike most modes of coordination, language highlights wordings whose sense is, in part, shared or “on display.” Second, as with picture perception this depends on invariants both in and of the relevant array. Third, as noted, there is a phonetic parallel: the invariants in interaction shape rich memory and, as we draw on them to realize values, we imbue circumstances and language flow with meaning. In part, this is anchored by how we make and track the phonetic gestures that give wordings their qualities. Finally, the view throws new light on development. Instead of positing that children “learn” linguistic forms, human symbol grounding is traced to coordinating in the circumstances while using phonetic skills and discrepant hearing. Once we develop skills in hearing and evoking wordings, stance taking can be used to enrich what we do. This is consistent with the claim that humans, perhaps alone, can use circumstances to call on the past, consider possibilities, and plan what to do. More radically, it fits the view that, by learning to language, we redeploy our neural resources. If dealing with wordings transformed the brain, we would expect this to have striking effects on human life. There is evidence of this, in that, for example, medieval culture construed the whole world in terms of signs (as the book of God). More recently, fMRI research has been brought to bear on considering objects in more or less “artistic” pictures. One can consider effects with respect to looking at, say, a close-up picture of a car or one where pieces of tomato are “artistically” arranged on the windshield. In comparing fMRI scans across “conventional” and “intentional” conditions, Tylén, Wallentin, and Roepstorff (2008) document variation in hemodynamics. This is enhanced activity in the fusiform gyrus, or Visual Word Form Area, and, bilaterally in the pars triangularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (part of Broca’s area, BA 45); there 630 635 640 645 650 655 660 Q15 665 Q16 20 COWLEY is also covariance with enhanced activity in the right hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus (Tylén, Wallentin, & Roepstorff, 2009). Given that these activation patterns resemble those which accompany speech, the “intentional” pictures are said to be language-like. Accordingly, Tylén, Phillipsen, and Weed (2009) also report how people describe pictures of the two kinds. In “conventional” cases, sense making is “structured by reference to episodic, autobiographical experiential content” (p. 573). By contrast, “intentional” pictures prompt a “qualitatively different meaning-making strategy.” Subjects speak more intersubjectively: in viewing the tomatoes on the windshield one said, “It’s some kind of hostile act or somebody pulling someone else’s leg: : : : Either way it’s a pretty strange thing to do” (Tylén, Phillipsen, et al., 2009, p. 589). Not only does what people see in the depiction prompt them to make something of the picture but also “intentional” pictures seem more likely to evoke shared values. Interpreted thus, they set up mixed (and discrepant) invariants like wordings. In these terms, Tylén et al.’s work suggests that Gibson’s (1979/1986) cline might be revised to discriminate picture types: 670 675 680 Q17 685 Perceiving ! seeing a conventional (or “realistic”) picture ! seeing an intentional (or “artistic”) picture ! verbal description By hypothesis, we draw on discrepant awareness in different ways: perhaps we synergize more when we engage with wordings (Gibson’s verbal descriptions) than we do with more aesthetic or “signallike” phenomena. 690 SYMBOLS AND DYNAMICS Virtual objects constrain real-time language (and looking). If the thesis of this article is correct, this integrates collective history with how individuals come to use discrepant forms of awareness. On this view, learning to talk resembles coming to look at images in pictures. In language, we begin with coordination; hear wordings; and, eventually, take a language stance. Rather than rely on knowledge of a language system, we use the interplay of the dynamic and the symbolic (Raczaszek-Leonardi, ˛ 2009). This suffices because human activity occurs in a world with language already in place. Indeed, language is necessarily distributed. As a result, speaking-while-hearing-and-acting allows young humans to “understand” activities like games, mashing beans, and watching television. By doing things with others, they orient to material and virtual constructs; as argued earlier, they come to hear wordings. Later, of course, the heard contributes to action. Language becomes a form of semiotic display that prompts us to use skills and materials as we engage with others. Language spreads as bodies coordinate in a world of cultural artifacts and institutions. 695 700 705 TAKING A LANGUAGE STANCE 21 No inner language faculty is needed. Far from identifying or representing forms, virtual objects depend on stance takers. Complementing biology, secondorder constructs extend the human ecology. Because life is collective, we consciously interpret the possible (Markoš, Grygar, Kleisner, & Neubauer, 2007). As we coordinate in a physical and biocultural environment, neural resources favor anticipation. Especially in more deliberate modes of action, we connect direct perception with historically based virtual conventions. Unlike users of man-made codes, we rely on not determinate units but speech habits. Rejecting organism/environment dualism, with Peirce, Gibson, and Dennett, language forms become virtual conventions. Although having a phenomenological aspect, language flow enriches organic memory with culturally compressed information. We draw on artifacts, wordings, books, and technologies. Neither language nor human life centers on an individual organism. Experience gives us skills in engaging with the resources of the world’s language stores. By using this meshwork, we act; realize values; and, with learning, discover new stances (and ways of using verbal descriptions). Though many animals hear virtual patterns, we strategize about what to do with wordings. Given that language is symbolic and dynamic, we face riches and dangers. In spite of the tendency to focus on technology, we have constructed an ecologically extended world (Steffensen, 2009). Its evolution is increasingly bound up with our affective and social modes of coordinating actions while drawing on our changing resources. 710 715 720 725 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to all those who participated in the Distributed Language Group conference at Gordon College, especially the two reviewers of this article. As I learned much from their illuminating comments, the failings that remain are entirely my own. 730 REFERENCES Anderson, M. L. (2008). Circuit sharing and the implementation of intelligent systems. 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