Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time.

Stephen J Cowley

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01085

Abstract

Using radical embodied cognitive science, the paper offers the hypothesis that language is symbiotic: its agent-environment dynamics arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints. As a result, co-action grants human agents the ability to use a unique form of phenomenal experience. In defense of the hypothesis, I stress how linguistic embodiment enacts thinking: accordingly, I present auditory and acoustic evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk, first, in fine detail and, then, in narrative mode. As the parties attune, they use a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings. The latter arise in making and tracking phonetic gestures that, crucially, mesh use of artifice, cultural products and impersonal experience. As observers, living human beings gain dispositions to display and use social subjectivity. Far from using brains to “process” verbal content, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources. On this distributed-ecological view, language can thus be redefined as: “activity in which wordings play a part.”

Highlights

Since it is beyond debate that living systems depend on metabolism, it can seem trivially true that cognitive activity draws on embodiment
To block any such view, the paper turns to how metabolism functions as “cognition emerges in ecological space and ecological time from the interactions of brain activity, motor actions, and artifacts” (Vallée-Tourangeau and Vallée-Tourangeau, 2014)
The resulting skills underpin the paper’s thesis: language is activity based on symbiotic control of bodily movements that are perceived as “wordings.” Given phenomenal experience of iterated patterns, understanding connects the subjective to the impersonal or, alternatively, linguistic embodiment falls under partial control of a community’s verbal constraints

Summary

Introduction

Since it is beyond debate that living systems depend on metabolism, it can seem trivially true that cognitive activity draws on embodiment. Parties are shown to use phonetic gestures, phenomenal experience and, given unending repetition, lay and linguistic concepts of language (qua verbal pattern).

Results

Conclusion