Mastering Languaging and Extending our Agency in and through the Virtualities of Languaging: The Interplay of Causes and Constraints in Actualising the World

Abstract

Abstract In a process-ontological perspective, I consider some aspects of the ways in which human languaging enables persons to operate on and to actualize and de-actualize the modal potentials of their world. I examine Johanna Seibt’s notion of functional individuals to show how some aspect of the world can be selected and differentiated and thus located in some region of space-time by a particular linguistic (or other) operation. Rather than referring to an already given and present actuality, utterances actualise and situate functional individuals to varying degrees of definiteness, specificity, realness, and so on in occasions of languaging and in texts. Wordings enable and scaffold de-coupled intentional-semantic registration that coordinate selves and the functional individuals that populate their world. With reference to the nominal group and criteria of Thinghood, I consider concrete particulars and functional stuffs in relation to the capacity of our languaging to activate selective aspects of the modal potentials of the processes that we encounter in the world. This requires a process-ontological account of the world on which and in which we act in and through languaging. Languaging functions to sensibilize us to different aspects of the modal potentials that it activates.