Situated talking

Abstract

In ecological psychology language use is not about inferring pre-existing meaning in the mind of the speaker, but it is tied to a practical process of adapting to the environment shared with others. A tension with such a processual account of language appears when we notice that affordances, i.e. the possibilities for action that the environment offers, are often considered meaningful prior to the activities of any particular organism. In this paper we start from affordances as temporally constituted: they are processes that set up the conditions for their own continuation by inviting individuals to participate in them. We explore the contribution of talking to that process. By looking closely at three examples of situated talking in the real-life practice of making an architectural art installation, we show how talking has a double ‘situated-situating’ character. In our observations we see utterances as invited by an ongoing process: talking is situated. It establishes practical continuity between activities that unfolded earlier and those that are unfolding now. Doing so, talking is also situating: it achieves this practical continuity from past to present so that future activities are enabled to continue the process further. By running different threads of unfolding affordances together, talking can contribute to determining an affordance of a larger timescale. Talking skillfully can thus concurrently bring multiple affordances across timescales closer to enactment. The paper suggests that thinking of language as inextricably bound up with affordances in this way, opens ecological psychology to a wide range of distinctively human activities.