Abstract
In order to adequately understand the foundations of human social interaction, we need to provide an explanation of our specific mode of living based on linguistic activity and the cultural practices with which it is interwoven. To this end, we need to make explicit the constitutive conditions for the emergence of the phenomena which relate to language and joint activity starting from their operational-relational matrix. The approach presented here challenges the inadequacy of mentalist models to explain the relation between language and interaction. Recent empirical studies concerning joint attention and language acquisition have led scholars such as Tomasello et al. (2005) to postulate the existence of a universal human “sociocognitive infrastructure” that drives joint social activities and is biologically inherited. This infrastructure would include the skill of precocious intention-reading, and is meant to explain human linguistic development and cultural learning. However, the cognitivist and functionalist assumptions on which this model relies have resulted in controversial hypotheses (i.e., intention-reading as the ontogenetic precursor of language) which take a contentious conception of mind and language for granted. By challenging this model, I will show that we should instead turn ourselves towards a constitutive explanation of language within a “bio-logical” understanding of interactivity. This is possible only by abandoning the cognitivist conception of organism and traditional views of language. An epistemological shift must therefore be proposed, based on embodied, enactive and distributed approaches, and on Maturana’s work in particular. The notions of languaging and observing that will be discussed in this article will allow for a bio-logically grounded, theoretically parsimonious alternative to mentalist and spectatorial approaches, and will guide us towards a wider understanding of our sociocultural mode of living.
Highlights
Linguistique Anthropologique et Sociolinguistique – Institut Marcel Mauss, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Since objects are the operational condition for languaging, it follows that interactions not relying on recursive consensual coordination do not entail the constitution of interobjective domains
The principal aim of this paper has been to contribute to studies in the domain of social cognition and interaction by introducing some considerations on the constitutive conditions of language
Summary
Linguistique Anthropologique et Sociolinguistique – Institut Marcel Mauss, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. The spectatorial position that cognitivists ascribe to interacting individuals implies that they engage in the observation of objects, persons, intentions, “shared knowledge” and “common ground.” this observation cannot bio-logically precede recursive coordination and cannot be a precondition of language and joint activity.
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