The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

The experience of illness raises profound issues concerning the sense or non-sense of human existence as a whole: does life have meaning when it is marked by suffering? And what meaning would it bear, in this case? These questions are asked by both caregivers and recipients of care when they come into contact with limits, pain, and death. In this regard, the existential condition of homo patiens is ambiguous: it can lead either to nihilism and despair or to a higher (...) level of awareness and responsibility. Studies on resilience, post-traumatic growth, and meaning-making processes seem to suggest that in difficult situations the search for meaning comes most clearly to the fore, so that the possibility of finding meaning in life can be a protective factor and a key therapeutic resource, while meaninglessness increases weakness and vulnerability. But what is meant by “meaning” in the illness experience and how may it be integrated into one’s personal life story? This question is answered here in terms of narrative methods that can enhance healthcare practitioners’ capacity to approach their patients with sensitivity and deep understanding and guide them to find meaning in their lives, despite all. (shrink)

The increased influence of neoliberalism in education has allowed the trend of evidence-based teaching to dominate professional development in many Western countries. Despite increased and persistent neoliberal measures in education, education critics argue that neoliberal reforms have a naive view of teaching. This narrowed neoliberal view both ignores the complexities involved in the everyday interaction between teacher and student and constrains the teacher’s judgement thereby limiting their contribution in the educational process. Many educators will note the significance of reflection in (...) learning as essential and often emotional. However, the emotional experiences embedded in teacher reflections are often ignored, even discounted, in the discussion of teachers’ professional development. Investigating this phenomenon of emotions in teacher reflections, analysed by drawing on lifeworld theory, revealed how emotional experiences can be a resource in teachers’ professional development. To acknowledge teachers’ emotional experiences means recognizing that the teacher’s subjective and lived body is involved in the reflective and learning process of becoming professional. (shrink)

This article investigates the ways that children with different motor disabilities move in an improvisational context. We developed and implemented a one-year long movement improvisation program in which 12 children with different motor disabilities participated in weekly sessions under the practical leadership of two dance teachers and the researchers. The project's theoretical perspective and research approach are based on a phenomenological perspective that emphasizes movement as a personal, relational, and expressive phenomenon. The empirical material was developed and created through close (...) observation and consists of the researchers' kinaesthetically lived experiences, video observations, and logbooks from the weekly movement improvisation sessions. In the article, we present and reflect upon five episodes from one activity regularly performed during the year. The article shows that movement improvisation can, over a period of time, offer children with motor disabilities an opportunity to explore their personal ways of moving together with others. The analysis explores how and why the children gradually felt secure enough to throw themselves into exploring their own movement possibilities and how improvisation promoted their desire to keep on moving. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic theories of meaning have developed within a univocal, explanatory model of science which is concerned with the use of language rather than its creation. Such a model is insufficient to deal with the complex data of human discourse with its multiple domains in speech, writing, reading, and interpreting. While recognizing the necessity of univocal explanatory procedures in the analysis of meaning the hermeneutic circle of explanation and understanding demands that "interpretation" occupy both a preliminary and a posterior place within (...) a scientific procedure. Problems of the univocal procedure in the study of language development, thought processes, and content analyses are more adequately handled by a hermeneutic model, such as the one developed by Paul Ricoeur on the works of Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis while approximating this model tends to be univocal rather than plurivocal in its treatment of the role of symbols in the creation of meaning. A hermeneutic model would place the crucial emphasis on a dialectic of both suspicion and affirmation. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to vindicate the viability of Kurt H. Wolff''s methodology of surrender-and-catch for the human and social sciences. The article is divided into three sections. The first section explicates the fundamental significance of surrender-and-catch and Wolff''s motivation for advocating its practice. The second section compares surrender-and-catch with phenomenological methodology as well as objective science and the province of the everyday. The third section illustrates surrender-and-catch through my own practice. In this section I contextualize surrender-and-catch in (...) a triangulated design, which exhibits its flexibility and compatibility for use in conjunction with other forms of research. (shrink)

Making sense of soul and Sabbath necessitates understanding these phenomena experientially and then suggesting “biochemical” or empirical analogues. Soul, which is defined as the core or essence of a person (or group), includes a working memory of personally purposeful behavior. The states of the soul are reflected in the states of the mind and their physiological correlates-the states of the brain. Such uniqueness appears similar to the biblical cycle of creation-Sabbath-consciousness and its analogue in the biorhythm of brain-mind-that is, waking (...) and work, sleeping and rest, dreaming (rapid eye movement [REM]) and the reorganization-integration process that is ever making sense of our senses by synthesizing what they mean to us. Working memory and biorhythm, therefore, are crucial for the making of meaning, and meaning is the making of soul. (shrink)

Heidegger’s 1927 call to provide “a special hermeneutic of empathy” is linked with his later commitment at the Zollikon Seminars to engage explicitly with issues in psychodynamic therapy with psychiatrists. The task of providing a special hermeneutic of empathy is one that Heidegger assigns in Being and Time, but on which he does not deliver. Inspired by the assignment, this article applies the distinctions of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis to human interrelations. This article generates a Heideggerian account of empathy as a multi-dimensional (...) process that delimits and illuminates the field of possibilities of authentic human relationships. The multiple dimensions of empathy include affectedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding of possibility, interpretation, and speech, the latter including listening. The result is a reconstruction of a Heideggerian account of empathic human relations in the sense that it goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says to what the Heideggerian method of inquiry can contribute to understanding and implementing the process of empathy. In particular, a two-by-two matrix is built and engaged in detail, cross referencing the four possibilities of authentic and inauthentic relationships with the individual and the other. A specifically Heideggerian analysis of the multi-dimensional process of empathy is the result. The clinical relevance of Heidegger’s work is made explicit as empathy is positioned as the foundation of clinical practice as exemplified in psychodynamic psychotherapy. (shrink)

This article takes Heidegger's design distinctions for human being [Dasein] including affectivity, understanding, and speech, and, using these distinctions, generates a Heideggerian definition of empathy [Einfuehlung]. This article distinguishes empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic speech (or responsiveness). It also looks at characteristic breakdowns.

The Two Selves takes the position that the self is not a "thing" easily reduced to an object of scientific analysis. Rather, the self consists in a multiplicity of aspects, some of which have a neuro-cognitive basis (and thus are amenable to scientific inquiry) while other aspects are best construed as first-person subjectivity, lacking material instantiation. As a consequence of their potential immateriality, the subjective aspect of self cannot be taken as an object and therefore is not easily amenable to (...) treatment by current scientific methods. -/- Klein argues that to fully appreciate the self, its two aspects must be acknowledged, since it is only in virtue of their interaction that the self of everyday experience becomes a phenomenological reality. However, given their different metaphysical commitments (i.e., material and immaterial aspects of reality), a number of issues must be addressed. These include, but are not limited to, the possibility of interaction between metaphysically distinct aspects of reality, questions of causal closure under the physical, the principle of energy conservation. -/- After addressing these concerns, Klein presents evidence based on self-reports from case studies of individuals who suffer from a chronic or temporary loss of their sense of personal ownership of their mental states. Drawing on this evidence, he argues that personal ownership may be the factor that closes the metaphysical gap between the material and immaterial selves, linking these two disparate aspects of reality, thereby enabling us to experience a unified sense of self despite its underlying multiplicity. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I argue that much of the confusion and mystery surrounding the concept of "self" can be traced to a failure to appreciate the distinction between the self as a collection of diverse neural components that provide us with our beliefs, memories, desires, personality, emotions, etc (the epistemological self) and the self that is best conceived as subjective, unified awareness, a point of view in the first person (ontological self). While the former can, and indeed has, been extensively (...) studied by researchers of various disciplines in the human sciences, the latter most often has been ignored -- treated more as a place holder attached to a particular predicate of interest (e.g., concept, reference, deception, esteem, image, regulation, etc). These two aspects of the self, I contend, are not reducible -- one being an object (the epistemological self) and the other a subject (the ontological self). Until we appreciate the difficulties of applying scientific methods and analysis to what cannot be reduced to an object of inquiry without stripping it of its essential aspect (its status as subject), progress on the "self", taken as a pluralistic construct, will continue to address only one part of the problems we face in understanding this most fundamental aspect of human experience. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of “experiential realism” I offer a critique of modern psychology’s all-too-frequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is “What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that, in the service of scientific objectification, transform the qualitative properties of experience into quantitative indices?” I conclude that such treatment is neither necessary for realizing, nor sufficient for capturing, (...) subjectively given states (such as perception, pain, imagery, fear, thought, memory) – that is, for understanding many of the principle objects of psychological inquiry. A “science of mind” that approaches its subject matter from a third-person perspective should, I contend, be treated with a healthy amount of informed skepticism. (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to argue that Kant’s aesthetic ideas can help us to overcome cognitive limitations that we often experience in our attempts to articulate the meaning of abstract concepts. I claim that aesthetic ideas, as expressed in works of art, have a cognitive dimension in that they reveal the introspective, emotional, and affective aspects that appear to be central to the content of abstract phenomena.

This Target paper is about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., how is subjective experience possible given the scientific presumption that everything from molecules to minerals to minds is wholly physical?). I first argue that one of the most valuable tools in the scientific arsenal (metaphor) cannot be recruited to address the hard problem due to the inability to forge connections between the stubborn fact of subjective experience and physically grounded models of scientific explanation. I then argue that adherence (...) to the physicalist tenets of contemporary science has a limiting effect on a full appreciation of the phenomenon under discussion. (shrink)

The first step that I took in preparing myself to undertake what is in essence a piece of epistemological research was to divide the psychological therapies into two: the potentiality paradigm and the pathology paradigm. The former is based upon the potentiality model articulated by person-centred theorists like Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne, which is essentially a growth model, whilst the latter reflects a form of therapy that recognises people according to what may be considered ‘wrong with’ or ‘deficient about’ (...) them, such as operates in the disciplines of medicine and clinical psychology. The main focus of this piece of research was to determine the epistemology that is at work with what actually goes on in the practice of potentiality paradigm therapy. In order to achieve this, I set about identifying, reading, analysing and eventually coding the most epistemologically rich writings that I could find from mainstream authors on potentiality paradigm therapy from the professional and the academic literature. It became clear from this analysis that the heart of what was actually going on in the practice of potentiality paradigm therapy as articulated in these theoretical writings could be coded into three main discourses: an experiential discourse, a relational discourse and a hermeneutic discourse, each of which I have considered to represent an epistemological discourse for the purposes of this piece of research. My next question was to ask myself how these discourses set about articulating the potentiality paradigm with respect to the practice of the psychological therapies, and the answer came back that they articulated the potentiality paradigm best when they worked concertedly rather than discretely. Indeed, it soon became apparent that the human brain integrates and synthesises the data that it receives by way of these three central discourses, and so it seemed only appropriate that I should work towards expressing these findings by creating a qualitative meta-synthesis of these three discourses: the experiential, the relational and the hermeneutic, which is exactly what I did. The epistemological mechanism by which these three discourses are integrated and synthesised needs to reflect the way in which the human brain integrates and synthesises the data that it receives, and the name given to this epistemological mechanism is dialectical constructivism. This is included along with the three epistemological discourses – the experiential, the relational and the hermeneutic – in the creative and interpretive synthesis in which this piece of research culminates, and is followed by an illustrative worked example showing how these discourses articulate the potentiality paradigm – concertedly – with respect to the practice of the psychological therapies. One of the advantages of applying this meta-model to the way in which we look at potentiality paradigm therapy is that it may be used to free us up to practice in the more dialogical ways which have been becoming increasingly favoured by practitioners in recent times. With our view of potentiality paradigm therapy mediated by this meta-model, we may find it easier to traverse across what many practitioners have tended to view as theoretical boundaries. It could also be viewed as a move towards a more functional and less structural form of governance or regulation, as expressed by Mearns and Thorne. (shrink)

This research investigates the intersubjective aspects of communication design practice through a focus on the other, and the roles that the other takes in practice. It does so in order to better understand the practice of communication design as practiced on a day-to-day basis. Communication design, as a practice, and a field, extends out of graphic design. This extension is due to a change in priorities; from privileging the graphic and artefactual aspects of practice, to prioritising the consideration of the (...) broader agency of design within a specific context. This research has been accomplished through a practice-led methodology. Communication design projects form the methods of, and the foundation for, the investigation. Seven individual research projects have been designed and carried out. These projects have each incorporated members of the different participants of communication design practice; new and existing clients, student designers and established practicing designers. This has allowed the research to investigate its concerns from a range of roles and viewpoints, incorporating different perspectives into its observations and understandings. This research extends the work of Donald Schön and his investigation into The Reflective Practitioner. It achieves this through a consideration for the roles of the other in professional practice. In order to articulate this move extensive reference is made to the thinking of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. This research has found that the other plays critical roles in the practice of communication design. These roles are ones of providing provocative disjunction. Provocative disjunction, as understood by this research, contributes directly to the generative action communication design offers artefacts, clients and designers. The observations and understandings of this practice-led research have enabled extensive insights into the practice of communication design. These insights contribute significantly to the broader communication design discourse in professional practice, education and research. (shrink)

Reports of patients with schizophrenia show a fragmented and anomalous subjective experience. This pathological subjective experience, we suggest, can be related to the fact that disembodiment inhibits the possibility of intersubjective experience, and more importantly of common sense. In this paper, we ask how to investigate the anomalous experience both from qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. To our knowledge, few studies have focused on a clinical combination of both first- phenomenological assessment and third-person biological methods, especially for Schizophrenia, or ASD therapeutics (...) and diagnosis. We will thus attempt to bring forward a second-person scientific design, accounting for both the first-person subjective experiential aspects, and respective third-person neurobiological correlates of embodied aesthetics in anomalous experience. From this proposal, we further explore the consequences to clinical and research practice. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain depends, at least partly, on recognizing its subjectivity (thus, its first-person epistemology). This in turn requires using a first-person experiential method in addition to third-person experimental approaches to study it. This paper is an attempt to spell out what the former approach is and how it can be integrated with the latter. We start our discussion by examining some foundational issues raised by the use of introspection. We argue that such a first-person method in the (...) scientific study of pain (as in the study of any experience) is in fact indispensable by demonstrating that it has in fact been consistently used in conjunction with conventional third-person methodologies, and this for good reasons. We show that, contrary to what appears to be a widespread opinion, there is absolutely no reason to think that the use of such a first-person approach is scientifically and methodologically suspect. We distinguish between two uses of introspective methods in scientific experiments: one draws on the subjects’ introspective reports where any investigator has equal and objective access. The other is where the investigator becomes a subject of his own study and draws on the introspection of his own experiences. We give examples using and/or approximating both strategies that include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities, and brain imaging- psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. We explain what we call the experiential or phenomenological approach that has its origins in the work of Price and Barrell (1980). This approach capitalizes on the scientific prospects and benefits of using the introspection of the investigator. We distinguish between its vertical and horizontal applications. Finally, we conclude that integrating such an approach to standard third-person methodologies can only help us in having a fuller understanding of pain and of conscious experience in general. (shrink)