Was macht das Besondere der menschlichen Lebensform aus? Wie können wir es verstehen, dass unsere Art wie alle anderen natürlich evolviert ist und dennoch als einzige Art die Fähigkeit entwickelt hat, unter dem Anspruch der Freiheit und in reflexiver Distanz zu handeln, damit aber die Umwelt auf eine Welt hin zu transzendieren? Jung argumentiert, dass sich diese Fragen nur beantworten lassen, wenn man philosophische, evolutionstheoretische und kognitionswissenschaftliche Ansätze aufeinander bezieht. Der Schlüssel hierfür ist der Begriff der Bedeutung. Alle Lebewesen erfassen (...) ihre Umwelt im praktischen Umgang mit ihr als bedeutsam. Auch der Geist des Menschen ist essentiell verkörpert und basiert auf erlebten Bedeutsamkeiten. Die Fähigkeit zur symbolischen Artikulation und kulturellen Weiterentwicklung solcher Lebensbedeutungen erlaubt es ihm aber auch, die lokale Umwelt zu transzendieren und dabei Werte, Normen und objektive Geltungsansprüche zu entwickeln. Eine zeitgemäße Anthropologie muss in der Lage sein, diese qualitativen Besonderheiten des menschlichen Geistes als Resultate von Naturprozessen verständlich zu machen. Sie verbindet methodischen Naturalismus mit Offenheit für die Transzendenz des Geistes über die Umwelt. Damit leistet der Autor einen wichtigen Beitrag zu einem nichtreduktionistischen Verständnis des Menschen, das Leib und Geist nicht dualistisch trennt, sondern ihre spannungsvolle Einheit sichtbar macht. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors explore the pedagogical call as an articulated or unarticulated appeal from children in classroom settings and the many facets of pedagogical responsivity as they in vignettes stemming from a research project, funded nation-wide in Austria. While instruction can be planned, the pedagogical call can be understood as an appeal that occurs in medias res, in the midst of an event in the pedagogical situation, and can at best be anticipated. This dilemma of planning for the (...) unplannable is constitutive of the pedagogical relation and addressed in the discourse regarding pedagogical tact in both North America and Europe. In seeking to gain insight into educational processes and learning through the lived experiences of 5th-grade students in Austria’s “New Middle School” reform pilot, researchers were faced with a similar dilemma: How to capture the experiences of others, of children at school in medias res? The authors therefore provide background to their vignette research as a framework for their readings oriented to the pedagogical call as they arise in two vignettes. While articulated calls, and articulated responses, tend to be more straightforward, the authors address the difficulty of recognizing an unarticulated call of which the student is unaware, as well as recognizing no response as a response on the part of the teacher. Refraining from judgment as to the pedagogical quality of the teachers' actions, the authors conclude by addressing two critical aspects of the discourse on pedagogical tact driven by the principle of individuality: the underlying assumption that the other can be understood and the inherent concept of the pedagogical situation as one-to-one contact, the former ignoring the inaccessibility of the other and the latter neglecting the institutional laws that govern school reality. (shrink)

Drawing on convergent work in a broad range of disciplines, this article uses the tipping point paradigm to frame a new account of how early human ancestors may have first broken free from, as Bickerton calls it, the “prison of animal communication.” Under building pressure for an enhanced signaling system capable of supporting joint attentional-intentional activities, a cultural tradition of disambiguated indexical pointing, combined with increasingly sophisticated mindreading circuitry and prosocial tendencies, may have sparked the first in the series of (...) biocultural explosions that led from a simple protolanguage to fully modern human language. This account successfully integrates at least ten other competing hypotheses, and is shown to pass nine important tests that have been proposed for language origin scenarios of its type. (shrink)

Tomasello and colleagues have offered various arguments to explain why apes find the comprehension of pointing difficult. They have argued that: (i) apes fail to understand communicative intentions; (ii) they fail to understand informative, cooperative communication, and (iii) they fail to track the common ground that pointing comprehension requires. In the course of a review of the literature on apes' production and comprehension of pointing, I reject (i) and (ii), and offer a qualified defence of (iii). Drawing on work on (...) expressive communication, I sketch an account of a mechanism by which ape gestural communication may proceed: the showing of expressive and naturally meaningful embodied behaviours. Such gestures are easily interpretable because they present rich evidence for a speaker's message. By contrast, pointing typically provides poor evidence for a speaker’s message, which must therefore be inferred from considerations in the interlocutors' common ground. This makes pointing comprehension comparatively difficult. (shrink)

We call those gestures “instrumental” that can enhance certain thinking processes of an agent by offering him representational models of his actions in a virtual space of imaginary performative possibilities. We argue that pointing is an instrumental gesture in that it represents geometrical information on one’s own gaze direction, and provides a ritualized template for initiating gaze coordination and joint attention. We counter two possible objections, asserting respectively that the representational content of pointing is not constitutive, but derived from language, (...) and that pointing directly solicits gaze coordination, without representing it. We consider two studies suggesting that attention and spatial perception are actively modified by one’s own pointing activity: the first study shows that pointing gestures help children link sets of objects to their corresponding number words; the second, that adults are faster and more accurate in counting when they point. (shrink)