In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, (...) and symbols and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

The article argues in favour of a pragmatist enactive interpretation of the emergence of the symbolic and contentful mind from a basic form of social communicative interaction in which basic cognitive capacities are involved. Through a critical overview of Radical Enactivists (RECers)’ view about language, the article focuses on Mead’s pragmatist behavioural theory of meaning that refers to the gestural conversation as the origin of the evolution of linguistic conversation. The article develops as follows. After exposing the main elements (...) of REC’s theory of cognition and language that involve the construction of a theory of natural signs (teleosemiotics) and basic directionality (Ur-intentionality), some critical points of Hutto and Myin’s proposal will be highlighted. To foster a continuist perspective of language, the behavioural theory of meaning and language that Mead develops from the notion of gesture will be analysed. His theory is akin to REC and could augment the bare bones of REC’s sketched perspective, helping to include Ur-intentionality in a broader non-dualistic phylogenetic and ontogenetic theory of symbolic language from gestural communication, thus helping to overcome the distinction between a content-less intentionality and a content-involving intentionality, i.e., a semantic propositional intentionality. Furthermore, a recent revival of Mead’s theory testifies to its up-to-date relevance to explain the innate social dimension of human and non-human animals, and the human communicative capacity through the conditioning of bio-social canons and structures. (shrink)

When authors act by either publishing or non-publishing their texts, they sometimes use a language of gestures. These gestures can assist to position the author in the intellectual field. In this way some German eighteenth-century philosophers who thought against the grain of mainstream rationalism withdrew from the public sphere, using the image of the Egyptian god Harpocrates, who puts his index finger to his lips—a symbol for maintaining silence. In a sense one can thus label this kind of (...) quietism as “harpocratism.” The essay examines the imagery and contextualizes it in three case studies from the years 1720-50. Moreover, it explores its sources in political as well as antiquarian and hermetic discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay serves as a model for defining intellectual positions not so much by their content, but rather by their practices of symbolic distancing from others, of building identities in emotional communities, and of shaping free zones of inquiry where they could flourish. (shrink)

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for synthesis. Defining (...) gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge. (shrink)

The complex gestures of artwork remain an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In our turbulent mediasphere where images are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled in all kinds of cultural conflicts and controversies, a turn to the gestural life of images promises a particularly pertinent avenue of intellectual inquiry. As both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical concept, the notion of gesture straddles several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, (...) performance, theater, film and visual studies. In this volume, contributors ask: How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image? What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself? By thinking about images within this conceptual framework, this volume seeks to renew our understanding of the image. (shrink)

Our earliest tools are our bodies. Our hands raise and turn and toss and carry and push and pull, our legs walk and climb and kick allowing us to move and act in the world and to create the multitude of artifacts that improve our lives. The list of actions made by our hands and feet and other parts of our bodies is long. What is more remarkable is we turn those actions in the world into actions on thought through (...) gestures, language, and graphics, thereby creating cognitive tools that expand the mind. The focus here is gesture; gestures transform actions on perceptible objects to actions on imagined thoughts, carrying meaning with them rapidly, precisely, and directly. We review evidence showing that gestures enhance our own thinking and change the thought of others. We illustrate the power of gestures in studies showing that gestures uniquely change conceptions of time, from sequential to simultaneous, from sequential to cyclical, and from a perspective embedded in a timeline to an external perspective looking on a timeline, and by so doing obviate the ambiguities of an embedded perspective. We draw parallels between representations in gesture and in graphics; both use marks or actions arrayed in space to communicate more immediately than symbolic language. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to mount a challenge to gesture-first hypotheses about the evolution of language by identifying constraints on the emergence of symbol use. Current debates focus on a range of pre-conditions for the emergence of language, including co-operation and related mentalising capacities, imitation and tool use, episodic memory, and vocal physiology, but little specifically on the ability to learn and understand symbols. It is argued here that such a focus raises new questions about the plausibility of (...) gesture-first hypotheses, and so about the evolution of language in general. After a brief review of the methodology used in the article, it is argued that existing uses of gesture in hominid communities may have prohibited the emergence of symbol use, rather than ‘bootstrapped’ symbolic capacities as is usually assumed, and that the vocal channel offers other advantages in both learning and using language. In this case, the vocal channel offers a more promising platform for the evolution of language than is often assumed. (shrink)

Religious experiences of the human spirit are implemented, in an inevitable way, due to body-soul connection, at the level of the dynamics of corporeality. Gestures in religious rites are a key issue for the believer who sits in front of the Deity to supplicate and adore. Among the most common religious gestures are kneeling and putting the hands together in a vertical position. Far from being simple positioning and posture without any symbolical meaning, they express intense inner feelings (...) of the human emotionally and mentally directed from the profane dimension towards the endless extensions of the sacredness in a total approach of worship and mystical confession. (shrink)

Human communication is by defaultpolysemiotic: it involves the spontaneous combination of two or moresemiotic systems, the most important ones beinglanguage,gesture, anddepiction. We formulate an original cognitive-semiotic framework for the analysis of polysemiosis, contrasting this with more familiar systems based on the ambiguous term “multimodality.” To be fully explicit, we developed a coding system for the analysis of polysemiotic utterances containing speech, gesture, and drawing, and implemented this in the ELAN video annotation software. We used this to analyze 23 video-recordings of (...) sand drawing performances on Paama, Vanuatu and 20 sand stories of the Pitjantjatjara culture in Central Australia. Methodologically we used theconceptual-empirical loopof cognitive semiotics: our theoretical framework guided general considerations, such as distinguishing between the “tiers” of gesture and depiction, and the three kinds of semiotic grounds (iconic, indexical, symbolic), but the precise decisions on how to operationalize these were made only after extensive work with the material. We describe the coding system in detail and provide illustrative examples from the Paamese and Pitjantjatjara data, remarking on both similarities and differences in the polysemiosis of the two cultural practices. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the study and point to some directions for future research. (shrink)

In this article, we utilize Merleau-Ponty’s notions of gesture, flesh and reversibility as philosophical tools to explicate the corporal reality of ritual, incarnation, sacramental presence and the church as the mystical body of Christ. The phenomenological investigation of bodily gesture provides a foundation to elucidate the meaning of symbolic presence from which we compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh with that of the patristic fathers, leading finally to its ecclesiological interpretation.

This essay represents a reflection on the nature of shufa, the Chinese “art of writing,” and its ontological grounding as a continuous, “durational transcription,” of an inscriptional event, producing a phenomenology of “viewing.” This distinguishes it from ordinary writing (xiezi) in which attention is focused on the lexical meaning of the written characters (i.e., an experience of “reading”). Viewing a calligraphic inscription actually unfolding in time (i.e., as a dynamical structure or “temporal object event”), however, raises an interesting theoretical question (...) concerning the two complementary aspects of temporal consciousness of calligraphy as both duration and unity. This will be addressed in terms of recent discussions of a dynamical approach to Edmund Husserl’s theory of time consciousness. (shrink)

In a prior article, “Symbolic Difference,” I followed the indications provided by certain data in order to focus on the ontological locus of the symbol. A difference then appeared in the origin, which revealed itself through gesture, sign, use, and trace. The symbol, distended by definition between man and his origin, is the privileged region of language where this difference is thematized for itself. The search for the concealment-manifestation at work in the symbol led to the difficult problems surrounding (...) its interpretation, and it culminated with a summons or provocation towards existence. I mentioned some historical examples in which the symbol’s efficacy with regard to a life was blatant: the symbol opens up a path whose course makes one experience the origin. The condition of this experience is to “live without why,” to let that which is, be. (shrink)

In a prior article, “Symbolic Difference,” I followed the indications provided by certain data in order to focus on the ontological locus of the symbol. A difference then appeared in the origin, which revealed itself through gesture, sign, use, and trace. The symbol, distended by definition between man and his origin, is the privileged region of language where this difference is thematized for itself. The search for the concealment-manifestation at work in the symbol led to the difficult problems surrounding (...) its interpretation, and it culminated with a summons or provocation towards existence. I mentioned some historical examples in which the symbol’s efficacy with regard to a life was blatant: the symbol opens up a path whose course makes one experience the origin. The condition of this experience is to “live without why,” to let that which is, be. (shrink)

Two central assumptions of current models of language acquisition were addressed in this study: (1) knowledge of linguistic structure is "mapped onto" earlier forms of non-linguistic knowledge; and (2) acquiring a language involves a continuous learning sequence from early gestural communication to linguistic expression. The acquisition of the first and second person pronouns ME and YOU was investigated in a longitudinal study of two deaf children of deaf parents learning American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language. Personal pronouns in (...) ASL are formed by pointing directly to the addressee (YOU) or self (I or ME), rather than by arbitrary symbols. Thus, personal pronouns in ASL resemble paralinguistic gestures that commonly accompany speech and are used prelinguistically by both hearing and deaf children beginning around 9 months. This provides a means for investigating the transition from prelinguistic gestural to linguistic expression when both gesture and language reside in the same modality.\nThe results indicate that deaf children acquired knowledge of personal pronouns over a period of time, displaying errors similar to those of hearing children despite the transparency of the pointing gestures. The children initially (ages 10 and 12 months) pointed to persons, objects, and locations. Both children then exhibited a long avoidance period, during which one function of the pointing gesture (pointing to self and others) dropped out completely. During this period their language and cognitive development were otherwise entirely normal, and they continued to use other types of pointing (e.g., to objects). When pointing to self and others returned, it was marked with errors typical of hearing children; one child exhibited consistent pronoun reversal errors, thinking the YOU point referred to herself, while the other child exhibited reversal errors inconsistently. Evidence from experimental tasks conducted with the first child revealed that pronoun errors occurred in comprehension as well. Full control of the ME and YOU pronouns was not achieved until 25-27 months, around the same time when hearing children master these forms. Thus, the study provides evidence for a discontinuity in the child's transition from prelinguistic to linguistic communication. It is argued that aspects of linguistic structure and its acquisition appear to involve distinct, language-specific knowledge. (shrink)

The canonical history of mathematics suggests that the late 19th-century “arithmetization” of calculus marked a shift away from spatial-dynamic intuitions, grounding concepts in static, rigorous definitions. Instead, we argue that mathematicians, both historically and currently, rely on dynamic conceptualizations of mathematical concepts like continuity, limits, and functions. In this article, we present two studies of the role of dynamic conceptual systems in expert proof. The first is an analysis of co-speech gesture produced by mathematics graduate students while proving a theorem, (...) which reveals a reliance on dynamic conceptual resources. The second is a cognitive-historical case study of an incident in 19th-century mathematics that suggests a functional role for such dynamism in the reasoning of the renowned mathematician Augustin Cauchy. Taken together, these two studies indicate that essential concepts in calculus that have been defined entirely in abstract, static terms are nevertheless conceptualized dynamically, in both contemporary and historical practice. (shrink)

Focusing on a subject the author has extensively engaged with over the years, the article develops the notion of service as a cultural technique, and the media-theoretical figure of the servant as its servomechanism. The analysis follows three distinct scenarios that highlight, via different channels of perception, the interplay between corporeal practices and media objects in the production of specific cultural effects. In each of the examples chosen, service implies highly regulated networks of recursive operational chains that regulate in their (...) turn the production and distribution of power and knowledge. Thus, Krajewski argues, despite, or rather, precisely because of their apparent marginality and invisibility, the ‘small gestures’ of service join the ranks of already established, elementary symbolic techniques such as reading or writing. (shrink)

In a prior article, “Symbolic Difference,” I followed the indications provided by certain data in order to focus on the ontological locus of the symbol. A difference then appeared in the origin, which revealed itself through gesture, sign, use, and trace. The symbol, distended by definition between man and his origin, is the privileged region of language where this difference is thematized for itself. The search for the concealment-manifestation at work in the symbol led to the difficult problems surrounding (...) its interpretation, and it culminated with a summons or provocation towards existence. I mentioned some historical examples in which the symbol’s efficacy with regard to a life was blatant: the symbol opens up a path whose course makes one experience the origin. The condition of this experience is to “live without why,” to let that which is, be. (shrink)

Bharatanatyam is a traditional Indian dance form that involves the use of facial expressions and body movements to tell stories. A key aspect of Bharatanatyam is the use of hand gestures, also known as hastas, which are used to communicate with specificity and precision. Hastas are symbols, and along with facial expressions and body movements that are contextually relevant, they help to communicate narratives. I am a neuroscientist and have been immersed in Bharatanatyam for 25 years; true to the (...) tradition of the form that emphasizes lifelong scholarship and immersion, I continue to learn from my gurus and supplement my dance training with the study of Carnatic music and Sanskrit. My journey in creative aging started after losing my mother and witnessing the lack of access to expressive movement that was available to her; for fear of falls, my previously-dynamic mother spent the last three months of her life without leaving the bed or feeling the sunshine on her skin. By using hastas in the context of creative aging, I describe how we can promote the acquisition of new skills, the physical benefits even in the face of arthritis and limited mobility, the ability to ascribe meaning to the gestures, and the capability to form new meanings and new gestures that are contemporary and relevant to the lives of older adults. Above all, we can engage older adults actively in the creation and appreciation of art. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds (...) of rule have divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures. (shrink)

The role of gestures in communication is still debated: Some claim that gestures are merely ancillary forms of expressions, whereas others suggest a central role of gestures in the development of language. In this article, I provide data in support of the overarching hypothesis that gestures have a transitional function between ergotic/epistemic movements of hands and symbolic expressions. The context for the study of these transitions is constituted by school science laboratory activities conducted by students (...) who are also asked to describe and explain while still within proximity of the materials of their investigations. It is hypothesized that communication is distributed across the context (verbal, gestural, material) and shifts increasingly into a verbal modality as students become familiar with the phenomena they are to learn about. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that initial temporal delays between gestures and the corresponding words decrease and finally disappear so that gestural and verbal modalities coincide. It is suggested that engaging in communication in the presence of material has an important cognitive function in that it affords a distribution of cognition across different modalities until individuals have developed the competence to express themselves effectively in the verbal modality. (shrink)

Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these (...) deep-rooted abilities for what I term “self-originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism. (shrink)

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

Apart from these reservations, however, the child sacrifices certain immediate ends of satisfaction for ends which by their very transcendence elude him. The consequence of his new attitude on his interpretation of the actions of other individuals will he striking; for, inasmuch as their acts and gestures no longer signify as means to his immediate and tangible ends within his life-space, their behavior will be problematic, and the child will attempt to interrogate its meaning. Under the old dispensation he (...) could grasp the meaning of a bodily movement by following its direction towards an object in his proximate environment, and the end of the movement was simply the object viewed as terminus ad quem or as positively charged with respect to action. Under the new dispensation, based no longer on Pleasure and Pain but on Good and Bad, the signification of the gestures and speech of those around the child is transcendent in the sense that it does not aim at material objects or at combinations of the same in his proximate milieu, but at possible or ideal objects separated from the child not by an interval of space but by an interval of time. Thus the transcendent terminus of a gesture is not a materially given object but an object to be constructed and as yet existing only in the projects of the parents. Moral and intellectual formation is a process of self-alienation, of auto-suggestive submission to the Transcendent, interrupted periodically on the part of the child by acts of defiance, systematic contradiction and obstinacy, and regression to earlier modes of adjustment with considerable nuisance-value. If under the regime of indulgence the child becomes what he is by acquiring his immanent meaning in his activities of self-gratification, under the regime of discipline he becomes other than he is by a sacrifice of his determinate individuality. (shrink)

In this way, his diffuse if not altogether random behavior is already action in the world, directed towards ends which he did not lay down and yet which satisfy his needs. The neonate is integrated in a system of immediate utility, and his body is surrounded by a complex of instruments, utensils, and commodities, never made or put there by him but nonetheless constituting the meaning of his objectivity. Hence his objectivity, or his body as a significant object, is constituted (...) by the activity of others. Although he has not himself made or given himself this meaning, it is what he is, for his needs are silenced and this is decided according to an empirical test of satisfaction as drive reduction. At the stage of immediate utility it cannot be maintained that the child's objectivity or the systematic interpretation of his behavior is forced upon him, since the system works and his needs are satisfied. We conclude, then, that his body is his being-for-others and that he is this body although he cannot pose it for himself; that is to say, he cannot manipulate and control the complex of instruments that surround him and thus give to his gestures the meaning they have for others. (shrink)

In light of the mandate of social distancing imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the subsequent disruption in habitual practices involving physical contact, the essay explores the ancient gesture of the handshake with reference to both its cultural codifications and its iconography, widespread especially in Mediterranean and Near Eastern areas. While involving manifold semantic and symbolic significance, the handshake is taken into account especially as a gesture implying a tactile exposure to another, hinting at the possibility of joining radically (...) discontinuous worlds. Ancient Greek funerary art is considered and a few final remarks return to the experience of isolation we lived on a global scale in recent years. (shrink)

Abstract:Through dismantling the territorial integrity of the modern nation-state, Indigenous sovereignty threatens state imposed hegemonic systems. While these systems exist at the threshold spatially—borders and boundaries—they are the ideological epicenter for controlling human and non-human life, rendering them manageable by the state. These borders are also perpetually liminal spaces, and it is in this liminality that artists intervene through poetics, confronting state rhetorics and exercising sovereignty to address colonial wounds. In 2015 and 2017, two land-based ephemeral art projects were created (...) to challenge the terms by which territory is instrumentalized in order to justify the commodification of both land and humans. In 2015, the artist collective, Post-commodity, set up a land-based art installation, Repellent Fence, intersecting the US/Mexico border in an effort to “stitch” the Americas together again. The gesture of stitching is also employed in Maureen Gruben's Stitching My Landscape from 2017 in which Gruben stitched a segment of ocean ice with vibrant red broad cloth near her home in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories alongside the Ibyuk Pingo, a national landmark administered by Parks Canada. Both of these projects provide entry points into the various methods by which land is abstracted into an oppressive and singular form. They push back against the rigidity of prescribed borders, instead investigating more fluid entanglements with land.This paper provides a comparative analysis of these projects, examining the ways in which counterpoints are central to them as artistic interventions. Crossing diagonally to the borders that the nation-state has institutionalized produces a moment of reprise to a highly specific end: to heal. Pivotal to these anti-colonial critiques are rejection, dismissal and a refusal to translate. A symbolic reorientation of the ways humans interact with land arises, evoked through a performative gesture of stitching across fragmentations and divides. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. Thus, the (...) term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

The study investigates the manifestation of the “IDEA-IS-AN-ENTITY” metaphor across the linguistic and manual modalities by the use of the object gesture in daily conversation, to understand the relationship between metaphorical conceptualization and the context of use. Two types of the entity metaphor were distinguished: “cross-modal entity metaphor” and “gesture-only entity metaphor.” For the former, the metaphor was expressed by metaphorical speech and the object gesture simultaneously. Among all of the 67 cross-modal instances, a wide variety of idea was represented (...) as referring, characterizing, and quantifying referents in speech. Manually, the object gesture was configured in numerous ways. The way the object gesture was configured reveals the facet of the metaphorical conceptualization the speaker focuses on during speaking, and the details about the real-time thinking of a metaphorical object in discourse. For the gesture-only entity metaphor, it was manifested in the single modality of gesture. Among all of the 73 gesture-only instances, the object gesture depicted a stretch of talk as discrete object mainly by configuring a spatial boundary with curled fingers. Metaphor of this type attests that the thinking of phrasal-clausal ideas as entities is as common as that of lexical ideas as entities in conversation. Importantly, the object gesture bears out the emergence of a phrasal or clausal idea being conceptualized as object in natural discourse. Together, the findings demonstrate the inseparability of metaphorical conceptualization from cognition and the context of use. (shrink)

Concepts such as “symbolism” and “symbolic cognition” often remain unspecified in discussions the symbolic capacities of earlier hominins. In this paper, I use conceptual tools from phenomenology to reflect on the origins of early symbolic cognition. In particular, I discuss the possible early use of pointing gestures around the time of the earliest known stone tool industries. I argue that unlike more basic social acts such as expression, gaze following, and attention-getters, which are used by extant (...) non-human great apes, communicative pointing involves key elements that are characteristic of symbolic cognition. In particular, it involves “third order intentionality” as well as “shared practice horizons”: shared frameworks of understanding which are required for the interpretation of communicative acts whose meaning is not codified indexically or iconically in the signaling behavior. In the final part, I briefly review some indications for the use of pointing gestures around the time of the Lomekwian and Oldowan industries, as a way to sustain cooperation and possibly learning by instruction. It is suggested that pointing is more complex than is standardly acknowledged, and that it may have been an important communicative act for Early Stone Age hominins in transitioning to more fully symbolic speech capacities. (shrink)

According to the deductivist view of mathematics which became the rule during the nineteenth century, formal proofs working with symbolic formulas replaced the intuitive knowledge that used to be gained by the step-by-step construction of geometric fgures and diagrams. Twentieth century epistemological refection on symbolic formulas and formal proofs, however, took them to be diagrams respectively exhibiting formal relations and transformations. The claim was also made that, for such diagrams to be proofs, temporal displays of transformations—and of other (...) speech acts—were required. By returning to the signifcant elements of contemporary theories of mathematical proofs, we will here show how these proofs came to be a matter for semiotics and pragmatics as much as for formal logic. Once this is done, we will provide a few arguments against the standard objections to the ability of diagrams to present temporal order or perform speech acts. (shrink)

This paper attempts to illustrate a process of analysis that will hopefully open a path to more complete and useful definitions of sign and symbol. It applies a form-content analysis to the metaphysical properties of these two concepts. The objective is to locate criteria necessary and sufficient to derive formal definitions for these terms. Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of representation” is analyzed and applied to the topic. Criteria are outlined that determine the appropriateness of the sign and symbol to be (...) applied as labels. Criteria of definition are then developed using gesture, metaphor, and several other example types to illustrate the use of the criteria in distinguishing between sign and symbol. The structural organization of these two concepts proved to be especially complex and led to what some readers may find somewhat obscure. It is not our intention to be purposefully obscure. (shrink)

A number of language evolution researchers have argued that while language as we now know it is a predominately vocal affair, early language plausibly made extensive use of gesture. Relatedly, these same researchers often claim that while modern language in general uses arbitrary symbols, it is very likely that early language made extensive use of iconicity. Anyone accepting an account of early language along these lines must therefore explain how language shifted over time from a heavily gestural and iconic communication (...) system to a predominately vocal and highly arbitrary one. This article looks at an intriguing theory advanced by Woll as to how this shift was made. We find the spirit of the theory plausible but take issue with its details. Specifically, we identify a serious tension at the core of the theory. We then go on to explore how that tension might be plausibly resolved. The result is a blueprint for a much-improved version of the theory, in our view. (shrink)

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types (...) of evolutionary storylines. 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

It was once common to regard ASL as less than a full-fledged language, as a mere combination of miming, pointing and a few primitive gestures. That conception of ASL was laid to rest by William Stokoe’s landmark work [22] and much careful research that has come in its wake. This work..

Research suggests that typically developing children begin to understand verbal irony around 5 or 6 years of age. Children's production of verbal irony, however, has not previously been examined. This study was a preliminary investigation of children's irony production, including both verbal and gestural (nonverbal) forms. We coded instances of irony in interactions within 118 family triads, each consisting of 1 parent and 2 children, aged 3 to 15 years. Triads performed an 8-min cooperative task with dominos. In this context, (...) gestural irony was used more frequently than verbal irony: 80% of the families used gestural irony at least once and 32% used verbal irony at least once. Children produced gestural irony as early as 4 years of age, and verbal irony as early as 5 years of age. Children's use of irony was not related to their general cognitive ability or vocabulary, but was related to use of irony by other members of the triad. Results suggest that social context is important to the emergence of irony production. (shrink)

This study examined the performances of three groups of participants in interpreting metaphors in three different conditions: congruent gesture-prime conditions, opposite gesture-prime conditions, and no-prime conditions. In congruent gesture-prime conditions, each metaphor was preceded by the congruent gestural representation of metaphor schema. In opposite gesture-prime conditions, each metaphor was preceded by the opposite gestural representation of metaphor schema. The results showed that participants of congruent gesture-prime conditions had the best performance in interpreting metaphors, while participants of opposite gesture-prime conditions had (...) the worst performance. It is suggested that metaphor schema is an important part of metaphorical meaning of a metaphor. Therefore, when this part of meaning is activated by a gestural prime, metaphor comprehension is facilitated. Furthermore, when a schema is used to metaphorically describe a concept or an event, that schema and the neural network that represents it become one part of a larger interconnected neural network that represents the meaning of the metaphor. It could mean that the activation of one part of it could facilitate the activation of the whole of the network. Finally, it is emphasized that a gesture that depicts the schema of a metaphor is in fact the embodied realization of that metaphor. (shrink)

Recognising that signed languages are true languages adds to the variety of forms that languages can take. Such recognition also allows one to differentiate those aspects of language that depend on the medium (voiced or signed) from those that depend on more cognitive aspects. At least some aspects of language, such as symbolic representation, time markers, and generativity, may derive from the communication of the products of mental time travel, and from the sharing of remembered past and planned future (...) episodes. (shrink)

Ecological-cognition approaches share the overall assumption that cognition is enacted, extended, embedded, and embodied. In this article, these basic assumptions are illustrated and critically evaluated from the point of view of gesture and film studies. In a theoretical introduction, the idea of metaphorizing as embodied interactivity is developed and connected with these basic assumptions of an ecological cognition approach to metaphor. Four case studies illustrate how metaphoricity in face-to-face contexts and in film viewing is enacted, extended, embedded, and embodied. Examples (...) from gesturing face-to-face and a case study of a television news report serve to illustrate how metaphors in these ecologies have important common characteristics: they emerge from metaphorizing as embodied interactivity. (shrink)

As this foreword is written, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the cognitive sciences are in epistemological ferment. The exuberant optimism of the late 20th-Century adaptationist programme has, itself, started to fragment like the many fingers of a wave against the implacable shore of empirical reality. Dramatic new directions in the philosophy of mind and in developmental psychology are beginning to mature. This special issue, Pointing: Where Embodied Cognition meets the Symbolic Mind, edited by Massimiliano Cappuccio, brings together (...) in one volume an incendiary mix of the emerging generation of philosophers and language researchers, who bring their diverse perspectives to moor on one of the most fascinating phenomena in human development: the ability to co-orient in both space and time to a common focus with what seems, on the face of it, to be a simple pointing gesture. The emerging significance of research and analysis pertaining to pointing reflects a recent phase shift in the sciences concerned with mind and behaviour. To put these innovations in context, it might be worthwhile to review the sweeping upheavals that have recently occurred in the conceptual bedrocks of psychology and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way (...) of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a framework where possible relations between learning and mental models are explored. In particular, I’ll be concerned with non-symbolic gestures accompanying discourse and their role in inducing the construction of models and therefore deep comprehension and learning in the listener. Also, I’ll be concerned with cognitive and socio-cognitive conflicts and their roles in inducing construction of alternative models of a problem and therefore in learning to reason. Human ability to learn is of great (...) importance for individuals interested in change. Indeed, to learn both declarative and procedural knowledge means to change, and in order to be able to intervene on change in a desired way it is necessary to have a theory of the mental representations and processes involved in learning and a theory of the communication and contexts that favour learning. (shrink)

My approach to reference focuses on naturally occuring processes of communication, and in particular on children's earliest referential activities. I begin by describing three different kinds of child gesture — ritualizations, deictics, and symbolic gestures — and then proceed to examine young children's early word learning. The account focuses on the joint attentional situations in which young children learn their earliest gestures and linguistic symbols and on the social-cognitive and cultural learning processes involved in the different cases.

Against the backdrop of the challenges posed by xenophobia and other social phenomena that operated with harmful strategies of “othering,” this article considers the promise that the notion of “mutual recognition” as exemplified in the later work of Paul Ricœur holds for discourse on these matters. Can the hermeneutical and mediating approach of Ricœur provide an adequate framework in order to respond to these radical challenges? In light of this question, this article discusses and ultimately affirms Ricœur’s view that places (...) mutual recognition between what he calls the prose of justice and the poetics of agápē. In addition this article draws attention to the value of symbolic gestures and an ethic of linguistic hospitality to give further texture to the plea for mutual recognition amidst experience of exclusion, conflict and violence. (shrink)