Activities

Centre for Human Interactivity is currently hosting a visiting scholar, Elena Clare Cuffari, from the University of the Basque Country. Her presentation "The Sense of Sense-Making" takes place on February 14, 2013 from 12-14pm in room O 77.

The Sense of Sense-Making

Abstract

In this talk, I consider some difficulties that non-representational, coordinative approaches to languaging face when it comes to conceptualizing meaning.
Languaging is understood as interactive sense-making activity according to paradigms such as enactive cognition (Maturana 1978; Stewart 2010; Bottineau 2010; Kravchenko 2004, 2006, 2007) and the distributed language movement (Cowley 2011; Steffensen 2012). How should we understand the sense that is made in sense-making? How can we understand this sense as sense – that is, as felt, and yet also as shared, as suggested by related work on intersubjectivity and interaction?
Considering two foundational thinkers of ‘enactive’ approaches to language, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002, 1964) and Humberto Maturana (1978, 1995), I show that both rest on an associational approach to word meaning rooted in individual perceptual relation with the world. Actual interactive encounter in languaging, where my words are not (only) sense-data for you to cope with but interventions that matter to you directly, seems to have slipped out of reach.
I then turn to more recent efforts at explaining sense-making in interaction: the enactive theory of social coordination known as participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) and work done under the rubric of distributed language/ecological/interactivity (namely Steffensen 2011, 2012). Both paradigms go beyond subjective association to include the dynamics of interaction itself. Yet this move leads to ambivalence regarding the role of experience, as participatory sense making points to a paradoxical struggle between competing autonomies, and the distributed approach attributes value-realization to systems rather than agents (Steffensen 2012, 528).
As part of offering an alternative way of thinking the relation of languaging and experience, I suggest that both participatory sense making and the distributed language/interactivity approach aim at something the American pragmatist notion of transaction captures well (Mead 1925, 1934; Dewey and Bentley 1949/1991). These approaches share common ground as well as common problems and would benefit from affecting each other more directly as they develop.