Upcoming guest lectures:
Guest lectures are currently being planned for October and November. More information later.
Previous guest lectures:
Visit from Nigel Love (University of Cape Town). Professor Love gave two lectures in which he presented an integrational view of foundational issues in linguistic cognition.
1. Language and mind: what do we know?
Wednesday, 20th November, 12-14.00
Report from the talk:
In this first lecture, Nigel Love looked at language production from the perspective of the ‘grammar and dictionary’ approach to what it is to know a langauge. He did so by focusing on the complexity that is assumed by, for example, William Levelt’s model of how a person can ever produce a single grammatical sentence. The aim of the exposition was to cast doubt on the view that such models capture what people actually know.
Nigel Love then scrutinised the view that minds of brains use inner grammars and dictionaries. In modern guise, this was traced to how Chomsky placed variability strictly outside the language system by invoking competence and its successors (e.g. Merge). Historically, this derives from Saussure’s mentalist view of what it is to ‘know a language’ (i.e. the view that mastering a language-system depends on inner structures that resemble what a linguist can describe). The moral of the lecture is that we do now know much about language and mind. We should be very wary of theories that present neural models of language.
Nigel Love has been Editor of Language Sciences for many years and authored the classic paper: “Cognition and the Language Myth” [link].
2. Language and mind: how do we know?
Wednesday, 27th November, 12-14.00
In a ground breaking lecture, Nigel Love presented a positive argument on the issue of how we can move forward in understanding linguistic knowledge. He focused attention around intuitions associated with signs he saw at the airport: ‘Danish ordered taxis’ and ‘Please queue up’. Having clarified how the first shows grammatical anomalies while that the second is unidiomatic, he traced the relevant intuitions to –not a mental grammar and dictionary–but to experience. Like everything else, he claims, language draws on statistical learning and episodic memory.
In the first place, the claim is simple. Second, while building on John Taylor’s work (and using some of his examples), the approach does not posit that people memories of either forms or meanings or that they are somehow the ‘same’. Quite the contrary. When people engage with each other, communication is always partial and incomplete: it is based in practical knowledge that can be described in terms of both words and rules and with respect to skills that derive from dialogical and social aspects of life. Thus, as a child finds its way into language, its caregivers use its vocalisations to guide it towards what they count as first words. From the perspective of CHI, this is important because it suggests that second-order aspects of language must necessarily be adapted to the workings of a statistically primed brain.
Visit by Davide Secchi (University of Bournemouth).
Developing an agenda for distributed cognition in management
Monday 29 April, 2013, 12-15, SDU (Slagelse Campus), Room A.102
Report from the talk: Moving beyond a bounded view of rationality, Davide Secchi emphasizes that, in organisations, people are primarily concerned to create environments that support externalization and social dynamism. In this context, much depends on a person’s docility or, in short, an ability to participate in information sharing, to create a community, make public ideas for improvement and, above all, show fidelity to standards. From the CHI perspective this places due weight on why people depend on – not just interactivity – but how organisations and artifacts enable second-order cultural constructs to be used in realizing values.
Davide Secchi coordinates the DLG research cluster on Organizational Cognition and Decision Making: https://sites.google.com/site/orgcogn/home
Do also pay a visit to Davide’s website: http://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/dsecchi
Visit by Elena Clare Cuffari (University of the Basque Country)
The Sense of Sense-Making
Thursday, February 14, 2013, 12-14, SDU (Odense Campus), Room O77.
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.