Letting language be: reflections on enactive method

Filosofia Unisinos 22 (1):117-124 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,401

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology.Hanne De Jaegher - 2019 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (5):847-870.
The enactive approach and disorders of the self - the case of schizophrenia.Miriam Kyselo - 2016 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (4):591-616.
Enactive Music Cognition: Background and Research Themes.J. R. Matyja & A. Schiavio - 2013 - Constructivist Foundations 8 (3):351-357.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-03-20

Downloads
34 (#698,174)

6 months
5 (#702,808)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Elena Cuffari
Franklin and Marshall College
Ezequiel Di Paolo
University of the Basque Country
Hanne De Jaegher
University of Sussex

Citations of this work

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references