Living as languaging: Distributed knowledge in living beings (2025)

Meaning comes first: languaging and biosemiotics

rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio, 2021

In linking evolution, biosemiotics and languaging, analysis of meaning is extended by investigation of natural innovation. Rather than ascribe it to internal or external content, meaning comes first. Ecological, evolutionary and developmental flux defy content/ vehicle distinctions. In the eco-evo-devo frame, I present the papers of the Special Issue, pose questions, and identify a direction of travel. Above all, meaning connects older views of semiosis with recent work on ecosystemic living. Whilst aesthetics and languaging can refer to evolving semiotic objects, nature uses bio-signals, judging experience, and how culture (and Languages) can condition free-living agents. Further, science changes its status when meaning takes priority. While semiotics shows the narrowness of laws and recurrent regularity, function brings semiotic properties to causal aspects of natural innovation. By drawing on languaging one can clarify, for example, how brains and prostheses can serve human cyborgs. Indeed, given a multiscalar nexus of meaning, biosemiotics becomes a powerful epistemic tool. Accordingly, I close with a model of how observers can use languaging to track both how selffabricated living systems co-modulate and also how judging (and thinking) shapes understanding of changing 'worlds.' In certain scales, each 'whole' agent acts on its own behalf as it uses epigenetic history and adjusts to flux by engaging with an ecosystem.

Language and biosemiosis: Towards unity?

SEMIOTICA-LA HAYE THEN BERLIN-, 2006

Although many pay lip-service to the view that signs are common to culture and biology, it remains unclear how such a unity could emerge. Indeed, while those working with culture usually ignore biology, biologists rarely consider how their observations bear on issues of meaning. So, when sign-making is studied, its outcomes are usually interpreted either against a cultural surround or models of how semiosis is represented in the brain. Often it is implied that the only alternative is a biolinguistic view where syntactic computations are used to claim that (internal) language has its basis in molecular biology (Jenkins, 2000). In what follows, I challenge the view that verbal language are, on any such view, entirely separable from persons, neural processes and the sensorium. Building on Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault’s (2003) overview of what Gumperz’s opus offers to the ‘theory and practice of communication analysis’ (2003: vii), I consider how to naturalize contextualization cues. I argue that, since much contextualizing is independent of ‘meaning potential’, we can turn to how indexical sense-making is grounded in biosemiosis. Sketching such a model, I link Barbieri’s (2002) approach to semantic coding with Damasio’s (1999) view of core consciousness to show how human judgements can use the feeling-of-what-happens. During talk sensitivity to the feel of biosemiosis prompts us both to adjust to each other in real-time and to make verbal judgements about how they sound and act.

Evolution, lineages and human language

Language, 2018

In life as in language, living beings act in ways that are multiply constrained as history works through them both directly and as mediated by what we identify as structures (e.g. genes or words). Emphasising direct effects, we replace the 'language metaphor of life' with the view that language extends the domain of the living. Just as a living proteome system manages without central control, so does language. Both life and language enable living beings to expand into –and create – new domains or Umwelten. Pursuing the parallel , we link emphasis on fitness with Berthoz's notion of simplexity and the distributed view of life/language/cognition. The semiosphere evolved, we suggest, as systems found novel ways of tapping into the bio-ecology's energetics. Accordingly, there are striking parallels between how regulatory genes influence body structures and how, in humans, community histories re-echo during conversation. In both cases, cross-talk prompts living systems to re-enact a lineage/community's music (or 'worldviews'). While rejecting Berthoz's residual neuro-centrism, we find 'simplexity' to be a powerful heuristic. Instead of proposing a single explanatory principle (e.g. computation, autonomy), lineages and communities build on meaning by altering ways of coordinating/cooperating. In all cases, life and language cooperate to bring forth new possibilities.

Language and life: is meaning biosemiotic?

Since the multi-scalarity of life encompasses bodies, language and human experience, Timo Järvilehto’s (1998) ‘one-system’ view can be applied to acts of meaning, knowing and ethics. Here, I use Paul Cobley’s Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016) to explore a semiotic construal of such a position. Interpretation, he argues, shows symbolic, indexical and iconic ‘layers’ of living. While lauding Cobley’s breadth of vision, as a linguist, I baulk at linking ‘knowing’ too closely with the ‘symbolic’ qua what can be said, diagrammed or signed. This is because, given first-order experience (which can be deemed indexical/iconic), humans use observations (by others and self) to self-construct as embodied individuals. While symbolic semiosis matters, I trace it to, not languaging, but the rise of literacy, graphics and pictorial art. Unlike Chomsky and Deely, I find no epigenic break between the symbolic and the iconic/indexical. The difference leads one to ontology. I invite the reader to consider, I ask if, as Cobley suggests, meaning depends on modelling systems (with ententional powers) and/or if, as Gibson prefers, we depend on encounters with whatever is out-there. Whereas Cobley identifies the semiotic with the known, for others, living beings actively apprehend what is observable (for them). Wherever the reader stands, I claim that all one-system views fall in line with Cobley’s ‘anti-humanist’ challenge. Ethics, he argues, can only arise from participating in the living. Knowing, and coming to know, use repression and selection that can only be captured by non-disciplinary views of meaning. As part of how life and language unfold, humans owe a duty of care to all of the living world: hence, action is needed now.

Languaging evolved A distributed perspective

Chinese Semiotic Studies, 2019

Taking a unified view of life, language, and cognition, the Special Issue contests linguistic (or enactivist) models that grant "reality" to symbolic entities. Rather than focus on texts, utterances, or communication, language is traced to living in the extended human ecology. On a distributed view, languaging arises as, alone or together , people act while orienting to denotata and (physical) wordings. Languaging requires, not linguistic bodies, but skills based in common ways of understanding. While verbal entities are of immense value, they draw on a history of reflecting on languaging from a language stance; people need only imagine "symbols". Accordingly , languaging is part of acting, observing and imagining. Using a language stance suffices for reflecting on human practices and written marks as if linguistic entities were "real". The deflationary view extends to semiotics. As Ho and Li (this vol.) document , languaging-and-action enables a learner to grasp a Chinese character as a sign. While, in principle, semiosis might draw from physics or life, signs are also likely to derive from human practice. Coming to read Chinese may require not a semiotic ontology, but a human ability to self-fabricate new powers. By deflating linguistic models one can avoid appeal to observer-independent signs.

Biosemiotics and ecolinguistics: two tales of scientific objectification

rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio, 2021

Science builds on what people say and, thus, the use of signs. In pursuing this important observation, I contrast two views of knowing that look "beyond" sense impressions. I begin with John Deely's (2015) theory that self-referring symbols allow critical control of objectification. In showing the limits of science, he targets what he calls "solipsism". In all animals, Deely thinks, knowing draws on sign relations. However, humans, and only humans, grasp that these relations are pure. Our selfreferential "symbols" disclose ens reale, or that which is «independent of finite awareness» (2015: 175). Given this epigenic break (Deely 1966), humans alone «know that there are signs» (Maritain 1970). Ex hypothesi, we can all embrace a/the non-finite knowing: on his post-modern view, moreover, scientific objectifications pick out a small part of what awareness can reveal (ens rationis). Wary of ontological proliferation, human powers can be traced to evolutionary history. On an ecolinguistic view, semogenesis (Halliday 2003) informs vocalizing and, in many societies, writing too. Practices, social activity and knowing thus co-evolve. As infants learn under verbal constraints, they concert socially to become persons who make use of material engagement. As contingencies arise, they set off prompts or languagings (Sellars 1960) that afford rich semiotic description and coordinate social experience. Languaging, or language activity, informs practices as people learn from what happens. Perduring verbal and other patterns bind action, talk, ritual, objects and objectifications or, I suggest, "seeing through the eyes of others". In many practices, texts, images, data sets and institutions, together with careful control of methods, stabilize observations and models. These are what groups treat as collective knowledge. Even without a semiotic ontology, what people do, say and observe places narrow limits on the scope of science. Knowledge is grounded in belief in signs.

The language-organism-species analogy: A complex adaptive systems approach to shifting perspectives on 'language"

The human mind is not only embodied, that is, individually situated in its own body, but it is also situated together with other embodied minds, that is, it is also socioculturally situated. This chapter addresses the interactive and dynamic role of sociocultural situatedness by examining the way that “language” itself has been “imagined” in its various metaphoric instantiations in discourse. The chapter brings forward a new conceptual frame of analysis that concentrates on the way metaphors, especially in scientific discourses, have come about, expanded, disappeared or been replaced by new ones. Divided into four parts the paper begins with an introductory section in which the concept discourse metaphor formation is introduced and discussed. It then moves on to a detailed examination of a discourse metaphor, namely, the “language-as organism-species” metaphor, which has dominated the metaphoric repertoire of linguistics for several centuries (cf. Zinken, Hellsten & Nerlich this volume). The analysis is further informed by thinking of language and metaphor formations as complex adaptive systems. The characteristics of the latter are taken up, explicitly, in the third section of the paper. The final section looks at the way the metaphor of “language-organism-species” is undergoing shifts in its meaning and application to language and language change, shifts that coincide in certain ways with those taking place in the discourse of the biological sciences in the post-genomic era. Key words: complex adaptive systems, discourse metaphor formation, emergence, evolutionary linguistics, linguistic organicism, race, species.

A Sensory Experiment into Languages as (R)evolution

Vol 14, No 1 (2016) Canadian Curriculum Studies: A Métissage of Polyphonic Textualities

How are we informed and transformed by tuning into our relationships to land, emotions, relations, and bodies within our academic pathways into languages? In this paper, we tell a story of our journey, as scholars, into how languages relate to land, historicity, bodies, and the ecosophical concept of ubuntu. Our discussion brings in the temporal and spatial multidisciplinary lineage of languages, as an open space to re-envision, re-experience, and re-engage with our academic writing in new and ancient ways. We use multimodal layers of language ontology—from ecological, physical, historical, and intercultural perspectives—as a decolonizing, pedagogical process of (re)covering humanness. We use the particular example of academic writing and reading as a sensory experience to dive into languages as ontological ways of becoming human. And because we are academics (or failed magicians) we try to provide insights into theoretical and practical ways to transform this conversation into pedagogy.

Dynamics and Languaging: Toward an Ecology of Language

Ecological Psychology, 2011

We introduce the second of 2 special issues of Ecological Psychology that present papers from a conference, “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter)action,” held at Gordon College in June 2009. The articles in this issue situate the study of language use in two kinds of context that are central to an understanding of “languaging” activities in the social settings in which they occur. The first is the context of dynamical systems theory. Wallot and Van Orden show how a dynamical systems approach can illuminate language use as the intentional and creative activity that it is. Cowley and Thibault illustrate the distributed language approach. Cowley follows Gibson (1979/1986) in comparing language understanding to picture perception. Thibault illustrates the wholly embedded nature of language use in an evocative example of 2 boys offering a description of aliens they have learned about in a story. All of the contributors emphasize language as embodied social action deeply embedded in the social contexts of talking. The articles in this issue and its predecessor, Ecological Psychology 22(4), offer valuable insights for development of an ecological theory of language use.

Niche construction, too, unifies praxis and symbolization. Commentary on Michael Arbib: How the brain got language.

Language and Cognition 5: 261-271., 2013

Arbib hypothesizes that evolutionary modern language significantly postdates human speciation. Why should this be so? I propose an account based on niche construction theory, in which Arbib's language-ready brain is primarily a consequence of epigenetically-driven adaptation to the biocultural niche of protolanguage and (subsequently) early language. The evolutionary adaptations grounding language evolution were initially to proto-linguistic sociocommunicative and symbolic processes, later capturing and re-canalizing behavioural adaptations (such as serial and hierarchical constructive praxis) initially "targeted" to other developmental and cognitive domains. The intimate link between praxic action and symbolic action is present not only in the human brain, but also in the human biocultural complex. The confluence of praxis and symbolization has, in the time scale of sociogenesis, potentiated the invention of domain-constituting and cognition-altering symbolic cognitive artefacts that continue to transform human socio-cultural ecologies. I cite in support of this account, which differs only in some emphases from Arbib's account, my colleagues' and my research on cultural and linguistic conceptions of time in an indigenous Amazonian community.