Linguistic fire and human cognitive powers

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Cowley
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Action Perception ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
Opening Up

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains (or minds), but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross (2007) argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making.

scholarly journals Illuminating Vestige: Amateur Archaeology and the Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Rural France

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Historical Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Rural France

AbstractThis article provides a historical ethnography of an abrupt and transient awakening of interest in Roman vestige during the 1970s in rural France, and explores its implications for comparative understanding of historical consciousness in Western Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Languedoc, and particularly the commune of Monadières, it details a vogue for collecting pottery shards scattered in a nearby lagoon that developed among local inhabitants. The article frames this as a ritualized “expressive historicity” emergent from political economic restructuring, cultural transformation, and time-space compression. It analyses the catalyzing role of a historian who introduced discursive forms into the commune for symbolizing the shards, drawn from regionalist and socialist historiography, which local people adapted to rearticulate the historicity of lived experience as a novel, hybrid genre of “historical consciousness.” These activities are conceptualized as a “reverse historiography.” Elements of historiographical and archaeological discourses—for example, chronological depth, collation and evaluation of material relics—are reinvented to alternate ends, partly as a subversive “response” to contact with such discourses. The practice emerges as a mediation of distinct ways of apprehending the world at a significant historical juncture. Analysis explores the utility of new anthropological theories of “historicity”—an alternative to the established “historical idiom” for analyzing our relations with the past—which place historiography within the analytical frame, and enable consideration of the temporality of historical experience. Findings suggest that the alterity of popular Western cultural practices for invoking the past would reward further study.

Cognitive Development in Chimpanzees

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetsuro Matsuzawa
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Essential Difference ◽  
Laboratory Studies ◽  
Learning Abilities ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Fetal Stage

Cognitive development in chimpanzees has been illuminated through fieldwork and laboratory studies. Their life history reveals the importance of the mother–infant relationship. Females give birth at 5-year intervals on average, and the infants cling to their mothers in the first 3 months. Each chimpanzee community has its own unique cultural traditions, for example in tool use. How tools are used is passed across generations through social learning, in a process called education by master-apprenticeship. Laboratory studies in the early 21st century examined chimpanzees’ learning abilities even at the fetal stage. Chimpanzee and human cognition appear similar in both physical and social domains, and they follow the same developmental stages. However, there is a fundamental difference in the levels of complexity of hierarchical structure. Chimpanzees do not show the recursive and infinite levels that characterize human cognition. Chimpanzees are good at memorizing things at a glance but less skilled at representing things through imagination. The cognitive trade-off between working memory and language may explain the essential difference in cognitive development in the two species.

Neoteny and Social Cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Somatic Development ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evo Devo

The chapter will address the notion of embodiment from a neuroscientific perspective, by emphasizing the crucial role played by bodily relations and sociality on the evolution and development of distinctive features of human cognition. The neurophysiological level of description is here accounted for in terms of bodily-formatted representations and discussed by replying to criticisms recently raised against this notion. The neuroscientific approach here proposed is critically framed and discussed against the background of the Evo-Devo focus on a little explored feature of human beings in relation to social cognition: their neotenic character. Neoteny refers to the slowed or delayed physiological and/or somatic development of an individual. Such development is largely dependent on the quantity and quality of interpersonal relationships the individual is able to establish with her/his adult peers. It is proposed that human neoteny further supports the crucial role played by embodiment, here spelled out by adopting the explanatory framework of embodied simulation, in allowing humans to engage in social relations, and make sense of others’ behaviors.This approach can fruitfully be used to shed new light onto non propositional forms of communication and social understanding and onto distinctive human forms of meaning making, like the experience of man-made fictional worlds.

Models of Self-Replicators

2010 ◽  
pp. 282-314
Author(s):  
Eleonora Bilotta ◽  
Pietro Pantano
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
External World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Christopher Alexander ◽  
On Line ◽  
Instinctive Behavior ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
The Way

Structural models and patterns are vitally important for human beings. From birth, we base our emotional and cognitive representations of the external world on species-specific signals (the human face) and exploit these signals to structure our instinctive behavior. The creation of cognitive patterns to represent the world lies at the very heart of human cognition. It is this process that underlies our efficient use of signs, our ability to communicate with natural languages and to build cognitive artifacts, the way we organize the external world, and the way we organize external events in our memories and our flow of consciousness. Patterns are sometimes called schemas, or models, and discussed in terms of a gestalt (Piaget, 1960; 1970; Koelher, 1974). In the middle ages a pattern meant “the.original.proposed.to.imitation;.the. archetype;.that.which.is.to.be.copied;.an.exemplar” (from the On Line Etymology Dictionary). Modern use dates back to the XVIII century. In 1977 Christopher Alexander introduced a new way of using the term in architecture. For Alexander, a pattern was a model used to encode and organize existing knowledge, avoiding the need to reinvent the knowledge every time it was needed. For Alexander a pattern was “a three part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution” (Alexander et al., 1977).

Refugee and asylum seekers’ experiences

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-290
Author(s):  
Rachel Tribe ◽  
Angelina Jalonen
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Coping Strategies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Service Users ◽  
And Coping ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
Asylum Seekers And Refugees

This chapter reviews the socio-political environment and legal factors that provide the context and influence the lived experience of many refugees and asylum seekers. These factors are considered in relation to flight, arrival, and settlement in a new country. How these contextual factors may impact upon refugees and asylum seekers, their sense of identity, and mental health will be reviewed. The chapter reflects upon the possible challenges faced by many refugees and asylum seekers, as well as arguing that the strengths, resilience, and coping strategies that many asylum seekers and refugees exhibit need to be adequately considered by clinicians, if a meaningful service is to be provided. The importance of clinicians being culturally curious and listening to service users’ meaning-making is vital. An overview of some other issues that clinicians may need to consider is provided. The chapter contains a number of case studies to illustrate the related issues.

Negative Affect, SCUM, and the Politics of Possibility

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-181
Author(s):  
Desirée D. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Negative Affect ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Reparative Reading

Negativity has been widely framed through Edelman’s “no future” orientation. While being productive, this orientation forecloses the potential negativity to foster coalitional alliances. Building off previous works about Valerie Solanas, I turn toward an investigation of the negative affective traces of her SCUM Manifesto to create paths of meaning-making beyond Edelman’s accounting. First, I examine how Solanas uses negative affect in her work. Second, I build from contemporary re-framings of negativity to imagine a possible reparative reading of SCUM. I argue that through her use of lived experience—specifically her narratives of violence, SCUM challenges the reader’s engagement with negativity. Within SCUM, there is a potential path of meaning-making through Solanas’ invocation of her own lived experience.

Paul Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation adapted as a method for narrative analysis to capture the existential realities expressed in stories from people living with Multiple Sclerosis

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 649-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Hardwick
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Sclerosis ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Chronic Conditions ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The North ◽  
Insight Into

This paper draws on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation to highlight aspects of the existential realities that emerge woven within the narratives of people living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). It aims to give social workers and other professionals involved in inter-disciplinary care insight into the meaning-making process and the existential realities interwoven in accounts of lived experience, thereby validating this aspect of experience. To support this approach it also aims to make explicit the method used and interpretation applied to elicit these features. Ten adults with MS from across the North of England were recruited to tell their story related to the onset of, and adjustment to MS. Two of the narratives are presented, and through these, the method used for interpretation derived from the theory of Paul Ricoeur is demonstrated. What emerge, threaded within the events told in a triptych of past, present and future life envisaged, are glimpses of existential realities that evoke universal recognition such as abandonment, loss, acceptance; solidarity, aloneness, suffering and finally calm. The paper concludes that, given chronic conditions like MS often predispose existential deliberation, it is important that these dimensions of lived experience are acknowledged in professional encounters that seek to manage the condition and support people living well with it.

Extending the Private Language Argument

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-531
Author(s):  
Marcin Trybulec
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Private Language Argument ◽  
Material Characteristics ◽  
Objective Meaning ◽  
Distributed Language

Abstract The paper poses the question of how the use of external artifacts contributes to the stabilization of meaning and thought. On the basis of the private language argument and the problem of objective meaning, I argue that Wittgenstein’s considerations regarding meaning-making should be sensitive to how materiality bears on the interactions with semiotic artifacts produced in speech and writing. The distributed language perspective and the concept of languaging (Cowley 2011, 2007; Steffensen 2011) is then linked to a metacognitive theory of writing (Goody 1977; Olson 1994, 2016) to clarify how social and material settings contribute to the lived experience and metalinguistic awareness that is essential to meaning-making. It is argued that, if material characteristics of symbolizations change metalinguistic awareness, the interpretation of the private language argument partly depends on the types of external artifacts the private linguist is allowed to exploit. The frameworks of distributed language and the theory of writing thus shed new light on the private language argument by making it even more radical than has previously been assumed.

The Lived Experience of Adults Bereaved by Suicide

Crisis ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Begley ◽  
Ethel Quayle
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Important Variable ◽  
Self Blame ◽  
Suicide Bereavement ◽  
Causal Nature ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract. In recent years, a plethora of research studies have attempted to delineate the grief experiences associated with suicide from those of other sudden traumatic deaths. The emerging consensus suggests that bereavement through suicide is more similar than different to other bereavements, but is characterized by the reactions of shame, stigma, and self-blame. The causal nature of these reactions has yet to be fully understood. This study reports on the lived experiences of eight adults bereaved by suicides, which were obtained through in-depth interviews. Data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Four main themes dominated the relatives' grief experiences. First, the early months were checkered by attempts to “control the impact of the death.” The second theme was the overwhelming need to “make sense of the death” and this was coupled with a third theme, a marked “social uneasiness.” Finally, participants had an eventual realization of a sense of “purposefulness” in their lives following the suicide death. Overall, the findings suggest that suicide bereavement is molded and shaped by the bereaved individual's life experiences with the deceased and their perceptions following social interactions after the event. The findings from this study suggest that “meaning making” may be an important variable in furthering our understanding of the nuances in suicide bereavement.

scholarly journals Meaning-making of a group of South Africans in their experience of living with HIV: a phenomenological study

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
H G Pretorius ◽  
N Goldstein ◽  
A D Stuart
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Living With Hiv ◽  
Disease Specific ◽  
Hiv Aids

With the primary focus of disease specific studies on the medical and biological transmission and progression of HIV/AIDS, the lived experience and meaning-making of individuals who live with this disease, is a literary scarcity. Opsomming Met die primêre fokus van siektespesifieke studies op die mediese en ook biologiese oordrag en progressie van MIV/VIGS, is daar ‘n literêre skaarste oor die geleefde ondervinding en betekenisgewing van individue wat met hierdie siekte leef. *Please note: This is a reduced version of the abstract. Please refer to PDF for full text.

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