ABSTRACT
Building on theories of distributed cognition, I introduce the idea that languaging is constituted and enacted in interactive loops between brains, bodies, and the external environment rather than internal mental states and their representations or abstract verbal patterns, as in current discourse-analytical and form-based approaches. However, languaging is irreducible to either the brains or the bodies of the persons who participate in it. Moreover, the environment is not reducible to the physical one consisting of inert matter that is assumed in Galilean science. The persons who participate in languaging have together created a distinctively human world—the human ecology—that is constituted by the collective processes and products that have gone into the making of and caring for a communal human world. This world lives in both the subjective time of selves and in the historical time of a community of languaging selves. The distributed languaging view has developed the distinction between first-order languaging and second-order language to explain the relationship between the diverse timescales that are integrated in human languaging. Embodied first-order languaging between persons and other aspects of situations in the here-and-now takes place on the intermediate timescales of specific co-orchestrated activities and occasions that enact particular situations. It draws on micro-level or pico-scale neural and bodily dynamics of biological individuals and meshes or integrates these with artefacts, cultural patterns, norms, technologies, tools, and values that derive from cultural-historical timescales. Languaging therefore integrates embodied selves on the timescales of interactive events to both lower-scalar biosemiotic dynamics and to higher-scalar cultural-historical ones. One useful tool for thinking about the multiscalarity of languaging is the three-level scalar hierarchy view developed by Salthe (1993) in the field of developmental biology. Salthe's construct is generaliseable to hierarchical systems of all kinds. The three-level scalar hierarchy provides a way of breaking a complex phenomenon down into a triad of constituent scalar levels of organisation that enable us to contextualise the relations between levels and the relations within levels. I show how the multiscalarity of languaging can be interpreted in these terms. In anticipation of the main themes of Volume II, I consider action-perception to be a means of interactively exploring and constituting the world through the actualisation of its potentialities and, when necessary, of being corrected by the feedback that we receive from the world when we interactively explore it either solo or in concert with others. In this way, we develop perceptual, conceptual, and semantic categories that simultaneously embed us in the world on the basis of histories of successful past interaction outcomes at the same time that they enable us to develop approximations of the world “out there” that can be corrected and improved as perception is refined and extended into new domains, or is corrected in the case of error. Languaging builds on action-perception and is a further extension of it rather than something totally different that transcends action-perception. Languaging, like perception, is not an “interface” that stands between self and world. Instead, it is a way of acting on and of interactively constituting focused ways of attending to and caring for the world and of shaping and directing future interaction potential in it.
