Elena Cuffari
Franklin & Marshall College, Psychology / SPM, Faculty Member
- Worcester State University, Philosophy, Faculty Memberadd
- Gesture, Philosophy Of Language, Intersubjectivity, Language and Social Interaction, Embodiment, Cognitive Linguistics, and 13 morePhilosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Science, Feminist Theory, Virtue Ethics, Pragmatism, Phenomenology, History of Philosophy of Science (Especially Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism), Languages and Linguistics, Cognitive Sciences, Philosophy of Mind, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Existentialism, and Philosophyedit
- elenaclarecuffari.wordpress.comedit
We offer a theoretical and empirical exploration of parental or guardian hope through an enactive, ecological, and reflective lifeworld research framework. We examine hoping as a practice, or know-how, by exploring the shape of... more
We offer a theoretical and empirical exploration of parental or guardian hope through an enactive, ecological, and reflective lifeworld research framework. We examine hoping as a practice, or know-how, by exploring the shape of interviewees’ lives as they prepare for lives to come. We pursue hoping as a necessarily shared practice–a social agency–rather than an individual emotion. One main argument is that hoping operates as a kind of languaging. An enactive-ecological approach shifts scholarly conversations around hope, in part by including voices of non-scholars and considering lifeworld factors like class privilege. We aim to identify particular impediments to or facilitators of hope, which may be thought of as classes of restrictive and generative thought-shapers, respectively. Results from our qualitative study indicate that uncertainty is deeply salient to hoping, not only because hope as a concept entails epistemic limits, but more vitally because not knowing, when done skill...
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Note: I wrote this paper in July 2019 and finished proofs in Jan 2020. I am now wondering in what ways what we are witnessing in response to the global pandemic is forcing the kind of rapid habit change and 'flank... more
Note: I wrote this paper in July 2019 and finished proofs in Jan 2020. I am now wondering in what ways what we are witnessing in response to the global pandemic is forcing the kind of rapid habit change and 'flank movement' that I discuss (following Dewey) in the final section of the paper. Abstract: Dewey’s thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’ (Malabou 2008: vii), shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection” (Ramírez-Vizcaya and Froese, 2019: 4). This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018). Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”
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Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction.... more
Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction. Within an enactive understanding of human cognition, we propose a view of literary reading as a process of participatory sense-making between a reader and a storyteller. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making maintains that agents, by enacting their own sense-making, directly and partially constitute the sense-making of other agents. Sense-makers in interaction navigate two orders of normativity: their own and that of the interaction itself. Linguistic sense-making (languaging) opens up further possibilities for understanding complex spatially and temporally distributed forms of social interactions such as narrative interactions. Reading a narrative is one such example of mutually constituted navigation between an interaction dynamic and ...
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Pairing interpretation of philosophical texts with microanalysis of video data, this essay examines some particular ways that hand gestures enable embodied meaning making and sharing. The point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s... more
Pairing interpretation of philosophical texts with microanalysis of video data, this essay examines some particular ways that hand gestures enable embodied meaning making and sharing. The point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s statement that gesture is the initial basis by which a subject lives and signifies. Intercorporeality and interpretive effort then become the basis of interactive meaning making. Meaning emerges when hand gestures, as intercorporeal acts, reflect and reflexively alter the constituting norms, perspectives, and possibilities found in a given space. This double movement is appropriative and disclosive—hand gestures must fit to a given world of meaning even as they take hold of and form it. Explaining this common feature of distinct gesture ecologies leads to a number of conclusions for the study of language.
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Research Interests: Philosophy and Art
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Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily... more
Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with o...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, and 14 moreEpistemology, Embodied Cognition, Social Interaction, Embodiment, Citizen Journalism, Intersubjectivity, Enactivism, Embodied Intersubjectivity, Enactive cognition, Sense Making, Dialectics, Distributed Language, Languaging, and Participatory Sense Making
Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an... more
Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and language is not an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that...
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In this paper I initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive psychologist David McNeill's groundbreaking work on gesture and existential-phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's treatment of gesture in The Phenomenology... more
In this paper I initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive psychologist David McNeill's groundbreaking work on gesture and existential-phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's treatment of gesture in The Phenomenology of Perception. McNeill has increasingly turned to Merleau-Ponty in support of the theoretical side of his project of classifying spontaneous narrative gestures. I act as a philosophical mediator between these two different theories in order to bring attention to the provocative but also problematic metaphysical implications of McNeill's theoretical contributions to the study of gesture, contributions which have yet to be taken up by philosophers and yet to be seriously critiqued by other cognitive scientists and embodiment theorists. Merleau-Ponty and McNeill both highlight gesture as a site of bodily meaning and thus as evidence of the embodied origin of linguistic meaning, yet they do not do so in the same way, with the same focus, or even ne...
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Kravchenko encourages language science to approach languaging as “a species-specific semiotic activity that has a biological function.” Languaging as a form of social agency is broader than …
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1 Franklin and Marshall College, Department of Psychology, Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind, United States. Email: ecuffari@fandm.edu. 2 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bizkaia, Spain. Centre for Computational... more
1 Franklin and Marshall College, Department of Psychology, Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind, United States. Email: ecuffari@fandm.edu. 2 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bizkaia, Spain. Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country, Donostia, Spain. Email: ezequiel. dipaolo@ehu.es. 3 IAS-Research Center for Life, Department of Philosophy Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country, Donostia, Spain. ChatLab, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton UK. Email: hanneke.dejaegher@ehu.eus. ABSTRACT
"Living Bodies: Co-enacting Experience 1. Introduction 2. The standard view of embodiment: individual, minimal, universal 3. From embodiment to inter-bodily co-enacting 4. Conclusion 5. References Abstract: We advocate a move... more
"Living Bodies: Co-enacting Experience 1. Introduction 2. The standard view of embodiment: individual, minimal, universal 3. From embodiment to inter-bodily co-enacting 4. Conclusion 5. References Abstract: We advocate a move away from the received notion of embodiment that operates in much of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and a corresponding move towards the notion of inter-bodily co-enacting, which affords salient features and phenomena for the study of language in social interaction. Human bodies know of wide variety; bodies are different in both how they sense and in how they are sensible to others. We review the paradoxes and limitations of embodiment when ‘the human body’ or ‘all human bodies’ are characterized in simultaneously universal, individual, and minimal (sub-personal) terms. The implicit logic of this use of ‘embodiment’ holds that cognition is the activity of isolated individual minds (even if they are indeed ‘embodied’ minds), and that only by guaranteeing the sameness in structure will we reach sameness in meaning and thereby secure communicative success. To offer an alternative to this view, we draw on distributed and enactive cognition and interaction studies to demonstrate how specific sense-making bodies-in-interaction participate in the coordination dynamics that afford meaning, understood as consequences in experience. "
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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... more
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 so...
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A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of... more
A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the
starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor,
one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation
to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition.
In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition
as an inter-bodily and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development
we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon.
On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal
social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce
metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action,
co-ordination, and co-experience. Here metaphoricity is explored as a distinct and emergent aspect
of the coordination processes that constitute social interaction. In the final section we point to the
general findings of the analyses and discuss the challenges that conceptual metaphor theory faces in
the light of the new tendencies within cognitive science as well as a possible way forward.
starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor,
one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation
to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition.
In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition
as an inter-bodily and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development
we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon.
On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal
social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce
metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action,
co-ordination, and co-experience. Here metaphoricity is explored as a distinct and emergent aspect
of the coordination processes that constitute social interaction. In the final section we point to the
general findings of the analyses and discuss the challenges that conceptual metaphor theory faces in
the light of the new tendencies within cognitive science as well as a possible way forward.
Research Interests:
Note: I wrote this paper in July 2019 and finished proofs in Jan 2020. I am now wondering in what ways what we are witnessing in response to the global pandemic is forcing the kind of rapid habit change and 'flank movement' that I discuss... more
Note: I wrote this paper in July 2019 and finished proofs in Jan 2020. I am now wondering in what ways what we are witnessing in response to the global pandemic is forcing the kind of rapid habit change and 'flank movement' that I discuss (following Dewey) in the final section of the paper.
Abstract: Dewey’s thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’ (Malabou 2008: vii), shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection” (Ramírez-Vizcaya and Froese, 2019: 4). This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018). Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”
Abstract: Dewey’s thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’ (Malabou 2008: vii), shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection” (Ramírez-Vizcaya and Froese, 2019: 4). This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018). Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”
Research Interests:
Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction.... more
Human experience is inherently temporal and involves placing events, symbols, and actions in a temporal scheme. This article deals with a specific aspect of temporal experience as it relates to reading and experiencing narrative fiction. Within an enactive understanding of human cognition, we propose a view of literary reading as a process of participatory sense-making between a reader and a storyteller. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making maintains that agents, by enacting their own sense-making, directly and partially constitute the sense-making of other agents. Sense-makers in interaction navigate two orders of normativity: their own and that of the interaction itself. Linguistic sense-making (languaging) opens up further possibilities for understanding complex spatially and temporally distributed forms of social interactions such as narrative interactions. Reading a narrative is one such example of mutually constituted navigation between an interaction dynamic and interactors’ sense-making. The reader completes and co-authors emergent textual meaning and a textually emerging storyteller guides and anticipates the multiple temporal displacements, realized linguistically,
that a reader has to experience in the process of reading. We explore the participatory structure of a narrative through its temporal unfolding and the specific, non-linear nature of the temporal dynamics of interacting
with a storytelling agency. In particular, narrative interactions are seen as modulations in the pacing of a given narrative’s unfolding. It is suggested that the reader’s enactment of such temporally realized pacings
constitutes a better description of narrative immersion than its traditional understanding as a simulation of spatial situatedness.
that a reader has to experience in the process of reading. We explore the participatory structure of a narrative through its temporal unfolding and the specific, non-linear nature of the temporal dynamics of interacting
with a storytelling agency. In particular, narrative interactions are seen as modulations in the pacing of a given narrative’s unfolding. It is suggested that the reader’s enactment of such temporally realized pacings
constitutes a better description of narrative immersion than its traditional understanding as a simulation of spatial situatedness.
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For a special dossier in Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, in press. Please cite published version of this work.
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To appear in New Philosophies of Love and Sex: Thinking Through Desire http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/new-philosophies-of-love-and-sex. Please cite published version.
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Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily... more
Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination.
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The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical... more
The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making.
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A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of... more
A new concept of cognition also implies a novel approach to the study of metaphor. This insight is the starting point of this article presenting two innovations to comprehending and analyzing metaphor, one theoretical and one in terms of methodology. On a theoretical level we argue for a new orientation to metaphor and metaphoricity based on enactive cognition and distributed language and cognition. In recent years enactive and distributed cognition have been developing a new concept of cognition as an inter-bodily and ecologically afforded achievement, and in light of this theoretical development we propose an approach to metaphor as a multi-body, multi-party, and multi-timescale phenomenon. On a methodological level we demonstrate a new way of analyzing metaphoricity in multimodal social interaction based on in-depth video analyses of two real life examples in which we introduce metaphorical identification criteria focusing on doubleness in meaning, affordances for co-action, co-ordination, and co-experience. Here metaphoricity is explored as a distinct and emergent aspect of the coordination processes that constitute social interaction. In the final section we point to the general findings of the analyses and discuss the challenges that conceptual metaphor theory faces in the light of the new tendencies within cognitive science as well as a possible way forward.
Research Interests:
"Living Bodies: Co-enacting Experience 1. Introduction 2. The standard view of embodiment: individual, minimal, universal 3. From embodiment to inter-bodily co-enacting 4. Conclusion 5. References Abstract: We advocate a move... more
"Living Bodies: Co-enacting Experience
1. Introduction
2. The standard view of embodiment: individual, minimal, universal
3. From embodiment to inter-bodily co-enacting
4. Conclusion
5. References
Abstract: We advocate a move away from the received notion of embodiment that operates in much of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and a corresponding move towards the notion of inter-bodily co-enacting, which affords salient features and phenomena for the study of language in social interaction. Human bodies know of wide variety; bodies are different in both how they sense and in how they are sensible to others. We review the paradoxes and limitations of embodiment when ‘the human body’ or ‘all human bodies’ are characterized in simultaneously universal, individual, and minimal (sub-personal) terms. The implicit logic of this use of ‘embodiment’ holds that cognition is the activity of isolated individual minds (even if they are indeed ‘embodied’ minds), and that only by guaranteeing the sameness in structure will we reach sameness in meaning and thereby secure communicative success. To offer an alternative to this view, we draw on distributed and enactive cognition and interaction studies to demonstrate how specific sense-making bodies-in-interaction participate in the coordination dynamics that afford meaning, understood as consequences in experience.
"
1. Introduction
2. The standard view of embodiment: individual, minimal, universal
3. From embodiment to inter-bodily co-enacting
4. Conclusion
5. References
Abstract: We advocate a move away from the received notion of embodiment that operates in much of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics and a corresponding move towards the notion of inter-bodily co-enacting, which affords salient features and phenomena for the study of language in social interaction. Human bodies know of wide variety; bodies are different in both how they sense and in how they are sensible to others. We review the paradoxes and limitations of embodiment when ‘the human body’ or ‘all human bodies’ are characterized in simultaneously universal, individual, and minimal (sub-personal) terms. The implicit logic of this use of ‘embodiment’ holds that cognition is the activity of isolated individual minds (even if they are indeed ‘embodied’ minds), and that only by guaranteeing the sameness in structure will we reach sameness in meaning and thereby secure communicative success. To offer an alternative to this view, we draw on distributed and enactive cognition and interaction studies to demonstrate how specific sense-making bodies-in-interaction participate in the coordination dynamics that afford meaning, understood as consequences in experience.
"
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An ENactive Seminars Online presentation and discussion about an on-going book project.
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... Towards a Like-Minded Ontology: Gesture and the Embodied Nature of Thought in David Mcneill and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ... McNeill follows Merleau-Ponty in emphasizing thought's essential nature as bodily expression and... more
... Towards a Like-Minded Ontology: Gesture and the Embodied Nature of Thought in David Mcneill and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. ... McNeill follows Merleau-Ponty in emphasizing thought's essential nature as bodily expression and co-occurrence with speech and gesture. ...