Distributed Language

This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.

Load balancing functionalities are crucial for best Grid performance and utilization. Accordingly,this paper presents a new meta-scheduling method called TunSys. It is inspired from the natural phenomenon of heat propagation and thermal equilibrium. TunSys is based on a Grid polyhedron model with a spherical like structure used to ensure load balancing through a local neighborhood propagation strategy. Furthermore, experimental results compared to FCFS, DGA and HGA show encouraging results in terms of system performance and scalability and in terms of load balancing efficiency.

В статье рассматривается новый подход к языку, обозначаются его пер-спективы. Установлено, что язык необходимо изучать как часть живой систе-мы, которая неотделима от человека и его сознания.

In this paper, I argue that, rather as views of language changed a hundred years ago, another such shift is underway. We are part of, not a refutation, but an emerging perspec-tive. Turning from synchronic „objects‟, language is increasingly placed in the living world. It is physical, emerges from living beings, and transforms human understanding.

It was long assumed that thinking goes on ‘in the head’: indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, many would have regarded it as absurd to examine thinking with reference to events beyond the brain.  The chapters in Cognition beyond the brain adopt a different perspective: In thinking, people use dispositions from both sides of the skull. Readily observed phenomena—including neural activity—constitute the object of thinking, which relates conceptually to the construct ‘thinking’.  Like all folk concepts, ‘thinking’ is a second-order construct used to ‘explain’ observations or, specifically, how action is — and should be—integrated with perception. As attested in each of the chapters, bodies co-orient to cultural resources while using bidirectional coupling. The focus thus falls on what can be learned about thinking by studying world-side activity. The chapters report empirical, observational and theoretical studies of how people use circumstances (and objects) to act alone, in dyads and in groups. People manage and track attention as they integrate speech and action with gestures, gaze and other bodily activity. In making interactivity part of thinking, a broad range and assortments of parts, procedures and modes of operation are invoked.

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? In their famous 1998 paper “The Extended Mind,” philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed this question and answered it provocatively: cognitive processes are not all in the head. The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument excited a vigorous debate among philosophers, both supporters and detractors. This volume brings together for the first time the best responses to Clark and Chalmers’ bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer a valuable overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis.

  The contributors first discuss (and answer) objections raised to Clark and Chalmers’s thesis. Andy Clark himself responds to critics in a paper that uses the movie Memento’s amnesia-aiding notes and tattoos to illustrate  the workings of the extended mind. Contributors then consider the different directions in which the extended mind project might be taken, including the need for an approach that focuses on cognitive activity and practice.



Contributors

Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa, David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Stephen Cowley, Susan Hurley, James Ladyman, Richard Menary, John Preston, Don Ross, Mark Rowlands, Robert D. Rupert, David Spurrett, John Sutton, Michael Wheeler, Rob A. Wilson



Richard Menary is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of Cognitive Integration and the Philosophy of Cognition.

Linguists tend to view language in terms of forms and their use. For historical reasons, speaking and listening have often often ascribed to knowledge of a language system. Language behavior is thus seen as the production and processing of forms. Others contrast language to man-made codes (see Kravchenko, 2007; Love, 2004). Instead of focusing on forms, language can be conceived of as action and, as such, both dynamic and symbolic (Raczaszek-Leonardi, 2009). History places us in a meshwork where public resources of language, among other things, contribute to games, mashing beans, and watching television. Speaking-while-hearing draws on cultural products (e.g., axes, social roles, pictures, and wordings). As we collaborate, we orient to wordings or repeated (and systematized) aspects of vocalizations that, within our community, carry historically derived information. Pursuing this view, it is argued that hearing “words” is like seeing “things” in pictures. This is described as taking a language stance. To defend the position, it is argued that, first, we learn to hear wordings and, later, to use “what we hear” as ways of constraining our actions. Far from depending on individual knowledge, orienting to wordings makes language irreducibly collective.

Code biology uses protein synthesis to pursue how living systems fabricate themselves. Weight falls on intermediary systems or adaptors that enable translated DNA to function within a cellular apparatus. Specifically, code intermediaries bridge between independent worlds (e.g. those of RNAs and proteins) to grant functional lee-way to the resulting products. Using this Organic Code (OC) model, the paper draws parallels with how people use artificial codes. As illustrated by Tetris and Morse, human players/signallers manage code functionality by using bodies as (or like) adaptors. They act as coding intermediaries who use lee-way alongside “a small set of arbitrary rules selected from a potentially unlimited number in order to ensure a specific correspondence between two independent worlds” (Barbieri, 2015). As with deep learning, networked bodily systems mesh inputs from a coded past with current inputs.

Received models reduce ‘use’ of codes to a run-time or program like process. They overlook how molecular memory is extended by living apparatuses that link codes with functioning adaptors. In applying the OC model to humans, the paper connects Turing’s (1937) view of thinking to Wilson’s (2004) appeal to wide cognition. The approach opens up a new view of Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) seminal studies on Tetris. As players use an interface that actualizes a code or program, their goal-directed (i.e. ‘pragmatic’) actions co-occur with adaptor-like ‘filling in’ (i.e. ‘epistemic’ moves). In terms of the OC model, flexible functions derive from, not actions, but epistemic dynamics that arise in the human-interface-computer system. Second, I pursue how a Morse radio operator uses dibs and dabs that enable the workings of an artificial code. While using knowledge (‘the rules’) to resemiotize by tapping on a transmission key, bodily dynamics are controlled by adaptor-like resources. Finally, turning to language, I sketch how the model applies to writing and reading. Like Morse operators, writers resemiotize a code-like domain of alphabets, spelling-systems etc. by acting as (or like) bodily adaptors. Further, in attending to a text-interface (symbolizations), a reader relies on filling-in that is (or feels) epistemic.  Given that humans enact or mimic adaptor functions, it is likely that the OC model also applies to multi-modal language.

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.

[I would like to note that my comments about Marcelo Barbieri's biosemiotics in this document reflect an inadequate understanding of his work. I can only refer you to the original texts, and to Cowley (2008; cited in my thesis) for an overview of their relation to the language sciences.]

The language sciences are in the midst of a radical transformation, springing from the simultaneous and interrelated rejection of computational models of cognition and formal systems models of language.  This essay attempts to outline some basic aspects of a new paradigm for approaching linguistic meaning, bringing together fundamentally congruent ideas from thinkers in a broad array of fields. Information and symbols, the two default conceptual apparatuses for engaging with linguistic meaning, are based on a self-contradictory and as such self-defeating dualism of form and meaning. In their place, a language science capable of cross-talk with other disciplines must begin with a biologically valid conception of meaning rooted in embeddedness and situatedness. Among the most developed models available is the enactive perspective, which suggests that all living entities can be regarded as reciprocally partially causal networks of organic processes, which operate as a system providing its own enabling and boundary conditions, both of which are therefore in a constant state of change. This provides the basis for a conception of meaning that can be “scaled up” or brought into contact with language by means of the concepts of sociality, technology, and intersubjective mediation, which together describe the complexification of lifeforms from individual autonomous cells to fundamentally social humans by changing the substrates from which they are constituted as networks of processes. This casts new light on inheritance in evolution, the concept of a shared environment or pre-given reality, and an understanding of human agency as inherently fragmented, flexible, and multi-faceted. The concept of active language or “languaging” emerges from this altered view of agency and humanity as a process of joint-attentional action on attention or awareness itself; mutual action by agents on their own and one another’s encounters with the world. Our experience of “symbolic” or static forms in languaging can be understood as stabilized entities of phenomenological experience built by means of coordination with other agents, and integrated into a larger domain of collective action by means of stabilized behaviors and artifacts whose use across ontogeny is structured by socializing or enculturating linguistic interactions. In this way, a language science built within the theoretical framework and empirical research paradigm established by enactivism is contiguous with philosophy of language and with the social and biological sciences, allowing cross-disciplinary comparison of empirical findings.

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.

In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural processes, bodily processes and manipulating written sentences. In section one I introduce Harris’ criticisms of ways in which writing has been said to restructure thought (Goody 1968; McLuhan 1962, 1964; Ong 1982). This will give us a preliminary idea about possible pitfalls for a cognitive integrationist account. The second section outlines, firstly, how integrated cognitive systems function. Secondly, the model is applied to a hybrid mental act where writing allows us to complete complex cognitive tasks. The final section outlines the sense in which, following Harris, there is “a more realistic picture of how writing restructures thought” [Harris, R., 1989. How does writing restructure thought? Language and Communication 9 (2/3) 99–106] that is concealed by the ‘romantic fantasies’ of theorists such as the above. This picture is one of writing providing an autoglottic space in which a new form of theoretical thinking becomes prevalent. The cognitive integrationist understands this in terms of the nature of the written vehicles and how we manipulate them

Linguistics is currently being transformed. In relating this to the return of languaging, I link the concept's genealogy with all of its major applications. Crucially, human understanding becomes social and subjective and, thus, incompatible with linguistic theories that focus on individual knowledge of entities like languages, usage, or forms of language use. As in Elizabethan times, understanding is part of socially organized practice. In leaving behind linguistic "forms," languaging shapes an entangled meshwork that links living, observing, and social action. In welcoming the return of long-suppressed ideas, I focus on their implications for evolution, history, and human embodiment. In so doing, I hold that each person's practical experience links a living subject with what can be, has been, and should be said. Finally, I argue that one can use the concept of languaging to build awareness that favors collective modes of action that are directed within the living world, the bio-ecology. By tracing social organization to embodied expression, a new ecolinguistics can aim to think on behalf of the world.

In viewing language as multi-scale co-ordination, the distributed perspective challenges two dominant orthodoxies. First, it denies that language is essentially ‘symbolic’ and, second, that verbal patterns are represented inside minds (or brains). Rather, language is, at once, collective, individual and constitutive of the feeling of thinking. It is distributed between us. In illustration, the opening Chapters report empirical work on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke and solving insight problems. Having given reason to consider this challenge to linguistic autonomy, the collection concludes with theoretical papers.  First, it is argued that language depends on a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that realizing values is a central function of language. Third, as with all social activity, this is traced to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate human dynamics. Finally, Steffensen (this volume) argues, far from being organism-centred, language gives us access to an extended ecology in which, through co-ordination, we enact our own history.

The paper seeks to shift ecolinguistic focus from discourse to the bidirectional coupling of the human and the living world. In so doing, it endorses Gregory Bateson's unity of mind and nature. Accordingly appeal is made to the bio-ecology, a domain affected by, not just languages, but also individual and collective agency. Indeed, humans change the world by linking social modes of control with individual skills based on life-history. On this eco-logic, humans are both collective agents and living subjects that act within the bio-ecology. To pursue the reciprocal relations of humans and the living is to clarify the limits of scientific knowing. Accordingly, ecolinguistics has the mission, first, of critiquing models that separate the human from the living and, second, of raising the bio-ecology's profile. It needs to build a bio-logic where life draws on energetics, values and how human (and other) collectives behave. Critical approaches to discourse can be complemented by work aimed at bio-ecologial awareness. Ecolinguists can join scientists and the many others who stress our responsibility for terrestrial life or, in the terms of ancient Chinese tradition, for harmony between heaven and earth.

Abstract The paper examines Marcello Barbieri’s (2007) Introduction to Biosemiotics. Highlighting debate within the biosemiotic community, it focuses on what the volume offers to those who explain human intellect in relation to what Turing called our ‘physical powers.’ In scrutinising the basis of world-modelling, parallels and contrasts are drawn with other work on embodied-embedded cognition. Models dominate biology. Is this a qualitative fact or does it point to biomechanisms? In evaluating the 18 contributions, it is suggested that the answers will shape the field. First, they will decide if biochemistry and explanatory reduction can be synergised by biosemantics. Second, they will show if our intellectual powers arise from
biology. Does thinking use—not a language faculty—but what Markoš and colleagues call semiosis by the living? Resolution of such issues, it is suggested, can change how we view cognition. Above all, if the biomechanists win the day, cultural models can be regarded as extending natural meaning. On such a view, biomechanisms prompt us to act and perceive as we model our own natural models. This fits Craik’s vision: intellect gives us the alphanumerical ‘symbols’ that allow thoughts to have objective validity. For the biomechanist, this is explained—not by brains alone—but, rather, by acting under the constraints of historically extended sensoria.

While much scholarly work has contributed to the theorizing of translanguaging, in this article, we sketch an alternative model based on materiality and information theory (Bateson, 1951; Lemke, 2015) to theorize translanguaging together with flows, through reconsidering issues of speech events in which features normally associated with different language systems co-occur. And in doing so, we hope to contribute to the ongoing theorizing work in the field of translanguaging.

This is nominally a book review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (The MIT Press, 2013). But it is a narrowly focused and highly prejudicial review, which presents an analysis of a contradiction at the heart of the book. Radicalizing Enactivism is a powerful and original philosophical argument against representations in cognition, but it repeatedly endorses an old-fashioned representationalism about language. I show that this contradiction arises from the authors’ unexamined, reflexive adoption of traditional linguistic concepts and terminology, which presuppose a representational interpretation of linguistic capacities and phenomena. The key piece of evidence for this analyses is the separability of Hutto and Myin’s substantive remarks on the ontogeny of language-dependent cognitive capacities, which they explain in terms of scaffolding and decoupling, from the representational gloss on those remarks that they present as if it were simply identical with observed empirical matters of fact. They follow a model laid out in Hutto’s earlier work, in which everyday linguistic activity is understood as instantiating abstract public vehicles with representational content (i.e., sentences which express propositions). I argue that this model is susceptible both to pre-existing arguments against representational theories of language and to a variant of their own ‘Hard Problem of Content’. The take-away lesson from Radicalizing Enactivism is that anti-representationalist accounts of language remain unconvincing - even to radicals like Hutto and Myin - because they have no way of explaining the phenomenal experience of literate speakers, wherein words really do feel like instantiations of abstract forms with determinable semantics. I suggest that anti-representationalists can address this by focusing on the ways in which patterns of attention become stabilized and interpersonally regularized as we learn language.

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.

I use biological simplexity to argue that, having recognised nature’s repeated tricks, one can reconnect coordinated linguistic embodiment with language in its verbal aspect. The fact of linguistic symbiosis is exemplified in face-to-face dialogue and, later, in relation to an instance of text-messaging that show language as, at once, multi-scalar, individual and collective. With Didier Bottineau, I argue that language links interactivity or “embodied coordination” with “techniques” for vocal and gestural sense-making. Next, I consider implications for (our idea of) evolution, know-how and individual-collective agency. As living humans become persons, I argue, they gain skills in linguistic cognition –they mesh collective knowing with ways of linking experience to action (“perçaction”).  Language becomes crucial to the bio-ecology (plant-animal-human-cultural formations), affords a metaphorical home for Yin and Yang, and connects living beings within a social domain. I conclude that linguists and semioticians have a major role in the collective thinking that is needed to reduce the degradation of the living world.

A growing number of scholars regard language as social co-ordination. Not only does this overcome stale debate about whether langauge is cognitive or communicative but it opens up new thinking about its evolutionary history. Focusing on populations, the paper outlines and critiques Merlin Donald’s view of the human mind. It endorses the view that the evolutionary emergence of language can be traced to mimesis or what, twenty years ago, was called the “ability to produce conscious self-initiated representational acts that are intentional” (Donald, 1991: 168). However, ecological critique rejects the original theory’s appeal to symbolic models. I therefore argue that, while Donald is regarded as likely to be correct about the evolutionary basis of language (and languaging), it is possible to simplify his account. Instead of positing 3 evolutionary thresholds (mimesis, language and writing), mimetic skills may themselves be sufficient to ground all the slow processes of human cognition. Indeed, like tool-making, they probably co-evolved with vocal coordination. As cultures developed tools together with ‘public language’, we gained skills in using distributed cognition –ways of living that were later extended by external resources such as, for example, writing, religions, laws and technologies.

The paper asks how languaging and language influence the world of the living. Extending Clements and Shelford (1939), the bio-ecology is redefined as the domain of plant-animal-human-culture formations. The move places what people do as a result of languaging into a reciprocal relation with the bio-ecology. While shaped by discourse and beliefs about language-systems (and representations), the language and actions of human organism-environment systems change the world. As Garner (2004) argues, ecolinguistics can do more than invoke ‘interaction’ between language and ecology. While ‘realities’ are partly shared, much is biophysical. Living subjects link language and languaging with experience and technologies that have transformed the bio-ecology. Once these dynamics are subject to investigation, macrosocial issues can be reconnected with biological, human and linguistic concerns. Ecolinguistics can thus illuminate the dynamics which enmesh the bio-ecology, human evolution, local histories, and language. In short, part of the field’s agenda becomes that of clarifying how languaging and language affect plant-animal-human-culture formations. If the approach can be used to forge a unified perspective on the bio-ecology, it will have non-negligible economic and political implications.

From Nigel Love's perspective, language is a multi-scalar process that connects people, history and nature. In leaving behind the Saussurian tradition's object based views, he contrasts first and second order language. However, the 'orders' do not explain each other and, implicated as they are in change, cannot be defined. Indeed, Love suggests that language can describe everything under the sun – except language. I concur that how people speak cannot explain language and, conversely, that linguistic analysis cannot explain how people speak. By tracing language to interdependency between two 'orders', Love makes use of carefully crafted tautologies. Such a perspective illustrates the kind of abduction that Gregory Bateson finds across nature. In showing this, I compare how contingency-driven change serves birds with Love's use of beguiling tautologies. These, I claim, contribute much to the productivity of his perspective. While integrationists celebrate his tautologies as paradoxes, in dialogism, there is a tendency to relate them to theses. Others make unexpected changes: the Distributed Language Approach traces language to interactivity between ecological beings and, echoing hylomorphism, others trance human plasticity to the interplay of language, nature and peculiar kind of social agency. As the effects of Love's perspective ripple across the human sciences, I conclude, they are changing the idea of language.

Heteronomy informs parts of human sense-making including perceptual and linguistic activities. This article explores Berthoz's (2012) notion of simplexity in relation to heteronomous aspects of human cognition while it criticises proponents of active externalism for presuming that cognitive activity is based in strong autonomy. Specifically, its negative target is the problematic aspects of Varelian Enactivism and Extended Cognitive Functionalism which are linked to the assumption that cognition is conditioned by the cogniser's strong autonomy. Since proponents of active externalism presume that cognition has a clear agent-to-world directionality, they prove unable to account for cases where cognition is informed by novel sensuous inputs. The article presents a positive argument that acknowledges the embodied basis of human sense-making as well as the weak autonomy of the cogniser. It argues that biological simplexity not only enables human enacted perception, but also underlies the embodied habits that shape the perceptual horizon that grants us being-in-the-world. This horizon has a heteronomous dimension which allows us to set up habits, orient ourselves towards unknown parts of our surroundings and engage in conversations. In fact, we are able to communicate with others because linguistic activity originates in enacted perception and sense-saturated coordination.

To challenge cognitivism it is important emphasise how human bodies function. Like other organisms, we evolved to act and perceive in changing environments. In spite of the fact that this can be described as representing aspects of the world, there is no reason to think that people use what are representations for the brain (Steiner 2010). The central nervous system deals in the body-world relations that sustain flexible, adaptive behaviour. Bodies use measurable physical events or cognitive dynamics to control how they coordinate with the world. Humans extend this general capacity by cooperating in cultural settings.

Biology thus becomes enmeshed with history and, in looking at language too, this must be traced to minded behaviour. It follows that language -and teaching languages -must be explicated with respect to how encounters with the world are experienced as meaningful (Gibson 1979). Far from being subjective or abstract, cognitive dynamics function as public opportunities and threats. Social activity realizes values that motivate inhibition, thinking and communication (Gibson 1950; Hodges & Geyer 2006; Hodges 2007). In language, successes and failures arise as we mesh wordings with experience of items that serve in a (partly) shared social world. Using this perspective, I turn to pedagogical design and signs of writing to consider how applied linguistics can be enriched by viewing language as values realizing activity. The main concern of applied linguists becomes, not learning, but SLA or 'skilled linguistic action'.

Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. Cowbirds, for example, coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert 'long-distance' control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee's work, we compare the foxtail's self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour (or languaging) grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers.

Linguists classically focus on phenomenologically salient units or verbal patterns. In biolinguistics, these are “explained” by positing a brain that grows a system that identifies / generates linguistic forms (a “language faculty”). The paper offers an alternative: individuals become skilled in linguistic action by using cultural resources to extend their embodiment. Language and languages are heterogeneous and distributed. Although the verbal is salient, its basis lies in coordinated biosemiotic activity. In illustrating this perspective, the paper builds on two case studies of real-time events. These show that people link fine inter-bodily coordination with skills in orienting to utterances as types – they use cultural patterns to constrain biosemiosis. As people become strategic actors, they rely on embodiment (and, of course, brains) to develop skills based on taking a language stance. By imaginatively separating language from activity, they both tame biosemiotic powers and transform the brain’s functional organisation. There is no need for language genes, neural spandrels or undiscovered physical principles. Wittgenstein’s (1958) view that language connects living human bodies within forms of life can thus be extended by means of empirical and observational work.

The classical pragmatists––Peirce, James Dewey, and Mead––all had important things to say about the self and there are clear continuities in their thought. Since little work has been done to connect them up, in this chapter I trace these continuities and begin to assemble a picture of a pragmatist conception of the self. The picture that emerges is strikingly modern and original and has much to offer contemporary accounts of the self.

This dissertation uses an ecological framework to investigate human error in the social practice of emergency medicine. An ecological framework embraces a phenomenon in its wholeness - that means as part of a larger system than that which appears in real-time. The overarching motivation behind this project was nourished by an interest in how the multi-scalarity of human cognition in emergency medicine relates to human errors and successes. Having introduced the field of human errors, the dissertation sets out to answer the overall question:

How do healthcare practitioners manage cognitive events in patient diagnosis and treatment in a way that yields cognitive results?

I further raise three subquestions that relate to the overall research question:

(i) How do healthcare practitioners anticipate and counter errors? How does an emergency medical team function to prevent errors in complex diagnostic situations? How do errors emerge and escalate in a (dys)functional social system?
(ii) How does medical culture affect real-time interaction and how is the culture itself shaped by the exact same dynamics?
(iii) What are the methodological innovations that can be extrapolated from an ecological perspective on human errors and an ecological approach to language and cognition?

The dissertation concludes that an ecological approach is apt for explaining how events on multiple timescales affect cognition in complex organisations. Thus, by tracing practitioners’ cognition to an ecosystemic activity, I show how cognitive results are shaped by non-local dynamics and situational affordances for actions within the cognitive system. The dissertation’s empirical findings are specific examples of non-local dynamics and situational affordances for action in real-life diagnostic events.
  Chapter 2 reviews and contrasts a conversation analytical approach (CA) to social interaction with Hutchins’ classic approach to the study of distributed cognition (DC), which are two major approaches to the studies of social interaction. It shows how DC favours embodied information processing within a distributed cognitive system defined by functional properties, while CA underlines the sequential organisation of social orderliness in a local situation. It concludes by claiming that both positions are inadequate in the exploration of the phenomenon in its ecological entirety, as, in each case, the enabling conditions for human behaviour are reduced to a single domain of either social orderliness or representational states.
  Building on an ecological view, chapter 3 presents an alternative analytical framework for studying the ecology of human cognition in complex organisations: the interactivity-based framework. This framework provides analytical models and theoretical perspectives to investigate the multiple time-scales in human cognition. Specifically, the innovative approach of Cognitive Event Analysis (CEA) is used for investigating cognitive events in local interaction. 
  Chapter 4 presents the project’s research design. I use cognitive ethnography to examine the real-time dynamics of medical decision-making and other cognitive events at a Danish Hospital (Køge Hospital). The primary data material consists of video-recordings of 17 real-life diagnostic and treatment situations in the hospital’s emergency department. From beginning to end, the case study was carried out by the author - as were the coding and general data processing. Based on the initial coding process, six themes were defined and further investigated.
  Six analytical chapters (chapter 5-10) treat these themes as aspects of the diagnostic encounter in the emergency ward. Using the interactivity-based framework, the analyses take their starting point in the enchronic timescale, using CEA to frame cognitive events. From there they move beyond the conversational scale of interactivity and embrace both the rapid pico-scales and the larger cultural scales of interactivity as explanatory resources in the investigation of how cognitive results are reached. The analysis examines how agents, artefacts and expertise are linked on multiple timescales. This analysis seeks to balance (potential) medical error cycles and a more general understanding of how practitioners undertake treatment as a team-based problem-solving activity.
  Each chapter, thus, focuses on a thematic aspect related to the systemic function of cognition: (a) medical visual systems; (b) interruptions; (c) diagnostic procedures; (d) medical cultural dynamics; (e) sense-making in teams and (f) writing the electronic medical record. The analyses demonstrate how team members enact expertise-in-action, and also how lack of coordination and communication can lead to human errors. In particular, it shows that non-routine events are crucial to what goes on in the emergency ward: anomalous events afford errors and trigger feedback mechanisms which prompt team members to anticipate possible changes of plans. For instance, it can be demonstrated that interruptions are handled differently depending on the interlocutors’ level of expertise, team composition and situational and material circumstances. In conducting empirical analyses of how practitioners manage cognitive events, it becomes evident how the concept of multiple timescales is crucial to understand the enabling conditions of human cognition. Specifically, the chapters show (a) how visual systems are extended in space-time, (b) how procedures and interruptions constrain practitioners in balancing multiple moral values as part of cognition, (c) how cultural patterns shape local role hierarchies that are shaped by the very same dynamics of local interaction, (d) how team members co-act and manage cognitive events by relying on the team’s sense-making capacities, and finally (e) how rich embodiment increases the chances for flexible adaptive behaviour in human-artefact interaction. A common element unites the chapters. Each chapter shows, in different ways, that when practitioners are unable to balance the non-local and local constraints on the system, they fixate on one thing, which increases the risk for the emergence of error cycles. In contrast, when practitioners are capable of balancing non-local and local constraints on the system, they are able to adapt flexibly to changes in the environment and to anticipate what comes next.
  Chapter 11 concludes by summarising how the project’s empirical findings respond to the research questions that motivated it. A synthesis of the empirical results forms the basis for a description of their practical implications. These implications are discussed in relation to challenges in everyday medical practice. On these grounds three initiatives are suggested: (a) the implementation of a new model of language and cognition in the field, (b) changing the basic assumptions of what is relevant content in training programmes and (c) dealing with (the design of) material artefacts as flexible artefact environments.
  The dissertation makes clear that it does not provide a complete account of the entire ecology of human cognition. Rather, it gives an ecological account of pivotal elements in (dys)functional cognition. Thus, a cross-section of the ecology is investigated to demonstrate the complexity, spatial extension and multi-temporality of human cognition in complex organisations. The process of determining the precise extent of cognitive ecosystems can explain the dynamic and bounded possibilities individuals have for producing cognitive results. This insight connects to the third research subquestion, the one concerning which methodological innovations can be derived from an ecological perspective. Crucial to the ecological perspective on human errors, interaction and cognition, is the fact that local coordination is understood to be sense-saturated. Behaviour is shaped by sense-saturated coordination rather than being local instantiations of individual logical choices. In this, the interactivity-based framework contrasts with other approaches to human interaction, and for the reasons mentioned above it provides the best option if the aim is to study dynamics in the ecology of human life, including human cognition.
  Finally, a broad, long-term ambition of this project is to contribute to an ecological turn within the humanities and the cognitive sciences. By showing the results of embedding naturalistic studies of human interactivity in an ecological framework, the project illuminates the benefits of treating language and cognition as ecological, distributed and intertwined in interactivity. In so doing, it challenges traditional approaches in linguistics and cognitive science to adapt their methods in accord with these foundational assumptions.

Translation has traditionally been viewed as a branch of applied linguistics. This has changed drastically in recent decades, which have witnessed translation studies growing as a field beyond, and sometimes against, applied linguistics. This paper is an attempt to think translation back into applied linguistics by reconceptualizing translation through the notions of distributed language, semiotic repertoire, and assemblage. It argues that: (a) embedded within a larger textual-media ecology, translation is enacted through dialogical interaction among the persons, texts, technologies, platforms, institutions, and traditions operating within that ecology; (b) what we call translations are second-order constructs, or relatively stable formations of signs abstracted from the processual flux of translating on the first-order; (c) translation is not just about moving a work from one discrete language system across to another, but about distributing it through semiotic repertoires; (d) by orchestrating resources performatively, translations are not just interventions in the target language and culture, but are transformative of the entire translingual and multimodal space (discursive, interpretive, material) surrounding a work. The paper argues that distributed thinking helps us de-fetishize translation as an object of study and reimagine translators as partaking of a creative network of production alongside other human and non-human agents.

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, hereifies ‘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 embodies 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.

The underlying assumption of this paper is that language co-evolved with social coordination. In the commonest forms of language-based coordination, therefore, people do things together while also talking. Although there are many other ways of coupling language with human action and coaction, our concern is with the relevant coordinative capacities. Rejecting the view that they reduce to either pure Shannon information or embodied mind, we trace its grounding to social coordination. Language is sensorimotor coordination that (re) enacts the symbolic pattern of a collective world. Together, these shape human modes of action.
Physical coordination contributes to linguistic interactions. Rather than argue that linguistic forms are ‘wired’ by an individual brain, we turn to how cognition can involve “concerns that are not immediately related to physiological and biological events” (Froese & Di Paolo 2011, p. 12). Since language is both non-local and physical, language has an important constitutive role in the human ecology. Given its non-local aspect, as we speak through language, language speaks through us: strategic gains can have gradually accrued from mutual coordination. Linking this insight to both Becker’s (1988) and Maturana’s (1978) views, we suggest that languaging be defined as “routine face-to-face activity in which wordings play a part” (Cowley 2012). From an evolutionary perspective, this shifts the focus from the results of grammatical and lexicographical analysis to how language arises as collective modes of control provide a background against which we can concert sensorimotor activity. On this view, language is whole-bodied activity that functions both directly –as concerted action –and as pattern has a constitutive role in social routines and practices.