Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language

428 Pages·2018·7.29 MB·

by  Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, Hanne De Jaegher

Linguistic Bodies

Linguistic Bodies
The Continuity between Life and Language
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in ITC Stone Sans Std and ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set
Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. author. | Cuffari, Elena Clare author. |
De Jaegher, Hanne author.
Title: Linguistic bodies : the continuity between life and language /
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001231 | ISBN 9780262038164 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Philosophy. | Language and languages.
Classification: LCC P106 .L53965 2018 | DDC 400--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001231
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Verena,
Giorgos and Kato,
Floris and Colette

Contents
Acknowledgments xi
1 Making Introductions 1
1.1 Letter of Invitation 1
1.2 The Continuity between Life and Language 3
1.3 This Book Is about Bodies (and Also about Language) 6
I Bodies 11
2 Living Bodies 13
2.1 What Kind of Bodies? 13
2.2 Reframing the Sciences of the Mind 15
2.3 Two Senses of Embodiment 18
2.4 From Self-Individuation to Meaning 22
2.4.1 Living as Caring 22
2.4.2 Autonomy 23
2.4.3 Sense-Making and Agency 32
2.4.4 Life’s Primordial Tension 37
3 Enacted Bodies 43
3.1 Feelings of Agency 43
3.2 Animal Bodies 44
3.3 Sensorimotor Networks and Habits 46
3.4 Sensorimotor Agency 48
4 Intersubjective Bodies 61
4.1 Intercorporeality 61
4.2 The Autonomy of Social Interactions 64
4.3 Participatory Sense-Making 73
4.4 Readiness to Interact 75
4.5 Participatory Sense-Making in Practice 81
4.6 Not One, Not Two 83
viii Contents
5 Entanglement and Historicity 87
5.1 Billions of Different Bodies 87
5.2 A Recapitulation 97
II Linguistic Bodies 103
6 Dialectics: A Tool for Enactivists 105
6.1 Language as a Concrete Totality 105
6.2 Dialectics and the Enactive Approach 107
6.3 The Abstract and the Concrete 111
6.4 Dialectics in Psychology and the Study of Language 116
6.4.1 The Complicated Real Life of Language 116
6.4.2 The Bakhtin Circle 118
6.4.3 Merleau-Ponty 121
6.4.4 Tran Duc Thao 123
6.4.5 Psychology 125
6.5 Dialectical Motifs 129
7 From Participatory Sense-Making … 131
7.1 Toward a Constitutive Theory of Language 131
7.2 Choosing a Starting Point 136
7.3 A Dialectical Model, First Part 138
7.3.1 The Primordial Tension of Participatory
Sense-Making 139
7.3.2 Social Agency 145
7.3.3 Coordination of Social Acts: Going Meta 152
7.3.4 Normativity of Social Acts 157
7.4 The Model So Far 159
8 … to Linguistic Bodies 165
8.1 A Dialectical Model, Continued 165
8.1.1 Community of Interactors 166
8.1.2 Dialogue and Mutual Recognition 171
8.1.3 Participation Genres 179
8.1.4 Reported Utterances 186
8.1.5 Linguistic Bodies 191
8.2 The Objectifying Attitude Emerges 198
8.3 Linguistic Bodies Are Unfinished 209
III Living as Linguistic Bodies 213
9 Becoming Linguistic Bodies 215
9.1 Linguistic Experience 215