Intercultural dialogue and the processing of significance: cognition as orientation

J. Seibt, J. Garsdal (eds.) How Is Global Dialogue Possible?—Foundational Research on Values, Conflicts, and Intercultural Thought, Degruyter New York, 2015. Draft version

Johanna Seibt CHAPTER FIVE Intercultural dialogue and the processing of significance: cognition as orientation This chapter explores connections between the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue and theories of cognition. Theories of cognition investigate how living organisms of suitable complexity generate cognitive significances, which for the human case include meanings, valuations, beliefs, and motivations. A theory of cognition has many different types of data, ranging from neurophysiological measurements to third-person observation to the phenomenology of cognition, i.e., to experienced and introspectively re-identifiable differences in cognitive processing and type of cognitive contents. The thesis I will try to make plausible in this chapter is that the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue can provide important leads for theory choice in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, at least if one admits the form of argument called ‘inference to the best explanation.’ I will thus ask here the book’s topical question ‘how is intercultural dialogue possible?’ in the sense of ‘which theory of cognition can best explain the phenomenal aspects of understanding as we experience them in intercultural dialogue?’ Theories based on the so-called “computational paradigm” of cognition where understanding is conceived of as algorithmic processing of predefined symbols seem ill-suited to explain the phenomenology of dialogue. In contrast, approaches to cognition along the lines of the compet-ing new paradigm of “embodied cognition” can accommodate all relevant phe-nomenal aspects.

The chapter’s primary aim, then, is to argue for the significance of intercultural dialogue as a datum for a theory of cognition. However, in the process of doing so it will also become apparent that, vice versa, cognitive sci-ence research can also contribute to a better understanding of intercultural dialogue in theory and praxis. Insights about the cognitive processing involved in dialogue might allow us to identify non-attitudinal factors—e.g., sensory relevant aspects of the spatial environment as well as temporal aspects—that are positively linked to facilitating the relevant communicative attitudes of dia-logue participants.

I proceed from the simple observation that intercultural dialogue would not be undertaken if it did not engender at least some degree of subjective under-standing, that is, understanding in the weak sense as one speaker’s impression of being ‘able to follow’ the utterances of another speaker. Moreover, it seems

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that participants of intercultural dialogues, i.e., speakers who belong to radi-cally different cultural and linguistic communities, not only subjectively feel that they can make some sense of the utterances of their interlocutors, they also have the impression of reaching some sort of mutual understanding. The im-pression of such mutual understanding could amount to the literal sharing of some cognitive content across linguistic and cultural barriers—in cognitive science research the current consensus on linguistic and cultural relativity ap-pears to be that while language plays an important role in shaping human thought, there is no evidence for ‘hermetic relativism,’ i.e., the thesis that the linguistic and cultural norms of a community strictly delimit what members of that community can think.1 However, we do not even have to assume that the mutuality of understanding in intercultural dialogue is grounded in literally shared cognitive content. As I argue below, even if the mutuality of understand-ing engendered by intercultural dialogue were a subjective illusion on all sides and warranted only at the practical level, by nothing else but the occurrence of certain interaction patterns, this would suffice to claim that intercultural under-standing is a distinctive cognitive activity that a theory of cognitive significance should account for.

Based on this empirical premise that we experience mutual understanding in intercultural dialogue, the chapter’s overall argument proceeds in three steps. In a first step I delineate the type of situation that is targeted by the no-tions ‘dialogue’ and ‘intercultural dialogue’ in their reflected use, and recon-struct the main elements of the phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue.

In a second step I consider the epistemic status of the kind of understand-ing generated by intercultural dialogue. As it turns out, ‘intercultural’ under-standing involves a type of knowledge that is neither theoretical ‘knowing-that’ nor practical ‘knowing-how.’ Guided by the phenomenological elements of (intercultural) dialogue, I suggest that the understanding generated in this type of communicative situation is best classified as orientation. Orientation—e.g., in its most familiar form as spatial orientation—is neither propositional knowledge nor inference nor the formation of an intention for action but a mental operation sui generis.

In the third step of the argument I set out with a brief reconstruction of an early proposal for ‘embodied cognition, the so-called “theory of cognitive orien-tation” developed by psychologists H. and S. Kreitler (1976); hereafter abbrevi-ated as ‘TCO’. Even though TCO is prima facie outdated, it is still relevant for the conceptualization of cognition and I will use it here as a generic representative

|| 1 Cf. e.g. Gumperz & Levinson 1996, Casasanto 2004, 2010.

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of the embodied cognition approach with useful ‘umbrella’ terminology. TCO uses the familiar process of orientation, i.e., the ‘online’ interaction of an organ-ism with its environment, as model for the process of cognition in general, a postulated theoretical entity called “cognitive orientation.” According to TCO, cognitive orientation is a fast and defaulted interactivity between organism and environment; the routines that emerge from this interactivity have quasi-objectual permanence and can be classified as meaning and values. But cogni-tive orientation also occurs in two slow modes, especially in heuristic cognition. I argue that the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue is best explained in terms of a slow mode of heuristic social cognition.

Altogether, then, I suggest, that dialogue, but especially intercultural dia-logue, is an opportunity to experience the process of cognition in ‘slow-motion’—cognition is always social meaning-making, the contextual working up of meanings, rather than the processing of ready-made symbolic representa-tions. In everyday conversations, where meanings are communicational tools to achieve certain goals, the generation of contextualized meanings happens too fast to enter our awareness. In intercultural dialogue, however, our routinized valuations are challenged; we are forced to re-experience the dynamic origins of valuations in the searching activity of orientation and to recalibrate our field of significances.

In conclusion I briefly consider two implications of this suggestion. I argue that the link between, on the one hand, the natural interactivity of cognition and the experienced process of creating significances during dialogue opens up the route towards a processual conception of values. Second, I suggest that cognitive science research on the cognitive processing of narratives, e.g. on neuronal simulations of movements during the cognitive processing of action words, may hold important clues for an assessment of the role of the scholarly narratives produced by intercultural value research in academic contexts.

Elements of a phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue

The expressions ‘intercultural dialogue’ and ‘intercultural understanding’ are used for a rather wide range of activities and phenomena, especially in political contexts. Many of these communicative activities and phenomena are rather remote from those situations that correspond to what one might call the ‘re-flected sense’ of dialogue. In this latter sense ‘dialogue’ denotes a distinctive type of interpersonal communicative engagement that attracted the attention of thinkers such as Mikhael Bakhtin, Martin Buber, David Bohm, or Carl Rogers. I shall largely avoid, however, any theoretical idiom and try to characterize the

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relevant communicational engagement in common sense terms. I begin with a conceptual analysis of the term ‘dialogue’ in its reflected sense, in order to be able to hone in on a sufficiently specific kind of communicative situation; in a second step I will characterize some of the main phenomenological aspects of situations of this type.

In common usage the term ‘dialogue’ refers to direct personal conversation between two or more people, and further, more narrowly, to a distinct type of communication that contrasts with discussion, argument, interrogation, brain storming, planning, co-ordination or instruction. Communication studies have their own criteria to distinguish dialogue from other sorts of communication and differentiate between various types of dialogues.2 Staying with a common-sensical description of phenomenal features, however, dialogue stands out as a form of conversational engagement without extraneous purpose or product—there is no opponent to be defeated, no action plan to be worked out, no infor-mation to be extracted, etc. To be sure, a certain episode of arguing might de facto fail to vindicate a claim, or an episode of joint planning might de facto fail to result in a plan; but arguing or joint planning are communicative actions that are undertaken for the sake of certain products. In contrast, an episode of dia-logue has its communicative goal in communication itself. Dialogue, it is often said, is undertaken in order to listen. But even here, the listening is not aimed at receiving instructions, at the assessment of competences, or at the detection of lies. A dialogue does not aim to accomplish certain results or to produce some-thing—it is undertaken merely for the sake of creating a joined horizon of un-derstanding, in order to enable continued meaningful communication.

This observation is reminiscent of Aristotle’s distinction (in Metaphysics Theta. 6) between, on the one hand, ‘accomplishments’ or productions (kine-seis)—i.e., telic actions that are performed in order to achieve a purpose or goal beyond the occurrence of the action—and, on the other hand, ‘activities’ (ener-geiai)—i.e., actions that are undertaken for the sake of their own occurrence. But again, staying with the phenomenology of dialogue, I think it is important to point at the difference between, on the one hand, self-directed actions that are undertaken strictly for the sake their own occurrence, and, on the other hand, self-facilitating activities.3 An episode of dialogue is a self-facilitating activity,

|| 2 Cf. Anderson et al. 2004. 3 When I intentionally raise my arm just in order to intentionally raise my arm, I perform a strictly self-directed action, an action that is undertaken for the sake of their own occurrence, but one might question whether such actions ever have a natural pragmatic context. Even though Aristotle discusses in Metaphysics Theta.6 human actions, one should note that the target of his distinction are more generally forms of dynamics or types of processes.


not a self-directed activity—no dialogue is undertaken just for the sake of dia-logue, but for the sake of improving the conditions for future communication.4

If we say that the purpose of an action is the aim of the action that lies in an ‘extraneous’ product, i.e., an independent product that differs from of the type of action performed, then it would appear that dialogue is a mode of com-munication that has an aim but no purpose. For this reason, because dialogue does not try to achieve anything beyond the facilitation of communication, it is often a form of communication used in order to transform a conflict. In fact, by ‘dialogue’ we often refer to a specific communicative situation where the speak-ers involved have prima facie incompatible agentive commitments but no longer aim to defeat each other by argument or rhetoric.

It would be misleading, however, to characterize dialogue simply as the tool or process of communicative conflict transformation.5 Different types of conflict call for different types of conflict resolution or mitigation—commonly sorted into problem-solving, negotiation, arbitration, mediation, and facilita-tion—and in some of these forms of conflict intervention dialogue plays no es-sential role or even no role at all. 6 For example, in conflicts of interests that are resolved by arbitration, i.e., by a third party with authority recognized by both conflicting parties, dialogue among conflicting parties is not called for. Simi-larly, conflicts of interest that are addressed by problem solving or negotiation may not relevantly involve dialogue among the conflicting parties—here discus-sion and rational argument may suffice. On the other hand, the primary goal of third party mediators or facilitators is to assist the conflicting parties to imple-ment a process of conflict transformation, and for this purpose it may be useful to create the communicative stance of dialogue on different occasions through-out the process, at the beginning or at the neuralgic point of the process where “shifts of consciousness” are in sight.7

However, there is one type of conflict that is inseparably tied to dialogue in the sense that dialogue appears to be the only instrument we have in order to transform such conflicts—namely, conflicts generated by incompatible com-

|| 4 This holds in particular for the dialogues that David Bohm realized in ”dialogue groups” who nominally meet ’for the sake of engaging in dialogue’ without topic and agenda, but, as be-comes clear from Bohm’s exposition of the concept, do have a purpose, namely, to observe the workings of consciousness and the interactive constitution of meaning; cf. Bohm 1996: 6ff. 5 In Skandinavian countries the term ‘dialogue’ is frequently used in a semi-technical sense to refer to the settlement of labor conflicts. Similarly, Bohm (ibid.) observes that in international politics the term has rhetorical use and predominantly denotes negotiation. 6 Cf. Cheldelin et al. 2003 and below chapter 7. 7 Cf. Allan Nan 2011.

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mitments resulting from diverse cultural values. Conflicts resulting from differ-ences in cultural values—which are here taken in the broadest sense and includ-ing ethnic and religious values—cannot be negotiated. As Rodogno (chapter 6 below) explains, value diversity with genuine potential for conflicts requires that both parties hold the relevant values in the special form of “attachments,” which are constitutive for an agent’s self-understanding (‘identity’). Further-more, conflicts that result from valuative commitments cannot be resolved by arbitration; in cultural differences, in particular for religious differences, there is no likely cultural authority acknowledged by all parties. If such conflicts cannot be settled by power (as opposed to resolved, see Druckmann 2002 and chapter 7 below), the remaining option is to ‘facilitate’ a resolution by dialogue.

If dialogue is used as a form of conflict intervention in cultural conflicts, the conflicting parties will need to engage in intercultural dialogue, a form of communication that has the aims of dialogue in general—the aim of enabling and improving ongoing communication by creating a joint horizon of under-standing across cultural boundaries. However, intercultural dialogue is a form of communication that can be, and frequently is, undertaken outside of the context of an ongoing conflict, and not even with a view of reducing the likeli-hood of a future conflict. The attempt of transcending one’s own cultural hori-zon of understanding is a special hermeneutic undertaking that can be pursued in its own right.8

To summarize our considerations so far, dialogue is a communicative ac-tivity that has no extraneous purpose but is self-facilitating, i.e., undertaken only with the aim of generating present and future understanding; unlike me-diation or arbitration dialogue is not a phase of conflict mitigation, even though this is frequently a context where this type of communicative activity is recom-mended.

Let us continue then and investigate more closely the way in which par-ticipants of a dialogue experience this sort of communicative activity. There are, I submit, three interconnected aspects that stand out in the phenomenology of (intra- and inter-cultural) dialogue.

|| 8 Global intellectual history shows that this hermeneutic enterprise often has been pursued independently of conflict contexts; cf. for instance the cases cited in Shayegan (Chapter 1 above) or the European fascination with China in the 17th and 18th century, carried by Western scientists and scholars (cf. e.g. Jacobsen 2013 and the reference in note 1 of the introduction to the Part II).


First, the fact that dialogue is a communicative activity that is not instru-mentalized is commonly experienced as a form of acknowledgement.9 Since a dialogue is not geared towards a product, whether intrinsic to the conversation (e.g., disputation of topic) or extrinsic (e.g., plan), the participants of a dialogue do not perceive themselves as tools but as ends in themselves. Each participant is engaged for the sake of realizing his or her understanding or ‘meaning mak-ing’—that very capacity that we experience as our own form of being.10 In intercultural dialogue this first phenomenal aspect, acknowledgement, is par-ticularly strong, since the participants are acutely aware of the fact that the communicative activity they are engaged in cannot serve any intrinsic or extrin-sic instrumental purpose, given the linguistic-semantic and conceptual obsta-cles they perceive. On might even say, for the situation of intercultural dialogue, the less dialogue partners can linguistically interact, the more they are present to each other as non-instrumentalized human beings, and the special effort at continued communication affirms such presence. In other words, assuming that ‘meaning making’—our capacity of ‘taking something as something’—is the distinctive form of human being, precisely because communication is hampered in intercultural dialogue, the sustained effort of participants at understanding and at affording understanding constitutes an affirmation of what it is to be human, in oneself and in the other.

The second ingredient in the phenomenal experience of dialogue partici-pants is the awareness of a cognitive search. While in instrumentalized commu-nicative interactions speaker and hearer process cognitive contents subcon-sciously and attend to the external goal of the interaction, in dialogue participants become aware of the cognitive processes as such—cognitive con-tents are no longer used or even experienced as ‘ready-made’ packages of in-formation, they are felt as the yet unavailable products of mutual linguistic understanding. In Martin Buber’s phenomenology of dialogue this aspect of cognitive search is the outstanding characteristic of the cognitive posture of the so-called “I-Thou” relationship, which Buber contrasts with the posture of the “I-It.” While in the “I-It” mode of cognition we effortlessly apply and express established classificatory concepts, cognition in the mode of the “I-Thou” rela-tionship is the experience of grasping as effort, of the taking in of potential con-

|| 9 This point is stressed by many authors, cf.e.g. Hyde 2004, however without exploring the connection between acknowledgement and the lack of instrumentalization. 10 I take this here as a basic phenomenological datum, setting aside philosophical elabora-tions of this insight in Bergson, Buber, and Heidegger. The ‘understanding’ at issue here is the effort of making sense, as hermeneutic activity, not the exchange of semantic content between two speakers.

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tent. In dialogue, Buber observes, the ‘I’ is “arrested” in the experience of ongo-ing cognitive exploration of the ‘Thou.’11 In other words, the dynamics of mean-ing-making is ‘arresting’ since it is felt as search or ongoing effort, as the experi-ence of partial failure and the necessity of renewed engagement.

Closely connected with the felt effort of meaning making is the third ele-ment of the phenomenological experience of dialogue, namely, the awareness of the social nature of meaning making. Participants of dialogue are both posi-tively and negatively aware of this feature, as a dimension that is both present and absent. Interlocutors are aware of sociality as present in the sense that they are awareness of the other as physical present—they take in another human being that is exposed in its inexhaustible particularity.12 But sociality is also experienced as absence in the sense of an absence of social contents—the fact that in the “I-Thou” mode established conceptualizations for the content of the experience are lacking is experienced as a lack of social confirmation. The com-bined experience of the social dimension as present and absent generates the feel of ‘adventure,’ of precariousness and exposure, but also of open potential-ity. The physical presence of the interlocutor is felt as immediate totality—as not mediated and filtered by the classificatory concepts of a linguistic community; vice versa, interlocutors are aware of the fact that they are not protected from the ‘onslaught’ of the totality of the other’s otherness by the common layer of conceptual filters, i.e., that they cannot hide behind conventional meanings and roles. This double immediacy, the immediacy and exposure of self, and the immediacy of the totality of an ‘other’ is felt more strongly to the degree to which social meanings are experienced as absent—that is, it is felt more strongly again in intercultural than in inner-cultural dialogue.

Altogether then, we have arrived at the following characterization of dia-logue, inner-cultural and inter-cultural. Dialogue is a non-instrumentalized or merely self-facilitating communicative activity that is undertaken only for the aim of realizing present and future understanding. The interlocutors of a dia-logue experience this communicative activity as an acknowledgement of what it is to be human—as the capacity of understanding or meaning making. The re-alization of this capacity is felt as ongoing search, as the process of meaning-making, which is undertaken in the absence of social confirmations yet in the

|| 11 Cf. Buber 1923:18. My references to Buber are merely pointers to epistemological aspects of his phenomenology of dialogue; for a more comprehensive exposition of Buber’s notion of dialogue see below chapter 18. 12 Cf. “each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and par-ticular being” (Buber 1965:19).


presence of the formative power of the social. Thus the process of meaning-making is experienced both as risky exposure and as creative engagement.

The status of this characterization of dialogue is that of a thesis or claim about conceptual content and phenomenal experience—as such it is left to the reader’s validation, as this is typical for definitional and phenomenological claims in philosophy. The phenomenological characterization can derive some support from the fact that the various extant description of dialogue (in the ’reflected’ sense of the term) largely concur on these points, mutatis mutandis. For example, with reference to over 100 sources in the literature on dialogue across disciplines, Cissna and Anderson (1998) claim that approaches to dia-logue are “generally consistent” with the following description:

Thus, a dialogic perspective on communication emphasizes that meaning, often unex-pected meaning, emerges from the encounter between self and other; prefers a concep-tion of self as continually emerging in and through the relationship with other rather than one anchored in individualism; and notes that there can be no isolated utterance—that all talk presupposes an ongoing conversation in which one participates for a time (Cissna & Anderson 1998: 65).

There is one aspect of dialogue, however, that Cissna & Anderson highlight as neglected in the discussion, namely, the temporal dimension of dialogue. While most characterizations of dialogue, including the one I offer here, take dialogue to consist in an ongoing activity, Cissna & Anderson submit that “the qualities necessary for genuine dialogue occur only occasionally and for brief moments” (ibid. 68). This interesting suggestion is based upon the observation that in dialogical engagements we experience only for very short periods of time a con-nectedness that Cissna & Anderson characterize with Kaplan (1969) as “mutual-ity,” a connectedness that goes “beyond reciprocity” where we “become more fully human” (ibid. 97). While it strikes me as very important to highlight such possible moments of special connectedness, I think it is best to consider them not as a definitional trait but as a potential of dialogue; below I will show how this phenomenon of ‘mutuality beyond reciprocity’ can be explained on the account of cognition that, as I shall argue, best accommodates all phenomenal features of dialogue combined.

The phenomenology of orientating oneself

The overall thesis of this paper is that intercultural understanding presents an important datum for any theory of cognition. Intercultural understanding is the ‘frame of mind’ we are in when we engage in intercultural dialogue; it is that

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which intercultural dialogue aims for (but not, as I stressed in the previous sec-tion, as a detachable product of the activity of dialogue that would render dia-logue an instrument used for a purpose). Intercultural understanding is the content of what we experience in dialogue and as such carries the latter’s hall-marks as worked out above—it is the awareness of meaning-in-the-making in-tertwined with the awareness of acknowledgement, adventure, and creative potential.

Assuming that understanding is a form of cognition, and assuming that a theory of cognition is to account for all forms of human cognizing, the kind of understanding that we experience during dialogue is something a theory of cognition must come to grips with. If intercultural understanding were a clear instance of either declarative ‘knowledge-that’ or practical ‘knowledge-how,’ it could be straightforwardly accommodated by theories of cognition that operate with the classical model of cognition as computation. In the first case it could be analyzed as any other item of propositional knowledge, as the result of rule-based composition of symbols with pre-defined meanings; in the second case it could simply be rejected from the domain of relevant data.

However, the type of understanding that is generated in intercultural dia-logue does not seem to fit the traditional dualism of knowing-that versus know-ing-how, of propositional knowledge versus practical skill. Intercultural under-standing is intrinsically tied to the activity of dialogue and is in this sense an ‘on-line’ capacity akin to practical skills; yet it also has the felt character of being ‘about’ something, akin to the distinctive feel of intentionality that we associate with propositional goings-on such as perceivings, believings, infer-rings, intendings etc. (at least on those occasions when we consciously reflect on the difference between acting and thinking). But the sort of understanding we are building up in the course of dialogue is not yet articulated into the form of propositional judgments—it is imbued with the searching character of the dialogical experience, the felt tentativity of the effort of making sense that does not yet allow for settling down into judgment.

In short, dialogical understanding seems to present us with a ‘half-way house’ of non-propositional contents that nevertheless amount to ‘knowledge’ of sorts. In order to conceptualize this peculiar frame of mind, we need to re-mind ourselves that we are, in fact, perfectly familiar with a kind of conscious cognitive processing that is neither a clear-cut instance of propositional knowl-edge nor a practical skill (knowing-how). Such cognitive processing occurs when we orientate ourselves in space. When we perceptually and physically explore a new environment, we ‘get our bearings onto’ the environment by plac-ing ‘landmarks,’ i.e., points of significance for later orientations. Imagine step-ping out of the train in a foreign city— there is a distinctive subjective feeling of


disorientation to which we respond by ‘placing’ the scenery relative to familiar categories of significance, but such ‘placings’ of significances typically are not processed at the level of propositional judgements. We can make ourselves explicitly aware of these ‘placings’ of significances, which takes the form of classificatory statements (‘the exit is over there’). But commonly we do not raise orientational insights to this level of awareness since the information is tempo-rary, perspectival, and context-bound—used for ongoing action.

Immanuel Kant may have been the first Western philosopher to observe that cognitive processing during orientation yields, or better: performs, non-propositional knowledge. He draws attention to the fact that orientation is by no means limited to spatial orientation but appears to be an ubiquitous phenome-non we also experience at the level of abstract thought, e.g., when we search for the solution of complex problems or try to systematize a complex domain (Kant 1786: A 308-310, 316). The insights that orientation provides are not classifica-tory judgments (“Erkenntnis”) based on criteria but a “felt need of reason” (ibid. 308), a knowledge of ‘how to go on,’ in which direction to proceed, both con-cretely and abstractly. In the recent epistemological discussion orientational knowledge has been described as “agentive knowledge, not a general knowl-edge that can be taught, but a knowledge that shows itself in individual praxis, in the course of doing something right in a given situation” (Stegmaier 1992: 11, my transl.).13 Importantly, however, ‘doing something right’ here does not mean performing a skill well, but placing something into the right relationships to oneself. Orientational insight is not only situational in that it is perspectival and temporary, it is also “abbrevatory—it lives in a network of indications [An-haltspunkte], which we do not (and do not need to) survey in their entirety,” and whose significance only emerges in the course of our continued action (ibid. 12).

In short, when we orientate ourselves we subjectively experience a content that does not (yet) have the form of an articulated proposition but presents itself as temporary and tentative awareness of an incomplete network of placed sig-nificances for action (‘landmarks’) that is continuously updated in the course of action. It is important to observe that the ‘landmarks’ used in orientation are significances introduced by this very process. Using J. J. Gibson’s notion of ‘af-fordances’ we can bring out this point more strongly by saying that orientation is the ongoing interaction with the environment that establishes affordances for

|| 13 On the larger significance of orientational knowledge within philosophy cf. Stegmaier 2005 and 2008.

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further interaction (orientation and other interactions).14 Altogether, then, ori-entation is a kind of cognitive processing that we experience as the activity of establishing significances that are pre-propositional and action guiding.

On the basis of the characterizations suggested here, it is plausible, I trust, to claim that our phenomenal experience of the activity of searching-for-understanding in intercultural dialogue in relevant ways resembles the phe-nomenal experience of the cognitive processing involved in spatial and figura-tive orientation. As such, it may not seem particularly striking or theoretically fertile to draw attention to a phenomenal similarity between the two kinds of cognitive processing, intercultural understanding and orientation. The com-parison becomes theoretically productive, however, if we take a further step and ask for the relation between, on the one hand, the kind of cognitive processing involved in orientation, and, on the other hand, cognition in general. For this purpose let us briefly review an account of cognition that operates with ‘orienta-tion’ as its basic theoretical metaphor.

The theory of cognitive orientation

From the vantage point of today’s research on cognition, Kant’s observations about the “felt need[s] of reason” or pre-propositional contents guiding us to the point where classificatory judgments can be made, appear uncannily percep-tive. They seem to anticipate, at the level of phenomenology, the recently devel-oped view that the cognitive processing begins below the level of classificatory symbolic representations that computationalism and other traditional represen-tationalist dualisms take to be the point of departure for all forms of cognition. This view of cognition, increasingly denoted as the new paradigm of “embodied cognition,” is actually a cluster of approaches labeled “interactivism,” “the Dynamic Hypothesis,” “enactivism,” “extended mind,” “situated agency,” or “distributed cognition.”15 What these positions have in common, despite all differences in detail, is a general outlook on cognition as a complex process in which an organism’s interaction with its physical and social environment gen-erates cognitive contents continuously or ‘online.’ Importantly, on this view of cognition cognitive contents are themselves ‘in-the-making,’ they are processes

|| 14 Gibson’s (1979) affordances are features of the environment that the organism processes as indications for possible actions where such processing is not to be conceived on the model of either recognition or projection but as a process that is both. 15 Cf. e.g., Bickhard 2004, 2009, Calvo 2008, Clark 1997, 2013; Hendricks-Jansen 1996, Hutchins 2001, 2006; Pfeiffer & Bongaard 2006, VanGelder & Port 1995.


that begin in attunements and might, but need not, end in the formation of that which we consciously experience as propositional contents (beliefs, intentions etc).

Proponents of accounts of embodied cognition struggle with a conceptual problem, however, especially those who champion anti-representationalist theories. In general, scientific theoretical terms—e.g., ‘electrical current,’ ‘har-monic oscillator,’ or ‘self-maintaining system’—are introduced together with a model, a familiar thing or occurrence that exhibits suitable analogies—e.g., a water current or (ideal) spring or a candle, respectively. Accordingly, in order to denote the relational dynamics of cognition as proponents of embodied cogni-tion envisage it, a new theoretical term must be introduced, together with a model, for purposes of explanation and hypothesis formation. Emphasizing their naturalist commitments, many proponents of embodied cognition resort to dynamic systems theory, biology, or acoustics to harness productive metaphors that might lend themselves as explanatory models, speaking of “coupling,” “adaptation,” “attunement,” “resonance,” etc. The difficulty with this strategy is that these ‘source domains’ for the analogical transfer are ontologically too restrictive. While the relationships between scientific theoretical terms (or: theoretical entities) and models are extremely variegated, the focal properties of the new theoretical entities should be illustrated literally by properties of the model.16 Among the focal properties of the process of ‘embodied cognition’ is precisely its ontological status as a ‘mongrel entity’ that combines several onto-logical domains. According to its very idea, embodied cognition is an interactiv-ity that covers three ontological domains—embodied cognition is a dynamics that connects physical processes and physiological processes and engenders emergent dynamics as ‘product’ the functioning of which fulfil the role of se-mantic items.17 To highlight this unusually encompassing character of embod-ied cognition I shall speak of a ‘p+p+s interactivity’ (physical-cum-physiological-cum-semantic). Thus, the dynamics of embodied cognition can-not be modeled by anything that is either just physical, or just physiological, or

|| 16 Cf. Frigg & Hartmann 2006. 17 I am using the term ’semantic’ here in a wide sense of ’having content,’ to denote dynamics with that operate under ‘normative’ (in contrast to ’linear-causal’) constraints. Paul Mehle and Wilfrid Sellars, to whom we owe the original suggestion that content is a way of functioning, already in 1956 noticed categorial difficulties for a naturalist ontology of mind--they introduced the term ’physical1’ to classify interactions that involve both processes of inorganic nature (called ‘physical2’ processes) and the physiological processes of sensory organisms—i.e., to characterize physical processes as they occur under the special constraints that obtain within the context of a sensory organism.

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just semantic— an explanatory model for embodied cognition should be a well-known process that in some fashion engages physical, physiological, and se-mantic elements, i.e., is a p+p+s entity.

Interestingly, there is an early precursor of an ‘embodied cognition ap-proach’ that operates with an explanatory model exhibiting the prerequisite ‘p+p+s’ ontology. The “Theory of Cognitive Orientation” (to restate, abbrevi-ated as ‘TCO’) by Hans and Shulamith Kreitler (1976) is nominally a ‘theory of motivation’—it describes cognition as a process that links classificatory as-sessments with agentively relevant valuations. To denote this process the authors introduce a new theoretical term: ‘cognitive orientation’; the entity denoted by the term ‘cognitive orientation’ today still has the status of a theo-retical postulate, comparable perhaps to the status of the denotation of ‘elec-tron’ in 1990. The explanatory model of cognitive orientation is everyday spatial orientation, a familiar process which is ontologically speaking a p+p+s interac-tivity involving physical, physiological, and semantic factors. To forestall a narrow reading as human orientation, Kreitler and Kreitler point to Pavlov’s studies on the so-called ‘orientating reflex’ in higher animals. This reflex is a reaction to stimuli that are „novel, surprising, incongruent“ (ibid. 45) and con-sists in a combination of (i) a “matrix of specific somatic, automatic, electroen-cephalographic and sensory reactions” (ibid. 60) and (ii) two behavioral as-pects: the organism’s directing itself towards the stimulus for increased sensory reception and active exploration of the stimulus in the physiological state of attentiveness (higher muscle tonus, lower perceptual thresholds), in order to determine which further course of action is appropriate: fight, flight, or feed. On the other hand, to counteract connotations of passivity in Pavlov’s talk about a ‘reflex,’ Kreitler and Kreitler also speak of orientation as “meaning ac-tion” (ibid. 60) and emphasize that the organism’s role during orientation is active exploration and that orientation is interactivity, not mere reaction, nor interaction understood as a series of separable phases of ‘give and take’.18

With these qualifications of the explanatory model in place, the authors turn to elaborating the postulated dynamics of cognition called ‘cognitive ori-entation’ (abbreviated here as ‘co’ in order to stress the theoretical status of this term in contrast with everyday phenomenal (spatial and figurative) orientation). As in any analogy, there are similarlities and dissimilarities between co and

|| 18 Cf. ibid. 62: ”The occurrence of an orienting response as the very first reaction in response to each relatively new stimulus demonstrates that there exists no purely mechanical or phys-ical linkage between stimulus and response on that level of behavior on which defensive, adaptive, and conditioned reflexes take place.”


phenomenal (spatial and figurative) orientation. For example, co is an ongoing interaction between organism and environment in the course of which a net-work of (preconceptual) significances is established and continuously revised. Most importantly, while phenomenal orientation often draws on ‘ready-made’ cognitive content (sign posts, pictograms), co does not involve any symbolic representations. According to TCO no such items exist. It is in the course of perception that significances arise, and not, as classical representationalism would have it, at a last stage where certain arrays of sensory data are selected and miraculously matched to given representations. “The placement of mean-ing action at the core of perception implies that there is no one particular stage or fixed point […] at which the selection of what to attend to is established” (bid: 61). In other words, TCO promotes the anti-representationalist claim that the interactivity between organism and environment is all there is to cognition; there is no distinctive phase marking ‘success’, no point when representations sufficiently ‘match’ external conditions. In cognitive orientation significances (or, in human processing: meanings) are formed as emergent quasi-objects of this dynamics, like hurricanes, i.e., entirely situation-bound and temporary.19

TCO’s main thesis, then, can also be summarized as the claim that percep-tion, understood as the interactivity dynamics of co, does not precede meaning but performs meaning. Such a processual account of significance (meaning) needs to explain (i) how significances formed—or rather: performed—and (ii) in which way the transitory nature of processual significances generated in the course of interactivities can be combined with the relatively stability or context-independence of conceptual content.

In order to address these two tasks in the spirit of TCO we need for a mo-ment to set aside the literal descriptions offered by Kreitler and Kreitler and look for a more recent theoretical idiom; as it turns out, the closest affinity is with “situated simulation theory” (Barsalou 1999, 2003). Reading TCO’s postulates about “dimensions of meaning” with situated simulation theory, the relevant ‘assessments’ can be understood as weights in the output vector of a neural net that determines further activation patterns in more encompassing networks. The strengthening of these activation patterns due to repetition creates default network activations that consist of sensory information (in all sensory modali-ties: touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste), motor action, proprioception of motion, and internal states (in particular, feelings of pleasure and pain, emotions). What humans consciously experience as ’content’, whether proto-conceptual & pre-

|| 19 Thus Kreitler and Kreitler’s “theory of cognitive orientation” can count as the first proposal of a so-called “pure theory of embodied cognition” (Calvo 2008: 17).

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positional or conceptual & propositional, are re-enactments of these complex activations.20 Conceptual content thus is inextricably “modal” (i.e., includes sensory information as sound, sight, smell etc.), “non-modular” (i.e., inextrica-bly bound up with sensory information and motor action), ”valuative” (i.e., including activation patterns of the limbic system), and ”situational” (i.e., re-stricted to activation patterns for motor actions that are afforded in the situa-tion; cf. Barsalou 2003). As we now return to the further elaboration of TCO, it is important to keep in mind that the—as such: infelicitous—intentionalist meta-phors of TCO can be given more general and neurophysiologically grounded theoretical underpinnings in terms of more recent research. 21

According to TCO the process of co establishes significances in the inter-section of many “dimensions of meanings” that belong to three fundamental “perspectives of assessment”: descriptive, valuative, and normative. The sig-nificance of an environmental stimulus with respect to these three perspectives the authors call the “orientativeness” of the stimulus in the given situation (ibid. 79). To use the authors’ elucidation, the ‘orientativeness’ of a stimulus in a given situation is its significance relative to the questions “What is it? What does it mean for me? What shall I do?” (ibid.). In short, classical representa-tionalism postulates three modules and two stages of translation: perception translated into conceptual representations translated into proximate volitions; TCO, on the other hand, takes cognition to be the interactivity between organ-ism and environment that generates and—dependent on agentive feedback—re-enacts neural activation patterns, thereby establishing the patterns’ orienta-tiveness or perceptually grounded significance for action.

The complex activations that amount to the orientativeness of a stimulus—again, roughly: of what the stimulus is for the organism and what it can do with the stimulus—are not inert, however, with respect to dynamic aggregation. Focusing on human cognition, Kreitler and Kreitler speculate that co-activations of orientativenesses in the course of the dynamics of co increasingly create link-ages. In this way, due to simple repetition (Hebbian learning), orientativenesses

|| 20 Cf. Barsalou 2003 for discussions of the empirical validation of the re-enactment or simula-tion hypothesis, which was conceived at the same time but independently of the discovery of ”mirror neurons” by G. Rizzolatti and colleagues in the mid-1990s. 21 In the context of human cognition the formation of cognitive orientation clusters indeed may involve significances that are propositional contents (“beliefs,” “intentions”) but on the whole the intentionalist idiom (“evaluate”, “assess,” “mean” etc.) does not quite square with the authors’ ambitions for a general account of cognition beyond the human case. Once these metaphors are cashed out in neurophysiological or functionalist terms, the intended generality is achieved.


are combined; they form propositions and these in turn associate to form “cog-nitive orientation clusters” (ibid. 113). ’Cognitive orientation clusters’ thus con-sist of “beliefs” about (a) the world, (b) oneself, (c) norms, and (d) about one’s wishes and desires.22 Ultimately, then, the orientativeness or action-guiding significance of a stimulus that is generated in the course of the dynamics of co is both situated—attuned to the physical situation—and contextualized, i.e., em-bedded into the context of a contingent clustering of significances that have come about within a concrete human biography.

To summarize, as I have reconstructed it here, the theory of cognitive ori-entation views cognition as the process of the ‘on-line’ formation of signifi-cances. Significances are emergent modes of the underlying interactivity be-tween organism and environment; that is, they are intrinsically relational—a significance is an affordance: what an environmental feature is for the organ-ism—and processual.23 The significance of an environmental feature for an or-ganism is the “orientativeness” of the given experiential interaction. In the spe-cial case of human cognition, such orientativeness is experienced as ‘content’ or ‘meaning.’ In human cognition an orientativeness amounts to a complex char-acterization of a stimulus with respect to descriptive, valuative, and normative aspects; here each orientativeness is embedded into a network of orientative-nesses, a “cognitive orientation cluster.” In human cognition the orientating information of this cluster is often worked up into the form of an association of “beliefs.” These beliefs articulate the descriptive, valuative, and normative dimensions of the orientativeness of an experiental interaction. Importantly, there is a ‘motive force’ in any belief that is inherited from the pre-propositional orientativenesses that constitute a belief, where these orientativenesses are, to re-emphasize, dynamics and not causally inert ‘abstract objects.’ Kreitler and Kreitler speak here of the “meaning value” of a belief:

Cognitive orientativeness […] may be defined as the potential power of the meaning val-ues of beliefs, functioning singly or in interaction, to promote the formation of a specific

|| 22 To illustrate the embedding cognitive orientation cluster for a perception: after a depart-mental meeting I discover a fancy pen on the floor. The action-guiding orientativeness of the perceptual process I am engaged in is influenced by the following complex of beliefs: that this is a pen with certain attractive features, that I am an honest person, that one should return lost items, and that I want to keep the pen.—Note that I shall here set aside a critical discussion of TCO’s account of belief formation. 23 TCO predates complexity theory; from the present point of view it is suggestive to under-stand emerging significances as complex phenomena, modes of occurrences of an underlying interaction complex akin to hurricanes and convection cells.

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behavioral intent and thus to predispose the individual toward a certain overt […] behav-ior (ibid. 95).

Once we appreciate the ‘motive force’ in “meaning values,” it becomes clear how TCO explains the translation from cognitive contents (intentions) into ac-tions. Cognitions, on this account, are themselves the processes in the course of which ‘efficient’ motivations arise.

This concludes our brief overview over basic ideas of TCO, which Kreitler and Kreitler tested in the context of therapeutic applications. 24 In places one might prefer to replace the intentionalist metaphors of TCO by the more detailed process descriptions of current research in cognitive science; however, in my view, the theory’s main idea to conceive of cognition on the explanatory model of phenomenal orientation still stands as a particularly accessible and fertile conceptualization of embodied cognition.

In one respect, however, TCO would need to be extended to fit with current cognitive science research. In its original formulation TCO still retains the as-sumption of traditional Western philosophy of mind that cognition is the dy-namics of a solitary thinker. Other cognizing subjects enter in TCO only indi-rectly, as elements in one of the four components that make up a ‘cognitive orientation cluster,’ namely, in the component that contains ‘beliefs about the world.’ On the other hand, recent research on social cognition suggests that the presence of other human beings influences the process of co itself. The impor-tant point I wish to draw attention to, for the purposes of this paper, is not the familiar one that the presence of others changes our motivation in the sense that it changes the components of the cognitive orientation cluster—for exam-ple, the phenomenon that the presence of others changes what we experience, i.e., that the content of our experience involuntarily reflects what we take to be the beliefs and goals of others.25 What matters for our present purposes is rather the observation that the presence of other humans changes how we experience, i.e., the mode in which experience occurs. Philosophers have speculatively postulated two modes of intentionality, “we-mode” and an “I-mode” (Tuomela 2006). In cognitive science the ‘we-mode’ is taken to amount to a different sort

|| 24 The theory has been empirically investigated in over 60 studies in social and educational psychology; therapeutic applications pertain to motivational ‘reprogramming’ in cases of substance abuse. See e.g., Kreitler & Kreitler 1986a, b, 1990a, b, 2004; Kreitler 2001, 2002. 25 For example, the adjustments of one’s own preferences (in TCO: ”wishes and desires”) in the presence of others, or the involuntary representation of collective tasks as social tasks (see Hommel et al. 2009): when humans perform certain tasks in parallel with conflicting assign-ments, performance decreases since subconsciously each person takes the other person’s goals into account.


of cognition, a process with different dynamic architecture. For example, the presence of other observers changes which environmental features become salient for processing as affordances—i.e., in the terminology of TCO, which orientativenesses are at all generated in a situation; this can be taken to indicate that we process the environment from the point of view of a group subject (Frith 2012). That co occurs in an individual and a social mode, i.e. that there is a change in the dynamics of cognition itself, is perhaps most strongly suggested by experiments showing that in the social mode cognition is slowed down—we process visual information more slowly if the scene contains the figure of an-other observer with a different perspective and conflicting information (Samson et al. 2010).

Assuming, then, that co has two modes, an individual and a social mode, let us now consider how TCO might be used in order to explain the phenomenal features of (intercultural) dialogue.

A hypothesis

The considerations presented in the previous sections have been leading up to the formulation of a hypothesis about the significance of intercultural under-standing for theory choice in the theory of cognition. In order to motivate the specifics of this hypothesis, I need to establish two further premises. Both of these premises are likely to appear trivial and redundant, but I think it is worthwhile to put these two ‘reminders’ in place.

The first premise concerns the relationship between (i) phenomenal as-pects of cognition to be explained (explananda) and (ii) aspects of the process of cognition that a theory of cognition postulates as explaining factors (explanan-tia). Obviously there are no similarity requirements—this is important to em-phasize especially for a theory like TCO that operates with a model taken from the domain of the phenomenology of cognition. To explain phenomenal fea-tures of orientation in terms of similar features of co—e.g., to explain the phe-nomenal feel of a distance S between landmarks L1 and L2 in spatial orientation in terms of a relationship R between the dynamics D1 and D2 that generate con-tents L1 and L2—would be a return to the pre-modern style of scientific explana-tions along the lines of the ‘like generates like’ principle. However, we can for-mulate a generic requirement for the relationship of explananda and explanantia if both are taken more abstractly as changes. Various notions of scientific explanation ride on the systematic correlation (in the form of a con-trolled experiment) between changes in one factor or system and changes in another factor or system. So we can say, and this is my first premise, that a the-

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ory of cognition needs to explain the temporal aspects of phenomenal contents, and by these shall be meant externally timed subjective changes and perma-nences. For example, the difference between quick and slow memory recall must be explained in terms of two different sorts of cognitive processing.

My second premise is that a theory of cognition should cover all cases of cognition, from cognition as it occurs in normal information processing of adult subjects during everyday tasks, to cognizing in two exceptional situations, learning and heuristic cognition (phenomenal orientation, problem-solving, etc.). In particular, then, given that the dynamics of co is taken to be the general form of the process of cognition, learning and heuristic cognition are just as much occurrences of the co-dynamics as routine everyday cognitive processing.

Let me quickly elaborate on this second premise, taking the case of learn-ing first. While computational accounts of cognition notoriously have trouble coming to terms with learning—this is part of the so-called “grounding prob-lem”—the embodied cognition approach in general and TCO in particular can straightforwardly accommodate learning. In fact, the dynamics of repetition and reinforcement by which cognitive orientation clusters are generated is a phase of the full dynamics of co as introduced by TCO. This phase of the co-dynamics may occur slowly and distributed (embedded in other interactional dynamics) over the years of our primary socialization in childhood.26 From the point of view of TCO, cognition under ‘normal’ circumstances in everyday praxis and everyday communication situations merely abbreviates the first phase of the full dynamics of co and immediately reactivates cognitive orientation clus-ters that are already established as default routines.

But not all forms of cognition after learning fit with this fast abbreviated routine processing. Take the second sort of exceptional cognition, heuristic cognition, which we experience as going on, as a dynamic response to a state of disorientation—e.g., as spatial and figurative orientation, as fundamental re-search in a new field, as problem-solving, and whenever we try to make sense of “baffling” or “mind-boggling” phenomena. On these occasions the first phase of

|| 26 Note that both physical features and human practices constitute the environment in which cognitive orientation as learning occurs. Once we admit that the environment in which affor-dances are established contains practices, our ’normative capacities’—i.e., our understanding of the concept of normativity in general and our knowledge about particular norms—can also be taken to be acquired by nothing more than repetition and reinforcement, i.e., by condition-ing, in the course of acquiring linguistic competence, which includes the capacity of participat-ing in normative discourse; cf. Sellars 1954.—The embedding dynamics in which the generation of cognitive orientation clusters occurs may have the character of caretaker-child interactions as early and basic as described by Reddy & Morris 2004.


the full dynamics of co is operative again and new cognitive orientation clusters are generated. There are, however, also distinctive differences in the temporal aspects of learning and heuristic cognition. Thus, according to the first premise above, the temporal differences between learning and heuristic cognition call for two different explanantia—the dynamics of co must occur in two varieties, one to account for learning, another one to account for heuristic cognition.

With these two premises in place, let us now turn to the question of what, if anything, intercultural dialogue can reveal about cognition. Above I sug-gested, on the basis of phenomenological similarities, that intercultural under-standing creates the same kind of knowledge as phenomenal (spatial and figu-rative) orientation. Since phenomenal orientation is one of the varieties of heuristic cognition, we can also say more broadly that in intercultural dialogue we are engaged in heuristic cognition. At the phenomenological level this ap-pears initially plausible—in dialogue we experience the effort of making sense, an ongoing search for ‘leads’ in an engagement that feels adventurous, risky and creative, and phenomenally this has much in common with the way in which we experience the heuristic phase of fundamental research.

One might object, however, that there is a decisive phenomenological dif-ference between dialogue and heuristic cognition. In heuristic cognition (as phenomenal orientation, fundamental research, problem-solving, etc.) the fo-cus is on the object or subject matter; this seems to be case even during heuris-tic inquiries undertaken in conversation with someone else.27 By contrast, dia-

|| 27 This footnote is an excursion. In Plato’s ‘dialogues’ precisely this element of existential encounter in dialogue is missing. But the interpretation of dialogue as manifestation of cogni-tive orientation also throws new light on the engagement that we have come to call “Socratic dialogue.” From our current interpretational perspective we should say that Plato recognized the close connection between dialogue and ‘first inquiry’ or the heuristic phase of fundamental (conceptual) research. Socrates’ conversations typically have two parts, separated by an apo-ria, a point of complete disorientation. The first part is instrumental and thus not a dialogue in any sense—it has the purpose to generate the aporia, to bring Socrates’ interlocutors to the realization that all routes of conceptual routine navigation are unviable. The actual dialogical phase begins only after this state of disorientation has been reached, as joint search for new leads, a joint placing of affordances for how to go on. The placing of affordances for how to go on take the form of definitions—to define a term, Socrates explains in the Meno, is like tying it down, grounding something that floats, setting a position from where one may proceed further to stake out more of the conceptual landscape. Importantly, the ‘ideas,’ and the definitional links between them, that are generated in this process, are not solidified abstract quasi-things but persist as ‘attractors’ of a future dynamics, i.e., as leads for future inquiry. Switching to the descriptive level of cognitive science, Plato’s ‘ideas’ are cognitive orientation clusters or attrac-tors for the dynamics of cognitive orientation—they are ‘abstract’ in the sense of that they ‘live’ only in occurrences of cognitive orientation as it occurs in ‘first inquiry.’ For an interpretation

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logue is experienced as an encounter of another self, intertwined with an awareness of sociality as both present and absent, yielding a paradoxical mix-ture of heightened acknowledgement of one another as human beings, and heightened personal exposure due to a lack of social conventions. We noted that this paradoxical social aspect of dialogue is especially pronounced in intercultural dialogue and increases with the decrease of shared linguistic meaning.

Thus we should say that participants of a dialogue and in particular of intercultural dialogue are involved in heuristic cognition but in ways that reflect the social dimension of cognition. Is there a theory of cognition that can ac-count for the phenomenology of intercultural dialogue, at least for its temporal aspects (cf. premise one above)? As I just suggested, TCO holds out the prospect of being able to explain what occurs during heuristic cognition and, as pointed out in the previous section, TCO can be extended to accommodate the effects of “social cognition,” i.e., the effects of the physical presence of other people on the process of cognition. Even though we cannot yet detail the neurophysiologi-cal differences between the ‘individual mode’ and the ‘social mode’ of the dy-namics of co, the theoretical model that TCO uses to describe the process of cognition at least provides the conceptual resources to accommodate the social dimension of cognition.28 If cognition is the interactivity of an organism and its immediate physical environment, social cognition can be conceived as the modifications of that interactivity that ensue once the environment is altered by the presence of humans. Altogether, then, we can formulate the following hy-pothesis:

(H) In dialogue, and especially in intercultural dialogue, we experience the effects of social cognition on heuristic cognition. The temporal aspects of the phenomenology of (intercultural) dialogue can be explained if we con-

|| of Plato that supports such a processual reading of Plato’s ideas see Wieland (1982). Wieland argues that it is not by chance that Plato never presented a ‘theory of ideas’. Plato’s emphasis on ‘dialogue’ as method of philosophical inquiry is a commitment to the claim that philosophi-cal knowledge is not theoretical knowledge; rather, philosophical knowledge is the “reflected ability” to create communicative situations (dialogues) that engage contents and interlocutors in such a way that the action-guiding or motivational force of these contents is realized in the interlocutors even though the content are never made fully explicit in propositional assertions (cf. Wieland 1982: 38-70). 28 Compare this with the conceptual difficulties that arise for any attempt of making sense of the data on social cognition on the basis of a traditional Cartesian representationalist theory of cognition as a procedure occurring strictly inside an individual thinker’s head.


ceive of cognition along the lines of an anti-representationalist account of ‘embodied cognition paradigm’—for instance, along the lines of accounts that fit the generic mold of TCO—as a physical-cum-physiological-cum-semantic interactivity involving an organism and its immediate (sensorily accessible) and social environment.

On the assumption of (H) we can make sense of the above-mentioned observa-tion by Cissna & Anderson about the “mutuality” of dialogue, which, as the authors claim, is a phenomenal aspect of dialogue that is not captured by recip-rocal acknowledgement. Indeed, the mode of social cognition, the unreflected ‘we-mode’ of cognition, goes beyond reciprocal acknowledgements of individ-ual agents. Cognitive scientist have argued that what is experienced as “mutu-ality” or “engagement” is a “relational dynamics” of its own kind, akin to the “coupling” of two dynamics systems, that is independent of the ability to enter-tain a ‘theory of mind,’ i.e., of propositional knowledge about the intentional states of others.29 Whichever theoretical metaphor one might use before the details of the ‘social mode’ of the dynamics of cognitive orientation are worked out in empirical research, it should prove important for such research, I submit, to keep the ‘data’ of dialogue in mind—the mutuality we experience in dialogue is the phenomenal manifestation of the social mode of cognition.

To summarize, then, in this section I drew attention to three forms of cog-nition as learning, everyday classificatory and inferential processing, and heu-ristic–creative processing. I presented the hypothesis that dialogical engage-ments are best explained by accounts of cognition that can accommodate the form of heuristic cognition occurring in the mode of social cognition. Even though computational theories of cognition have offered explanations of every-day classificatory and inferential processing, they are notoriously incapable of accounting for learning and, more generally, for any situation where new sig-nificances are (non-definitionally) introduced. On the other hand, accounts of cognition as ‘embodied,’ which describe cognition as an ongoing interactivity between organism and environment, have the conceptual resources to explain everyday classificatory and inferential processing in terms of processing rou-tines, as well as the special form of heuristic cognition and the special mode of social cognition. This is particularly palpable if the model for the theoretically postulated interactivity of cognition is taken—as this is done by the ‘Theory of Cognitive Orientation’—from the phenomenology of heuristic cognition,

|| 29 Cf. Varela 2001, Reddy et al. 2004, De Jaegher et al 2007, Tylén et al 2007, Auvray et al 2009, De Jaegher et al. 2010.

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namely, ‘orientation.’ If cognition is modelled on phenomenal orientation as “cognitive orientation,” it might seem, at first blush, circular and uninforming to point out that phenomenal orientation and other instances of heuristic cogni-tion manifest cognitive orientation. But, and this I have tried to emphasize in this and the previous section, as long as the difference between model and theo-retically postulated dynamics is clearly kept in sight, and as long as explanation here is understood as correlation of temporal aspects of phenomenological features with structural and temporal features of the postulated dynamics of cognition, there is no danger of a circular explanation. It is in this qualified and more tenuous sense of manifestation as correlation that intercultural dialogue can be said to be a communicative engagement that phenomenally manifests the thoroughly processual nature of cognition, as well as the irreducible social mode of cognition in the presence of others.

Conclusion

The aim of this chapter was to pose the question of ‘how is dialogue possible?’ in the form of a query about cognitive foundations: ‘what do we need to assume about cognition in order to explain the peculiar phenomenology of the knowl-edge or understanding generated by intercultural dialogue?’ In conclusion let me now turn the tables and ask what a processual, anti-representational, and embodied conception of cognition could betoken for theory and praxis of intercultural dialogue. There are two implications I briefly wish to point to.30

|| 30 A larger question I need to omit altogether here is how to relate the process account of significance sketched in this chapter to methodological reflections on intercultural dialogue from a metaphilosophical perspective as offered, for instance, by Panikkar 2007 and Garsdal (chapter 3 above). The account is developed with the conceptual tools of Western analytical philosophy, and one might question whether an analysis of the cognitive conditions for the possibility of intercultural dialogue is at all meaningful if it is not undertaken from an intercultural standpoint itself. On the other hand, process thought has been a longstanding interface between different philosophical traditions, within and across Western and Eastern thought—as documented in the titles of the book series Process Thought. To mention a specific point of potential contact, as Jesper Garsdal has pointed out to me, the fact that the embodied cognition paradigm must expand the traditional toolbox of Western ontological category the-ory to include cross-level concepts creates an interesting link to Buddhist metaphysics, espe-cially the postulate of ontological cross-level elements (nama-rupa); note, though, that the ‘nama-rupa’ are commonly characterized as ‘psychophysical,’ while the category of a ‘p+p+s’ dynamics, i.e., of a physical-contentual or physical-normative entity is tied to a naturalist metaphysics, cf. Seibt 2014.


First, if we conceive of cognition along the lines of TCO, we can begin to understand more clearly what values are and how they function in the context of dialogical engagements. The debate about values, traditionally characterized by the opposition between subjectivist and objectivist approaches, recently has favored what appears to be the intermediate third alternative, namely, accounts that take values to be dispositional or response-dependent properties.

According to standard formulations of the dispositional approach, an item is of value if and only if we would be disposed, under ideal conditions, to value it, where ‘valuing’ in turn is understood as ‘desiring to desire it.’31 Such ‘desiring to desire’ is intended to create a link between value and reflected motivation, which is relative to a thinker’s paradigm of rationality. This latter point some authors prefer to bring more explicitly into view by taking values to be “tertiary properties”:

An object’s secondary properties pivot on its dispositions to evoke characteristic affective responses in the suitably responsive senses. Analogously, a state of affairs’ tertiary prop-erties pivot on dispositions to evoke characteristic reflective responses in the suitably prepared mind. (Rescher 2005: 117).

Dispositional and response-dependent accounts of values are quite ‘static,’ however. Here values are taken to be relational properties (of an object, feature, event etc.) that exist—timelessly—on the condition of a certain response by the subject. If at all, dispositional and response-dependency accounts offer a cur-sory characterization of the process by means of which members of a commu-nity are conditioned (or “prepared”) to react with certain valuations, but they do not describe how established valuations may be changed later on. In particu-lar, to the extent to which dispositional and response-dependency accounts link valuations to emotional reactions and motivations, they cannot be used to ex-plain why the mere dialogical encounter of people with conflicting values should have any impact on established valuations.

By contrast, if we conceive of cognition along the lines of TCO, valuations are continuously in the making—they are part of the cognition orientation clus-ter, i.e., continuously reactivated in the course of the interactivity of cognition. According to TCO values are, like meanings, processing routines, emergent dynamics akin to standing waves and convection cells, and thus are continu-ously disruptable if environmental changes (interferences of cultural practices) create a state of disorientation. If values are emergent processing routines this

|| 31 Cf. for instance Lewis 1989.

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does not render them more subjective, however, since qua emergent they intrin-sically dependent on the interactivity that connects organism and environment. As a first asset, then, of the view of cognition suggested by TCO, we can note that such a processual account can make sense of the dynamics of valuations and values. Second, an account of values based on the TCO view of cognition also holds out the prospect for coming to grips with the difficult relationship between values and emotions. On the one hand, values and disvalues are closely connected with emotions or, to use Rodogno’s somewhat broader term, with ‘attachments.’ According to TCO we build up our valuative routines in the course of the long learning process during primary socialization; since this is at once the process during which we grow up and reach our reflective self-understanding as particular persons, we can explain with TCO why attacks on values feel, as Rodogno points out, ‘personal.’32 On the other hand, in dialogue we apparently can bracket some of the emotional and motivational force of our attachments—precisely this special emotional posture enabled by dialogue renders dialogue of use for conflict mitigation. With TCO we can attribute this ‘detachment effect’ in dialogue to the fact that in this special non-purpose-driven form of communicative engagement social cognition is foregrounded, i.e., the dynamics of cognitive orientation occurs in its social mode. Since the social mode of cognition apparently aims for an alignment of the epistemic and valuative assessments of the processed scene, it forces a disruption of valuative routines and a transition to the form of heuristic cognition. The phenomenal impression that in dialogue conflicting valuative commitments can be jointly ‘explored’ might have their roots in the combination these two alterations of the dynamics of cognitive orientation.33

Second, an approach to cognition viewed as embodied and anti-representational along the lines of TCO can also shed light on the praxis of intercultural dialogue. Above I tried to make plausible that the peculiar irenic and creative potential of (intercultural) dialogue can be attributed to the work-

|| 32 Cf. Rodogno’s discussion of values below in section 2.1. TCO also affords us with an expla-nation of the persistence of valuations of items that we no longer ‘desire to desire’ as in, for example, sentimental reactions—that we as adults now experience pain if a long forgotten childhood toy is discarded is due to the fact that the perception of the toy triggers the momen-tary reactivation of an old cognitive orientation cluster. 33 Based on the situated simulation account Prinz (2005) has argued that moral values are grounded in emotions; the relativist position he promotes can be avoided if one moves away from the classical focus on the moral judgment of the individual subject and attends—as Prinz does not—to dialogue and to phenomena of valuative commitments with emotional detach-ments due to foregrounded social cognition.


ings of social cognition in direct embodied personal communication. Moreover, embodied cognition approaches should enable us better to understand the role of contact for intercultural dialogue. For example, it should enable us to explain the fate of “intergroup contact theory,” an approach first presented in1954 by Gordon Allport, who proceeded from the hypothesis that contact between op-posing groups can, under the right conditions, reduce social tension. Intergroup contact theory still seems to inform recent public calls for intercultural ‘dia-logue’ in the sense of the mere pragmatic facilitation of direct physical encoun-ters. However, it is questionable whether such orchestrated short-term “encoun-ters for dialogue” provide the right sort of contact in order to engender attitudes required for patient joint exploration of communalities and differences—these seem to be more the results of repeated and long-term contact.34 Finally, embod-ied cognition research also should be able to elucidate the possibility of dialogi-cal engagements in cases where embodied contact is not an option. Certain elements of direct dialogical engagements can be re-created even “when groups are highly segregated, physically or socially, or when there is little motivation to engage in contact.”35 As has been shown, even the imagination of individual positive contact with an ‘outgroup member’ reduces anxiety and stereotyping; when individuals listen to a simple story about a positive encounter with a member of an outgroup, the mental simulations engendered by the semantic processing of the story produce a measurable attitudinal change.36

Interestingly, the scripted story can be as minimal as the instruction to imagine a positive interaction. An anti-representational theory of cognition that conceives of meanings as ‘reactivations’ of processing routines or, in Barsalou’s terminology, as “simulations” of perceptual processing, would seem to contain the basic resources to explain these psychological effects of imagined contact, as well as to suggest under which conditions the effects of imagined contact can be enhanced or reduced. Since scripted stories for imagined positive interaction do not have to be short, all kinds of narratives, whether fictional or scholarly, also can serve this function (cf. chapter 8 below). For the mitigation of cultural conflicts it will be of primary importance to clarify whether there are additional features of such narratives that will increase the desired irenic effect.37 Precisely

|| 34 Cf. Pettigrew 1997 as well as the critical reflections on the efforts of the European Commu-nity’s to establish 2008 as Year of Intercultural Dialogue in Berg 2011. 35 Cf. Crisp, R. and Turner, R. 2009: 232. 36 Cf. Crisp and Turner ibid. as well as Turner, R. and Crisp, R. 2010. 37 E.g. narratives that reconstruct conflict frames in agreement with the principles of “appre-ciative inquiry” developed by D. Cooperrider and S. Srivastva or “positioning analysis” (cf., Mogghadam et al 2008).

112 | Johanna Seibt

here future research in cognitive science will need to play a pivotal role. This holds in particular also for the pursuit of intercultural dialogue at the level of scholarly discourse, e.g. as intercultural value research, as promoted in this book. A better understanding of the conditions under which a script re-creates the mode of social cognition without disturbing the form of heuristic cognition will enable us to determine whether and how the academic field of intercultural value research can be more than a purely ‘academic’ enterprise and more effec-tively support the praxis of intercultural dialogue.

To be sure, despite the important role that cognitive science research can play for the realization of dialogue, the ultimate criterion of success for any theoretical and practical attempt at facilitating dialogue must always remain the phenomenal experience of shared humanity that Buber once formulated with powerful simplicity: “I think no human being can give more than this: making life possible for the other, if only for a moment. Permission.”38

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Intercultural dialogue and the processing of significance: cognition as orientation

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