The illusion of common ground

THE ILLUSION OF COMMON GROUND Page ! of !1 22

July 2015

The Illusion of Common Ground

Stephen Cowley and Matthew Harvey1 2

Abstract

When people talk about “common ground”, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions. In the language sciences, however, ‘common ground’ also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and cognition seek to explain that everyday feeling in terms of how isolated individuals “use” language to communicate. Autonomous cognitive agents are said to use words to communicate inner thoughts and experiences; in such a framework, ‘common ground’ describes a body of information that people allegedly share, hold common, and use to reason about how intentions have been made manifest. We object to this view, above all, because it leaves out mechanisms that demonstrably enable people to manage joint activities by doing things together. We present an alternative view of linguistic understanding on which appeal to inner representations is replaced by tracing language to synergetic coordination between biological agents who draw on wordings to act within cultural ecosystems. Crucially, human coordination depends on, not just bodies, but also salient patterns of articulatory movement (‘wordings’). These rich patterns function as non-local resources that, together with concerted bodily (and vocal) activity, serve to organize, regulate and coordinate both attention and the verbal and non-verbal activity that it gives rise to. Since wordings are normative, they can be used to develop skills for making cultural sense of environments and other peoples’ doings. On our view, the technical notion of common ground is an illusion, because appeal to representations blinds theorists to bodily activity and the role of experience. Turning away from how wordings influence the circumstances, skills, and bodily coordination on which interpersonal understanding depends, it makes premature appeal to reasoning and internally represented knowledge. We conclude that outside its vague everyday sense, the concept of common ground is a notion that the language sciences would be well advised to abandon.

KEYWORDS: distributed language, common ground, embodiment, language stance, radical embodied cognitive science, synergies, ecological psychology, pragmatics

Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC Cluster, Department of Language and 1

Communication University of Southern Denmark. Contact at [email protected]

Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC Cluster, Department of Language and 2

Communication, University of Southern Denmark. Contact at [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Several years ago, the city of Washington DC was engaged in contract negotiations with the local Teacher’s Union. They went smoothly, by all accounts, partly because of the way the city’s lead negotiator opened up discussion. Rather than begin with the negotiation itself, she asked participants to talk about students who had most affected them and their careers. She said afterwards that “the very beginning of the negotiation was a shared experience around the ability to change children’s lives”, which had the effect of highlighting the negotiators’ shared concerns, values, and goals (Turque, 2010). In everyday conversation, the feeling of having shared ideas, assumptions, or goals is often said to draw on “common ground”. This feeling is seen as a starting point for communicating or working together and is what we will refer to as the lay view of common ground (‘CG-lay’). Just as in our example, the concept is imprecise, unclear, and highly flexible, which may be why it is useful in describing how people talk and think about shared conversational projects. However, it is our contention that, as a naturalistic object for study, enquiry, or explanation, CG-lay identifies little more than a feeling that arises in everyday language-involving behavior (cf. Taylor, 2015).

This is not the dominant view in cognitive science, where there is a long history of both philosophical and experimentally-oriented efforts to develop a technical notion of common ground (‘CG-technical’) by placing CG-lay in an explanatory framework on

1. Introduction 2 2. Linguistic Embodiment 4

2.1. Local coordination and synergies 5 2.2. Non-local and virtual patterns 7

3. Biological engagement with social norms 9 3.1. Becoming a person: From synergies to stance-taking 10 3.2. The ecological functions of wordings 12

4. Conclusion: The illusion of common ground 15 5. References 16


which knowing is conceptualized in terms of internal data storage and logical reasoning. Within such a framework, interpersonal understanding is construed as CG-technical, that is, as a mental state or process that is somehow rendered “common” between two minds. In section 2, we contrast this account with one that turns away from CG-lay by tracing the roots of human understanding to radical embodiment. First, though, we sketch the case against CG-technical, and against the representationalist framework that requires it by assuming both that human individuals are epistemically and teleologically isolated and that language is fundamentally a means of conveying information from one person to another (see e.g., Descartes, 2009; Fodor, 1975; Locke, 1996; Newell, 1982; Saussure, 2013).

Having made these assumptions, representational theorists are forced to posit CG-technical to explain how linguistic understanding depends on peoples’ shared circumstances and common experiences. Historically, two parallel representationalist traditions have arrived at the notion of CG-technical by this process of inference from a priori assumptions. The first is philosophical pragmatics, where CG-technical (also called ‘mutual knowledge’ and ‘common knowledge’) is conceived of as a known set of propositions whose truth values can be used to evaluate the ‘content’ expressed by an act of utterance (Abbott, 2008; Grice, 1989; Lee, 2001; Lewis, 1979; Schiffer, 1972; Stalnaker, 2002; von Fintel, 2008). The second is computational psychology, where CG-technical refers to the shared, as opposed to private, information an experimental setup makes available to a participant by means of observation and reasoning (Barr & Keysar, 2005; Clark, 1996; Gibbs, 1987; Hollers & Stevens, 2007; Horton, 2005; Keysar, 1997; Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 1998).

From both perspectives, CG-technical reduces the world where action occurs to a mentally represented, epistemic context. This is done by construing bodily coordination, ecological embedding, and distribution of activity as internal knowledge, or, in standard terms, as mental representations of the contexts, circumstances, background information, and contingencies that are brought into play as people speak and write. The model may also include the immediate perceptual environment, experience with a language, general cultural knowledge of every kind, in-group knowledge or special expertise, and what has already been said during current or prior conversations. Within this representationalist framework, the explanatory function of CG-technical is to posit internal computation and inference as the mechanism by which humans engage with their environments and coordinate with each other. By choosing to ascribe a technical sense to the familiar feeling of CG-lay, a theorist or experimenter buys into a model where shared understanding is abstract and divorced from any non-mental (or non-computational) process.

Like many others - and here we must show our colors by noting that we connect distributed language (e.g. Cowley, 2011a; Hodges, Steffensen, & Martin, 2012) with ecological psychology (e.g. Chemero, 2009) - we reject any approach that restricts its


explanatory tools to algorithms operating on abstract representational objects and instantiated in the brains of individuals (e.g., Gibson, 1979; Hutchins, 1995; Maturana & Varela, 1987; Ryle, 1949; Sellars, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1958). In this essay, we turn to how representationalism distorts the phenomenon of language by using CG -technical to account for even mundane behavior. Above all, the idea of CG-technical imposes the view that humans are isolated cognitive agents and that shared experiences come from representing the world in the same way; on our distributed-ecological perspective, they simply come from inhabiting the same sociocultural world. For instance, on a classic view it is said to be our mutual knowledge (i.e., CG-technical) that the Louvre is in Paris. By contrast, we claim that writing (or reading) “the Louvre is in Paris” in this situation-for-action derives its force from the Louvre’s being located in Paris. The difference is between a fact about what an agent knows and a fact about where an agent is located in space, time, their social networks, and their sociocultural ecology.

In support of this perspective, we will sketch an alternative, non-representational framework for the explanation of linguistic phenomena. Section 2 argues that non-representational accounts of language begin with embodiment and bodily coordination, and that the current challenge for such an account is to get to grips with the richly meaningful, experiential aspects of language. Section 3 takes steps in this direction by identifying the ontogenetic routes of the relevant abilities, and conceptualizing them in ecological terms. The purpose of this sketch is to demonstrate that CG-technical is inadequate as an account of the feelings and experiences used in lay talk of common ground. For this reason, we regard the technical notion of common ground as a pernicious illusion which blinds researchers to crucial aspects of language and human understanding. It induces them to consider explanations that ignore crucial constitutive elements of how everyday life is able to make effective use of linguistic coordination.

2. Linguistic Embodiment

Representationalism is increasingly challenged by approaches based in radical embodiment (Chemero, 2009; Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2010, p. 42; Wilson & Golonka, 2013). A representationalist construes language in terms off of abstract forms that are said to be realized physiologically, and so holds that articulatory movements are planned on the basis of represented knowledge that the speaker wishes to convey about a shared situation. On an embodied account, language is primarily constituted by movement and bodily coordination, and so linguistic activity is often not planned at all. Rather, language is improvised as people navigate and construe meaning-laden sensorimotor environments where they act in the presence of, and with respect to, other people. Language does not reduce to movement, because of its emotional immediacy but


also because, in languaging, people use sociocultural norms that inhere to acoustic and 3

graphic patterns. Together with emotion, these patterns function to regulate attention and lived experiences. To illustrate this, we will refer throughout this section to a focal scenario that, in terms of CG-technical, is described as follows. Imagine that you are visiting a friend, and, watching her chop vegetables for dinner, you say, “Have you got a second cutting board?” If she responds by handing one to you, then on the CG-technical view you now mutually know (i.e., have added to your common ground) several new propositions, which include the fact that she has got a second cutting board (which she knew but you did not), the fact that you would like to help prepare dinner (which you knew but she did not), the fact that there are still more vegetables to chop (which her action implies), and so forth.

2.1. Local coordination and synergies

The first thing to note is that representationalist description leaves out bodily activity. For the moment, let us set aside the question of how vocal activity can normatively regulate attention, and focus on the imagined situation’s ‘local’ physical dynamics. Suppose that you articulate, not a name, but a demonstrative (“have you got another one of those?”) and that you glance or nod at the cutting board as you say it. This brings home that some of the situation’s affordances are based in the precise timing of activity 4

that constitutes speech and gesture (Cowley, 1994, 2010). Making an utterance is intended to shift the host’s attention to her cutting board by, for instance, inducing her to move her eyes towards it. If you succeed, the cutting board becomes a transient focus of attention and, in these circumstances, this may fix the intended sense. In such a case, linguistic understanding (i.e., coming to understand what it wanted) is relatively independent of the words actually spoken, with sensorimotor coordination - something

‘Languaging’ is a term due to Maturana (1978), and indicates human vocal activity that is 3

organized by a history of interpersonal coupling within a community. This term is used to avoid invoking ‘language’, which can indicate, e.g., an alphabet and a set of rules for combining its elements (as in Chomsky, 1965).

In ecological psychology, “affordances” are a particular animal’s opportunities for action in a 4

given setting. We accept Chemero’s account of the concept (2009, Ch. 7).


like a neurophysiological alignment of visual attention - doing the work. As in the 5

Louvre example, there would be no need to invoke CG-technical to “explain” the interaction in terms of the putative alignment of private knowledge or mental content.This is not an isolated case. In conversation, interlocutors’ bodily movement is coordinated through exquisitely skillful mutual sensorimotor engagement (Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, & Richardson, 2014; Fusaroli, Rączaszek-Leonardi, & Tylén, 2014; Rączaszek-Leonardi, Dębska, & Sochanowicz, 2014; Wallot & Van Orden, 2011). Like other motor activity (Bernstein, 1967), interaction is structured by networks of neuromuscular assemblages called synergies, or “naturally selected chunks of self-organizing behavior” (Kelso, 2009, p. 88). Synergies are relationships between physiological processes in which (i) the relationship displays fewer dimensions of variation than the component processes do, (ii) the components compensate for fluctuations in one another’s activity such that the relationship itself remains stable, and (iii) the whole assemblage is organized by an over-arching ‘function’. It is worth emphasizing that synergies have no explanatory value in themselves - they are mathematical descriptions of a pattern of inter-dependence and mutual constraint among neuromuscular elements. They constitute explanations only when accompanied by an account of their organizing functions and the informational constraints that underlie them. For instance, an explanation of a centipede’s leg movements would have to note, not just that the movements are synergetically coordinated, but that their coordination serves the collective function of locomotion, which function imposes physiological constraints on the legs by coupling their movements to one another.

A consequence of this is that explaining coordination involves identifying the over-arching function it realizes, and in living systems, such functions are typically nested - synergies are sub-components of other synergies. Accordingly, they can serve as functions for one another, as when joint-synergy constrains individual muscle-synergy during an arm movement (Kello & Van Orden, 2009; Kelso, 1995; Latash, 2008; Riley, Richardson, Shockley, & Ramenzoni, 2011). Some are intra-personal, like those required to simultaneously move and focus our eyes, and others are inter-personal, like the vocal-auditory synergies that regulate turn-taking and co-speech. Intentional speech sounds arise as intra-personal synergies (Kelso, Tuller, & Fowler, 1982; Kelso, Tuller, Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Fowler, 1984), and speaking involves not just vocal-auditory but eye, torso, and limb coordination between persons (e.g., Fowler, Richardson, Marsh, & Shockley, 2008, pp. 273-274; Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003). The upshot of this is

The assumption that this goes on all the time is implicit in the eye-tracking literature. We know 5

that eye movements follow what is being indicate or talked about, for the speaker as well as the hearer (e.g., Griffin & Bock, 2000; Hanna, Tanenhaus, & Trueswell, 2003; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003), and that this following is interpersonally coupled - in other words, the speaker’s and hearer’s eye movements are similar (Dale, Kirkham, & Richardson, 2011; Richardson & Dale, 2005; Richardson, Dale, & Kirkham, 2007).


that speaking and hearing are primarily organized by multi-level bodily coordination, rather than being based in either the said or the known (Cowley, 1994, 2014).

Nonetheless, in our cutting board example, bodily coordination is only part of the story. Coordinating with your host requires, among other things, that you both perceive cutting boards as part of the act of chopping, and chopping as part of bringing about an eventuality (i.e., eating) whose preparation can be “shared” (or better, co-constructed). Cultural practices and values like these are needed to explain how sounds become normative with respect to motion, attention, and phenomenal experience (Cowley, 2014), and it is not clear that their historical specificity can be adequately accounted for entirely in terms of functional coordination.

2.2. Non-local and virtual patterns

These general considerations suggest that embodiment-based explanations for languaging demand other explanatory tools apart from synergies and coordination. Before addressing this, we will clarify what we think they need to explain, focusing on two aspects of verbal activity that differentiate it from other modes of languaging (e.g., from texting). The first concerns how we attribute “sameness” to discrete and recombinable verbal units (Love, 2007; Ross, 2007), and the second concerns their experiential normativity. On this view, verbal activity is vocalization whose organizing function is experiential - having to do with the replication of routines and abstract patterns - rather than strictly auditory and articulatory. To aid in telling apart these aspects of verbal activity, we distinguish words (strictly abstract objects, with typographic and conceptual existence) from wordings, where the latter are nonce events that are perceived and construed in relation to a person’s sociocultural experience. When speech events are recognized as involving “the same” wordings, their identity relation can only be defined phenomenologically. The speaker aims, not to produce an acoustically identical sound (we never do this), but to produce a pattern that can be treated as “the same” as another. Once human children develop the capacity to do this, they can learn to use articulatory actions to normatively affect experience. Once infants perceive sounds as wordings, they modify the functions that organize their movements, and by coordinating with other people, they gradually re-organize attentional aspects of our engagement with an environment in accordance with specific cultural norms relating to attentional, imaginative, and affective activity. As an illustrative example, one author recalls the sudden, shocking change in flavor brought about by his mother telling his infant self that the muffin he was eating had been made from zucchini. Thus it seems to us that languaging does not reduce to movement, and we claim that neither experience nor its re-evocation can be wholly described in terms of neuromuscular synergies.


Attentional normativity differs from mental content, because wordings’ effects on experience depend on individual histories of encounters with a range of related events. This is why, for instance, the “meaning” of a wording as it is used in a particular task will be specific to that task, i.e., will be a concentration of the experiences that make it up (Duran & Dale, 2014; Fusaroli et al., 2012; Mills, 2014; Mills & Healey, 2008). At issue here is how phenomenology can stabilize bodily dynamics, which as a result can be used to affect attention, emotion, and experience in flexible ways.

We conceptualize that phenomenon in terms of ‘non-locality’. Abstract entities like words, concepts, and cultural norms are said to be ‘non-local’ in that they are constituted by processes that play out on timescales that are longer than those of human action and interaction. Such sociocultural patterns are also ‘non-located’ in that they are ontologically defined by patterns of change in the activity of populations of individuals rather than by definite regions of space-time (Steffensen & Cowley, 2010, pp. 336-348). To say that languaging implicates non-local resources is thus to say that it is intrinsically multi-scalar, and to stress that judgements of “sameness” allow sociocultural beings to display beliefs, knowledge and various kinds of attitudes (see Steffensen & Pedersen, 2014; Uryu, Steffensen, & Kramsch, 2013; Van Dijk & Withagen, 2015). Articulatory 6

activity that plays out over seconds and tens of milliseconds is embedded in events, structured by wordings that play out over minutes and hours (e.g., conversations, daily tasks), and in ontogenetic and historical changes that are completed over years and generations (e.g., the creation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships, identity development, and linguistic change). While interaction is lived, its dynamics are constrained by patterns that unfold in longer-timescales. Consider: in our kitchen example, if you were visiting your parents in your childhood home, you would already know about extra cutting boards. If at the house of a friend in Spain, you’d achieve a similar physical effect by articulating “esos” in place of “those”. If the occasion were more formal, you might not ask at all. These scenarios are differentiated by cultural ecologies - by social role, by speech community, and by situational conventions. Note that the constraints that are imposed on the interaction do not reduce to organizational dynamics or local physical contingencies.

One consequence of this multi-scalarity is that wordings are concrete and observable both as acoustic or graphical patterns on short timescales and as virtual patterns on longer, inter-generational timescales (Fowler, 2014; Port, 2010). Short-timescale wordings are articulatory gestures, vocal-tract synergies articulated to evoke word-objects and other linguistic units. Long-timescale wordings, by contrast, are community-level patterns maintained by custom and text. The long-timescale patterns both constrain and are realized by short-timescale patterns, through the ontogenetic

Note that this assumption follows directly from rejecting CG-technical’s reification of cultural 6

practices, geographical and spatial locatedness, etc., as internally represented knowledge.


entrainment of individuals to the behavioral regularities of their fellows. As a result of this entrainment, the long-timescale patterns can be described as attractors in the phase space constituted by the speaker’s and hearer’s coupled perceptual and articulatory systems during conversations between community members (Thibault, 2011).

Explaining “sameness” and attentional normativity thus demands more than just an expansion in the scope of the dynamics involved. This is because, in Gibson’s (1979, p. 283) sense, wordings are ‘virtual objects’ or entities that are constituted by acts of perception. As such, they supplement and transform the structural and physical domain of ecological information. Virtuality is classically defined by pictures: an image of a pipe is not defined by the structural properties of pipes, on any scale or set of scales. It is neither the shape of the picture (an affordance of the surface) nor what it represents that make it what it is. Rather, depicting is an affordance in the surface. Whilst structural relations are necessary to depiction, these fail to explain the relation between an image and its subject. This is a phenomenology-based capacity, although it is enabled by a person’s sensitivity to visible structural relations. An image’s “aboutness” (i.e., its existence as an image rather than as a patterned surface) is thus intrinsic to acts of perception; it is part of how people look at an image, not a property of the image itself (Noë, 2012). Magritte’s “ceci n’est pas un pipe” was neither facetious nor metaphorical (cf. Foucault & Magritte, 2008).

For Cowley (2011b), gaining skills with structural similarities is the basis for later stages of learning to talk. After about 18 months, a child begins to hear one set of articulatory actions as “the same” as another. In the context of whole-bodied human coordination, the act of making phonetic gestures comes to grant, not an identity relation, but degrees of inter-event structural similarity that permit identification as “sames”. As with depiction, verbal “sameness” is an affordance in, not of, acoustic patterns: auditory and visual sensitivity to articulatory dynamics enable people to perceive acoustic patterns as instances of repeatable actions. Their repeatability is defined by the function individuals perceive the articulatory gestures as having served, such as speaking a set of abstract forms (as in reading aloud) or regulating experiential and bodily aspects of the present situation in a way that can evoke past situations (permitting, among other things, “referring”). Wordings are ‘virtual’ in that they are constituted by the activity of their own perception. Crucially, as wordings arise, their quality as affect and movement enables them to disambiguate contexts and, in so doing, take on senses that apparently “fit” the situation.

3. Biological engagement with social norms

Our argument can be summarized thus. Since linguistic understanding is not to be explained representationally by CG-technical, we propose that it be rethought with


respect to how human agents coordinate multi-level bodily activity. Taking a distributed-ecological view, we treat wordings as crucial to human activity. Even if described by and, perhaps, based in synergies, the phenomenology of wordings is crucial to non-local ways of understanding. Like pictures, wordings are intrinsically multi-scalar and virtual. Accordingly, our focus turns to how bodily activity comes to connect up with non-local and virtual patterns. Roughly, we replace an idea of ‘semantic content’ with a view of how agents use verbal objects normatively as they manage bodily coordination and inter-action. During ontogenesis wordings and phenomenal experience come to be co-constituted, and these allow agents to perceive, construct, and use cultural-ecological techniques. The child gradually gains a capacity to perceive material patterns as instances of ideas and concepts; in the case of (so-called) ‘words’, the capacity is developed by hearing oneself speak wordings as one makes and tracks articulatory movements. Not only are sociocultural patterns passed across the generations but, as a result, persons use historical resources to individuate as having unique skills, knowledge and beliefs. Accordingly, humans have become able to think in terms of situations, objects and events and, just as crucially, to describe and explain these as types that are “referred to” by ‘words’. CG-lay, of course, is just such an explanation. However, like many lay biases and beliefs (e.g. “everything happens for a reason”), we deny it any place in naturalistic approaches to what language is or how it works.

3.1. Becoming a person: From synergies to stance-taking

The ability to act with respect to customs, concepts, and norms is social agency, or personhood, which is not necessarily co-incident with biological adulthood. Human infants are already persons on legal and moral grounds, but their personhood is nascent, primarily because they differ behaviorally from adults and even from children. Human developmental stages are among our distinguishing evolutionary traits (Bogin, 1999), and it is well known that after weaning at about two years of age, human infants enter a stage of childhood that is unknown in related species. In chimpanzees, for instance, weaning marks the boundary between children and juveniles, with no intermediate stage. Although it remains unclear how this evolutionary discontinuity emerged, it is likely to be highly relevant for language development. In particular, it may help to explain why humans, unlike other species, use cultural resources to establish group methods for manipulating and using functional information.

From birth, infants rely on sophisticated interbodily coordination. In view of the above-mentioned work showing the importance of synergy to adults, this is less surprising than when first identified in the 1970s. For Colwyn Trevarthen (1979, 1998), development leads to intrinsic motive formation that is grounded in how infant-caregiver dyads enact learning based on how each party is moved by the movements of


the other. This allows infants to manifest forms of understanding that take place between subjects. Although these lend themselves to description in terms of intersubjectivity (i.e., as akin to how we talk about the understanding of conscious representation-using individuals), their basis is plainly affective and kinesthetic. Communication with a three month old is not amenable to explanation by CG-technical. What we see in the first weeks of life is an increasing sensitivity to repeating actional patterns of cultural significance (Froese & Gallagher, 2012; Krueger, 2013; Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Tronick, 1989). They begin to notice and to enact musical and vocal patterns, showing a preference almost from birth for syllable-based rhythms typical of their native languages (Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998). Engaging with those rhythms helps them become entrained in simple patterns of turn-taking and joint movement - for example, they start to reach for objects and anticipate when they will be offered, they learn to enjoy the anticipation of repetitive stories, and so on.

But something that might be described using CG-lay does begin to arise towards the end of the first year (see Cowley, 2003, 2007 for overview). As infants begin to participate in joint attending towards objects, and the triadic (infant-caretaker-object) behavior this allows, they begin to act deliberately by attending to aspects of the world that caregivers highlight as coherent objects-of-action. As Piaget first recognized, earlier sensorimotor modes of engagement later form the basis for new ‘deliberate’ action and perception (i.e., action with respect to entities defined by cultural norms). This happens because shared action can lead to shared emotions; using triadic behavior, children can be motivated to want what others want and to direct their actions towards expected objects. They learn to use new objects in familiar routines, as in giving games - because these have self-sustaining social dynamics, children can introduce new objects and learn that those, too, can be given and received. So they not only become adept at directing and following attention, they also begin to attend to aspects, as when they learn to signal disgust at certain foods. As they begin walking, infants go and get things, show a new interest in kinds of objects, and display attitudes towards places and people they do not like. In Maturana’s (1970, 1978) words, infants become observers as they learn to display intentions and gestures while manifestly acting on objects (Maturana would say, by coordinating already-coordinated actions).

These claims are all developmental commonplaces. In repeating them here, our only aim is to stress that the child develops into a person through direct experience of how particulars are regarded and conceived of in the child’s community. Presumably, this experience is enabled by developmental changes in neural organization, and by later neural reuse and sensorimotor re-enactment (Anderson, 2010; Danker & Anderson, 2010). Accordingly, there is no need to posit abstract or propositional knowledge to account for children’s budding interest in classes of things - for example, one of the authors used to display the movements of different windscreen wipers by moving his


legs in the bath. Nor, we would argue, is there any need for recognizing one’s own intentions or interpreting those of others (Cowley, 2007).

Further, we stress that what goes for the world’s particulars also goes for the repeating, synergetic units of speech. Children may show sensitivity to vocalizations in the first weeks of life, and recognize their names by the middle of the first year. However, they do not produce canonical syllables until later, and it is only around the end of the first year that these become abstraction-amenable and open to description as ‘words’ (Cowley & Spurrett, 2003; Spurrett & Cowley, 2004). Gradually, as infants become more person-like, they come to make and track utterances as utterances of something. As argued elsewhere (e.g., Cowley, 2011b), children begin to take a language stance - to treat articulatory actions as being “the same” and as separable from their contexts of occurrence. These newly-abstract wordings play an increasing part in utterance-activity, although they are still reliant on coordinated bodily synergies and body-based skills in directing action. Children begin to draw on wordings to disambiguate situations: they track how others use wordings to learn about situationally rewarding behavior. Put otherwise, they gain perceptual skills based on using the phenomenality of speech or sign as they orient to the affordances of a social and language-saturated world. In later childhood, of course, they gain many other capabilities. As they become skilled with wordings, they come to give reasons for their actions, attribute motives to others and, in late-modern societies, develop skills with text and machine-based coding. They become fully fledged persons. Our case is that all the relevant skills - including so-called mind-reading and literacies - can be traced to how children act/perceive while attending to and using salient aspects of phenomenality (or the ability to take a language stance). It is to this that we now turn.

3.2. The ecological functions of wordings

The power of wordings lies in their ecological function. The human niche, our species-typical Umwelt, has evolved to encompass competing societies, groups, and individuals. As a result, humans inhabit an ‘extended cognitive ecology’ (Steffensen, 2011; cf. Hutchins, 2014) filled with physical structures that carry impersonal social meaning, including organizations, architecture, technologies, and techniques, including wordings. These enable persons to fit their activity to the niche and (over time) to transform its affordances. In broad terms, this idea is familiar: it appears in claims that, for example, smartphones extend the mind. Metaphorically, it arises with the view that people use scaffolding to alter cognitive capacities (Sterelny, 2010). But social resources are not mass-manufactured parts that can be assembled into customizable agents. Rather, they are sensorimotor affordances that also shape participation in cultural ecosystems (Hutchins, 2014). A line of people is just that, but it might be a queue to one person and to another, an opportunity to be the first on the plane. The issue is more


marked when we ask how biological bodies exploit wordings. Wordings can be transcribed and recorded, but in the moment that we enact them their phenomenality links them, and us, with population-level patterns and a sense of what matters at the time. Probabilistic aspects of wordings (co-occurrence, typical acoustic realization, etc.) influence activity, in large part because their affordance-potential has been created and stabilized with respect to lived experience.

In light of these observations, we suggest that the organizational function served by wordings is best captured by theorizing them as a variety of ‘attentional techniques’ (or ‘technologies’, where we are concerned with inscription rather than vocalization), which is more accurate than treating them as material scaffolds for action or as undifferentiated coordinated activity (see Harvey, 2015). This reconceptualization of wordings builds on recognition that biological systems are always distributed, in that they are constituted partly from systems and processes outside the spatial bounds of their bodies (Di Paolo, 2009). In many cases, the environmental structures that serve these functions are created deliberately by organisms in order to change their actional capacities (i.e., to modify the layout of affordances around them). When this is so, the structure and effect of the external system or process can be stabilized by inter-agent coordination and become functionally replicable in multiple instances. These replicable 7

functions might be constituted in fast- or slow-changing substrates, as techniques (practices) or technologies (artifacts or structures), respectively. Organisms self-construct their own phenomenality, and for at least some of them, techniques can be articulated, perceived, and used as if they were sensorimotor objects even though they lack material stability on experiential timescales. This makes them attentional techniques, or inter-personally stable actions constituted as patterns of attention. Wordings are prototypical attentional techniques.8

The idea here is that, by hypothesis, the fast coordination from which speech-synergies emerge is complemented by slow coordination (among persons and

Later (1999) refers to functionally replicable body-external structures as ‘technological 7

mediators’, which inspired the phrase “attentional technology”.

This last point is the major difference between our view and the related view presented in 8

Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (2013) interpretation of Howard Pattee, on which “symbols” - including words - are “replicable constraints” on dynamics. While we are sympathetic to this perspective, we think Rączaszek-Leonardi takes too much for granted in writing about words as if they were a type of pattern. By contrast, we understand Pattee’s view as a functional view; anything that functions as a replicable constraint is a symbol. Whether a given speech event in fact functions as a “symbol” will be a matter of the details of the situation, not a matter of a person’s having articulated sounds that an uninvolved observer would identify as intelligible speech. The notion of attentional technology makes this explicit: the organizational functions of wordings are phenomenological in nature.


technique-dependent actions) that keeps wordings and their use within limits favored by a community (cf. Ross, 2007, pp. 716-717). At least three aspects of wordings, which are logically and to some degree operationally distinct, are coordinated in this way. The first is their phenomenological stability, which allows us to manipulate them as techniques. The second is partial extrinsic attentional normativity; actions organized using wordings draw on norms other than those embodied by the articulating agent. And the third is actional distance: given those first two features, wordings can be used to achieve action at a spatiotemporal remove, especially in socio-ecologies where their use is defined by a slow-changing visual substrate (i.e., by writing). These three aspects are a general characterization of their organizational function, which in practice tends to involve creating situations - that is, sorting a material environment in terms of attentional and cultural affordances. If this account is on the right track, the slow-coordination of wordings and other techniques is a highly significant empirical phenomenon that is all too easily concealed by unwary appeal to the technical notion of common ground.

Attentional techniques are phenomenological patterns that allow activity to be constrained by patterns on at least two very different timescales. The first is the scale of local bodily coordination, involving synergies that stretch across multiple bodies and modalities. Because it is constituted partly by these synergies, the phenomenality of “cutting board” evokes reams of both related and unrelated sensorimotor experiences. The second is the scale of “words”. Some scholars identify coordination on these two scales - notably, Carol Fowler (2013, 2014) holds that ‘language use’ (her term for distributed language) is to be explained as the instantiation of synergies among vocal articulators that have invariant properties, like place and degree of constriction. For her, this invariance grants articulatory acts an impersonal aspect which can also be described by phonology. On our view, Fowler’s work clarifies the basis for taking a language stance - gaining the ability to attend to sounds as words - by specifying the mechanisms that allow people to perceive syllabic events as wordings that co-occur with constantly changing and fluctuating voice dynamics (Abercrombie, 1967). It does not, however, account for how articulatory synergies take on their situated and normative force. Accordingly, in our account, we stress phenomenality - for instance, in listening to speech, we only sometimes attend to the articulatory motions, and at other time attend to an event or situation being described, the emotional aspects of how they are said, and so on. Phonology is just a small part of the coordination that arises in the flow of talk. What is most important in Fowler’s account is that it explains how speaking has nothing to do with forcing mental intentions into phonetic form; in general, articulatory activity (for persons but not for infants) relies on primitive, repeating, kinesthetic habits of vocal tract movement that Browman and Goldstein (1989, 1992) call ‘phonetic gestures’. Speech is sensorimotor activity that is controlled by these kinesthetic habits, although as we have seen, these are embedded in a network of


both intra- and inter-bodily synergies that affect perception and emotion as well as articulation and other modes of action.

The other aspect of wordings is their cultural, long-timescale aspect, which individuals engage with through their personal histories of stance-taking and engagement in wording-regulated interactions. The cultural expertise involved in perceiving wordings is just as fundamental as phonetic gesture, which is why one often hears articulate vocalization without hearing wordings when in an unfamiliar setting where you do not “know” the language (so to speak). (This is one reason we adopt the distributed definition of language as activity in which wordings derive from, but are not identical to, the mechanisms that allow linguistic activity to be described in phonological terms (as ‘language use’.) To be a person presupposes an ability to develop skills for engaging with wordings as ‘future attractors’ (Thibault, 2011). That is, children gain from becoming familiar with a community’s practices and connecting these with bodily and interbodily synergies, perceiving circumstances, and learning to anticipate the results of vocal and verbal actions. The coordination and frustration of these processes produces courses of action created by applying attentional techniques. For this reason, attentional techniques like wordings are able to self-sustain through various people who draw on them as they enact and develop routines while engaging directly with the world. Indeed, given the routines and meta-routines that permeate human lives – the many paths that have been (and will be) walked – a language has been seen as a city (cf. Wittgenstein 1958) or, perhaps, a meshwork of cities (De Landa, 1997).

4. Conclusion: The illusion of common ground

A distributed-ecological framework for understanding language shows how much is missed by accounts in terms of CG-technical, and by the representational frameworks to which they are tied. Neither linguistic understanding, nor the feeling of sharing an experience rely on possession of overlapping internal knowledge. Rather, we have argued, they come from being embedded in a world where coordination uses wordings and other sociocultural resources. The use of attentional techniques to create novel affordances accounts, in a general way, for adult conversation, literacy, and private thought, and cognitive processes that the representationalist would attribute to the mind’s alleged capacity to construct common ground. But that claim is facile. It is implausible and gratuitous to attribute linguistic understanding to chains of inferences that connect intentional states to reasoning which establishes common ground. Worse, it blinds us to linguistic embodiment and the use of phenomenal experience. For this reason, it also obscures how we capture and influence each others’ attention, link this to


experience and, in so doing, undertake solo and cooperative action. For all these reasons, CG-technical has no explanatory value as a theory.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their excellent and very detailed feedback on an earlier draft of the paper, as well as one of the author’s families for emotional and financial support during its writing.

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