Scaffolded Cognition, Basic Mentality and Language: Some non-representationalist insights from the later Wittgenstein

  • Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen
Keywords: Wittgenstein, Language-games, Doxa, Enactivism, Non-representational Cognition

Abstract

Building on insights from the later Wittgenstein, this paper thematizes the non-representational basis of human language games. It considers how linguistic activity is enacted as a multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be adequately described solely by means of the central enactivist concepts of ‘sense-making’, ‘participatory sensemaking’ and ‘basic minds’. Rather, the argument goes, the human capacity for partaking in linguistic activity is bound to the faculty of understanding as well as doxastic and proto-doxastic attitudes that can be both explicit and implicit in linguistic utterances. The paper shows how such beliefs play a crucial role in allowing linguistically mediated cognition to scaffold social co-engagements. Further, they attest to the success of language-games by conditioning the satisfactory outcome of such games thus allowing not only their unhindered ongoing but also their reoccurrence.

References

Ambrose, Stanley H. (2001), «Palaeolithic technology and human evolution», in Science, n. 291, pp. 1748-1753.

Blair, David (2006), Wittgenstein, Language and Information: “Back to the Rough Ground!”, Springer, Dordrecht.

Bottineau, Didier (2010), Language and enaction, in Stewart John, Gapenne Olivier, Di Paolo Ezequiel A., a cura di, Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 267–306.

Coliva, Annalisa (2010), Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Cowley, Stephen J., Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus (2015), «Deflating Autonomy: Human Interactivity in the Emerging Social World», in Intellectica, vol. 63, pp. 49-63.

Cuffari, Elena C. (2014), On Being Mindful About Misunderstandings in Languaging: Making Sense of Non-sense as the Way to Sharing Linguistic Meaning, in Cappuccio Massimiliano, Froese Tom, a cura di, Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sensemaking: Making Sense of Non-sense, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 207-237.

Cuffari, Elena C., Di Paolo, Ezequiel, De Jaegher, Hanne (2015), «From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again», in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 14, n. 4, pp. 1089-1125.

De Jaegher, Hanne, Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. (2007), «Participatory Sense-making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition», in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 6, n. 4, pp. 485-507.

Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. (2005), «Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency», in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 4, n. 4, pp. 429-452.

Donald, Merlin (2017), «Key cognitive preconditions for the evolution of language», in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 24, n. 1, pp. 204-208.

Froese, Tom, Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. (2011), «The Enactive Approach: Theoretical Sketches From Cell to Society», in Pragmatics & Cognition, vol. 19, n. 1, pp. 1-36.

Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus (2017), «Experience, poetry and truth: On the phenomenology of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart», in Phainomena, vol. XXVI, n. 100-101, pp. 61-73.

Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus (2019), «But language too is material!», in Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, vol. 18, n. 1, pp. 169-183.

Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus, Cowley, Stephen J. (2017), «Phenomenology & Sociality: How Extended Normative Perturbations Give Rise to Social Agency», in Intellectica, vol. 67, pp. 379-398.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (1996), Spencer and Dewey on Life and Mind, in Boden Margaret, a cura di, The Philosophy of Artificial Life, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 314-331.

Heidegger, Martin (1927), Sein und Zeit, in E. Husserl, ed., Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. 8.

Husserl, Edmund (1973), Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a genealogy of logic, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Hutto, Daniel D., Myin, Erik (2013), Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hutto, Daniel D., Satne, Glenda (2015), «The Natural Origins of Content», in Philosophia, vol. 43 (3), pp. 521-536.

Jensen, Thomas W., Cuffari, Elena (2014), «Doubleness in experience: Towards a distributed enactive approach to metaphoricity», in Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 29, n. 4, pp. 278-297.

Jünger, Ernst (2012), The Adventurous Heart – Figures and Capriccios, Telos Press Publishing, Candor.

Kolodny, Oren, Edelman, Shimon (2018), «The evolution of the capacity for language: the ecological context and adaptive value of a process of cognitive hijacking», in Phil. Trnas. R. Soc., vol. 373, n. 1743.

Malafouris, Lambros (2013), How Things Shape the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

McDowell, John (2009), Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London.

Okrent, Mark B. (2005), The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy, in Dreyfus Hubert L., Wrathall Mark A., a cura di, A Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell, Malden MA, pp. 468-483.

Rorty, Richard (2007), «Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn», in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Volume 4: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 160-176.

Thompson, Evan (2007), Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, Harvard University Press, Harvard.

Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, Rosch, Elanor (1991), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969), On Certainty, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Malden, 4th edition, 2009.

How to Cite
Gahrn-Andersen, R. (1) “Scaffolded Cognition, Basic Mentality and Language: Some non-representationalist insights from the later Wittgenstein”, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, 13(1). Available at: http://160.97.104.70/index.php/rifl/article/view/537 (Accessed: 4December2024).