Abstract
Enactivist accounts of language use generally treat concrete words in terms of motor intentionality systems and affordances for action. There is less consensus, though, regarding how abstract words are to be understood in enactivist terms. I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy to argue, against the representationalist paradigm that has dominated the cognitive scientific and philosophical traditions, that language is fundamentally a mode of participation in our world. In particular, language orients us within our milieus in a manner that extends into the depth of the idea-endowed world (where “ideas” are construed in a specifically Merleau-Pontian sense). This conceptualization of language allows us to see that abstract words orient us bodily just as surely as concrete words do, albeit in a manner that is more diffuse across the entirety of given situations, as I will show with an example of abstract language use in Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld. These insights are applied to some of the recent enactivist discourse to suggest some ways in which representationalism maintains a latent presence in this discourse. I conclude by pointing to developments in conceptual metaphor theory that can enrich our sense of how abstract language is involved in embodied understanding.
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Notes
For an example of how language continues to be treated as fundamentally referential, see Jirak et al.’s decription of the embodied cognition perspective on language: “When applied to language, embodied cognition views claim that when we understand words, the same sensorimotor areas are recruited as for interacting with the objects and entities the words refer to. Similarly, when we comprehend sentences, we internally simulate the state of the world the sentences describe” (2010, 711). As we will see, these notions of reference, internal simulation, and description are insufficient to account for what we actually do with words.
Arguably, in the very development of this ontology Merleau-Ponty goes beyond a phenomenological approach, which (again, arguably) relies on the sort of “philosophy of consciousness” that characterizes Phenomenology of Perception. I bracket this question in an effort to focus on the features of experience which are, at the very least, given phenomenological description by Merleau-Ponty.
An earlier version of portions of this essay were presented as “Situating Speech: Merleau-Ponty on Language in The Visible and the Invisible,” at the conference Intersubjectivity as Interaction: In the Footsteps of Merleau-Ponty, Nijmegen, Netherlands, June 2013.
By orientation, I mean the manner in which we are embedded in meaningful milieus in any given situation, which entails having a certain perspective and being open to certain possibilities for action.
Consciousness has been likened to a sea; only the surface glimmers in the sun, and perhaps the first few meters are illuminated, but the light fades on descent towards the invisible depths; yet those depths are the source of forces that drive the tide and the currents and the waves—they are the volume that supports the surface. So it is with the depth of ideas beneath appearances: we may be largely unaware of the associations and resonances which underlie appearances, even as they provide this invisible depth to the visible world in the production of meaning.
This term is used, for instance, by Schilhab (2013) to describe instances in which “understanding at the competent level is attained in the absence of actual interaction with the environment and on-line embodiment” (311). Indeed, simply by reading Proust’s prose, and drawing on antecedent experience, we can know something of what it is like for Marcel to be so moved by the little phrase.
We find here an anticipation of Gendlin’s “moreness” (see Gendlin 1997).
See especially Frege (1892). Certainly, the rather obvious limitations of treating linguistic meanings without regard to their situated nature have led to efforts to accommodate context into the semantic discourse. But insofar as those accommodations still function within a semantic framework based on content and reference, or otherwise treat meaning as contained by language, they remain insufficient to account for the meaningful depths of language as we actually live them. To give just one example, Mitchell S. Green proposes a “scorekeeping” semantic model according to which “speakers uttering indicative sentences have those sentences entered into the conversational record unless there is a demurrer from an addressee, and once in the record the content of those sentences may be used as fodder for future inference as well as be presupposed by their speech acts” (Green 2000). Green argues that such a model could “articulate a conception of linguistic meaning according to which (a) a single bit of contentful language can serve any of a variety of communicative tasks, while (b) the meaning of certain expressions can only be properly elucidated in terms some extralinguistic purpose that their utterance subserves [sic]. Thus developed, the scorekeeping model will permit an explication of certain sorts of expressions in terms, in part, of their use without jeopardizing a systematic and rigorous treatment of their meaning” (Ibid., 469–70). Green sees the need to treat meaning as contextually embedded, yet he is only willing to extend the frame of reference for his analysis to incorporate other indicatives issued within the conversational context. The implication is that the demand for a “systematic and rigorous treatment” of linguistic meaning can succeed only if it operates on a linguistic level that is free of situational embeddedness—free, for instance, of the milieu in which a conversation takes place, of the social status and nature of the relationships between the participants, of the cultural background which is presupposed by the conversation, of mood and tone and gesture and facial expression, etc. But such elements are integral to the processes of sensible interaction with the world by which meaning is produced—so integral, in fact, that there can be no meaning without them. The cost of this “systematic and rigorous treatment” of linguistic meaning, then, is that it doesn’t actually account for meaning at all.
Or, in the case of structuralism, a “system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others,” as Saussure puts it (de Saussure 1959). Whereas representationalist theories of linguistic meaning tend to tie language to objects in the world (or mental representations of objects) by lines of correspondence, structuralism frees meaning from this sort of correspondentism, but at the cost of constituting meaning solely at a “psychological” level. Thus, as Bottineau (2013) puts it, in structuralism “the forms under scrutiny, treated as symbolic objects independently from the way in which they are experienced, are the disembodied transcriptions resulting from human traits of action.”
Even if the object is behind us and we are in no position to turn around and look, it is before our attention; to attend to an object is always, in this sense, to face it.
We do not, however, find corroboration of the language of representationalism in which they couch that thesis, nor their diremption of information into “experiential” and “linguistic” domains (Kousta et al. 2009, p. 1116).
It follows that its meaning is altered by being excerpted from the original text.
This apparent reduction of “thought” to a linguistic form is debatable; I would, in fact, argue against it. However, the significant contribution of language to thought, at least, is indubitable.
Literary tastes may differ, of course, and some readers may not respond to DeLillo’s style; but just about any reader, I would imagine, has had some such response to a writer who has compelled a recognition of some erstwhile unrealized depths of meaning through the skill and clarity of their writing.
Indeed, it could be argued that, if material technologies do influence thought, and thought is a means for enactive sense making, then the contribution of material technologies to the constitution of lived reality necessarily follows, according to the enactivist perspective.
And what is meant by ‘literature’ here could become an interesting point of discussion.
Regarding the generality of bodily disposition and patterns of interaction, contrast the “tone of repose” and “sense of mollifying silence” described by DeLillo with the specific actions afforded by, say, a mug in a cupboard.
Some degree of reification is probably inevitable, and in the nature of abstract language; but for this very reason it is important that we maintain an awareness of the effect this reification can have on our understanding.
In this they echo Bottineau, who says that “the network of experiences out of which the notion is born is not only personal, but collective and constructivistic in its genesis: the notions of cat and probity do not stem from my experience, but from that of all the persons who used the word publicly enough to have a say in the kind of situation recorded in the words’s usage” (2010, 183).
They, too, intend to treat the distinction between concrete and abstract words as oriented on a continuous spectrum rather than as a firm dichotomy, though for them the spectrum is defined by individual embodied experience at one end and social embodied experience at the other.
Language itself may in some cases be the sole link between ideas that could not be brought into propinquity otherwise. Shanon (2010) gives an example in a discussion of “thought sequences.” One participant in a study, asked to record the thoughts that passed sequentially through her mind as she called her dog by the name ‘Doni,’ reported thinking “1. It is really frisky. 2. She should have called it ‘Shedoni’ [in Hebrew, diminutive for devil]. 3. Or for short, ‘shed’ [in Hebrew, devil]. 4. That has meaning in English, too, ‘shed’.” The participant’s thoughts passed from one domain to another simply by way of an incidental homophony. The situated action of imagined speech opens on to new possibilities for action—domains of signification open on to others—through a spontaneous “generation of novelty” (Shanon 2010, 395), an important source of creative thought.
Research has clearly shown a link between language use and motor activation and, further, that the particular motor activation involved is context-dependent: motor systems involving grasping actions will be involved when we are asked to pass the salt, whereas systems involving kicking actions will be involved when we are asked to pass the ball. (See, for instance, van Elk et al. (2010), Borghi and Scorolli (2009), Scorolli and Borghi (2007), also Fischer and Zwaan 2008.)
On the other hand, it is tempting to wonder whether something a little more systemic is being expressed by this old habit: in particular, whether the authors’ perspectives as empirical scientists is predisposing them towards such language. Could it be that the structure of scientific observation—which requires the identification of a determinate object (in the case of the study in question, the coded transcriptions of study participants’ descriptions of concepts) and an observer who, at least in theory, is external to the phenomena observed—entails an understanding of those phenomena in representationalist terms, even in a case like this, in which the experiment supports a theory that in important ways subverts a representationalist account of language? This terminology, at any rate, is rife in the cognitive science discourse.
Glenberg et al. (2008).
This expectation is corroborated in Raposo et al. (2009), where the authors find that semantic context contributes to the sensorimotor involvement in processing meaning. I would only add the observation that semantic context entails situational context.
For a discussion of how even such abstract terms as logical operators orient us in a milieu that is navigable by means of our bodily capacities, see Johnson 1987, pp. 38–39. For an example from the domain of mathematics, and pertaining to the concept of infinity in particular, see Núñez (2010). For a sample of the empirical support for the role of derived bodily capacities in abstract sense-making, see Ijzerman and Semin (2010), Schnall et al. (2008), Jostmann et al. (2009), Schubert (2005), Boot and Pecher (2011), and Wilson and Gibbs (2007). For a general review of such support, see Gibbs (2011).
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Irwin, B.A. An enactivist account of abstract words: lessons from Merleau-Ponty. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 133–153 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9434-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9434-y