East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

In recent years, a change in attitude in particle physics has led to our understanding current quantum field theories as effective field theories. The present paper is concerned with the significance of this EFT approach, especially from the viewpoint of the debate on reductionism in science. In particular, it is a purpose of this paper to clarify how EFTs may provide an interesting case-study in current philosophical discussion on reduction, emergence and inter-level relationships in general.

The idea for this issue of the Rivista di Estetica comes from a conference that was held at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, June 2011. The question that the speakers were asked to tackle was “What keeps society together?”. At least since John Searle’s 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, a popular answer to that question has been that collective intentionality lies at bottom of all manifestations of social reality – from interactions in informal groups (...) to... (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Kant’s reception of and solution to the problem of the unity of the political will. I propose that Kant distances himself from the modern paradigmatic foundations of sovereignty principally with his theses of the ideality of the general will and of the apriority of the justification of popular sovereignty. My interpretative hypothesis is that Kant solves the problem by grounding sovereignty in a conceptual element which is new in the history of political philosophy, i. e. (...) the a priori unified omnilateral will. In section IV, I explain why my reading of the ideality of the general will can respond to seemingly plausible objections arising from Kant’s own texts and how it works in the face of concrete political states of affairs. (shrink)

In this paper we engage with and contribute to the critical project of highlighting the dilemmas that arise from structurally unequal and unjust social, political, and institutional realities when dealing with past wrongs or, better phrased, historic injustices. We emphasise the present-time character of historic injustices. We think that there is a risk of allochronism in discussing historic injustices mainly as wrongs done in the past. This risk consists in making people forget that redressing these injustices is something to be (...) done in an unjust present structured by domination, and that those very past wrongs and harms helped to shape the present-time condition of structural injustice. As the misplacing in the past phenomena that occur in the present and in one’s practical context, allochronism has the effect that people do not feel responsible for those present-time injustices that derive from wrongs done in the past. Our aim is to propose one way of dealing with this risk of misallocating responsibility (and thus accountability), which consists in intersecting the notion of historic injustices with the notion of coloniality. After showing how an approach oriented by the notion of coloniality helps surmount the negative effects of allochronism and provides a significant complement to a structural approach to injustice (Sect. ‘ Coloniality and Responsibility for Justice ’), we turn to Frantz Fanon (Sect. ‘ Fanon ’) and José Carlos Mariátegui (Sect. ‘ Mariátegui ’) to illustrate the relationship between coloniality and justice and how it is possible to render a construal of ‘past wrongs’ without losing sight of their pervasiveness in the present time. (shrink)

En este trabajo intento hacer algunos aportes al diálogo entre María Julia Bertomeu y Nuria Sánchez Madrid publicado en Con-Textos Kantianos en 2019. Me interesa establecer que la teoría kantiana de la propiedad es una teoría crítica que no justifica los derechos de propiedad privada y las relaciones de propiedad existentes sino que sirve para señalar el carácter no absoluto de los derechos de propiedad privada y la necesidad normativa de modificar las relaciones de propiedad existentes.

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

Feelings of guilt are human emotions that may arise if a person committed an action that contradicts basic moral mores or failed to commit an action that is considered moral according to their ethical standards and values. Psychological scholarship distinguishes between altruistic guilt (AG) and deontological guilt (DG). AG results from having caused harm to an innocent victim, either by acting or failing to act, whereas DG is caused by violating a moral principle. Although physicians may be expected to experience (...) frequent feelings of guilt in their demanding and intensive work, it is surprising to find that this issue has not been explored in the professional literature on medical ethics. To that end, we conducted a qualitative study that included personal in-depth interviews with Sunni Muslim gynaecologists. These doctors provide underground infertility care and perform religiously forbidden treatments involving sex selection and gamete donation. They opened their hearts and spoke about the emotionally taxing pangs of conscience they suffer. Analysing their narratives led us to characterize their feelings of guilt as DG. We discuss the causes for their plight and the way they cope with it, compare DG to the concept of moral distress, and call for future research on clinicians’ feelings of guilt and pangs of conscience. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en ofrecer algunas consideraciones acerca del esquema contractualista kantiano. Se analiza la particularidad de dos elementos que son fundamentales para las teorías contractualistas, en la medida en que determinan el modo en que cada una de ellas justifica la necesidad práctica del exeundum y del modelo político que se deriva de ello: la concepción de libertad que se adscribe a los agentes que ingresan a un contrato, y el modo de concebir la interacción práctica (...) entre esos agentes. Respecto de , se propone que la independencia entre ética y derecho redunda en una diferenciación entre la aplicación de la idea de «libertad» en ambos ámbitos, diferencia que permite comprender en qué sentido el derecho kantiano se maneja con una concepción política de la autonomía . Respecto de , se intenta mostrar que Kant no concibió al estado natural en términos individualistas, sino por el contrario en los términos de una comunidad interactiva. (shrink)

En este trabajo, me propongo reconstruir dos tesis de importancia metaética, jurídica y política que Kant expone en Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloβen Vernunft. Se trata de dos tesis que mantienen una sólida consistencia con dos de los núcleos temáticos de la Rechstlehre, lo que nos permite proponer que el texto de 1793 puede ser considerado una suerte de crítica propedéutica para la metafísica jurídico-política de Kant. La primera de estas tesis será analizada en la sección I y (...) atañe a la concepción metaética de la libertad que Kant presenta en Religion a propósito del análisis del mal radical. La segunda, analizada en la sección II, a la serie de diferencias trazadas entre el estado de naturaleza y la comunidad éticos, por un lado, y el estado de naturaleza y la comunidad jurídico-políticos, por el otro. En una sección III, presentaré el sentido que estas tesis obtienen respecto de la recepción crítica que Kant hace de las teorías modernas iusnaturales. (shrink)

We have measured the change of lung mechanical parameters on isolated rabbit lungs exposed to chlorine gas (Cl{in2}). Experimental results show parallel increase in elastance and resistance of impaired lungs. We tried to determine whether this may be explained by a reduction of the ventilated areas in the lung, consecutive to closure of some airways. We have then tried to simulate these experimental results by studying the effects of various airways occlusions imposed on two concurrent models (symmetrical and dissymmetrical) of (...) the tracheo-bronchial tree. For each model, we successively evaluated the resistance of the normal lung, simulated a partial peripheral airways occlusion and estimated the induced changes in total resistance. Analytical expressions of the "occluded lung" elastance and resistance have been found for the symmetrical model but not for the dissymmetrical model (a graphical approach is proposed). With the symmetrical model, simulated results are comparable to experimental ones when the occlusion level is proximal. Whatever the dissymmetry level (δ) of the fractal tree model, we could not simulate the expected increase in resistance with the observed increase in elastance. We conclude that either the occlusion is non homogeneous or the lung impairment is not only a reduction in ventilated areas. (shrink)

Research on the role of values in science and objectivity has typically approached trust through its epistemic aspects. Yet, recent work on public trust in science has emphasized the role of non-epistemic values in building and maintaining trust. This paper will use a concept of trust that adds concerns about justice to epistemic conditions to investigate this problem in relation to public health. I will argue that trust-conducive values, particularly justice, are relevant in deciding which value influences are legitimate in (...) scientific decision-making. Drawing on public health ethics, I will provide a consequentialist justification for employing trust-conducive values. While several concepts of justice have been explored in the context of public health, I will further draw on public health ethics, focusing on a view that brings together both distributive and procedural aspects. For illustration, I will use the case of cardiovascular disease prevention, particularly how concerns about justice apply when choosing between population-based and individual-based approaches. (shrink)

The current study investigates the influence of variety among online providers and customers' access to knowledge on consumer networks, consumer engagement, and sustainable purchasing. Emphasis is on the underlying relationships among these constructs in the digital economy, which has evolved into a complex structure of multifarious nodes and linkages unfolding in the online environment. The underlying theoretical approaches are knowledge-attitude-behavior (KAB) and customer sovereignty. Against this backdrop, a questionnaire-based survey was given to 200 Millennials (i.e., generation Y) and gen Z (...) Italians—approached as empowered stakeholders requiring accurate information and sustainable solutions from online providers—in January 2023. The data was processed via the structural equation modeling technique PLS-SEM, based on SmartPLS 4. The findings indicated that sustainable purchasing is influenced to some extent by access to knowledge, consumer engagement, and consumer networks. The study endeavors to fill a research gap, as the relationships between variety among online providers and sustainable purchasing, as well as consumer engagement from the empowerment perspective are underexplored. The study provides new evidence of the relationships between consumer networks, consumers' access to knowledge, sustainable purchasing, and consumer engagement in the framework of online retail by inquiring respondents. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

With this brief text I introduce the homonymous dossier. The idea of the dossier was to compile texts on matters that are not usually studied in the literature, written from original and polemical perspectives. These papers focus on subjects like the extraterrestrial perspective on humans, the a priori character of political conflict, drinking alcohol with friends and political philosophy of the mind.

En este estudio crítico, analizo la obra de Rivera Castro Virtud, felicidad y religión en la filosofía moral de Kant, obra en la que se resalta la importancia de la felicidad en la ética de Kant y se busca establecer su relación con la virtud. Mis objeciones conceptuales y metodológicas se orientan eminentemente a cuestionar su tesis básica sobre el alcance y especificidad del rol motivacional de la felicidad en tanto que componente del bien supremo. In this critical essay, I (...) analyse Rivera Castro's Virtud, felicidad y religión en la filosofía moral de Kant. In this work, the author highlights the significance of happiness in Kant's Ethics, aiming at establishing its relation to virtue. My conceptual and methodological objections are intended to question her fundamental thesis on the scope and specificity of the motivational role happiness plays as component element of the highest good. (shrink)

En este texto de presentación del número especial “Filosofía de la participación política”, coeditado con Moira Pérez y Blas Radi, mapeo algunos de los temas y problemas que motivaron la convocatoria a trabajos. En la primera sección presento dos grandes modelos de la participación política en contextos democráticos, con la tesis de que los fenómenos desdemocratizantes del presente se ven facilitados por un cierto modo de entenderla. En la segunda sección propongo que una manera fructífera de estudiar la participación política (...) es a través de los problemas que la inclusión en los procesos colectivos formales de decisión política democrática acarrea para determinadas personas y colectivos, en el marco de sistemas de dominación estructural. Por último, presento brevemente los diferentes trabajos que componen este número especial. (shrink)

Este texto reseña el libro Biglieri, Paula y Cadahia, Luciana, Seven essays on populism. For a Renewed Theoretical Perspective, Medford: Polity, 2021. Traducido por George Ciccariello-Maher y con prólogo de Wendy Brown.

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most talented linguists of the Soviet Union, among whom one can highlight N. F. Jakovlev and E. D. Polivanov, were involved in the process of "language building". Their role in the success of this process is examined from the point of view of the phonological theory that they developed for creating scripts for the numerous peoples of the Soviet Union, Turkic and Caucasian above all. Jakovlev's phonology, that Polivanov termed "social phonology", was (...) very different from the one that N. Trubetskoj proposed some 10 years later. We will try to explain their ambitious script projects, which remain difficult to understand from the point of view of the modern phonology. (shrink)

¿Es el desideratum secularista de separación Iglesia-Estado capaz de enfrentar las consecuencias negativas de la revitalización política de los conservadurismos religiosos y la instrumentalización de la religiosidad popular para fines antiigualitarios? La respuesta negativa es la tesis de la que parto para analizar por qué los liberalismos secularistas y postsecularistas no pueden procesar ni en la teoría ni en la práctica la reordenación política de las iglesias cristianas conservadoras (católicas y evangélicas) en nuestra región. Esto no me conduce a abrazar (...) una teología política ni un relativismo abstencionista. Me interesa estudiar la plausibilidad de desarrollar una postura ético-política anticlerical que no desprecia la religiosidad popular ni el potencial emancipador en los fenómenos religiosos, en un mundo en el que no es ni moral ni históricamente viable soslayarlos insistiendo en colocarlos en la esfera inasible de lo privado o en un pasado sublimado en procesos de secularización. La hipótesis guía de este artículo es que la cuestión normativa y política básica sobre la que tratan la mayor parte de los debates sobre secularización en la actualidad es la participación de las iglesias en lo político por medio de la formación del juicio y la voluntad públicos. -/- . (shrink)

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their homeland until (...) the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)

The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)