Scheda Articolo

Building Action in Public Environments with Diverse Semiotic Resources

in Versus n. 112-113, The External Mind. Perspectives on Semiosis, Distribution and Situation in Cognition, pp.169-182

Abstract

Human beings build action by bringing together structurally different kinds of phenomena (talk, gesture, prosody, multi-party participation frameworks, material structure in the world that is the focus of their work, etc.) into contextual configurations where they mutually elaborate each other to create a whole that is not found in any of the constitutive parts. This provides a framework for the public, distributed organization of action and cognition in two distinct, but deeply interrelated ways. First, actions themselves have a distributed organization in that they contain within them a host of diverse meaning-making practices that draw upon distinct, complementary forms of semiosis. Second, the public character of these diverse resources makes it possible for an action to be socially distributed in the sense that a variety of different kinds of actors can participate in its organization, both simultaneously, and sequentially as subsequent actions are built as interpretants of prior ones. Such phenomena contribute to the theme of this special issue in that they demonstrate how “cognition is not an isolated process, but happens in and through complex interactions between subjects, language, material artefacts and an environment that is both physical and interwoven with shared constructions of meaning.” These processes are investigated in two quite different kinds of materials: first, the practices through which an aphasic man with a three world vocabulary is constituted as powerful speaker in conversation; and second, the work of archaeologists as they see and uncover structure in the dirt they are excavating.