Member of ISSILC

I have registered as a member of International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language, and Cognition (ISSILC).

See also previous posts on ISSILC and on the CILC conference in Odense, Denmark, September 2012.

September 12th: Founding meeting of International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition (ISSILC)

On September 12th at 6.30 pm, during the 1st International Conference on Interactivity, Language and Cognition (CILC - Odense, Denmark September 12-14 - see full programme here), a founding meeting of the International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition (ISSILC) will be held. The last few weeks I have been in correspondence with Sune Steffensen, Stephen Cowley and Paul Thibault concerning the new learned society's constitution, providing other constitutions as examples and giving input and feedback regarding the ISSILC's draft constitution, which will be treated at the founding meeting/General Assembly of ISSILC. 

Abstract: "Beyond the anthropocentric (aka linguistic) mistake: Languaging as if nature mattered"

This is my abstract for the 1st International Conference on Interactivity, Language and Cognition (Odense, September 12-14).

***

Beyond the anthropocentric (aka linguistic) mistake: Languaging as if nature mattered

Morten Tønnessen

“How easy it is for inherited concepts to stifle our senses!”

Abram 2010

“[F]orgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Luke 23:34

Daniel Everett suggests that discourse entails dark cognitive and cultural matter, namely what is not said but is still somehow in discourse. How can we study the «dark matter» of our enlightened worlds? Can we escape the tunnel-sight on language?

To simple-minded humans (philosophers included), language largely constitutes reality. And yet language is free to evolve at the inkling of an eye, the hunch of a confused mind. Without a doubt, language does in many senses open the world up to us – but it also conditions and constrains us. Homo sapiens sapiens is a creature that organises ecological reality in linguistic categories – both perceptually and behaviourally. It is very “natural”, therefore, to commit the anthropocentric mistake, namely to reason (erroneously) that human reality is practically all there is. We tend to think in terms of language, and in terms of language, all is language. All is human language – all is human.

What we do not realize, when committing this mistake, is that it is not only our species that judges, that categorises, that is different, and so forth. It takes a brilliant (and somewhat ludicrous) mind to differentiate between the world as we see it and the world as it may be beyond (underneath, beneath) language. The anthropocentric – or indeed linguistic – mistake, then, consists in mistaking human reality for reality as such. Misjudging the nature of reality, we misjudge our nature – living nature – human nature. In consequence, even our own distinctive nature is obscured. Is there a way out of this ‘house of language’?

Perhaps there is. I suggest that language rather than being external to the human Umwelt (von Uexküll), as fellow biosemioticians Sebeok and Hoffmeyer have suggested, is internal to it. If so, then in a sense language is perception (and action) – and often perception (and action) is language. If cognition is situated, embodied, extended and distributed, then we must be able to be “thinking with animals” (Daston and Mitman (eds) 2005) in a literal sense. In fact, aren’t we already? Examples to this effect will be provided, demonstrating that we are indeed enmeshed in a cultural meshwork (Thibault 2011) – which was never merely human – as well as in a natural meshwork.

References

Abram, David 2010. The Discourse of the Birds. Biosemiotics 3(3): 263-275.

Daston, Lorraine and Mitman, Gregg (eds) 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Thibault, Paul 2011. First-Order Languaging Dynamics and Second-Order Language: The Distributed Language View. Ecological Psychology 23: 1–36.

Presentation scheduled for Language and Life event; title sketched

I will be one of three presenters during the Language and Life event in Tartu July 15th, two days ahead of this year's gathering in biosemiotics. My tentative title is "the conceptual Umwelt and its role in the tripartite model of the human Umwelt". There will further be a roundtable and group work, and presentations by Stephen Cowley and Leo van Lier. Attendance will be open to all interested.

Abstracts for our three presentations are due by March 16th.

See also previous posts on joining the research cluster Language and Life, and involving an update as of last summer.

Blurb on forthcoming book on Wittgenstein in translation

My Dutch colleague Dinda Gorlée (cf. previous posts), who is among other things Associate Editor of American Book Review, has written a book entitled Wittgenstein in translation: Exploring semiotic signatures. It is to be published this spring by De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin). Translation theory is her specialty, and she has for years been affiliated with the Wittgenstein archives in Bergen (see her profile page), Norway, so this should be a valuable publication.

Here's a blurb that I got from Dinda:

Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts for books, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. Wittgenstein followed St. Augustine (as translator) and Plato (as teacher). Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics, when he moved from Saussure to Peirce and Jakobson. This volume provides an application of Wittgenstein's methodological tools to study the multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology, and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish can be in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This book undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's original and translated texts in order to construct, instead of a paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence of Wittgenstein's fragmentariness in philosophy.

See also Dinda Gorlée's homepage, and her earlier book chapter on the theme of "Wittgenstein, translation and semiotics" (also available in part through Google Books). She can be contacted directly via gorlee@xs4all.nl.

Joining the DLG research cluster Language and Life

I have confirmed that I am joining the Distributed Language Group's new research cluster Language and Life, coordinated, as DLG itself, by Stephen Cowley.

Excerpts of initial description:

The DLG perspective suggests that, as part of action and perception – and especially as a mode of caring – language is central to both human lives and the world that we influence.
...
My first goal is to build a community who are interested in both the academic and practical implications of linking language with culture and the life sciences. I hope to link people from biosemiotics, ecological linguistics, enactivism, and other groups.
...
in 2012 or 2013 I hope that we can consolidate our concerns in some kind of academic meeting. In addition, I aim to construct a bibliography of materials, a set of links, and a discussion forum.