Saturday, July 07, 2007
Chris points to the latest from
Michael Tomasello et al.,
A New Look at Infant Pointing (
pdf). The nub of the claim being made is this:
Pointing is a special gesture functionally in that directing someone's attention to something does not convey a specific meaning in the manner of most conventionalized, symbolic gestures. Rather, pointing can convey an almost infinite variety of meanings by saying, in effect, "If you look over there, you'll know what I mean". To recover the intended meaning of a pointing gesture, therefore, requires some fairly serious "mindreading".
(p. 3)
Tomasello et al. call their perspective the cognitively rich interpretation of infant pointing, in contrast to the cognitively lean interpretation which they criticize. I haven't yet decided whether they make the case.
One idea that jumps out at me is the notion that infant pointing is "prelinguistic." Is infant pointing prelinguistic in the same way that babble is prelinguistic? Perhaps that depends on one's interpretation of babble. Is babble destined toward speech? Is pointing? Yet surely infancy has some meaning, i.e. an inability to speak. In either case, there is some evidence that social awareness and noesis are displayed in human infancy prior to the acquisition of language.
Maybe I'm jumping the gun. What can we really know about the noetic faculty of infants? And so how clear then is the idea of social awareness? Does it involve something like mindreading? For Tomasello et al. we need to know why somebody is pointing to something in order to genuinely communicate with the pointer (p. 7). Assuming this is true, how do we gain this knowledge? Is it simply by looking and suddenly realizing what is meant? Do we need something like a "theory" of other minds, a theory of mental agency, or is it enough to have an understanding of a person, an agency? The question here is whether mind-body dualism is a natural aspect of communication, or whether it is a bias introduced by investigators. Would a nondualistic interpretation of infant pointing resemble a cognitively lean interpretation, or is it really neither here nor there? (Am I missing the point?) In any event I think it's fascinating that we can know something about the cognitive abilities of infants, even if it's not settled in my mind how exactly we can interpret the facts of infant pointing.
Labels: infant, joint attention, noesis, sociality, Tomasello
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Concerning Maturana and Varela's approach to language, Bains notes that in their view "although language requires the neurophysiology of the participants, it is not a neurophysiological phenomenon. Language takes place in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions, not in the bodily materiality of the participants" (The Primacy of Semiosis, p111). I think I'll take issue with that formulation, with the proviso that the body of language is not exhausted by its neurophysiology. It's not just that the bodily leaks into language, which I think is demonstrable. Its a question of how language is possible. Our bodies does more for us than to serve as "nodes of operational intersection" (p. 112). They enable language (and action, for that matter) in such a way that the bodily is never quite completely forgotten.
In any case, I don't think the interesting claim here is the one against the body, but rather the one for the field of social interaction. (In that regard surely the body of a hypothetical single organism is not sufficient to enable language.) This view of language leads Maturana to the notion that the self is a product of language.
For Maturana the key feature of languaging is that it enable those who operate in it to describe themselves, thereby generating the self and its circumstances as linguistic disctinctions of the self's participation in a linguistic domain–that is, a domain of recursive consensual coordinations of actions. Meaning arises as a relationship of linguistic distinctions. Thus, words are distinctions of consensual coordinations of actions in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions–they are not symbolic entities–and meaning and languaging become part of the medium in which the participants exist contingent on the conservation of the social system.
(pp.116-117)
What do we do with that now that we have evidence of mirror self-recognition in dolphins, chimpanzees and elephants? We could just cast Maturana aside on this point, but that would seem to be ducking the crucial issues. Are we willing to allow that elephants, for instance, have something akin to human language? If we can admit to having been just a little bit wrong about the capabilities of elephants, how deeply then are we willing to probe into our own ignorance? Is there not an ethical problem with defining language in such a way that excludes elephants, chimpanzees and dolphins? Even if we ultimately set Maturana aside, we cannot do away with the social dimension of language and the implications this has for human relations with other self-aware social mammals.
Labels: Bains, body, language, pragmatics, self-awareness, sociality
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
During the period of infancy from three to six months the visual-motor system is virtually mature, allowing the infant to engage with its primary caregiver as a more or less equal partner in gazing activity. So says Daniel N. Stern (The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p.21), who continues:
[I]nfants exert major control over the initiation, maintenance, termination, and avoidance of social contact with the mother; in other words, they help to regulate engagement. Furthermore, by controlling their own direction of gaze, they self-regulate the level and amount of social stimulation to which they are subject. They can avert their gaze, shut their eyes, stare past, become glassy-eyed. And through the decisive use of such gaze behaviors, they can be seen to reject, distance themselves from, or defend themselves against mother. They can also reinitiate engagement and contact when they desire, through gazing, smiling and vocalizing.
(pp. 21-22, citations omitted)
(NB: Stern uses the terms "mother" and "primary caregiver" interchangably.)
No deep thoughts here. Is the gaze in absence of immediate social contact a diminished form of the essential phenomenon? A simple variation? I wonder how much time infants spend gazing off into space–Stern I think would say "staring" off into space, but I'm not sure there isn't such a thing as gazing off into space as well. What do we mean by gazing?
Labels: development, gaze, infant, sociality, Stern