Abstract: Human beings are embodied symbol-users. By performing bodily movements humans are capable of creating symbolic meanings which are intimately connected with the corporeal experience of living-in-the-world, but at the same time transcend the bound-aries of the organism within its environment. The concept of articulation enables us to do justice to these two complementary aspects of the human life-form. Having introduced the notion of articulation, Peirce’s semiotic theory is then employed to show how the func-tional integration of different types of signs shapes our semiotic capabilities and with them our consciousness. Finally, the distinctions which have been elaborated are put to the test by connecting them with the history of cultural evolution.
Introduction
In the last two decades, the general claim that human cognition is not only embrained but also embodied has developed from an outsider position to some-thing only a little short of a mainstream truism. As long as the details are left unspecified, most (second-generation)1 cognitive scientists and philosophers would concede that functioning brains (even if channels for sensory input and motor output are provided) are necessary but in no way sufficient conditions for cognition. In the meantime, the surge of enthusiasm about embodiment has reached an impressive height and produced rather extreme positions like radical enactivism (see Hutto and Myin 2013). The contested question now seems to be not whether cognition is embodied but how deep the embodiment goes.
Conceptualizing cognition and mind in terms of embodiment undoubtedly has many advantages. It helps us to avoid unconvincing dualist anthropologies and to keep both feet on the ground of what can either be phenomenologically described or scientifically analyzed. It situates cognition in the real world and thus immunizes against the alienating effects of neuro-constructivism in the fash-ion of Thomas Metzinger (2009).2 In moral philosophy, to mention a hitherto
3 For an important move in this direction, see Meuter 2006, chap. 8.
4 Hubert Dreyfus, deeply influenced by Heidegger, is the most prominent promotor of this conception (e. g., Dreyfus 2014).
5 See the section “Action and Play” in Jung (2010, 157 – 158).
6 The importance of – innerworldly – transcendence in Dewey’s thought is carefully elabo-rated in Kestenbaum (2002).
7 As Michael Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” reminds us, see Tomasello (2014). For a concise summarizing diagram, see ibid. (140).
mostly neglected but important point, it allows us to situate overly abstract uni-versalisms within the enactive primary intersubjectivity of corporeal persons.3
It is, however, possible to overemphasize embodiment. This happens when, attempting to describe cognitive processes in terms of skillful coping of the organism within its specific environment,4 we lose sight of something essential for human cognition: our capacity to transcend the here and now of our embod-iment. Embodied cognition is not necessarily driven by instrumental goals, as the term “coping” might be taken to imply. In this regard, the manner in which the American pragmatists are often highlighted as pioneers of the coping-con-ception of embodiment is characteristic. Teed Rockwell, to give one example, refers to Dewey’s philosophy as paradigmatic for the pragmatist alternative to dualism and opines that for Dewey “an experience is always constituted by a goal-directed activity” (Rockwell 2005, 164). It is true that Dewey often under-lines goal-directedness, but it would be a real mistake to overlook the degree to which he, for example in Art As Experience (Dewey [1934] 2008b), also acknowl-edges the importance of intrinsically satisfying activities with no instrumental or external purpose. Hence the importance of play in his account of embod-ied action.5 Such embodied activities do not lend themselves to an understand-ing in terms of copunderstand-ing. Ultimately, “every experience is the result of interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives” (Dewey [1934] 2008b, 50). But this leaves ample room for the aesthetic dimension and for the transcending force of higher-order goals.6 It is therefore important to avoid a one-sided reception of pragmatism as a philosophical source of embodied cognition. Only by acknowledging the degree to which the classic pragmatists – arguing from within the interactional unity of organism and environment – leave room for the depth and uniqueness of human experience, can we wholeheartedly appreciate their contribution to embodied cognition.
The aforementioned depth of human experience is internally connected with our ability to handle linguistic and other symbols. In the course of our evolu-tionary development, the structure of our minds, as Terrence Deacon has argued convincingly, co-varied with the evolution of semiotic capabilities (Deacon 1997, 449 – 450). We have embodied minds, shaped by our usage of symbols as well as by our corporeality. Our symbolically (and intersubjectively7) enlarged consciousness enables us to escape the realm of direct experience. We live in normatively structured cultures, in which possible worlds play an integral part of our orientation in the real world. We are capable of purposeless, entirely non-instrumental thought, of “musement” in the meaning Peirce gave to that
8 Peirce has even based his famous and controversial “Neglected Argument” (for the exis-tence of God) on this state of mind, of which only symbol users are capable, see Peirce (1998, 434 – 450).
term.8 Man’s cognitive feats include the construction of cosmological models, the development of comprehensive worldviews and – last but not least – the writing of books about embodiment. These capabilities are difficult to account for in terms of any narrow conception of situated interaction with the environment.
And they cannot be dismissed as mere epiphenomenal side-effects of the selective advantages produced by flexible coping-strategies within the environment. This point was forcefully made in Thomas Nagel’s recent Mind in Cosmos (Nagel 2012). On the other hand, fortifying the distinction between body and mind into a dualism is clearly no alternative, since the latter is distinguished from the for-mer by rendering the respective components “in terms that make . . . their char-acteristic relations to one another ultimately unintelligible. (Descartes’s dualism is, as always, the paradigm.)” (Brandom 1998, 615). Dualism avoids reductive naturalism only at the cost of denying essential embodiment. The challenge, in my eyes, thus lies in articulating our condition as situated but at the same time situation-transcending organisms in terms of embodied performances. As Teed Rockwell succinctly puts it: we are neither brain nor ghost and need to look for a nondualist alternative to the mind-brain identity theory (Rockwell 2005, 164).
The term “embodiment” itself already suggests the integration of organic functions with something different that is usually described as mind or “Geist”
in the German tradition (admittedly, “Geist” has a more dualistic ring to it than
“mind”). There’s a different danger lurking here, though: embodiment may – dualistically – be misunderstood as the contingent coupling of organic features and independently describable cognitive properties. This temptation has ancient Platonic roots but can, prima facie, also be detected in modern functionalist talk, when multiple realizability is conceived of in a manner which separates func-tional description and physical instantiation.
So how can we adequately think about our human condition as embodied symbol users? In this paper, I will develop a suggestion centered on the concept of articulation. Many animals communicate via highly sophisticated systems of signs, and the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, posture, gait, etc., can often be understood across species-borders, as Darwin famously showed (Darwin 1998). But there is no evidence available that any other species except Homo sapi-ens uses symbolic language in which meaning is conveyed by articulated strings of signs which combine direct and indirect reference to the world. Articulation is a genuinely corporeal activity, but it creates meanings which are detachable from the here and now of their articulation. By articulating what is meaningful for us in the course of our interactions with our environment, human culture brings forth a realm of meanings which are relatively independent from their origin and may in turn influence the embodied experiences of future generations, which will produce further creative fusions of actual and sedimented experience, and so on. These repeated feedback-loops between articulated meanings and novel,
9 The pragmatist philosopher who most forcefully developed the internal relation between thinking and intersubjective symbol-use is G. H. Mead: “We sometimes speak as if a person unanticipated experience – hermeneutic cycles, as Wilhelm Dilthey would have called them – introduce second-order reflexivity into first-order bodily coping, without ever severing the connection to the lived body. Insofar as the idea of cop-ing implies that the purpose of intelligent behavior is predetermined by the affor-dances and obstacles present in the immediate environment of the organism, a decisive transition occurs and the fixed distinction of means and ends is dissolved:
real-time coping is supplemented with genuine reflection upon the reasonable-ness of purposes, instrumental reasoning becomes embedded in second-order thinking, mere preferences become evaluated by values and norms. In the course of all this, the living-organism-within-its-environment remains the anchor point.
All expressive systems are ultimately owned in the same way as any other motor sys-tem: that is, they are self-rooted. . . . The conscious mind may have reinvented itself and greatly extended its reach in language, but it has never lost its vestigial roots in embod-iment. (Donald 2001, 137)
In what follows, I will try to elaborate this conception in three steps. First, I will sketch the concept of articulation as the embodied alternative to represen-tationalist views of language, second I will introduce some basic insights from Peirce’s theory of signs as a key to understanding the deep integration of sym-bolic transcendence and embodied sign-usage, and finally I will try to connect these insights with actual developments of cultural history.
1. Making Us Explicit – Articulation as the Practice of Embodied Sign-Usage
As pragmatists, phenomenologists and exponents of the hermeneutic tradition have pointed out time and again, we live in a reality of qualitative meanings.
“The world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated is preeminently a qualitative world. What we act for, suffer, and enjoy are things in their qualitative determinations” (Dewey [1930] 1998, 195).
These meanings come to us in the first instance not as representational content, but as something which is implicit in our practices and may be felt more or less intensely in the form of what John Dewey calls a “single pervasive quality” (ibid., 198). Distinct qualities accompany the situations we live through and individuate them. These qualities, however, are prima facie unarticulated. They contain no countable parts and no distinction of reference and meaning. Articulation is the process of making explicit what the felt meaningfulness of action-associated qual-ities actually means: where its personal or social significance lies and to which entities in the world it refers. Symbol-users sometimes accomplish this without actually articulating themselves, but even mute, fully-fledged thinking presup-poses linguistic abilities and is best thought of as internalized conversation.9
could build up an entire argument in his mind, and then put it into words to convey it to some-one else. Actually, our thinking always takes place by means of some sort of symbols. It is pos-sible that one could have the meaning of the word ‘chair’ in his experience without there being a symbol, but we would not be thinking about it in that case. . . . In a thought process there has to be some sort of a symbol that can refer to this meaning, that is, tend to call out this response, and also serve this purpose for other persons as well” (Mead 1967, 146).
10 See the section “Symbolizing in Pantomime” in Tomasello (2014, 59 – 66).
11 “Es vereinigen sich also im Menschen zwei Gebiete, welche der Theilung bis auf eine übersehbare Zahl fester Elemente, der Verbindung dieser aber bis ins Unendliche fähig sind, und in welchem jeder Theil seine eigentümliche Natur immer zugleich als Verhältnis zu den zu ihm gehörenden darstellt. Der Mensch besitzt die Kraft, diese Gebiete zu teilen, geistig durch Reflexion, körperlich durch Articulation, und ihre Theile wieder zu verbinden” (von Humboldt 1994, 13).
12 “We tend to perceive speech sounds in terms of ‘articulatory gestures,’ whose boundaries and distinctions correspond to articulatory (i. e., somatomotor) features, not just sound fea-tures”(Deacon 1997, 359).
The etymology is helpful here: the Latin articulus literally means the bodily joint whose inflections allow us to structure movements in general. The same applies to expressive movements: they are articulated, that is, their meaning is brought about by the position, direction and order of the performed gesture.
Today, not only Michael Tomasello10 is convinced that gesturing was at the beginning of symbolic language, and this means that the syntactical character of language is derivative of the process of bodily articulation in the literal sense.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt11 discovered the phenomenon later called “double articulation,” the fact that human languages are structured twice: words are composed out of smaller discrete phonemes, mean-ings are composed out of morphemes. Thus articulation is essentially embodied:
it consists in the functional coupling of semiotic meaning to bodily movements characterized by discrete parts and multiple, but limited, degrees of freedom in connecting them. In his book The Symbolic Species (1997), Terrence Deacon offers a convincing case for the sensory-motor character even of phonetic articu-lation: empirical research shows that the gestalt-like comprehension of “articula-tory gestures”12 lies behind our astonishing ability to detect words in the fast and blurred soundstream of speech. If we had to rely on acoustic impressions alone, we would never be able to discriminate the meaning of spoken language – it is the activation of patterns which match oral-vocal movements that does the job.
Semiotic articulation (in Humboldt’s terminology “Reflektion”) is thus based upon somatic articulation, which is not only dependent upon our body scheme and the coordinated movements it enables but is also directly connected with the felt meanings the Deweyan unifying pervasive qualities convey. The phe-nomenal gestalt of a pervasive quality and the expressive meaning conveyed by the person’s countenance, posture, gesture, gait, etc., are two sides of the same coin. If our embeddedness within our environment were characterized by flu-ent transactions, in which no hitches occurred, that would be the whole story and my paper would have to end here. But as a matter of fact, we live in a resis-tive world in which the interactional loops between organism and surrounding are constantly disintegrated and have to be restored again and again. As Peirce,
13 It is very easy to misconceive the phrase “problem-driven.” For the classical pragmatists, it precisely doesn’t mean that language and reason are mere instruments for the solving of pre-given problems. Whereas intelligence – the term used across the border between human beings and other animals – is always in the service of coping, mankind’s problems stem mostly from second-order ends not already fixed by survival-problems. Of course it is possible to still call this kind of problem-solving “coping,” but then what is coped with is the conditio humana – not as something eternally fixed, but as the result of contingent historical developments.
Dewey, and Dilthey pointed out in unison, the need for articulation is the need for reflective transformation of problematic situations into less problematic ones (Since the pragmatist use of the term problem is likely to cause misunderstand-ings, a clarification is in order: for pragmatists, problems are not be conceived of as exceptional occurrences with negative value. They are as much part and parcel of our interactions as uninhibited exchange; problems in the ordinary meaning of the term form only a more troublesome subspecies of them.). In the light of this conception, making matters explicit is always driven by a felt dissonance, be it ever so slight, within the interactional cycle, which in order to be solved has to be articulated. During this process, the holistic gestalt qualities which accompany action are transformed into semiotic performances containing discrete parts in an articulated sequence which determines its meaning.
If we conceive of language, as I suggest, as the problem-driven explication13 of felt qualities by both bodily and symbolic means, the veridical representation of matters of fact features as only one subspecies of the genus and not, as truth-con-ditional theories of meaning would have it, as what language is all about. “Truths are but one class of meanings, namely, those in which a claim to verifiability by their consequences is an intrinsic part of their meaning” (Dewey [1927 – 1928]
2008a, 4 – 5). The gestalt qualities of the lived body in its environment can never be represented in language anyway, since they have no parts at all that might be mapped in an isomorphic manner onto linguistic content. Their function in the process of articulation is to deliver a sense of directedness, not to be captured in their entirety. As Wittgenstein reminded us, the signs we use in our speech acts are the only means we have to determine their meanings (see Wittgenstein [1953] 1971, 220). But conversely it is also true that only the felt meaning which accompanies the process of articulation guides us in choosing the right words in a given situation. In this manner, articulation is always embodied in two distinct aspects: first, both the semantic composition of words out of smaller units and the syntactic ordering of meaning within a sentence depend upon sensory-motor performances of the body; and second, the successive determination of meaning within speech depends upon corporeal qualities and their felt change during the articulation process. Depending on the necessities of the context, this process may develop in a variety of ways, focusing either on subjective, intersubjective or objective features of the problematic situation. Representational theories of linguistic meaning misconceive their topic by taking the referential aspect, which allows us to separate and make explicit intentional correlates of consciousness, for the axis around which language revolves.
14 “It is in this phase of subjectivity, with its activities of attention in the solution of the problem, i. e., in the construction of the hypothesis of the new world, that the individual qua in-dividual has his functional expression or rather is that function” (Mead 1964, 52). For a detailed account, see Jung (2009, 217 – 252).
15 But see n13 for a non-reductionist understanding of the term “problematic.”
Charles Taylor, in a widely read paper on theories of meaning, has therefore proposed substituting representationalist accounts with expressivist ones (see Taylor 1985, 284 – 291). Taylor conceives of language as articulatory in principle:
by articulating the implicit meaning of our interactions with the environment, we achieve three crucial things: we generate explicit (ibid., 256 – 258) and public (ibid., 259 – 260) consciousness and shape the distinctions we need to handle our human affairs (ibid., 260 – 263). My only critique of Taylor’s conception – labeled by him variously as the “Herder-Humboldt-Haman,” “romantic” or “expres-sivist” (ibid., 255 – 256) theory – would be that it unnecessarily plays down the
by articulating the implicit meaning of our interactions with the environment, we achieve three crucial things: we generate explicit (ibid., 256 – 258) and public (ibid., 259 – 260) consciousness and shape the distinctions we need to handle our human affairs (ibid., 260 – 263). My only critique of Taylor’s conception – labeled by him variously as the “Herder-Humboldt-Haman,” “romantic” or “expres-sivist” (ibid., 255 – 256) theory – would be that it unnecessarily plays down the