Posts com a Tag ‘MIT Press (E)’
Against Nature | Lorraine Daston
El nuevo libro de Lorraine Daston es un breve ensayo que recapitula ideas previamente desarrolladas en sus dos conferencias Tanner “The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea” y “Nature’s Customs versus Nature’s Laws” (Daston, 2002), además de los dos libros editados The Moral Authority of Nature (Daston & Vidal, 2004) y Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Stolleis & Daston, 2008). Los lectores asiduos de la filósofa germano-estadounidense encontrarán que Against Nature no tiene la erudición y la densidad conceptual de sus predecesores, pero sí una retórica más ligera y penetrante. La prosa de esta obra es diáfana, habiendo sido escrita tanto en alemán como en inglés por la misma autora, manteniendo un estilo liviano bastante alejado de la pesadez que otrora fue característica del pensamiento producido en Alemania. Pero, curiosamente, este libro se inscribe con gracia dentro de un tema propio de la tradición filosófica germana: la antropología filosófica enmarcada por la obra de Kant. Hay cierta sensación de yuxtaposición a lo largo del libro, semejante al cruce de temporalidades presentes y pasadas en los sueños. Por momentos parece que Daston no se ha movido de la filosofía del siglo XVIII, pero al cambiar de página queda en evidencia que se trata de una pensadora contemporánea en el sentido fuerte del término. Esto, lejos de ser una contradicción que le reste mérito al libro, resulta en una fascinante experiencia de integración poco frecuente en la academia actual. Leia Mais
Linguistic Bodies: The continuity between Life and Language – DI PAOLO et al (M)
DI PAOLO, Ezequiel; DE JAEGHER, Hanne; CUFFARI, Elena. Linguistic Bodies: The continuity between Life and Language. MIT Press, 2018. 414 pages. Resenha de: FIGUEIREDO, Nara Miranda. Manuscrito, Campinas, v.43 n.1 Jan./Mar. 2020.
INTRODUCTION
Di Paolo, De Jaegher and Cuffari begin the book by inviting the reader to see herself as a linguistic body. They list individual and social daily activities that are always permeated by reasons, emotions, choices, thoughts and mental conversations and ask what would be the best way to approach a linguistic body to talk about its nature. The authors’ choice is to explain, from the beginning, what linguistic bodies are. Therefore, the book is divided into three parts: In the first, the authors offer their definition of a body, in the second, they discuss what linguistic bodies are, and in the third they focus more specifically on how we become linguistic bodies and how the language we know is part of our actions. These three parts comprise a total of 12 chapters and 414 pages, including glossary, notes, bibliography and index, and are entitled ‘Bodies’, ‘Linguistic Bodies’ and ‘Living as Linguistic Bodies’, respectively.
The authors claim that the theory of linguistic bodies is the first coherent embodied and social conception of human language that doesn’t resort to mental representations in order to explain any cognitive processes, including language itself. In order to contextualize the work, we should briefly recall that since the sixties the brain has been conceived as the center of cognitive processing and that theories about cognition, strongly influenced by Fodor’s philosophy (1975, 1983), sustained that cognitive processes are operations on mental representations of the world. Only in the eighties, under the influence of Gibson (1979), who argued that perception is ‘for action’, the representationalist conception began to lose space for less traditional conceptions that argued that cognition also occurs in the body (embodied), in the environment (embedded) and in action (enactive)1. The work of Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) is the main reference for embodied cognition and it provides the basis for the theory of linguistic bodies, which I call linguistic enactivism.
Linguistic enactivism, according to the authors, expands and deepens the enactive theory presented by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991), connecting dynamic explanations of action and perception to language. Its main aim is to show that the thesis of embodied cognition, contrary to what the critics of this conception suggest, can explain both basic skills, such as the sensorimotor ones, as well as higher skills, such as language. To provide this explanation, Di Paolo, De Jaegher and Cuffari stress that the distance between these two levels of cognitive activities has, until today, been little explored and that we can, at least in principle, imagine that they are of the same nature. Then, according to them, we need to significantly deepen our conception of the body (p.4). This is done in the book by exploring several concepts proposed by enactivism. The authors develop some of these concepts and present others and, after that, they present a conceptual model of cognition that leads us to the notion of linguistic agency, which is a key notion for considering reference, grammar, symbols and other features of language.
This review consists of a brief exposition of the book and offers a panoramic view of the theory. Following the structure of the book, I will first explain the authors’ notion of body, then refer to their notion of dialectics, after that I will expose the steps of the model and, finally, get to their conception of languaging.
THE THEORY
The authors start from the analysis of different traditional conceptions of the body: (1) the biological body, which is often considered from a purely functional perspective, and explains the development and functioning of parts essential to language, such as the brain, vocal structures, hearing, gestures, movements, etc.; (2) the situated body, which is anatomically structured and recognized by its patterns of action and linguistic behaviors; (3) the phenomenological body that, differently from functionalist conceptions, is considered from the experience of language in a world of sensations, feelings and emotions, such as desires, suspicions, care, love, confinement, respect, etc; and (4) the social body that is seen as an active body that acts socially, a body that not only uses language for communication, but that linguistically structures its practices, thoughts, rituals, places and institutions. This is a concept of corporeality as powers that spread from social practices among individuals with the development of skills (p.14).
However, the adoption of contextualized conceptions in which the body is considered only from one perspective is rejected by the authors because it is a type of “feeble pluralism lacking a theoretical core” (p.14). Thus, they seek a theoretical articulation that is capable of offering an understanding of the interconnections between the various dimensions of the body leading to the concept of linguistic bodies. This theoretical articulation has several key concepts2, among them, the concepts of precariousness, auto-poiesis, interest (concern), identity, adaptivity, autonomy, appreciation, adaptivity, agency, mastery, sense-making, social interaction, and, in my understanding, the concept of dialectics connecting them all.
Dialectics, roughly speaking, is not understood in the usual way, namely, as the confrontation of opposite sides of a debate, but as constant tensions that originate between multiple relations that constitute a system. These tensions are due to the disharmony and contradictions of operating trends between different parts, norms or functions (p.114) of the system. “When a passage out of a dialectical situation into another occurs, oppositions are transformed rather than equilibrated” (p.114).
The thesis presented in the book is that dialectical tensions occur between the most diverse opposing trends. At the corporeal level, they occur between and within the body’s own dimensions, which are: organic, sensorimotor and intersubjective. The organic dimension of the body is characterized by “anatomical structures or physiology, or as bundles of sensors, effectors, and neuromuscular tissues” (p.24), physicochemical processes of the organism, metabolic, immunological processes etc., and precarious processes of self-individuation and adaptive engagement (coupling) with the environment. These structures and processes can be, and in general are, explained by investigations in the natural sciences. The normativity of the organic dimension is the result of the interactions between these elements and processes. The sensorimotor dimension involves the processes of engagement (coupling) of the agent with the environment. These processes are not separated from neurobiological processes or from the relationships of organisms with other agents (p.21). Its normativity occurs due to these interactions. The intersubjective dimension is characterized by the agent’s interaction with other agents that relate to him/her not only as objects of contemplation, obstacle or use, but as powers of interpellation, which inquire him/her, ignore him/her, support him/her, respond to him/her, smile, cry, and share a world of activities and concerns with him/her (p.62).
Within the organism, dialectical tensions occur even between the tendencies of self-production and self-distinction. Every living organism is an autopoietic system. Autopoietic systems are autonomous, in the sense that they self-regulate, but they are not independent, as they need means for self-production. Autopoietic systems can be defined as networks of “biochemical processes organized in such a way that the operation of these processes” (p.329) support the organism and its relations with the environment. These processes involve the system’s self-distinction in relation to the environment, as well as the system’s self-production from the environment. Self-production is the process by which the system uses matter and energy, from the environment for its own self-organization; and self-distinction is the process of rejecting the matter and energy from the environment. Self-production and self-distinction interact dialectically by means of agency. This means that the organism adaptively regulates its coupling with the world selecting what it accepts and what it rejects from the world.
Dialectical tensions – and the overcoming of the tensions by means of transformations and mutual influences – constitute the normativity of a certain domain, which interacts with the normativity of other domains, ultimately resulting in the behavior that we observe in interactive encounters. This is why, in my view, the notion of dialectics is so important: because it identifies the very source of normativity.
Thus, we have individual normativity followed by interactive normativity, which is the idea that in social encounters, two or more organic systems self-regulate, for the interplay of their own sensorimotor normativities and the natural caring constitutes a dialectic tension, and the very interaction is dialectic. At this point, the concepts defining the organism and its interaction with the world and with others already give room to what is called sense-making, which is defined as “The active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. The basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring.” (p.332). As sense-making can be done jointly and it is affected by coordination patterns, breakdowns and recoveries undergone during social encounters, participatory sense-making comes into play. Participatory sense-making is “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own” (p.73)
THE MODEL
The dialectical model of cognition3 presented by the authors starts from participatory sense-making and builds up through seven other dialectic steps leading us to the notion of linguistic agency. But it is not until chapters seven and eight that the reader can have an overview of these steps. Each step, as the authors mention in the description of the visual representation of the model, is a form of social agency, “it breaks into its main form of tension” (p.160) and generates, or leads to, the next step. From this point on, things start to get very interesting, for the authors resort to theories of language, developmental psychology, phenomenological analysis and empirical research and consider “work in conversation analysis, interaction studies, and ethnography (p. 341)” as source of empirical evidence about social interactions4.
I will briefly explain a couple of the key steps of the model and refer to the others. Participatory sense-making breaks into individual norms and interactive norms. As I mentioned before, individual norms are constituted by the essential tensions between self-production and self-distinction among the three dimensions of embodiment5. Each interactive situation has its own interactive norms, which are constituted by the combination of the individual normativities. In practical terms, a good example for this autonomous normativity of interactive situations is the narrow corridor case: linguistic body A wants to walk through a narrow corridor towards the exit of the building while linguistic body B is coming on the opposite direction, both people want to pass by each other, but they bump into each other a few times before being able to pass by, because the corridor is narrow and the space is restricted. Both agents, together, self regulate their actions, despite the fact that they are not explicitly intentionally coordinating6 their actions at first (p.142), otherwise they wouldn’t bump into each other.
From the tension entailed by participatory sense making, we get to social acts which split to the tension between spontaneous acts and partial acts. In a nutshell, this is the difference between acts that require feedback and acts that do not. For example, when greeting, linguistic body A expects to be greeted back by linguistic body B, while just stretching does not involve any kind of feedback. From this tension, there is the coordination of social acts, which splits into creative and recursive acts. Shortly, recursive acts reproduce previous acts and reiterate them, while creative ones are new. From this tension, we have the normativity of social acts which splits into local pragmatics and portable acts, which can be synthetized in acts that are meaningful only in specific groups – local – and acts that can be enacted in several groups – portable. Internal jokes are examples of local pragmatics, while greetings are examples of portable acts. This tension leads to communities of interactors. Its tension is between two kinds of roles: regulatory role and regulated role. There is a good example for this case: in face-to-face conversation, usually, people keep a certain distance from each other; this is co-regulated by the individuals in the situation they are living. If, for example, there is something preventing the understanding between them, linguistic body A can get closer to linguistic body B in an attempt to hear better – this is a regulatory act. It says that the conversation must be clearer or louder, it is almost like a requirement for the conversation to keep going. A regulatory act is, then, “(…) a partial act used in order to modulate, select, project, reject, or encourage other particular partial acts within a shared repertoire.” (p. 331). The regulated act, on the other hand, is the partial act that complements the regulatory act. Naturally, linguistic body B can enact another regulatory act to which linguistic body A will either conform or confront7.
The tension between regulatory and regulated roles leads to dialogue and recognition, the sixth step of the model. It splits into production of utterances and interpretation of utterances. Before referring to the tension, it is important to highlight that utterances are not understood as we traditionally do, namely, as statements that involve sentences in spoken or written language, nor as linguistic gestures. Although these can also be examples of utterances, utterances are essentially acts. An utterance is “A dialogic act, enacted asymmetrically through the actions of a mutually recognized producer and an audience.” (p. 332). They have a double dimension of meaning (p.175): they contribute to the co-regulation of interactive encounters, which is its pragmatic dimension, and they are meaningful due to how they relate to the participants of the encounters, which is its expressive dimension (p.176). As I just mentioned, the tension that happens in dialogue and recognition is between interpretation and production. Interpretation is the act of the listener (audience or apprentice) before the producer. Production is the act of a producer, which is someone who performs the utterance, before the audience. Thus, “The utterance as a whole is a social act in the sense we have given to this term: it is constructed as much by the audience as by the producer and may fail if the corresponding complementary acts are not coordinated” (p. 174).
From production and interpretation of utterances in a dialogue, we come to participation genres. “Participation genres encompass the practices and situated norms of different kinds of social interaction, a subset of which are Bakhtin’s speech genres.” (p. 179). Participation genres frame the production of utterances and what is required for interpretation, and they help to coordinate the regulation of social acts. They split into self-control and mutual interpretation. Mutual interpretation is the act of interpreting himself/herself and others. Self-control is the act of the producer when he/she interprets his/her own utterances due to dialogical regulation. “In other words, mutual interpretation leads to self-interpretation and to the self-regulation of utterance production” (p. 184) which leads to social self-control.
The final step of the model is reported utterances, which splits into incorporation and incarnation and it has a transformative potential that leads to a “new kind of embodied agency: linguistic bodies” (p.191). Reported utterances are “utterances that echo, reflect, refract, or somehow make use of other utterances, the producer’s own or those of others.” (p.187). It brings up “the producer’s interpretation of the utterances it repeats or reflects (Voloshinov 1929/1973, 117).” (p.187). Incorporation is when external processes become constitutive of a system; it is the appropriation of utterances of other agents by a linguistic agent. Incorporated utterances are a result of personal enactments and patterns of a community. These acts “may sometimes lie deep in the past of a community’s linguistic experience” (p.191) and they define a linguistic agent. Incorporation “entails the incarnation of other linguistic agents, their perspectives, attitudes, voices, gestures, movements, personalities, ways of relation and so on”8 (p.194). This is the paradox of linguistic bodies: “acts of utterance incorporation define a linguistic agent, but the process of incorporation simultaneously entails the incarnation of other linguistic agents” (p.194). This is explained by means of virtual dialogues. Self-directed utterances, “a social skill put to personal use” (p.125), entail a dialogic attitude, even when there is no actual interlocutor (or audience). Thus, virtual dialogues “can be enacted by a single linguistic agent if in addition to invoking the presence of (specific or indeterminate) others, these others are also incarnated-that is, ‘animated’ as agents and given a part in the construction of the virtual dialogue.” (p.194). The ongoing management of this last tension of the model, namely, incorporation and incarnation, defines a linguistic body.
Objectivity is another concept worth mentioning before we come to how the authors propose that grammar develops from the continuity between life and mind. The claim is that it has been part of the model all along as it emerges through collaborative processes of sense-making. Objectivity is conceived as “the activity of taking something as a thing, a this that is the object of our treating, doing, acting, or uttering”9 (p.200). The objectification happens when, by repeating an utterance we bring “that utterance to presence (i.e., to shared attention and awareness); in so doing, we have made it a possible object of shared regulatory action; and we have also opened up the possibility of appreciating the utterance, of letting it be, of lingering there with us.” (p. 203). The objectifying attitude is, then, “the practice of regulating other practices and experiences in a mutually constraining relation with sociomaterial conditions” (p. 203).
LANGUAGING
Let us now move to the emergence of language. First, in chapter nine, the authors consider how we become linguistic bodies. They suggest that “children even at or before birth, experience full linguistic engagement” (p. 258) and that we are always unfinished beings, “constantly in becoming” (p. 218). After that, in chapter ten, they consider how research about autism can help not only to improve the model but also in our understanding of autism and non-autistic linguistic bodies. In chapter eleven, they start exploring how language as we know it (when we study grammar, narratives, symbols and so on) emerges from our living practices. They say that “It is not the case that in considering grammar, symbol, convention, and written language (…), we have finally built our way up to the inevitable plane where ideal entities of higher-order cognitive abilities hang out ” (p.279). But in seeing the sensitivities and powers of linguistic agency throughout the book, we can consider words, syntax and symbols differently (p.279). In reference to Ochs (1996) and Sapir (1927), they say that grammar is immersed in social interaction and language interpenetrates with experience. Thus, the enactive take is probably “compatible with research that links grammar to a logic of practices, material structures and social relations” (p. 280). Besides that, linguistic enactivism adds that several phenomena, such as “Sensitivities to symbols, grammar, convention, regulation, narrative” (p.280) can be explored from a linguistic enactivist perspective which considers, “the joint structuring and mutual accommodation of repertoires, the normative regulation of interactive encounters (…)” (p.280), bodily, interactive and societal autonomy, and the tensions of incorporation and incarnation.
According to linguistic enactivism, grammar “can be understood as a dynamic and local organizing activity of linguistic bodies” (p. 281). Regulating patterns can be identified since the first tension described in the model, the tension between individual norms and interactive norms. The authors point out that “(…) unspoken regulative patterns (…) help coordinate the construction of utterances. Emergent grammatical patterns (…) are in essence no different from (…) more obviously embodied and interactive forms of coregulation” (p.287). Grammatical rules are the objectification of these patterns. The preferred word for talking about grammar is ‘grammaticalizing’, as much as ‘languaging’ “referring, regulating, judging, symbolizing, and sensitizing” (p. 293) which preserve “the materiality, agency, and susceptibility of these processes” (p. 293), while ‘reference’, ‘rules’, ‘content’, ‘symbol’ and alike keep the idea of language as a set of abstract rules, somehow independent of living bodies.
“Referring, then, is an emerging outcome of sense-making processes of linguistic bodies becoming together” (p. 295). And because “linguistic bodies also symbolize and interact with symbols as ‘products’” (p. 295) of the processes of becoming linguistic bodies, a “novel materiality, asymmetry, and temporality” (p. 307) emerges. One that allows us to enact ourselves “through engagements with the utterances of another” (p. 307) when writing and reading, for example, and to understand voices “uttered by no body” (p. 308), in advertisements, political messages, institutional rules, guiding symbols, norms in our communities and so on.
The book ends considering some ethical issues implied by the theory. Once we accept that we are intersubjective bodies, constantly interacting not only with other linguistic bodies but also with utterances that do not have a specific enunciator, such as the ones just mentioned, we immediately see that the essential character of living beings of caring about life “because we are precarious organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective bodies” (p. 309), our embeddedness in a world of others, and our constant becoming by means or incorporation and incarnation leads us directly to the embeddedness of ethical concerns. Linguistic agency is a form of ethical agency because it “is only with the appearance of the critical and person-constituting powers of linguistic bodies that questions of what kinds of worlds we are building, for whom, and under what constraints and possibilities, first become issues in the history of life” (p. 10), and due to this, as put by Varela (1999a) “the turn toward concrete situated practices in the study of the mind should be accompanied by a similar turn toward concrete ethical know-how” (p. 350).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In short, we are linguistic bodies because we are, even before birth, immersed in a world of others and of several needs and constraints for life maintenance. These conditions mean that things are inherently meaningful to us. What we traditionally understand as language, is a development of several layers of complexity in our forms of life.
The main points to be highlighted in this theory, in my view, are (1) the source of normativity in the dialectical tensions and its natural character; (2) the idea that life itself is a dialectic tension between self-production and self-distinction that involves selective opening and selective rejection (adaptive regulation) (p.40); (3) the explanation of how language, as we know it, emerges from this natural normativity, which encompasses the whole dialectical model; (4) the perspective that we are essentially social beings, and (5) that because things are essentially meaningful to us, including being bad or good, the theory also involves ethical issues and gives room for the development of ethical agency from an enactive perspective.
As mentioned more than once throughout the book, this is not a finished work. Several points need to be developed, complemented and corrected. Besides that, “the model is not meant to describe the unfolding of historical stages in the evolution of human language or the development of linguistic skills” (p.133). The theory aims at extending “the remit of enactive theory” (p.133) in exposing the logic of the activity of using language (p.133). Also, the authors “do not end the book (…) with broad enactive accounts of symbols or grammar” (p. 10), but, despite its unfinished character, one can see that this book is the result of many years of research and dedication. Some concepts can be explored in more detail if one looks for specific papers; I should mention the very concept of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007), the concept of agency (Barandiaran, Di Paolo, & Rohde, 2009) and sense-making and language (Cuffari, Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2015)10, but there are several references throughout the book.
It is a very dense book, the theory is intricate and sophisticated, but it is totally worth the reading. For those working on embodied cognition, either by endorsing it or by questioning it, this is a keystone work and it promises to shake up our conceptions. For those not specifically working on that, it might be a little challenging, but it certainly provides an entirely different conception of mind and life. This book offers an insightful and fascinating perspective on the long-standing problems of the relationship between body and mind.
References
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BAKHTIN, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (C. Emerson, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [ Links ]
BAKHTIN, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. [ Links ]
BARANDIARAN, X. E., DI PAOLO, E. A., & ROHDE, M. (2009). Defining agency: Individuality, normativity, asymmetry, and spatio-temporality in action. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 367-386 [ Links ]
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CUFFARI, E., DI PAOLO, E. A., & DE JAEGHER, H. (2015). From participatory sense-making to language: There and back again. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14(4), 1089-1125. [ Links ]
DE JAEGHER, H., & DI PAOLO, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 485-507. [ Links ]
DU BOIS, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(3), 359-410. [ Links ]
JOHNSON, M. (2018) The Embodiment of Language in The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. “Newen, S. Gallagher, & L. de Bruin (Eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ Links ]
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LAKOFF, G., & JOHNSON, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [ Links ]
LAKOFF, G., & JOHNSON, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. [ Links ]
NEWEN, S. GALLAGHER, & L. DE BRUIN (2018) The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ Links ]
OCHS, E., SCHEGLOFF, E., & THOMPSON, S. (Eds.). (1996). Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Links ]
POPOVA, Y. B. (2015). Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction. London: Routledge. [ Links ]
RIEGEL, K. F. (1976). The dialectics of human development. American Psychologist, 31(10), 689-700. [ Links ]
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Notas
1We should also mention ‘extended’. It means that cognitive processes essentially involve our relation to things (our notebooks, for memory, for example) (Chalmers and Clark, 1998). Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition comprise what is today called 4E cognition (Newen, Gallagher, & Bruin, 2018) and might even become 7E cognition (Johnson, 2018) if it comes to include emotional, evolutionary, and exaptative.
2Many of them are concepts borrowed or developed from enactivism, ultimately referring to the book ‘The Embodied Mind’ of Thompson, Varela and Rosch (1991). Some of them amount to other authors, like Hegel (1976), Jonas (1966, 1968), Simondon (1957, 2005), Riegel (1976, 1979), Harris (1981, 1996, 2004), and others. I won’t explain these concepts here.
3The theory of linguistic bodies as a whole aims to show “the logic of the activity of using language” (p.133). The dialectical model of how participatory sense-making leads to linguistic agency is part of the theory.
4Several references are provided in the book, I’ll name a few: Sacks (1992), Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) Goodwin (1981, 986), Gibbs and Cameron (2008), Bakhtin (1984, 1986), Goffman (1959), Voloshinov (1929), Du Bois 920140, Andrén (2017), Sapir (1927), Popova (2015). This short list is merely to give the reader a general idea of the amount of work on which the theory of linguistic bodies is based.
5Keep in mind that we are talking about situated (embedded) bodies, which interact constantly with others and with the world. These processes don’t start from the individual. They are constantly developing and immersed in networks of relations. The theory is an attempt to abstract and objectify parts of these processes which are constantly happening. As all abstraction and objectification, according to the authors, it has its limitations, and it will always have. It is worth noting that the very concepts of abstraction and objectification have its own specific definitions in the book. I am using them here according to these definitions.
6I would like to refer here to the important concepts of dissonance and synergy. Although I shall not go into the details here, these concepts are fundamental for explaining social interactions.
7‘Conform’ and ‘confront’ are not specific concepts used by the authors, just my words to explain the relation between the two roles.
8My italics
9My italics.
10One can also search online for talks given by the very authors which offer good overviews of their theory. I should specifically mention a couple of videos made exclusively to present their work in a symposium dedicated to the book, which was held during the 2nd Meeting on Cognition and Language, in 2019, and is available on youtube on the channel “Cognição & Linguagem” https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTpRvDsWfOhDMa5NpdqSPXE_OWu_1efV
Nara Miranda Figueiredo – University of Campinas. Center for Logic, Epistemology and History of Science. Campinas, SP. Brazil. [email protected]
Evolving Enactivism – Basic minds meet content – HUTTO; MYIN (M)
HUTTO, Daniel; MYIN, Erik. Evolving Enactivism – Basic minds meet content. [?]: MIT Press, 2017. xxvi + 328p. Resenha de: NASCIMENTO, Laura. Manuscrito, Campinas, v.41 n.1 Jan./Mar. 2018.
Hutto and Myin’s most recent work, Evolving Enactivism – Basic minds meet content (2017, MIT Press, xxvi + 328 p.), contains the development of the Radical Enactive (or Embodied) approach to cognition (henceforth REC), initially presented in their previous book Radicalizing Enactivism – Basic minds without content (2013), where they laid out the basic framework for REC. REC aims to fully embrace the “E” (embodied, embedded and ecological) aspects that for an enactivist approach are fundamental to the adequate understanding of cognitive phenomena. For REC, cognitive phenomena amount to how an embodied and embedded organism which has an ontogenetic and phylogenetic history engages and interacts with the environment in specific ways. Nothing more (but also nothing less) than invoking these interactions, their history and their effects is needed in order to achieve comprehension of cognitive activities, be it, the jumping of an insect, the initial clumsy grabbing of a human baby or imagination and memory. More specifically, Hutto and Myin question the legitimacy and the necessity of relying on the closely related notions of representational content and contentful mental states in naturalistic explanations of cognition.
In mainstream cognitive science, cognition is usually taken to be formed by a series of processes that start with the retrieval of external information by the sensory organs and end in the overt behavior of the subject. In between, representations, which have as their content the information picked up by the senses, are created by brain processes. These contentful representational states can be multiply used: they can be stored, processed, manipulated and they interact with already existing content carrying representational vehicles to finally inform and cause the general actions of the subject. This mechanistic view on cognition, in which its parts, operations and organization are understood in terms of the informational processing of content-bearing states and their interactions, is firmly rejected by REC.
In REC’s view, the positing of mental representations and representational contents as the mechanistic components of cognition, besides not adding any explanatory value, also faces a fundamental problem: the Hard Problem of Content (henceforth HPC), an important challenge for explanatory naturalists. In general terms, for a representation to be contentful is for it “to take (‘represent’; ‘claim’; ‘say’; ‘assert’) things to be a certain way such that they might not be so” (p. 10), that is, representations have specified conditions of satisfaction. The HPC amounts to explaining how a mental state can semantically represent something, that is, how mental states acquire their contents without violating any naturalistic constraints. The problem arises whenever content is presupposed to be “literally ‘extracted’ and ‘picked up’ from the environment as to be ‘encoded’ within minds” (p. 30), as a sort of abstract commodity that can be traded in and out from organisms (p. 31). According to Hutto and Myin, the challenge posed by the HPC has not been successfully met: the available notions of content are either too weak to account for the semantic properties representations are supposed to play in cognition, or too strong to meet the constraints of naturalistic explanation. Hutto and Myin claim that “we lack any respectable scientific account of how to understand the idea that cognition is literally a matter of trafficking in such informational contents” (p. 31). As the matter stands, it is indeed possible that the fundamental cornerstones of Cognitive Science are in fact unwarranted theoretical posits.
In addition to the exposition of their substantial doubts about the assumptions that underlie much of the mainstream research on cognition, Hutto and Myin also argue that it is perfectly possible to explain cognition without relying on mental content and mental representation, and in their books they offer reasons to be confident about REC’s explanatory potential. REC claims that many of the cognitive actions which organisms perform do not depend on the employment of contentful representations. Saying that organisms do not rely on contentful representations when engaging in cognitive activity, however, does not amount to saying that organisms are not directed to the world: they do interact with the world, and respond to its offerings, but not in the contentful ways associated with semantic properties as exhibited, for example, by linguistic judgments.
Hutto and Myin propose a “duplex account” of cognition which allows for the existence of, but insists on the difference between, contentless but nevertheless world-targeting-cognition and content-involving cognition. The first kind of basic capacities “can be extremely flexible, open-ended and content-sensitive” but should not be considered as rudimentary or “low-graded forms of cognition” (p. 89); they merely come first in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the organism. Basic cognition, then, encompasses some of the central forms of human cognition both in children and adults, such as perceiving, imagining and remembering (p. 90). Content-involving cognition, by contrast, is “a special achievement” (p. 90), and only appears through the mastery of certain socio-cultural practices. By distinguishing between cognition which does and does not involve content, Hutto and Myin emphasize the fundamental difference that there is “between responding to and keeping track of covariant information and making contentful claims and judgments that can be correct or incorrect” (p. x). Thus, one of the tasks REC sets itself concerns explaining how dynamic and non-linear couplings between organisms and their environments can give rise to content-involving cognition, as the book’s title suggests.
The first chapters set the scene, and recover some of the arguments presented in the previous book. Chapter 1 makes explicit where REC is positioned within the theoretical landscape, by taking a critical stance on the nature and the role played by representational content in cognition. The strength of the commitment to representation and content can vary: from claiming that all kinds of cognitive capacities depend necessarily on contentful representations which are always neural and brain-bounded (what they call ‘unrestricted-CIC’) to more embodied varieties, in which some of the representational states are embodied and not only brain-bound, and/or possess bodily content (being, thus, conservative enactive approaches to cognition, or ‘CEC’). REC’s claim, in its turn, is that not all kinds of cognitive phenomena necessarily employ internal contentful representations.
In the chapters that follow, Hutto and Myin discuss other existing research programs and lines of thinking, such as Kandel’s (2001) empirical research (chapter 2), Predictive Coding (chapter 3) and Auto-poietic Adaptive Enactivism and Ecological Dynamics (chapter 4). Hutto and Myin argue that, after stripping these various approaches of their commitments to the notions of representation and content, such approaches are, at least in principle, compatible with the REC framework. With the same aim, a similar process of “RECtification” is then applied to the philosophical doctrine of Teleosemantics (chapter 5), in order to account for the notion of Ur-Intentionality.
Ur-Intentionality, the main theme of Chapter 5, is explored through questioning current takes on the Brentanian notion of intentionality. Hutto and Myin point out that the notion of intentionality that has been assumed in existing attempts aimed at its naturalization is too narrowly-focused, since it is very often only concerned with one single kind of intentionality, namely the content-involving one exhibited paradigmatically by propositional attitudes and linguistic judgments, but also by states with nonconceptual content. To account for the diversity of cognitive phenomena, Hutto and Myin insist that a more nuanced approach to intentionality is necessary. Ur-intentionality consists in the relation to the world that basic cognitive capacities exhibit: “it is possible to think of the most primitive form of intentionality (…) in non-contenful, non-representational ways while still allowing that such intentionality exhibits a trademark property of the intentional – that of being an attitude directed towards an object” (p. 95). Ur-intentionality, then, is explained by appeal to the result of the RECtification of Teleosemantics, Teleosemiotics. Original Teleosemantics defines mental contents according to the biological proper functions selected by evolutionary processes. However, mental content defined only by its evolutionary function is not adequate to account for intensionality, since it does not allow for the individuation of the intensions (with an “s”) of the purported representational vehicles (a worry already raised by Fodor (1990), when he argues that teleological accounts of content are not able to provide a solution to the disjunction problem). Consequently, Teleosemantics does not provide an appropriate explanation of the semantic properties of contentful representations. However, it can offer something else. Teleosemiotics (the RECtified Teleosemantics) aims not to provide a “robust semantic theory of content” (p. 154) but rather an account of the systematic relations that bear between the organism and the environmental features that affect it. Such systematic relations also incorporate phylogenetic traits, selected through the species’ biological history, and ontogenetic traits, developed in the individual history of the subject (pp. 117-118). Those elements account for the normative dimension that REC attributes to contentless behavior.
Chapter 6 explains why REC is not defeated by its own criticisms to the tradition, that is, why it does not fall prey to HPC and how suggesting a “duplex account” does not lead to a “saltationist view”, that is, a view that implies evolutionary discontinuity. Some critics claim that the HPC applies to REC as well, since REC is not an eliminativist or nihilist view on content and in fact acknowledges the existence of content-involving cognitive capacities that arrive on the scene later than basic ones. A similar issue lies at the origin of the “saltationist” criticism: how to understand the arising of content in cognition, without presupposing there to be a naturalistically illegitimate leap from the contentless activities to the content-involving ones? REC’s answer to these criticisms depends on the “relaxed naturalism” that it proposes. According to REC, resources such as Cognitive Archaeology, Anthropology and Developmental Psychology, for example, are as scientifically respectable as more restricted ones, such as Neuroscience or Physics. Hence, the kind of content that REC allows into its naturalistic picture arises from the “development, maintenance and stabilization of practices involving the use of public artifacts through which the biologically inherited cognitive capacities can be scaffolded in very particular ways” (p. 145). It is a complex story to tell but, according to REC, there are no fundamental obstacles that exclude it of being told. This is the aim of the second part of the book: to show how REC can be satisfactorily applied to particular cases. Hutto and Myin provide “naturalistically relaxed” considerations on how to properly describe perceiving (chapter 7), imagining (chapter 8) and remembering (chapter 9). They offer a positive account for such phenomena, dismissing some common presuppositions that they take to prevent a more adequate understanding of them. To exemplify, let us briefly consider REC’s account on memory, a phenomenon that is widely supposed to always require contentful representations to be stored and reused later.
First of all, REC emphasizes that memory cannot be accounted for by a single and general explanation, for it is constituted by different processes and functions. So, it is not the case that memory’s only (or even main) function is to reproduce the past accurately. REC acknowledges roughly three distinguishable types of capacities in a “memory spectrum”: non-declarative, declarative and amalgamated kinds of memory. Procedural memory is a non-declarative type of memory that is “purely embodied and enactive” (p. 203), that is, contentless, even if it implies sensitivity to particulars of individual places or things. Remembering how to execute a task in ways sensitive to the specific context at hand does “not require representing any specific past happening or happenings, and specially not representing these as past happenings” (p. 205). This can be considered the most ubiquitous type of memory, shared by humans and other animals alike, and, it is important to emphasize, it is not the exercise of a blind habit (p. 204). REC’s take on it can be made more specific: non-declarative memory is contentless, for it does not require anything more “than reinitiating a familiar pattern of prompted response, albeit with adjustments that are dynamically sensitive to changes in circumstance and context” (p. 205). On the other side of the spectrum lies a completely different kind of memory which “absolutely requires contentful representation” (p. 205), namely the declarative types of memory. Autobiographical declarative memory involves contentful representation to enable the description of past experiences. Drawing on research in Developmental Psychology, more specifically from a strong interpretation of Social Interactionist Theory (SIT), REC claims that autobiographical memory “requires the development and exercise of socioculturally acquired narrative capacities” (p. 207). REC’s point is that before this kind of special sociocultural interactive practice is mastered, which is accomplished through involvement with social artifacts such as narratives, children cannot make contentful autobiographical judgments. Unlike weak versions of SIT, which are compatible with unrestricted representationalist views on memory, REC holds that it is not the case that the development of full-scale autobiographical memory is a matter of the enhancement or improvement of a more primitive form of an autobiographical memory skill that is already present before involvement with social narratives. Rather, narrative practices are precisely what make autobiographical memory possible. Other functions are developed through narratives as well: the sense of self, that is, “what it is to be a person with a temporally extended existence” (pp. 210-211) and the establishment of social cohesion, not only within smaller groups, such as families, but also in larger societal groups (p. 212). In sum, for REC, memory consists in a variety of capacities, some of which involve representing the past. However, by being dependent on the engagement with sociocultural practices and artifacts, some memory capacities are not a matter of “built-in talent but an achieved skill” (p. 239).
Finally, the epilogue further explores the persistent attachment to the notion of representation in theorizing about Neurodynamics. Hutto and Myin analyze representational talk as it is employed in Neuroscience. They argue that the properties attributed by neuroscientists to neural patterns are not necessarily incompatible with REC, even though they are very often called “representational”. However, this then raises the question: what is the brain’s task, if it is not to represent, or to host representations? In REC’s view, it is to enable organismic contentless connections with worldly features, allowing for cognitive phenomena to unfold. Contrary to what is assumed in influential views, it is thus not necessary for brain cells or cell assemblies to contentfully represent the world in order to influence and allow for cognitive behavior. As such, while it is Neuroscience’s task to determine what are the causes of cognitive activity, REC claims that contentful neural episodes need not figure among those causes.
Throughout the book, Hutto and Myin urge for serious consideration of Enactivism, especially their radical version. Enactivism has received a significant amount of attention recently, which includes a variety of criticisms. For example, enactivist claims are sometimes criticized for being vague and/or trivial. Other times, it is claimed that enactivist approaches are only appropriate for more practical activities, that is, those activities that involve the body and environment in obvious ways, but not for more “sophisticated” higher cognitive activities. In the specific case of REC, it has been argued that it is a purely negative approach, and that it does not provide any positive considerations. It is safe to say that Hutto and Myin’s book successfully addresses the aforementioned criticisms: not only do they make clear what REC’s commitments are, they also show that it is possible for REC to account for diverse cognitive phenomena. Moreover, if REC is true, then it is not a trivial matter. Abandoning the main tenets of Cognitive Science, that is, the assumption that cognition is necessarily dependent on the notions of content and representation, as REC proposes, fundamentally transforms the pressing issues concerning cognition. In that sense, REC can be considered as having a truly revolutionary character.
Hutto and Myin’s philosophically and empirically informed analysis shows that they are well aware that an adequate understanding of cognition depends not only on more experimental data but also involves philosophical and highly theoretical matters. It is of great importance to be clear not only about the empirical adequacy of theories, but also about the assumptions that underlie and motivate these theories. Of course, whether REC is successful in fulfilling its aim of providing a thoroughly naturalistic account for cognition is a matter that demands further investigation, but Evolving Enactivism shows that there are good reasons to consider REC a promising framework from which an enactive cognitive science can proceed (and evolve). Many issues – language, mathematics, consciousness, to name a few – still deserve a to be reconsidered thoroughly in a RECish, pragmatic framework. Nevertheless, the second part of the book, on notoriously difficult issues such as perception, imagination and memory, demonstrate that the prospects look good. As Hutto and Myin repeatedly state, REC cannot be dismissed just because of traditional and cherished assumptions. REC’s radicalism is thus not gratuitous. It is instead a well-motivated and powerful answer to the sorts of explanatory stalemates and difficulties that cognitive science has struggled but so far failed to solve.
References
FODOR, J. A theory of content and other essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 1990. [ Links ]
HUTTO, D.; MYIN, E. Radicalizing Enactivism – basic minds without content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. [ Links ]
Laura Nascimento – University of Campinas, Department of Philosophy, Campinas, SP , Brazil, [email protected]. University of Antwerp, Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Antwerp, Belgium.
FireSigns: a semiotic theory for graphic design – SKAGGS (C-RF)
SKAGGS, Steven. FireSigns: a semiotic theory for graphic design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Resenha de: PONTE, Raquel. O Postulado do empirismo imediato. Cognitio – Revista de Filosofia, São Paulo, v. 19, n. 1, p. 186-191, jan./jun. 2018.
FireSigns: a semiotic theory for graphic design, de Steven Skaggs, foi publicado em 2017 como parte da coleção Design Thinking, Design Theory da MIT Press, editado por Ken Friedman e Erik Stolterman. Os editores apontam que o design enfrenta mudanças, neste início de século, que trazem novos desafios ao campo.
Podemos entender o design como uma atividade vinculada, originalmente, à produção de bens. Ele conforma o ambiente às necessidades e aos desejos dos seres humanos. Por isso acompanha as transformações socioeconômicas da humanidade.
Foi principalmente no século XVIII, com a produção em série e o desenvolvimento de projetos para a indústria, que o design aflorou como prática, com a separação entre as atividades de planejamento e fazer até então imbricadas (BUCHANAN, 1995). A partir das transformações no capitalismo ocorridas ao longo do século XX, com a mudança de uma economia de mercado pesada para líquida (BAUMAN, 2001), o design passou a demandar novas teorias e pesquisas para atender às questões contemporâneas de um mundo cada vez mais complexo. Os desafios que a área enfrenta requerem habilidades de planejamento analíticas e sintéticas, que não se desenvolvem apenas na prática. É a essa necessidade teórica premente que FireSigns visa atender.
A institucionalização do campo do design como atividade formal a ser ensinada é recente: data da criação da famosa Bauhaus na Alemanha em 1919. Skaggs faz uma crítica, aliás já frequente entre os estudiosos do design, de que grande parte do conhecimento dessa área é transmitido em universidades por meio da prática, isto é, apenas pela incorporação de modelos de projeto, sem reflexão crítica. Falta ao design uma fundamentação teórica robusta própria. Steven Skaggs propõe-se, em FireSigns, como o próprio subtítulo da obra sugere, oferecer uma teoria semiótica para o design gráfico. Calígrafo, designer de fontes e professor de design gráfico na Hite Art Institute da Universidade de Louisville, Estados Unidos, o autor pesquisa semiótica há 25 anos, sempre tratando das relações entre o verbal e o visual. Sua formação transparece ao longo de seu texto, como constataremos mais adiante.
Skaggs lista, na introdução, seis qualidades que uma teoria útil do design gráfico deveria ter. Uma teoria útil, segundo ele, deve: (1) explicar como a comunicação visual significa alguma coisa para alguém; (2) relacionar-se com o mundo real, com situações de vida e público reais; (3) oferecer terminologia clara, consistente e precisa; (4) apresentar um modelo para que se possa fazer julgamentos críticos; (5) fornecer ferramentas para conceituação; e, finalmente, (6) ser verificável por meio da prática.
Para atingir tal objetivo de oferecer uma teoria para o design gráfico com essas qualidades, o autor fundamenta-se na semiótica – teoria geral do signo –, que atende perfeitamente à primeira questão: dar explicações de como a comunicação visual significa alguma coisa para alguém. A escolha pela semiótica de Charles Sanders Peirce decorre do fato de Skaggs considerar a semiologia pós-estruturalista – muito aplicada nos anos 1970 e 1980 nos estudos de comunicação e de design – um empreendimento linguístico, enquanto o design gráfico se utiliza não apenas da linguagem verbal, mas também da não verbal, que é não linear. Já com o arcabouço teórico da semiótica peirciana, o autor busca atender às seis qualidades enumeradas.
Mas é importante notar que tais qualidades foram elencadas por esse pesquisador com amplo conhecimento da filosofia peirciana, para quem essas questões eram relevantes.
Skaggs, portanto, fundamenta sua teoria na semiótica de Peirce. Porém depreende-se, pela leitura de FireSigns, ainda que o autor não utilize explicitamente as terminologias utilizadas por Peirce, que ele domina também outros campos da filosofia peirciana, tais como pragmatismo, fenomenologia, metafísica, indeterminismo, falibilismo (campos estes de essencial compreensão para se ter um olhar mais maduro sobre a semiótica). Skaggs, que visa atingir principalmente um público ligado ao design, opta conscientemente por usar uma linguagem mais acessível, desejando ser pouco acadêmico, a fim de introduzir a semiótica para leitores que desconhecem a filosofia peirciana. O objetivo do autor, podemos sintetizar aqui, é oferecer uma teoria que explique situações reais de significação para que designers possam aprimorar sua prática por meio de um pensamento crítico e reflexivo quando da criação de novas peças de comunicação visual.
Mas Skaggs também deseja alcançar semióticos com sua teoria, a fim de que eles descubram como a prática do design pode ser um laboratório para trabalhar conceitos da semiótica peirciana. No prefácio, ele expressa que viveu sua vida profissional entre a comunidade de designers – aqueles que manejam fire signs (objetos visuais que acendem a memória, o intelecto, e o engajamento) com o propósito de influenciar pessoas – e a de semióticos – aqueles que estudam como as coisas são capazes de influenciar pessoas. FireSigns é, portanto, uma tentativa de estabelecer uma ponte entre duas comunidades que têm muito que contribuir uma com a outra, mas que, historicamente, se encontram afastadas por um abismo.
FireSigns é estruturado em quatro partes: (I) The view from outside sign action, em que ele aborda metafísica e percepção visual; (II) The view from within sign action, em que adentra na semiótica; (III) Conceptual tools, em que apresenta semantic profiles (perfis semânticos), functional matrix (matriz funcional) e visual gamut (gama visual); e (IV) Analysis and implication, em que faz uma análise de uma tipografia baseada nessa teoria a fim de demonstrar como as ferramentas conceituais podem ajudar a aprofundar o entendimento e a crítica a respeito de uma criação.
Na parte I, Skaggs afirma que as ciências da percepção, a semiótica, a retórica (que ele elenca separadamente da semiótica, diferente da proposta peirciana, em que a retórica é um de seus três ramos) e os fatores humanos são as quatro fundações teóricas do design, já que tratam, respectivamente, da recepção do objeto de design, da sua significação, da sua persuasão e de todas essas questões a partir do ponto de vista do destinatário. Como os fatores humanos – levantados pela antropologia, sociologia, psicologia e outras ciências – constituem, de acordo com Skaggs, o campo mais desenvolvido teoricamente quando se trata de design gráfico (sendo a semiótica o menos abordado), ele decide ater-se principalmente aos três primeiros citados em sua pesquisa. Para o autor, os fatores humanos são o materialbase, trazido pelos antropólogos, etnógrafos, entre outros pesquisadores, para se trabalhar na criação. Por isso não vê a necessidade de incluir esse assunto em sua teoria semiótica.
Nessa primeira parte, Skaggs dedica-se à percepção visual, valendo observar que nenhum outro dos nossos sentidos é ali tratado, embora o design gráfico não seja apenas visual. O autor, logo de início, apresenta um conceito fundamental para sua pesquisa: entidade visual (visual entity ou visent, como prefere abreviar), que consiste em algo potencialmente perceptível visualmente – conceito este importante já que o visent é que será percebido para ser interpretado a posteriori. O autor aborda, então, apresentando uma discussão entre Einstein e o filósofo Tagore, a visão externalista e a internalista da percepção. Os externalistas, como Einstein, acreditam que os objetos visuais são independentes da mente (conceito este não definido por Skaggs), enquanto os internalistas, como Tagore, creem na sua dependência. Por seguir uma linha peirciana, podíamos pressupor a tendência de Skaggs a conceituar entidade visual como independente da mente, mas o autor diz que o conceito de visent está mais alinhado com a concepção de Tagore. No fundo, Skaggs, que não cita a teoria da percepção de Peirce, parece mover-se entre essas duas correntes, quando afirma que “o conceito de uma entidade visual contém dentro dela uma realidade externa, independente da mente e, também, uma disposição condicional (would-be) para uma consciência perceptiva interna e mental” (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 19).
Na segunda parte da obra, Skaggs tem a intenção de mostrar a experiência visual como produto da ação sígnica, isto é, de entender o visent no papel de signo, definido por ele como “o dispositivo que nos permite conectar coisas que estão fora de nós com experiências internas […]” (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 39). O autor explicita ser a semiótica peirciana bastante complexa e sua terminologia difícil, o que faz com que ele opte por tentar sempre traduzir o léxicon peirciano para termos que os designers já empregam. Essa estratégia é uma faca de dois gumes: se por um lado ajuda aqueles que nunca foram apresentados à semiótica de Peirce, por outro cria ainda mais termos, para os quais já há definições na filosofia peirciana, tornando árdua a compreensão daqueles que já conhecem minimamente seus conceitos.
Portanto, alguns termos bem familiares para os semióticos, como as categorias fenomenológicas de primeiridade, segundidade e terceiridade, a definição ampliada de mente, os termos das tricotomias, entre outros, não aparecem no livro. Além disso, o esforço de Skaggs no sentido de fazer algumas analogias para simplificação dos conceitos enfraquece algumas definições, o que resulta em um problema, se observarmos a preocupação que Peirce sempre teve com a questão terminológica (EP 2:264). Vale também ressaltar que, ao adotar outras nomenclaturas, sem indicar sua origem, Skaggs acaba não tornando claro, algumas vezes, para um leitor leigo, se o conceito apresentado é de Peirce ou dele mesmo.
Outra estratégia adotada por Steven Skaggs para facilitar o entendimento dos conceitos que pretende transmitir consiste na criação de gráficos ou imagens a fim de representar visualmente a teoria, o que é compreensível por ter o autor formação em design. Mas, ainda que seja louvável o esforço de tradução empregado pelo autor, a representação visual acaba transmitindo apenas parte dos conceitos, como é o caso de qualquer representação, ou evocando outras ideias que não condizem com a filosofia peirciana. Por exemplo, no capítulo 3, o mundo semiótico é representado visualmente como uma dobradiça que conecta os mundos externo e mental – outra questão problemática, já que a ideia de mente de Peirce não é subjetiva –, o que dá a entender que o mundo externo e o interno (poderíamos nomear assim) não são semióticos, mas sim a relação entre eles.
Ainda em relação à parte II, Skaggs aborda o que chama de momento semiótico – um instante particular, aqui e agora, que será analisado. E a análise promove uma possibilidade maior de interpretação de qualquer peça, ainda que não seja infalível. O autor escreve que o momento semiótico tem a ver com três questões que os designers gráficos enfrentam nos problemas de design: “[…] O que é que precisa ser comunicado? Que coisa visual pode ser concebida para levar a cabo essa missão? Quem são as mentes potenciais que receberão a comunicação e como elas devem receber isso?” (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 44). Essas três perguntas não são apenas importantes para se analisar uma peça de design gráfico, mas também para criá-la.
O autor apresenta as classes de signos e as três tricotomias mais conhecidas de Peirce, aplicando-as à comunicação visual: a primeira tricotomia, do signo em relação a ele mesmo (qualidades, visents e sistemas); a segunda tricotomia, do signo em relação ao seu objeto (ele mantém os consagrados termos ícone, índice e símbolo); e a terceira tricotomia, do signo em relação ao interpretante (display, afirmação, conclusão). A partir disso, mostra as possíveis combinações que geram as dez classes fundamentais dos signos visuais, apresentando exemplos de cada uma delas. Ele espera que essas classes ajudem na análise e na criação de peças gráficas, cujo propósito é informar algo e persuadir um público, sempre dependendo, portanto, de uma mente interpretadora.
Apesar de destacar a importância dessa mente para o ato de interpretação, Skaggs, citando o semiótico Charles W. Morris – o primeiro a aplicar a semiótica peirciana aos estudos de comunicação –, foca em desenvolver a sintática e a semântica nessa pesquisa, sem abordar a terceira área, que seria a pragmática (ou fatores humanos). A sintática consiste na organização dos elementos formais com o intuito de se atingir um objetivo, enquanto a semântica trata das significações que essas formas combinadas transmitem. Segundo o autor, há apenas quatro formas com que uma peça pode gerar um efeito no receptor (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 85): presença, expressão, denotação e conotação. Presença (alta ou baixa) e expressão (soulful ou apático) são registros afetivos – o primeiro relacionado ao ambiente físico e o segundo, ao sistema cultural em que a peça está inserida. Skaggs extrai quatro combinações possíveis para as peças de design gráfico: projective soulful (alta presença e expressão), projective apathetic (alta presença e baixa expressão), recessive soulful (baixa presença e alta expressão) ou recessive apathetic (baixa presença e expressão). Já denotação e conotação constituem registros conceituais, sendo o primeiro a transmissão de um significado mais preciso e o segundo, de um mais divergente. É importante que o designer defina, já no briefing, se deseja que a peça seja mais específica ou mais associativa; neste segundo caso, poderíamos dizer mais “aberta”, citando aqui Umberto Eco (1991).
Após apresentar sua base teórica, Skaggs, na parte III, mostra suas ferramentas conceituais: perfis semânticos, matriz funcional e gama visual. Os perfis semânticos são baseados na análise combinatória dos registros afetivos e conceituais. Sabendo que presença, expressão, denotação e conotação têm duas valências cada, foram geradas 16 combinações de estratégias de display e de afirmação (display-assertion strategies), para as quais o autor oferece alguns exemplos, analisando peças de design gráfico. Ao fim, apresenta um modelo 3D como forma de visualizar essas classes, mas que, pela alta complexidade das combinações, não contribui tanto para o entendimento dessa ferramenta conceitual.
Já a matriz funcional traça eixos com focos em semântica e sintaxe, que interceptam os eixos de atributos hard (preciso) e soft (sugestivo), criando quatro nódulos: concreto (hard na semântica), tom (soft na semântica), práxis (hard na sintaxe) e forma (soft na sintaxe). Esses nódulos, por sua vez, são vistos do ponto de vista das relações verbal/visual e psicológico/ambiental (mente/corpo) – divisões estas dicotômicas, o que não se coaduna com uma teoria baseada na filosofia peirciana, não dicotômica por excelência. Em relação à matriz funcional, a visualização criada por meio do gráfico contribui muito para a compreensão das ideias.
Porém, neste ponto do livro, por terem sido apresentadas tantas combinações entre conceitos, o leitor pode acabar ficando um pouco perdido. Skaggs tem noção da complexidade da teoria que propõe e afirma ser ela necessária para que se desenvolva uma linguagem mais articulada no campo do design, evidenciando o que os designers já sabiam, mas de forma implícita anteriormente: “À medida que desenvolvemos essas ferramentas conceituais, pense nelas como oferecendo possibilidades de insight. Com elas, podemos investigar a comunicação visual em escala conceitual muito pequena, descobrindo novos relacionamentos nas interações complexas do processo semiótico visual” (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 139). E conclui que “os designers gráficos são semióticos visuais na prática profissional” (SKAGGS, 2017, p. 143). O autor finaliza essa parte do livro com um estudo de caso de redesenho de marca.
Por último, é apresentado o gama visual (visual gamut), definido por imagem (image), marca (mark) e palavra (word), para se fazer uma analogia com a possibilidade de uma imagem combinar elementos icônicos, indiciais e simbólicos, respectivamente, podendo tender mais para um ou outro tipo de signo. Aqui reside uma questão problemática de que Skaggs têm consciência: o uso do termo palavra como sinônimo de simbólico. Já que a semiótica peirciana foi escolhida pelo autor como fundamento teórico para o design gráfico – e não a semiologia estruturalista fortemente fundada na linguística –, valeria a busca por outro termo que não limitasse o simbólico ao verbal. O uso do termo palavra acaba por reforçar conceitos de que a pesquisa de Skaggs busca se afastar.
Para explicar o gama visual, o autor analisa um passaporte, uma marca, entre outras peças, baseando-se também em dicotomias como “a palavra (e outras escritas notacionais) versus o espectro visual”. Porém a ideia peirciana de ícone, índice e símbolo não transmite tal polarização. O símbolo traz em si características indiciais que, por sua vez, incluem características icônicas. O gama visual, em especial, é retomado na parte IV, quando o autor faz uma análise de uma tipografia para mostrar como as ferramentas conceituais podem ajudar a aprofundar o entendimento de uma peça de design.
No epílogo do livro, Skaggs retoma o objetivo da pesquisa: mostrar que a semiótica peirciana, tão pouco desenvolvida e aplicada ao design gráfico até então, constitui um arcabouço teórico poderoso para esse campo. Steven Skaggs pretende que a teoria desenvolvida por ele a partir dos conceitos peircianos seja mais um passo nessa direção e sinaliza que cada um dos capítulos pode vir a ser ainda mais aprofundado futuramente.
É importante que surjam novas pesquisas sobre análise de conteúdo gráfico a partir das ferramentas conceituais apresentadas. Com a aplicação da teoria proposta por Skaggs, poderão ser aprimorados cada vez mais os perfis semânticos, a matriz funcional e o gama visual, tornando-se esses conceitos cada vez mais claros e precisos. O grande mérito de FireSigns reside na sua tentativa de tornar acessível ao público leigo, por meio de exemplos e visualizações, uma arquitetura filosófica robusta e complexa, de maneira a facilitar o contato dos interessados em comunicação visual com a semiótica peirciana. Que este seja um convite para que cada vez mais designers percebam o potencial que os conceitos desenvolvidos por Charles Sanders Peirce oferecem para a compreensão, não apenas do design gráfico, mas de todo o campo do design.
Referências
BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Modernidade líquida. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001.
BUCHANAN, Richard. Rhetoric, humanism and design. In: BUCHANAN, Richard; MARGOLIN, Victor (Eds.). Discovering design. Explorations in design studies. Chicago e Londres: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. p. 23-66.
ECO, Umberto. Obra Aberta: forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas.
São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991.
HAUSMAN, Carl R. Charles S. Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
PEIRCE, Charles Sanders. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Electronic edition. Virginia: Past Masters, 1994. Disponível em: <http://library.nlx.com/>.
SKAGGS, Steven. FireSigns: a semiotic theory for graphic design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.
Raquel Ponte – Escola de Belas Artes – UFRJ – Brasil. E-mail: [email protected]
Radicalizing enactivism: basic minds without content – HUTTO; MYIN (Ph)
HUTTO, Daniel D; MYIN, Erik. Radicalizing enactivism: basic minds without content. Mit Press, 2013. Resenha de: SILVA, Marcos; BRITO, Carlos; FERREIRA, Francicleber. Philósophos, Goiânia, v.20, n.2, p.227-235, jul./dez., 2015.
In contemporary discussion, some authors are developing tenets in pragmatism (broadly construed) to motivate it as a comprehensive model of cognition, alternative to a farreaching representationalist tradition. The latter constitutes the orthodoxy in some influential areas of philosophy investigating language and mind. Roughly speaking, a representationalist would answer the question “What are we?” by saying that we are consumers of representations, which could be satisfied or not by (that is, correspond or not to) the world. And to the question “What is the world?” we could expect receiving an answer like this: The world is assumed to be, as in a typical Cartesian tradition, the totality of things that can be represented, or can be the content of our cognition. The world, according to this view, should be held as a domain of entities that could make our representations true or false. Thus, cognition or intelligent behavior is what make possible to representers to access and to manipulate the representations of reality, standing “out there” to be revealed by our thoughts. Sometimes, we could also act and do things in this rational and static world.
As a matter of fact, we may challenge this scenario. We could well hold that in the beginning was the deed, as Goethe put it in his Faust, instead of the word (or any representational content). Before representing the world, we have to enact in it. Actually representing demands enacting.
In short, representing can very well be held as a kind of action in the world. As a result, a shift in the traditional picture can be illuminating: from “We must think in order to act” to “we act before we think.” Abilities should be prior to theories; competence should be prior to content. As a result, “knowing how,” rather than “knowing that,” should be taken as the paradigm of cognitive states. Thinking is not a propriety of an immaterial mental substance, but rather a special capacity of some organisms to act in their environment.
Several authors in the pragmatist and related traditions call attention to the import of inherited practices, cooperation and Handlung in order to understand language, intentionality and cognition. They take seriously evolving biological systems and situated individuals interacting in communities over time as preconditions of our rationality, features often dismissed as not central in a representationalist tradition. What role do notions such as situatedness, contextual dependency, shared attention, openness and vagueness play in representationalism? The answer is: a very marginal role (if any). Wittgenstein, for example, already in his Tractatus (1918), instructively suggested that language is an integral part of the human organism (TLP 4.002, our emphasis). There it is already signaled (although not worked out) the idea that language should be best understood by appealing to dynamically unfolding, situated embodied interactions with worldly offerings. Hutto and Myin’s (2013) book belongs to this broad pragmatist tradition which we could call antirepresentationalism.
They develop the view that basic cognition, that is, mental processes involved in obtaining knowledge through intentional directedness in perceptual experience, is not a matter of consuming representational content which imposes to reality some conditions of satisfactibility.
In order to understand what cognition is we must understand how organisms dynamically interact with others and their environment. Here we must raise a caveat: our authors do not put forward a thorough rejection of contents, since they defend that representations may turn out to be necessary in a full account of complex human cognition, especially language skills.
This book is highly readable and relevant for current debates in philosophy of mind and related battle fields where representationalism can (and should) be challenged.
Hutto and Myin’s work does an impressive job of calling into question what they call CIC (Content Involving Cognition) and CEC (Conservative Enactive Cognition).
CIC states that cognition, and also perceptual experience, must be contentful. CEC, in contrast to CIC, holds the importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding minds, but still maintain the need for some manipulation of content in basic cognition. Hutto and Myin critically analyze CIC and CEC in order to make a case for REC (Radical Enactive Cognition), a form of enactivism where no form of content is used to explain intentional directedness and phenomenality.
If enactivism is already a defensible model and applicable to many hot contemporary discussions (as the mind/body problem and the development of Artificial Intelligence), REC, Hutto and Myin suggest, can do even more. It can be strategically applied as a tenable framework for different areas and problems, such as naturalism, qualia and extended minds.
What does it mean to promote REC? First, the main line of enactivism is maintained, that is, the idea that cognition is environment involving and dynamically unfolding. Not just human agency, but also experience should be thought of as a situated and embodied organismic activity. As a result, interactions with other organisms and engagement with the environment is not just a matter of fact.
They are crucial to understand what mind is. Second, to hold radically enactive cognition means to hold that we can understand cognition without any appeal to contents and representations (i.e., to conditions that must be satisfied by the world). Against the view that REC cannot “scale up,” Hutto and Myin hold that the scope of REC is indeed much wider and can be more fruitful.
Hutto and Myin’s work is well informed in contemporary problems and literature. It provides a good review of the enormous literature on the topic. However, we see some problems in their book. Content is hardly characterized in the whole work, and its connection with the notion of information is somewhat obscure. Also, the association they make between representationalism, internalism and intelectualism is not that evident to be just assumed. Moreover, Hutto and Myin hold in various moments that perception is an act; but the reader may have a hard time to understand that. They do not explain this crucial thesis.
It is also important to highlight that our authors show sometimes a limited view of the logic used in computer science.
For instance, they say that “The Information- Processing Challenge appears to present a formidable problem for REC. But it takes for granted that the standard computational and information-processing explanatory strategies of cognitivism are in perfectly good order under standard renderings” (p. 37). Nowadays approaches to computation can be real time, adaptive and interactive in several ways. This has been an agenda worked out by several important computer scientists in contemporary research.
Besides, we do not really understand why our authors do not discuss some particular philosophical traditions. By way of example, Descartes and Kant are very scarcely debated.
This choice obscures the fact that matters of cognition are widespread in the history of philosophy. Descartes, for instance, was not interested in cognition per se, but in facing skepticism and finding a new model for science.
IN WHAT FOLLOWS WE BRIEFLY DESCRIBE HUTTO AND MYIN’S BOOK CHAPTERS.
In Chapter 1, they clarify pivotal theses and introduce main players. Embodied cognition is characterized as concrete spatio-temporally extended patterns of dynamic interaction. This view is complemented by a developmentexplanatory thesis, which holds that mental interactions are grounded on the history of the organism’s previous interactions. Here they highlight that REC rejects all vestiges of the idea of contentfulness.
Chapter 2 shows how denying CEC means an ultimate rejection of CIC. Although the authors do not offer any clear definition of intelligent behavior, they hold that perceptual experience and intentional directedness do not imply content. Further, they assess some “sister accounts” of REC, including Noë’s Sensori-motor Enactivism (which, they think, makes just a modest advance) and Autopoetic enactivism (which, they hold, has a too broad concept of cognition). Both accounts deny dualism, emphasize input/ output processes and hold that the mental emerges from spontaneous self-organization and self-creativity of living beings. But these approaches, our authors criticize, still presuppose some kind of meaning being created, consumed and carried.
In Chapter 3, Hutto and Myin bring robotics and insects to the discussion. They also claim that enactivism can account for complex human activities of reaching and grasping objects. Content is not just unnecessary for basic cognition (even though it is relevant for complex human cognition); it can encumber development in AI and robotics, they maintain. The whole model of mentality holding information as the basic commodity of cognition has to be dropped. Information is not used, extracted, manipulated, carried in basic cognition. In fact, it would be very weird to think that children learn to grab something by means of some abstract instructions. REC can explain also distinctive human cognition, not just insects and simple robots. The variety of manual activities is too large and diverse to be captured by some general and abstract rules. We have to learn how to regulate actions in a wide range of dynamical environments.
Chapter 4 is their most important contribution for the discussions. They come back very often to this chapter throughout the whole book. In a nutshell, they suggest therein that CIC is not the case, on the grounds that we cannot make naturalism and CIC compatible. The challenge is that, if we take CIC seriously, we cannot explain what the origin of content in nature is. As Hutto and Myin explain: “they [defenders of CIC] are unable to account for the origins of content in the world if they are forced to use nothing but the standard naturalist resources of informational covariance.” (p.xiv) After proposing this far-reaching challenge, our authors answer two common problems suggested by defenders of CIC, namely: 1) REC does not address any relevant form of cognition because what it calls basic cognition is too basic, and 2) REC cannot be generalized.
However, if we start with dynamical explanations of a system, representation loses its import. Basic cognition mechanisms may have the proper function of guiding the system’s actions in the environment. Actually, according to REC and to some other naturalist accounts, organisms should be taken as sensitive to information. This means that organisms exploit correspondences in their environment, that is, co-variance among several phenomena, and not manipulation of representations, in order to adaptively guide their actions.
Chapter 5 shows that CIC is inappropriate and unnecessary, since it cannot explain highly sophisticated and intentionally directed behaviors. Behaviors of artificial agents and some insects, as well as reaching and grasping by human hands are explored in this chapter. Our authors evaluate Hyperintellectualism, which holds that perceptual experience is always inherently contentful and depends entirely on representational activity; and Minimal Intellectualism, which maintains a more modest view of how perceptual experience might be essentially contentfully representational. The leitmotif for Hutto and Myin’s criticism is perceptual human vision. Those accounts claim that visual experience implies representational activity. Hutto and Mying are against these views, but they don’t really answer how without the very idea of content we could pass from perception to belief and judgment. Hutto and Myin do not even pose this relevant question. It is not an accident that Kant, among others, holds that perception has to be conceptual.
Furthermore, the problem of false information is not touched in the book. How perception can be false if it should have no content at all? Here the whole discussion seems to presuppose that representational content should be independent of linguistic capacities (as they point out very quickly on page 87). They do not provide any reason for this assumption.
Chapter 6 evaluates some alternatives that try to make sense of content ascription in perceptual processes. A maximally minimal representationalism has much agreement with REC, namely: no concepts, no proposition, no truth conditions, no given. But it still holds there is need for conditions of satisfaction. This minimal CIC is modest, less expensive and more plausible. Are there compelling reasons to think that perceiving is representational? If not, we have to go REC, as our authors claim.
Chapter 7 deals with problems related to the boundaries of mind. Hutto and Myin defend that minds are in fact extensive and wide-ranging, and (contrary to the extended mind view) not merely extended. The crucial point is that we do not have things in our minds, but rather operate with objects in the world; our minds should not be thought of as a vehicle, but rather as a capacity. If REC is true, the extended mind hypothesis is not radical enough. External features of the environment are always constitutive of the mental. Extended-mind defenders are too deferential to internalism.
Chapter 8 discusses if whether phenomenal properties of experiences can be extensive. Hutto and Myin try to dissolve the well-known Hard Problem of Consciousness.
When we describe phenomenal properties, we cannot help but mention environment-involving interactions. Qualia discussions, they hold, make up an agenda of solving impossible problems. REC should liberate both science and philosophy to pursue goals they are able to achieve.
As a conclusion, we agree that “not only science but also philosophy benefits by radicalizing enactivism” (p. 178), since the idea that several relevant mental processes and basic minds require neither contentful representations nor manipulation of content indeed deserves a better hearing.
It is hard to expect that basic minds represent the world with specified conditions of satisfaction. As the book imposes itself as a reference, we think that people for or against enactivism should react to it if they want to make advances in this field.
Marcos Silva – Professor Adjunto da Universidade Federal de Alagoas (UFAL), Maceió, AL, Brasil. E-mail: [email protected]
Carlos Brito – Professor no Departamento de Computação da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC), Fortaleza, CE, Brasil. E-mail: [email protected]
Francicleber Ferreira – Pós-doutorando no Departamento de Computação da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)., Fortaleza, CE, Brasil. E-mail: [email protected]
Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian | R. Wolff e S. Resnick
Contending Economic Theories, escrito em sua maior parte pelos professores eméritos de Economia do Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard Wolff e Stephen Resnick é, na verdade, uma revisão ampliada da discussão desenvolvida em uma obra anterior, de 1987. O livro se apresenta como uma proposta “única e distinta” de comparação entre teorias econômicas. Nesse sentido, um primeiro reparo se mostra necessário, quando os autores vinculam diretamente a microeconomia à economia neoclássica e a macroeconomia ao keynesianismo, deixando em aberto a contribuição do marginalista León Walras à macroeconomia, com sua noção de equilíbrio geral , a qual influenciou não apenas visões agregadas do produto de uma economia, como a elaborada por Wassily Leontief, no início dos anos 1970, mas também a própria concepção das ideias de oferta e demanda agregadas. Leia Mais