Attentional actions – an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words

Abstract

This paper proposes an ecological-enactive account of utterances of concrete words - words used to indicate observable situations, events, objects, or characteristics. Building on the education of attention model of learning, utterances of concrete words are defined as attentional actions: a repeatable form of behaviour performed by a person to indicate (i.e. point out) a particular aspect of the current situation to someone in order to achieve something. Based on recent empirical evidence on categorical colour perception, attentional actions are proposed to constrain the ongoing phenotypic reorganisation of persons into task-specific devices. The paper ends by situating the proposed account in a wider theoretical perspective on language. This paper serves two purposes: first, it undermines the scope objection against the ecological-enactive approach, and second, it provides a novel explanation for recent empirical evidence with respect to the role of language in categorical colour perception

Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought

“…Certain affordances can be made manifest and articulated for others in talking and thereby "promoted" to them (Reed 1995;c.f. Taylor 2010;Van Den Herik 2018). This possibility to restructure the field of relevant affordances of oneself and others is constrained both by the concrete socio-material situation and by the patterns of practices that delimit the space of moves that can be made within the language.…”

Extended Skill Learning

“…It is more accurate to say that the nature of the activity has changed and a new skill has emerged. A radical embodied account of language must begin with this kind of situated, embodied, attention-directing activity in early childhood ( Reed, 1996 ; Baggs, 2015 ; Di Paolo et al, 2018 ; Van den Herik, 2018 ).…”

Ecological approaches to perceptual learning: learning to perceive and perceiving as learning

“…Natural language is not a common topic in the area of perceptual learning, but as ecological and enactive approaches to language and linguistics are developed, the potential relations of language and perception begin to come into view (e.g. Borchmann, 2018; de, Villiers, & Zukow-Goldring, 2012; Raczaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou, Rohlfing, & Deacon, 2018; Read & Szokolszky, 2016; van den Herik, 2018; van Dijk, 2016). The traditional representationalist approach to language and perception was to make both perception and language into code processes, and, therefore, to form the link between them (e.g.…”

“…As van Dijk (2016) points out, ecological and enactivist approaches to science share a commitment to contextual description over reductive explanation, they foreground the particular and ongoing, and they stress the role of human agency (p. 10). Given that language is part of perceptually guided action in communication, spoken words can be seen as attention guiding acts, especially in the case of concrete nouns (van den Herik, 2018). Words as attentional actions function to indicate situations, events, objects, or characteristics of objects to coordinate actions with other people.…”

“…Rucinska’s work in the field of pretend play (Rucinska, 2014, 2016; Rucinska & Reijmers, 2015) suggests that pretense focuses on interaction and the role of affordances in shaping pretend play. As mentioned previously, recently, a group of scientists (Rietveld et al, 2016; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; van Dijk & Rietveld, 2017, van den Herik, 2018) suggested a “skilled intentionality” framework to affordances, relating affordances to the Wittgensteinian concept of “form of life,” referring to “steady ways of living with others” (p. 329) and if these ways of living are perceptible as affordances, then a very complex field of affordances exists to guide human activity. Generally, they highlight that skilled agents are familiar with their sociomaterial surroundings and haveacquired their abilities by learning how to deal with these particular material settings in which their training has taken place.…”