Gilles Fauconnier and the meaning of a sentence

Abstract

We were all coming out from Ed Hutchins' talk at the Cognitive Semantics Working Group Series (https://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/spaces/), which Seana Coulson and I organized that academic year at USCD's Cognitive Science Department. At the end of these talks, as I walked among scientists such as Gilles Fauconnier, Jean Mandler, Rafael Núñez, or Mark Turner, I was mainly focused on paying attention, also perhaps on trying not to look too much like somebody who had just finished a PhD in Greek literature and was taking his first steps in cognitive science. Perhaps that concentrated attitude has helped me remember moments like this one.At this particular meeting, Ed Hutchins had just presented his enactive approach to gesture and human-device interaction in insight moments during navigation (Hutchins, 2011), which, incidentally, has become even more insightful now in light of Works from the rapidly developing fields of multimodal communication and distributed/grounded cognition (