Participatory Sense-Making through Bodies : Self-Organizing Principles in the Continuity of Life and Mind
Abstract
Since the simultaneous rise of cognitive science and ordinary language philosophy, linguistics has been challenged with how to embrace both streams of thought without succumbing solely to the lure of one or the other of them. The history of the discipline revealed the price for any one-sided preferences: we either end up modelling the mind as an individual, computationally based mechanism translating the outside world into detectable mental representations (functionalist epistemic frame) or we dare not to pay attention to the mind at all, restricting ourselves solely to the tangible - that which was uttered (linguistique de la parole).
Recently, a promising integrative stance rooted within embodied cognition has been proposed, based on participatory sense-making enacted by bodies organized by the autopoietic principles of human interaction. In this chapter, we reflect upon the advances of the proposed framework, focusing on the creative potential of bodily movements in performative arts (dance) and in spontaneous language interaction.
We demonstrate the dynamism of participatory sense-making, showing how the interacting bodies take part in the eternal loop of meaning creation, negotiation, shifting and conventionalization.