Horizons of the word: Words and tools in perception and action
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Horizons of the word: Words and tools in perception and action Hayden Kee 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, nonrepresentationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. Keywords Horizons . Phenomenology of language . 4e cognitive science . Scaling-up
problem . Affordances
* Hayden Kee [email protected]
1
Fordham University, 441 E Fordham Rd. Bronx, New York City, NY 10458, USA
H. Kee
A name is a certain kind of tool meant for teaching and for the disentangling of being. – Plato1 [Speech] tears out or tears apart meanings in the undivided whole of the nameable, as our gestures do in that of the perceptible. – Merleau-Ponty2
1 Introduction There is a longstanding philosophical tradition of comparing language as a whole, or specific words, to tools. The analogy dates back at least to Plato’s “Cratylus.” It was popularized in more recent times by Wittgenstein in his later work, while around the same time, across the Channel, Merleau-Ponty also toyed with the analogy throughout his writings.3 By and large, however, such discussions remain metaphorical. They are analogies meant to offer us some heuristically convenient way of thinking about this or that feature of language rather than attempts to literally tell us something about how language works or how we operate with it. This, at any rate, seems the only plausible way to read Socrates’ cryptic – and profound – remark in the “Cratylus” that “a name is a certain kind of tool meant for teaching and for the disentangling of being” (388b-c), functionally analogous to the weaver’s shuttl
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