Coming to Conceive: Radical Embodied Thinking in Action

In their chapter, Stephen J. Cowley and Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger discuss what they term the coming to conceive an idea, a plan, or a project. Using a classroom setting, they trace much of what students learn to moments of intense sense-saturated experience. They show that coming to conceive can be cumulative and slow because, in part, it draws on somatic properties of dialogical events that influence individual knowing. In classrooms, the condensed nature of such moments enables the sense to radiate over time. Cowley and Fester-Seeger’s account of coming to conceive draws attention to the interplay of pre-reflective or tacit non-conceptual modes of thinking and reflective and explicit conceptual modes of thinking. The cognitive dynamics of coming to conceive is therefore in part shaped and guided by embodied and sensible non-conceptual thought processes that are nonetheless active in the production of thinking and in practical activities. In clarifying their view, Cowley and Fester-Seeger build on how students use such moments in subsequent course examination essays. These are retrospectively discussed in relation to essay and video analysis that tracks various temporal scales: while making use of the micro (or enchronic) scale (what CA or text analysis treats as the use of utterances/gestures), Cowley and Fester-Seeger also focus on micro-temporal pico-dynamics that arise as vocalisations-cum-gestures are articulated and perceived (as nano-scale events).