TY - JOUR
T1 - Reading
T2 - skilled linguistic action
AU - Cowley, Stephen J.
N1 - Funding Information:
Inspiration comes, first, from Li Jia's interest in discourse, vitality and the future of bio-ecology. Second, it fed on exciting discussions with Krasnoyarsk ?Distributed language and cognition? group and, especially, the work of Anastassia Kolmogorova and Kseniya Martynyuk. Third, I thank Marcin Trybulec and Katharina Kehbel for their important contributions to this paper. Fulsome thanks also go to Sarah Bro Trasmundi who has tempted me into writing bravely on a topic about which I have never dared break my silence. Without her faith in the imaginative, I might not have found my tongue. And, as always, all errors and confusions are my own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - The paper links critique of ‘inner process’ to a perspective that treats language as activity that is accomplished by living beings. The view traces reading to human ways of coordinating with ‘the seen’. Having contrasted this distributed view with organism-first alternatives, I use a case study of reports to sketch how readers engage with written materials to both select details and project an imagined ‘source’ (e.g. a meaning, author or intention). Far from using inner process (‘decoding’) readers coordinate with a field of patternings. Where skilled, they use recollecting to link looking, silent thinking, expectations and strategic moves. Using judgements, they transform what they observe by setting off experience. I thus build on Wittgenstein's critique of inner process while also endorsing Trybulec's (2019) radicalization of his view. To avoid treating the sense of ‘written words’ as subjective, the material aspect of patternings is taken to index outward criteria (roughly, standards of judgement). In seeking to replace theories that presuppose ‘text’, I stress how patternings invite directed sensorimotor activity by an intelligent person. Indeed, since persons learn to see wordings (or take a language stance) arrangements of patternings act as marks, ‘symbols’ and aggregations that set off recollection, judgements and iterated action. Skilled readers can use re-reading, the already read etc. to modulate ways of attending. Readers link the said, hints, recollections and ways of actualizing movements to grant reading experience a specific sense. By considering how outer criteria are evoked, reading is traced back to skilled linguistic action.
AB - The paper links critique of ‘inner process’ to a perspective that treats language as activity that is accomplished by living beings. The view traces reading to human ways of coordinating with ‘the seen’. Having contrasted this distributed view with organism-first alternatives, I use a case study of reports to sketch how readers engage with written materials to both select details and project an imagined ‘source’ (e.g. a meaning, author or intention). Far from using inner process (‘decoding’) readers coordinate with a field of patternings. Where skilled, they use recollecting to link looking, silent thinking, expectations and strategic moves. Using judgements, they transform what they observe by setting off experience. I thus build on Wittgenstein's critique of inner process while also endorsing Trybulec's (2019) radicalization of his view. To avoid treating the sense of ‘written words’ as subjective, the material aspect of patternings is taken to index outward criteria (roughly, standards of judgement). In seeking to replace theories that presuppose ‘text’, I stress how patternings invite directed sensorimotor activity by an intelligent person. Indeed, since persons learn to see wordings (or take a language stance) arrangements of patternings act as marks, ‘symbols’ and aggregations that set off recollection, judgements and iterated action. Skilled readers can use re-reading, the already read etc. to modulate ways of attending. Readers link the said, hints, recollections and ways of actualizing movements to grant reading experience a specific sense. By considering how outer criteria are evoked, reading is traced back to skilled linguistic action.
KW - Distributed language
KW - Embodied cognitive science
KW - Languaging
KW - Literacy
KW - Radical embodied cognitive science
KW - Reading
U2 - 10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101364
DO - 10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101364
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85100391612
SN - 0388-0001
VL - 84
JO - Language Sciences
JF - Language Sciences
M1 - 101364
ER -