Event overview
Stephen J. Cowley (Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC cluster, University of Southern Denmark) will be giving a public lecture at Goldsmiths entitled "Sentence meaning as anticipatory action".
Taking a distributed perspective on language, the paper offers a new view of sentence meaning. By placing pragmatics (or action) first, skill in making up similar sentences falls to, not a working inner language system, but how players of language games exploit anticipatory action.
Extending Wittgenstein’s work, the paper replaces a form/meaning dichotomy with Lassiter’s (2015) neo-Aristotelian view. Bodily dynamics (‘matter’) enable human agents to build a capacity for coordinating by using what is termed linguistic functure (roughly, function-with-structure). As a result of dialogical entanglement people are able to discover affordances that others use in engaging with the world.
In literate communities, human cooperation gives rise to many ‘judgement games’. For example, many communities use opaque arrangements of alphabetic/ideographic marks as the basis for specifying synonyms or translations. Agents develop a capacity to scrutinise aggregates of marks, identify potential uses and, on these grounds, come up with possible substitutions. Such games, moreover, are anticipatory: to engender synonyms and/or translations, parties must ascribe sentence meaning to what a community is likely to deem both correct and acceptable. Having stressed parallels with practical skills, I consider what a distributed perspective implies for new ways of modelling semantics.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Jan 2016 | 5:30pm - 6:30pm |
Accessibility
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