Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Cognition Beyond the Brain pp 175–192Cite as

Human Agency and the Resources of Reason

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Abstract

The evidence shows that human primates become (relatively) rational actors . Using a distributed perspective, we identify aspects of human agency that raise important questions for sociocognitive science . In humans, we argue, agency does not centre on individual agents . Cognitive, social and linguistic outcomes depend on skills in moving in and out of aggregates that bind people, artifacts , language and institutions. While recognising the value of symbol processing models, these presuppose the embodied events of human symbol grounding . At a micro level, humans coordinate with others and the world to self-construct by cognising, talking and orienting to social affordances . We trace the necessary skills to sense-saturated coordination or interactivity . As a result of perceiving and acting on the environment , human individuals use the artificial to extend their natural powers. By using verbal patterns , artifacts and institutions , we become imperfect rational actors whose lives span the micro and the macro worlds.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    This is the time-scale within which gestures are made and syllables articulated. It can broadly be associated with a window of around 200 ms. It is especially important in prosody (see, Cowley, 2009) but, at this scale, interactivity is full-bodied (for detailed discussion, see Thibault, 2011).

  2. 2.

    Adults sing, converse, read books, discover new media, and are fooled by advertisements: wordings appear in dreams and silent thoughts. While not languaging, this is also what Love (2004) calls first-order language. In all of these activities formal patterns can be said to constrain expressive dynamics.

  3. 3.

    Here a symbol can be defined as a cultural constraint that serves in taking the measure or others and/or in controlling one’s behaviour: many symbols are prosodic, gestural or enact what Goffman (1959) calls the interaction order.

  4. 4.

    There is no clear evidence of when this occurs: however, there is abundant evidence that it is based on the skill of making and tracking phonetic gestures (Fowler and Rosenblum 1991; Fowler 2010). Further, since it is necessary to pretending it is likely that children begin to have the necessary experience in the second half of the second year.

  5. 5.

    Wegner and Sparrow (2007) use experimental work to trace the social and bodily complexity of co-action—and its deep links with our sense of agency.

  6. 6.

    One of the most remarkable facts about robots is that, already, they use human consciousness: this is exemplified, for example, when they learn to discriminate what we—but not they—see as colours; accordingly, it can be argued that robots are of importance as linguistic informants (Cowley 2008).

  7. 7.

    This depends on the observer’s point of view: in many respects, Kanzi remains distinctly a bonobo.

References

  • Anderson, M. L. (2003). Embodied cognition. Artificial Intelligence, 149, 91–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bateson, M. C. (1971). The interpersonal context of infant vocalization. Quarterly Progress Report of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, 100, 170–176.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bickhard, M. (2007). Language as an interaction system. New Ideas in Psychology, 25, 171–187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boudon, R. (1981). The logic of social action: An introduction to sociological analysis. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bråten, S. (2007). Altercentric infants and adults: On the origins and manifestations of participant perception of others’ acts and utterances. In S. Bråten (Ed.), On being moved: From mirror neurons to empathy (pp. 111–135). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York: WW Norton Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Belknap.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2007a). How human infants deal with symbol grounding. Interaction Studies, 8, 81–104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2007b). The cradle of language: Making sense of bodily connections. In D. Moyal-Sharrock (Ed.), Perspicuous presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology (pp. 278–298). Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2007c). Cognitive dynamics and distributed language. Language Sciences, 29, 575–583.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2008). Robots: The new linguistic informants? Connection Science, 20, 359–369.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2009). Language flow: Opening the subject. Cognitive Semiotics, 4, 64–92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2011a). Distributed language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (2011b). Taking a language stance. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 185–209.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J. (in press). Naturalizing language: Human appraisal and technology. AI & Society.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J., Moodley, S., & Fiori-Cowley, A. (2004). Grounding signs of culture: Primary intersubjectivity in social semiosis. Mind, Culture and Activity, 11, 109–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cowley, S. J., & MacDorman, K. F. (2006). What baboons, babies and tetris players tell us about interaction: A biosocial view of norm-based social learning. Connection Science, 18, 363–378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Craik, K. (1943). The nature of explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cronin, B. (2004). Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed cognition. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55, 557–560.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, K. (1949). Human society. New York: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davidson, D. (1997). Seeing through language. Royal Institute of Philosophy, Supplement, 42, 15–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, D. C. (1991). Real patterns. Journal of Philosophy, 88, 27–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mother’s voices. Science, 208, 1174–1176.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DeCasper, A. J., & Spence, M. (1986). Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns’ perception of speech sounds. Infant, Behavior and Development, 9, 133–150.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Di Paolo, E. (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 429–452.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, E. (1895[1998]). Rules of sociological method. Basingston: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fowler, C. A., & Rosenblum, L. D. (1991). The perception of phonetic gestures. In I. G. Mattingly & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Modularity and the motor theory of speech perception (pp. 33–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fowler, C. A. (2010). Embodied, embedded language use. Ecological Psychology, 22, 286–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harnard, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D. Nonlinear phenomena, 42(1–3), 335–346.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Oxford: Duckworth.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedström, P. (2005). Dissecting the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hodges, B. (2007). Good prospects: Ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating and caring in conversation. Language Sciences, 29, 584–604.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Järvilehto, T. (1998). The theory of the organism-environment system: I. Description of the theory. Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science, 33, 321–334.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Järvilehto, T., Nurkkala, V. M., & Koskela, K. (2009). The role of anticipation in reading. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17, 509–526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18, 513–549.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kravchenko, A. (2007). Essential properties of language: Why language is not a digital code. Language Sciences, 29, 621–650.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Linell, P. (2005). The written language bias in linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language mind and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte NC: Information Age Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Locke, J. (1690/1975). An essay concerning human understanding. In P. H. Niddich (Eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Love, N. (2004). Cognition and the language myth. Language Sciences, 26, 525–544.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacDorman, K. (2007). Life after the symbol system metaphor. Interaction Studies, 18, 143–158.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maturana, H. R. (1978). Biology of language: The epistemology of reality. In G. A. Miller & E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Psychology and biology of language and thought: Essays in honor of eric lenneberg (pp. 27–63). New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melser, D. (2004). The act of thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. (2009). Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17, 653–676.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reddy, M. J. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 284–297). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, D. (2007). H. sapiens as ecologically special: What does language contribute? Language Sciences, 16, 710–731.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pattee, H. H. (1969). How does a molecule become a message? Developmental Biology Supplement, 3, 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pattee, H. H. (1997). The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls”. In Proceedings from the Workshop on Control Mechanisms for Complex Systems: Issues of Measurement and Semiotic Analysis. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Redwood City, CA: Addison Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. New York: Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Port, R. (2010). Rich memory and distributed phonology. Language Sciences, 32, 43–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Raguso, R., & Willis, M. (2002). Synergy between visual and olfactory cues in nectar feeding by naïve hawkmoths Manduca Sexta. Animal Behavior, 64, 685–695.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Savage-Rumbaugh, S. E., Shanker, S. G., & Taylor, T. J. (1998). Apes, language and the human mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sigtryggsdóttir, T. (2007). Guiding attention leads to changes in child’s manifest practical understanding. Unpublished dissertation, University of Hertfordshire.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spiekermann, K. (2013). Judgement aggregation and distributed thinking. In S.J. Cowley & F. Vallée-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain (pp. 31–51) (First edition). London: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steffensen, S. V. (2011). Beyond mind: An extended ecology of languaging. In S. J. Cowley (Ed.), Distributed language (pp. 185–210). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Stern, D. N. (1971). A micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins. Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 10, 501–517.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stuart, S. A. J. (2012). Enkinaesthesia: The essential sensuous background for co-agency. In Z. Radman (Ed.), The background: Knowing without thinking (pp. 167–186). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. (2010). Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive Science. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed Language view. Ecological Psychology, 23, 210–245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, E. (2007). Mind and life: Biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tønsberg, G. H., & Hauge, T. S. (1996). The musical nature of prelinguistic interaction. The temporal structure and organization in co-created interaction with congenital deaf-blinds. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 5, 63–75.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and co-operation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before speech (pp. 321–347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, gesture, and symbol (pp. 183–229). New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trevarthen, C., & Aitken, K. J. (2001). Infant intersubjectivity: Research, theory and clinical applications. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 3–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wenger, D., & Sparrow, B. (2007). The puzzle of coaction. In D. Ross, D. Spurrett, H. Kinkaid, & L. G. Stephens (Eds.), Distributed cognition and the will (pp. 17–41). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Willems, R., & Hagoort, P. (2007). Neural evidence and the interplay between language, gesture and action: A review. Brain and Language, 101, 278–289.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein, L. W. (1958). Philosophical investigations (2nd ed.). Blackwell: Oxford.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Martin Neumann’s contribution was undertaken within the Project ‘Emergence in the Loop’ (EmiL: IST-033841) funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme of the European Commission, in the framework of the initiative “Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems”. Stephen Cowley’s draws much on the opportunity to contribute to a programme of scientific workshops on Agency and languaging (2010–2012) that were organized by the University of Jyväskylä (and sponsored by the Finnish Ministry of Culture).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Martin Neumann

  2. Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC cluster, Slagelse, Denmark

    Stephen J. Cowley

Authors
  1. Martin Neumann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Stephen J. Cowley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Neumann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse, Denmark

    Stephen J. Cowley

  2. Department of Psychology, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom

    Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Neumann, M., Cowley, S.J. (2017). Human Agency and the Resources of Reason. In: Cowley, S., Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds) Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49115-8_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49115-8_9

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49114-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49115-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation