Book contents
- Co-Operative Action
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
- Co-Operative Action
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What Is Co-Operative Action, and Why Is It Important?
- Part I Co-Operative Accumulative Action
- Part II Intertwined Semiosis
- Part III Embodied Interaction
- Part IV Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- Part V Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants
- 20 The Emergence of Conventionalized Signs within the Natural World
- 21 Calibrating Experience and Knowledge by Touching the World Together
- 22 The Blackness of Black
- 23 Building Skilled, Knowing Actors and the Phenomenal Objects They Are Trusted to Know
- 24 Professional Vision
- 25 Conclusion
- References Cited
- Index
- Series page
20 - The Emergence of Conventionalized Signs within the Natural World
from Part V - Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2017
- Co-Operative Action
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
- Co-Operative Action
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 What Is Co-Operative Action, and Why Is It Important?
- Part I Co-Operative Accumulative Action
- Part II Intertwined Semiosis
- Part III Embodied Interaction
- Part IV Co-Operative Action with Predecessors
- Part V Professional Vision, Transforming Sensory Experience into Types, and the Creation of Competent Inhabitants
- 20 The Emergence of Conventionalized Signs within the Natural World
- 21 Calibrating Experience and Knowledge by Touching the World Together
- 22 The Blackness of Black
- 23 Building Skilled, Knowing Actors and the Phenomenal Objects They Are Trusted to Know
- 24 Professional Vision
- 25 Conclusion
- References Cited
- Index
- Series page
Summary
A crucial issue posed for the understanding of human cognition, and indeed human evolution more generally, is how what Peirce called symbols emerged in the natural world. Unlike the iconic and indexical forms of semiosis that sustain the organization of life throughout the biological world, symbols are not inherently meaningful, but instead are lodged within communities of interacting actors who recognize them through rule, habit, or convention. No other animal pervasively uses symbols to organize action and shape understanding. The action-relevant importance of symbols is demonstrated by the attempts of an aphasic man to organize the subsequent actions of others with iconic and indexical signs alone. Movement to a next action is systematically delayed by the task of establishing what, of many possibilities, these signs mean now. This does not occur with symbols. Co-operative action thus provides an environment that would both promote and sustain the emergence of symbols by making powerful new forms of rapid, flexible action possible. Indeed, symbols, which sit at the center of human language, are themselves forms of co-operative action. Co-operative action is contrasted with modal, gesture-first theories for the origins of language.
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- Co-Operative Action , pp. 329 - 347Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017