- Date
- Wednesday 27 Feb 2019, 16:00 - 17:30
- Type
- Lecture
- Room
- C1-1
- Building
- Theil Building
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
The faculty colloquia aim to cover the broad scope of Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil), in analytic and continental philosophy as well as the history of philosophy. Speakers are free in their choice of the subject-matter of their talks, but are requested to present a talk accessible to all philosophers, students notably included.
About the speaker
Jasper van den Herik is a PhD-student at Erasmus School of Philosophy. He is working on the FWO and NWO funded project "Getting real about words and numbers. An enactive approach to language and mathematics".
He is interested in languaging as something we do. From a radical enactive-ecological perspective I investigate different aspects of languaging, such as the nature of linguistic knowledge, the ontogenetic origins of linguistic content, and the way words work.
About the lecture: An Ecological-Enactive Account of Language Learning
Explaining the origins of human language seems to pose a conceptual problem: we have ways of talking about non-linguistic behaviour and ways of talking about linguistic behaviour, but, in the words of Davidson (1999: 11), ‘what we lack is a satisfactory vocabulary for describing the intermediate steps’. In this talk I propose an account of these intermediate steps in the linguistic development of children by starting from the ecological-enactive approach. This approach explains human behaviour in relational terms, as dynamically unfolding skilful interactions with the sociomaterial world. Building on the education of attention model of learning, I propose to conceive of the child’s initial communicative behaviour (her ‘first words’) as attentional actions: actions that indicate an aspect of the environment to someone else in the unfolding of social interaction. By learning to be guided by, and guide others by these attentional actions, a child learns to construe her world as others in her community do. I argue that in order to become a competent language user, a child also has to undergo metalinguistic education of attention, in which she learns to construe linguistic behaviour as others in her community do. In doing so I pay special attention to how the normative background provided by the child’s caregivers enable her to gradually grow into her role as competent participant in linguistic practices.