6 - The Distributed Speaker

Summary

Chil’s ability to act as a powerful speaker, able to author intricate propositions, cannot be found within the boundaries of his own body, brain, or mental life, or within a single utterance or turn-at-talk. Instead it is distributed within a multiparty interactive field constituted through unfolding co-operative action. The rich language that publicly states the proposition that sits at the heart of his objection in Figure 5.2 was created by another, fully fluent speaker, in an earlier utterance, and this is true as well for the proposition that Chil will subsequently ratify as correct. Similarly his gestures gain their intelligibility through the way in which they are elaborated by words created by another. Shifting focus from self-sufficient bodies, utterances, and sentences to an interactively sustained field able to encompass multiple actors with diverse abilities has important analytic and moral consequences. Heterogeneity is also central to the semiotic repertoire required to construct intelligible action. Despite the focus on symbols in the study of language and cognition, symbols produced by Chil cannot be properly understood as action without grounding in other forms of semiosis. Chil provides a powerful demonstration of how we inhabit each other’s actions.

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