Interactivity and Languaging

1 Introduction

Radical approaches to language and cognition consider linguistic phenomena to be massively heterogeneous. In so doing, they recognize that linguistic activity is irreducible to a language system that can be defined by predefined rules (e.g. syntax, grammar) and/or conceptual meanings that are operant inside the heads of language users. As Cowley (2019: 487) remarks, “[f]or over 100 years, language was ascribed to ‘systems’ whose forms (or signs) were taken to consist, roughly speaking, in counterparts to written ‘words’.” When such a view is taken, those seeking explanations often trace communication to intentions, a language faculty, and/or ways of representing “knowledge.” Radical approaches reject such views by tracing language to activity across a myriad of timescales (Steffensen and Cowley 2010; Steffensen and Pedersen 2014). They link slow cultural processes with fast ones such as, for instance, embodied behavior (e.g. mimesis, gaze-following, and gestures) (Neumann and Cowley 2017). Also, they trace language to not only sociocultural norms and rules but also the wider ecology (Cowley 2011). On a radical view, language – or, better, languaging – is explored in relation to how particular agent– environment systems link embodiment to a range of behavioral contingencies.

The notion of languaging builds on a central assumption of radical linguists: language is irreducible to a Saussurean-style atemporal domain that unidirectionally shapes and conditions human lived experiences. By contrast, for radical linguists, language is constituted through situated action and the ways in which, together, people do things with (material) wordings. As a developed theoretical notion, languaging was introduced by Humberto Maturana to account for

a manner of living together in a flow of coordinations of coordinations of consensual behaviors or doings that arise in a history of living in the collaboration of doing things together. (Quote in Maturana 2002: 27)

For Cowley (2011) too, languaging should therefore first and foremost be regarded as the primary instantiation of the practical activity that constitutes language. This pragmatist point ties neatly with Wittgenstein’s (2009) “forms of life” and 4E cognitive theories (cf. Rowlands 2010) that regard human cognition as enacted by human agents whose doings are fully embedded in socio-material settings. On the view of radical linguistics, languaging is a viable concept for two main reasons. First, it avoids determinism because it allows linguistic activity to precede language as a phenomenon. Second, it offers a nonrepresentationalist way of coming to terms with linguistic meaning-making or what Maturana calls a flow of recurrent coordinations that comprise a consensual domain.

But there is another important concept that, like languaging, drives human style meaning-making. Whereas languaging requires wordings, interactivity is more directly embodied. In contrast to languaging, no clear theory of “interactivity” has yet emerged. In its basic sense, however, the term is clear. Human interactivity is “sense-saturated coordination” by living people. Its sense-saturation entails that agents act in ways that are constrained by diachronic resources including social roles and practices (cf. Harvey et al. 2016: 242). As with languaging, interactivity constitutes and, thus, enables different kinds of human-specific behavior. In fact, some regard interactivity as a necessary basis of even linguistic modes of action. For instance, Cowley and Nash (2013: 187) suggest that interactivity renders “possible language and human forms of cognition” by linking “human sense-making to historical experience.” Despite attempts at relating linguistic activity (and, thus, languaging) with interactivity, there is little explicit discussion of the link between the two. Accordingly, one finds puzzling statements like the following:

Phenomenologically, we may perceive [interactivity] as ’language’, ‘interaction’, ‘cognition’ or ‘niche-constructing’, but these are only perspectives on interactivity, not ontologically real phenomena per se. (Steffensen 2013: 199)

The need for clarification does not stem from introducing language as a category – a view with which Maturana would agree – but, rather, from what goes unmentioned. As a result, the status of linguistic activity remains unclear. Without clarification of its status, one could mistakenly think that such activity is subsumed under the general category of language. This brings me to the paper’s aim. Motivated by the goal of exploring the relation between interactivity and languaging, I offer a way of uniting the phenomena by making appeal to what I term existential meaning. In order to reach this outcome, I begin by substantiating the paper’s initial claim: interactivity is different from – but nevertheless, indispensable to – linguistic activity. However, since both are necessary to human meaning-making, I also discuss the meaning that appears to be involved. The need for so doing appears in how those who advocate in favor of languaging have all too often steered clear of meaning. As a result, the concept awaits definition in radical or nonrepresentationalist terms. However, the negative target is clear. Orthodox linguists take meaning to be instantiated as mental content – or simply, representations – inside the heads of language users. In developing a view of how interactivity and languaging co-function through acts of meaning, the paper takes an important step in rethinking nonrepresentationalist approaches to linguistic experience.

The paper is structured as follows. First, in section 2, I consider how the concept of interactivity has been developed in a narrow and a wide sense. Having done so, I suggest that interactivity highlights a broad range of human phenomena. In section 3, I turn to the notion of languaging by arguing for Maturana’s original conceptualization. In so doing, I abstain from embracing “broad” – and less theoretically grounded – understandings of languaging (e.g. Love 2017; Cowley 2019). In section 4, I clarify the relation between interactivity (in the wide sense!) and languaging with reference to how infants are socialized. Accordingly, in section 5, I propose that interactivity and languaging provide a basis for developing the concept of existential meaning. ^[1]

2 Interactivity: Narrow and wide

In the literature, “interactivity” is used in both wide and narrow senses. What distinguishes the wide one is that interactivity is said to underpin all human-specific activities (viz. it is wide in that it has general applicability). Yet, interactivity is also pursued narrowly in specific situations that are not generally “representative” of human living.

Theoretical discussion of interactivity can be traced to Kirsh’s (1997) work on human–computer interaction. Using the term in a narrow sense, he explored the interface dynamics of multi-mediated learning environments. Kirsh found that the freedom that they provide is especially revealing. Users face making future actions that depend on considerable complexity: to make the most of the software, they need skills in coordinating actions. For Kirsh, therefore, interactivity occurs both between user and interface and around how the software has been designed. Although predominantly concerned with interactivity in the computer-mediated setting, Kirsh also makes claims that treat interactivity as a multifaceted phenomenon that underpins most human interactions. Among examples he mentions are “a conversation, playing a game of tennis, dancing a waltz, dressing a child, performing as a member in a quartet, reacting to the audience in improv theater” (Kirsh 1997: 82). What these activities share clearly entails interactivity in the wider sense. While underspecified, it is clear that they all rely on considerable inter-individual cooperation. In his terms,

the involved parties must coordinate their activity or else the process collapses into chaos; all parties exercise power over each other, influencing what the other will do, and usually there is some degree of (tacit) negotiation over who will do what, when and how. In these examples, interactivity is a complex, dynamic coupling between two or more intelligent parties. (Kirsh 1997: 82–83)

For Kirsh, human–computer interaction encompasses a particular (or narrow) instantiation of a larger phenomenon. With a degree of understatement, he claims “there remains many unresolved questions about the nature of interactivity itself” (Kirsch 1997: 79).

It took more than 15 years before others pursued interactivity in the wider sense of the term. Specifically, Steffensen’s (2013) takes the view that interactivity is unique to human cognition and a substrate of human existence. By so doing, he tacitly acknowledges Kirsh’s (1997) distinction between, on the one hand, the interactivity that arises as intelligent systems draw on cooperation, coordination, and negotiation, and, on the other hand, interaction between inert bodies such the moon’s gravitational field and the Earth. But Steffensen (2013: 197) goes further by claiming that interactivity not only involves sense-saturation but also that the resulting coordination pervades “our species-specific capability for sense-making.” Steffensen argues that interactivity also happens between individual and environment in that it “is a primordial substrate of human life” (2013: 199). On this view, eating alone also depends on interactivity in that it draws on one’s enculturation and, thus, social norms. In the West, people typically do not eat off the table but rather from a bowl or plate and, in so doing, make use of a knife and fork and so on. Vallée-Tourangeau and Cowley offer a related view when they argue that

[w]hile neurally enabled, cultural and bodily dispositions contribute to human action, people exploit sense-saturated coordination or interactivity, a modus operandi based on coordinating with people/objects while orienting to the cultural environment. (Vallée-Tourangeau and Cowley 2013: 2)

Although the concept of “sense-saturation” has not been systematically developed, it appears in a range of empirical work. Studies in interactivity show that both human ways of doing things together with others and how they act in solitude are saturated by sense that meshes situated embodiment with social resources that are not found in the setting (cf. Harvey et al. 2016). Thus, contra the enactivist notion of “participatory sense-making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007), interactivity draws extensively on the nonlocal. By contrast, in “participatory sense-making,” the paradigm case is where parties find themselves performing a “dance” in a corridor. The social dimension of the activity, its meaning, depends on agents who are in close proximity to each other. As the term is used in a wide sense, interactivity is much more general. Thus, for Steffensen, it

flows between human beings – or between a single human being and cultural artefacts and procedures (e.g. previously crafted texts or technological devices). (Steffensen 2013: 198)

Subsequently, many have evoked the wide sense of interactivity (see Steffensen and Pedersen 2014; Cowley and Gahrn-Andersen 2015; Harvey et al. 2016; Vallée-Tourangeau and Cowley 2017; Steffensen and Harvey 2018). However, none have pursued the relation between interactivity and languaging. Not only do they conceive of interactivity in different ways, but they have tended to treat it as an empirical phenomenon which varies across cultures, persons, and situations.

Compared to competing concepts in radical cognitive science (e.g. the Autopoietic Enactivist notion of “sense-making”) the strength of interactivity lies precisely in how, in its narrow sense, it clarifies real-world events. For instance, Steffensen and colleague’s (2016) experiment with the “17 animal problem” shows how a subject reconfigures her perceptual perspective to find a solution to a problem that, at first sight, seems insoluble. Although the example is individual-centered (i.e. the cognizer herself brings about a solution), her novel solution draws on a history of engaging with the environment. Such engagements are run through with social normativity. Indeed, in the case of the 17 animal problem, the participant imposes order by using, not arithmetic or logic, but her personal, aesthetic sense. She enacts “a general tendency to impose an aesthetic order onto the physical layout of her surroundings” while drawing on sociocultural knowledge (Steffensen et al. 2016: 93). Interestingly, Vallée-Tourangeau and Cowley suggest that interactivity is needed if individuals are to experience something as a problem that invites a solution:

[P]roblem solving arises, not in relation to a [thing] qua physical object but to the interactivity that gives it cognitive life as a thing (i.e., through its perceived affordances). (Vallée-Tourangeau and Cowley 2017: 8)

Empirical research tends to consider interactivity around narrow phenomena that demand nonlocal skill, standards, and knowledge. In this “pregnant” sense of the term, interactivity dominates real-world problem-solving and human– computer interaction. In fact, a narrow focus also bears on definitions of interactivity in its wider sense. Thus, Steffensen and colleagues (2016) define wide interactivity as “sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action.” At the same time, they offer the narrow view that interactivity weaves

a contingent spatio-temporal trajectory, constituted by the action–perception dynamics between agent and environment. The agent and the environment metamorphose into a seamless cognitive ecosystem that follows a unique cognitive trajectory, that is, a dynamical and nonlinear path that the system creates as it achieves a given cognitive result. (Steffensen et al. 2016: 81)

By linking the wide sense to observable dynamics, they blur the two senses. Interactivity becomes the enabler of a unique (or, nonlinear) cognitive trajectory in ways that are not explained. Rather, it is illustrated by tracing qualitatively different agent–environment interactions that contribute to problem-solving situations. Studies on narrow interactivity in specific contexts ^[2] adopt the tacit assumption that any qualified understanding of human cognition and language – intelligent, adaptive behavior – arises as agents diverge from their mundane routines. ^[3] But is this true? To be sure there are differences between the unique trajectory of overcoming a problem as opposed to, say, moments of mundane “business as usual.” Although both involve interactivity, mundane activity seems to precede nonlinear behavioral shifts or trajectories and, thus, they are constituting conditions for radical changes in agent–environment relations. Despite conflating wide and narrow senses, it is clear that interactivity has an enabling role in much of human cognition. For this reason, I now examine interactivity, first and foremost, as a wide or general phenomenon. Only in this way can we clarify its role in meaningful activity. Before unpacking the wider sense of interactivity, I turn to another fundamental part of human living. Without linguistic activity or, simply, languaging, we would not be the kinds of beings that we are (cf. Heidegger 1982; Kolodny and Edelman 2018; Cowley 2019). ^[4]

3 Languaging

The need to pursue languaging is readily justified by its role in human everyday life. Human linguistic abilities underpin activities as different as talking, instructing, writing or, indeed, fantasizing and listening. In fact, even perceptual capacities draw on linguistic concepts (see Noë 2006; McDowell 2009). Cowley (2019) argues that languaging should be placed center stage in coming to terms with all behavior that is touched by linguistic know-how. But, he adds, one should also avoid considering language as something that can be defined in its own right (e.g. by reference to, for instance, grammar, syntax, meaning, etc.). Paraphrasing Maturana, Cowley claims not only that humans “happen in language” but also that the concept of “languaging” can be used to reveal its transformative potential. Not only does it enable every person to think differently about the phenomena of language and linguistic activity but, as a result, these open up the heterogeneity of the human world.

Although the concept of languaging has been used for centuries, it was first given theoretical importance by Humberto Maturana in 1983. Then, in 1988, he offered a systematic discussion that pushes language “beyond any intuition.” However, as Cowley (2019) critically adds, Maturana does so in ways that are bound to focus on not embodiment, but rather coordination. For Cowley, Maturana’s approach is so abstract that the key concepts barely touch on observable events or meaning-making. For this reason, Cowley prefers to use Nigel Love’s perspective where “languaging” becomes so inclusive that it encompasses all behavior that builds on linguistic abilities. It thus applies to qualitatively different phenomena such as speaking, listening, writing, and reading. In being inclusive, the strength of the concept is said to be that it “posits no a priori object, theory, or specific tradition” (Cowley 2019: 491). At the same time, however, there is a risk in making “languaging” so broad that it blurs differences between qualitatively different linguistic phenomena. For this reason, I choose a less inclusive – and, hence, more conservative – approach by considering languaging as it was clearly laid out in Maturana’s (1988) seminal paper, “Reality.”

For Maturana, languaging is intrinsically linked to the praxis of human living and acts of observing that appear in language. Languaging allows human beings, as observers, to experience the world as such and to bring forth nature as, strange as it may sound, they construct natural objects (Maturana 1988: 25). Thus, the world does not exist as an observer-independent reality. Rather, it is constituted by our being-in-language and the distinctions we impose on our surroundings as we observe them (Maturana 1988: 59). For example,

the domain of physical existence is brought forth as a domain of reality through the recursive application by the observer in his or her praxis of living of the configuration of operations of distinctions constituted by measurements of mass, distance and time. (Maturana 1988: 31)

Further, languaging enables us to reflect on ourselves as individuals and experience our own selfhood (Maturana 1988: 56). As Maturana underlines, it allows us to be “observing in a bodyhood.” In contrast to basic languaging, this mode of coordination relies on a higher order of successive coordination (Maturana 1988: 47). While languaging enables reflection, by definition, this need not be based on reflective observation. Quite the contrary. In its minimal occurrences, languaging is “prior to any reflection or explanation” or pertains to basic observing by means of language. By contrast, reflections and explanations derive from basic experiences (Maturana 1988: 39). ^[5] As Maturana puts it, “any explanation or description of how the praxis of living in language comes to be is operationally secondary to the praxis of living in language” (1988: 27). For this reason, he suggests, statements can only exist as reformulations of past observing (1988: 28).

As pre-reflective observing, languaging unfolds as joint action where basic intersubjective engagements constitute a domain of activity (Maturana 1988: 47). The linguistic domain is conditioned by “interactions and co-ordinations of actions between human beings” (1988: 45). Languaging emerges from interactions between two or more biological agents. In its emergence, it conditions the domain of coordinations between agents (Maturana 1988: 45). This domain becomes a medium within which the agents interact as observers. Accordingly, every distinction they make, draws on linguistic know-how within such a linguistic domain (Maturana 1988: 61).

The concept of languaging has the advantage of avoiding any assumption that the prerequisite for linguistic activity is an ability to draw on symbols. In fact, Maturana explicitly claims that basic linguistic action “does not operate with symbols” (1988: 47). Accordingly, at least with regards to traditional definitions, he allows languaging to precede connotation and denotation (cf. Maturana 1988). By rejecting symbols as a prerequisite for linguistic know-how, as least at first appearance, Maturana avoids an infinite regress (as is further discussed below). “Languaging” serves to clarify the course of language acquisition by making the claim that linguistic phenomena are primarily biological. ^[6] In other words, by rejecting symbolic knowledge and innate capacities for cognizing symbols, Maturana escapes from anthropocentrism and humanism. This is achieved by making languaging biological in the sense that “it results from the operations of human beings as living systems” (1988: 45). Nonetheless, it also “takes place in the domain of the co-ordinations of actions of the participants, and not in their physiology or neurophysiology” (1988: 45). The points below are necessary consequences of the position that he unfolds:

Though biological at the outset, languaging comprises a phenomenal domain which is, at once, biological, consensual and cognitive (cf. Maturana 1988: 61).

Languaging has limited applicability in that it entails coordination in the sense of instantaneous action. However, as Maturana rightly observes, it is constrained by diachronic experience ^[7] or, technically, “the structural history of the network of intersections, conversations and reflections to which we belong as members of a network of […] communities” (Maturana 1988: 71). For Maturana, languaging, in the pregnant sense, unfolds as conversations that can take place either “in a community or in a soliloquy” (1988: 58). Although it may happen in solitude, the basis of languaging is deeply social and synchronous because it is constituted through

the flow of consensual co-ordinations of consensual co-ordinations of actions between organism that live together in a co-ontogenetic structural drift. (Maturana 1988: 47)

Later, I link Maturana’s view of languaging to the wide sense of interactivity. Before so doing, I consider how Maturana delimits the conditions that make languaging possible. As noted, languaging presupposes a consensual coordination of meaning that arises out of basic non-linguistic activity. Despite claiming that languaging is constituted by basic intracorporal interaction between individuals, Maturana (1988) offers no account of this particular process. In order to bring clarity to his view, I turn to the child as the yet-to-become-observer, in other words, to how a child without experience of prior language-based consensual recursion can build on qualitatively different consensual relations in constructing the ground for observing experience (in the Maturanian sense).

Raimondi (2014) offers an explicit attempt to clarify the emergence of languaging. As argued below, however, it leaves aside important questions about how languaging contributes to human ontogenesis. For Raimondi, in its basic sense,

languaging appears in the domain of interaction as soon as individuals operate a coordination which takes place, recursively, “at the top” of their historically established domain of coordination. (Raimondi 2014: 6)

Crucially, as noted above, experience of languaging enables the observer to distinguish worldly objects. In Maturana’s terms, where “there is languaging, there are language, objects and human sociocultural activities” (Raimondi 2014: 8). Raimondi traces early languaging to changing dynamics between the infant, the caregiver, and objects. He exemplifies this by a case of passing toys between a caregiver and an infant. In this process,

a new framework appears if the infant and his caregiver bring about a new coordination by recursively drawing on the pre-established one as an operational basis; i.e., when activity such as the play of passing toys allows the emergence of a new activity that includes the request to pass said objects. (Raimondi 2014: 6)

While an important qualitative change certainly occurs at this stage in infancy, Raimondi overlooks an aspect of Maturana’s definition. While endorsing the proposed view of languaging, Raimondi leaves out the claim that objects come into being in entering language. Accordingly, if linguistic action allows a subject to distinguish objects, how can changes in existing infant–caregiver– object dynamics then precede languaging? Indeed, on Maturana’s definition, it is only possible to distinguish an object by doing so in language. Thus, in sticking to Maturana’s claim that languaging constitutes objects in general, Raimondi ends up presupposing the very phenomenon – i.e. languaging – that he sets out to explain. Indeed, Raimondi suggests that linguistic activity constitutes objects. For example, he says, ”[s]ince objects are the operational condition for languaging, it follows that interactions not relying on recursive consensual coordinations […] also do not entail the constitution of interobjective domains” (Raimondi 2014: 8).

This critique makes it imperative to consider the emergence of languaging in early infancy. Below, I argue that “interactivity” is “the missing link” in how the infant progresses from coordinating by means of recurrent embodied interactions with caregivers and objects into coordination by languaging (in a Maturanian sense). I argue that, understood in a wide sense, interactivity enables languaging to derive from non-linguistic activity. As the observant reader will realize, among other things, this involves reconsideration of how linguistic know-how contributes to bringing meaningful objects into existence.

4 How interactivity grounds languaging

A minimal definition of interactivity is “sense-saturated coordination that contributes to human action” (Steffensen 2013: 196). In this wide and most basic definition, interactivity evokes a “sense” that is neither conceptual nor symbolic. Rather, it is perceptual-affective: interactivity can thus be traced to sense-making that is independent of the linguistic and the symbolic. Further, on Steffensen’s account, interactivity is also human. For this reason, at least in principle, it is specific to an infant’s ontogenetic development. As I show below, this makes interactivity indispensable in enabling a child to grasp hitherto unknown meanings in the course of engaging with the world. Interactivity gives rise to human ways of doing things together. Indeed, as argued below, this is precisely why the wide construal of the term also allows for the emergence of behavior that enables interactivity in its narrow senses (i.e. as applied to problem-solving or human–computer interaction). In these terms, both narrow and wide senses help clarify how interactivity grounds flexible adaptive behavior or intelligent ways of dealing with other human beings and their common worlds.

In its fundamental sense, interactivity is synonymous with the “sense-saturated coordination” of human action. The definition allows participation in human action to precede languaging as infant development gradually connects activity with linguistic know-how. Further, it allows that human-specific activity – not just social interaction – presupposes particular kinds of sense-saturated coordination. The consequences are clear: while not overtly intersubjective, speaking to oneself involves sense-saturated coordination (i.e. relating to the world by means of linguistic resources). Of course, once linguistic resources come into play, a child can draw on experience in talking in solitude. The capacity, however, emerges from a myriad of interactivity-based events that, over the life span, allow the “mastery” of language. In developmental time, interactivity first occurs in infancy and, specifically, with a specific kind of coordination that precedes the child’s capacity for making utterances. Interactivity emerges with the onset of what Colwyn Trevarthen (1979) famously terms secondary intersubjectivity. Whereas the basic dyadic coordinator between infant and caregiver shapes primary intersubjectivity, this occurs in the absence of impersonal thirds or, simply, objects. By contrast, the secondary kind of intersubjectivity differs essentially in that it occurs later and revolves around triadic infant–caregiver–object activity. During this stage of infancy (toward the end of the first year), caregivers

use action proposals much earlier than the children appeared able to perform what they were asked to do. They usually follow a very similar plan of action. They start by showing the object to the child; some of them call it by its name, and when the child shows interest, they indicate a particular use that acquires a prototypical profile. After that, they make a suggestion: “Put the doll here ...,” “Feed him/her ....” Up to the age of 10 to 12 months, the child does not understand the mother's intentions with regard to his or her own actions, so the mother makes an overt, staged version of the intended answer. (Perinat and Sadurní 1999: 64)

Eventually, a crucial change in infant–caregiver–object relations occurs. As Perinat and Sadurní explain,

[t]here comes a point at which the mother's schemes refer back to a previous experience; actions begin to become meaningful for the child. It is as if the child says, “Oh yes, now I see what this is all about! You have to pull the object and put things inside it.... Like this?” The mothers’ actions become signs after regular repetition. (Perinat and Sadurní 1999: 64)

This change is independently described by Stein Bråten, Shaun Gallagher, and Michael Tomasello (cf. Gahrn-Andersen and Cowley 2017: 387). In the terms presented above, it marks the onset of human interactivity. There is, however, no reason to follow Tomasello and others by tracing it to “intention reading” (cf. Raimondi 2019). Rather, novel ways of meaning may draw on the phenomenology of the child (see also Gahrn-Andersen and Cowley 2017). Interestingly, therefore, the first occurrences of interactivity do not occur in isolation from past interactions. Rather, the infant grasps past encounters with caregivers in ways that set off novel ways of coordinating. An activity such as placing a doll in a position is now experienced as carrying a meaning potential. By hypothesis, this arises because the child’s emerging ability to bring past experiences to the present grants a sense of significance that was previously lacking.

This sense – or meaning – is social in two ways. Not only does it bear on the child’s past interactions with caregivers, but it also prompts future kinds of socio-material interactions. Of course, the latter follows only when the child “decides” to follow caregiver invitations. As the child learns to do so, interactions become saturated with sense or, in other terms, the social significance of the past enables future encounters that draw on social norms and expectations. Interactivity is more than simply picking up on caregiver cues: for example, Hobson (1998) notes how the infant comes to distinguish between, on the one hand, attitudes to objects and, on the other, the objects themselves. A child begins to grasp that it is possible to have “multiple attitudes to the same things and events” (1998: 289). The disclosure of this multiplicity is intrinsic to a toddler’s emerging personhood or social agency and, thus, his/her ability to engage in socio-material relations (Hobson 1998: 292, Gahrn-Andersen and Cowley 2017). Interactivity thus opens up a (virtual) space alongside a child’s increased socialization. This space slowly matures into the complex adult repertoire of customs, manners, expressions, linguistic know-how, etc.

This developmental stage precedes languaging. For according to Maturana (1988), languaging takes place in “the flow of consensual co-ordinations of actions” and relies on “recurrent interactions.” Using interactivity in grasping new meanings precedes later languaging in that it depends on experiential change that arise through recurrent interactions. On this view, interactivity grants a radically new kind of understanding that derives from coordination between infant and caregiver. One should not be surprised. It is well known that, while still in the womb, babies are moved by wordings and that, at only 4 days, infants can discriminate linguistic patterns in their native languages (cf. Mehler et al. 1988). Further, children of 20 weeks distinguish up to three different vowel categories (cf. Kuhl and Meltzoff 1996). However, they actively partake in the praxis of language after the first year of life. In Maturana’s sense, this is where languaging begins. As he emphasizes, without some reciprocity, coordination cannot be consensual and, thus, languaging cannot emerge. The child must acquire a voice if she/ he is to develop the wherewithal to “happen in language.” It seems, therefore, that interactivity is necessary to the “praxis of living” as it is structured in this particular medium.

Making use of interactivity to pick up on the caregiver’s articulation of absent phenomena (e.g. what Tomasello deems “the intentional states of the caregiver”) is a crucial step in entering language. Articulations of this kind invite the child to note differences between, on the one hand, what is localized in embodied interaction and, on the other hand, what derives from the past and is, in this sense, absent or nonlocal (cf. Harvey et al. 2016). ^[8] Here, interactivity instantiates what is akin to the reference (or aboutness) of the denotative (i.e. conceptual) cornerstones of human linguistic activity. ^[9] Since these relations are mediated by infant understanding, they connect with the occurrence of other aspects of nonlocality. On occasion, at least, these may converge with linguistic denotation and significance that can be rightly attributed to socio-material practices (see Gahrn-Andersen 2019). In the case described by Perinat and Sadurní above, a child suddenly discovers the practical significance of objects as a result of how they are interwoven in social relations. As the child does so, she enters socio-material reality by bringing into play meanings connected with social norms and expectations. As a result, the child gains capacities that enable him or her to actively bring significance to future situations. ^[10]

Interactivity enables the child to engage with things ^[11] whose socio-practical aspect spreads beyond a given situation. In Maturana’s sense, it has a recursivity that allows it to apply to a myriad of different situations. The child gradually gets accustomed to events and things on a global scale and, as a result, actions take on a trans-situational potential. As I argue elsewhere, this brings nonlocality or, rather non-appearance to the fore. Later, this will be central to linguistic activity. Here,

‘non-appearance’ should be understood as an undefinable trait which remains self-identical across different instances of a thing. It is, moreover, this non-appearance that enables us to engage with and use the thing as a particular kind of thing. In other words, the non-appearing aspects of things resemble Plato’s notion of εἶδος in that they belong to individual ‘essences’ of particular things that are not manifest. (Gahrn-Andersen 2019: 180)

Simply put, interactivity allows for the emergence of significance that, far from being conceptual or symbolic (in the cognitivist sense!), marks the beginning of the infant’s potential for engaging in social practices. It is the grounding of understanding that draws on what is absent. Here, the case of problem-solving can be rethought as arising from how social normativity contributes to meaningful ways of being in the world. Yet, one issue still remains: I need to specify the kind of meaning that is at play.

5 From ecological to existential meaning

Steffensen and Harvey (2018) label the meaning that arises with interactivity “ecological.” Indeed, this is an established way of looking beyond treating cognition as reducible to “mental processing of symbolic representations of the external world” (Steffensen and Harvey 2018: 1). Crucially James Gibson’s ecological psychology allows meaning to exist not in the head of the cognizer, but in the perceived environment. While endorsing this first step, I find compelling reasons for going beyond the ecological account. Specifically, the alternative I propose involves giving due attention to the virtual dimension of cognition.

On the Gibsonian view, meaning pertains to ecological objects (or affordances). ^[12] Although affordances are taken to be both subjective (i.e. virtual) and objective (i.e. real), The ecological approach to visual perception tends to focus on their real and objective dimension. Especially in chapter 8, Gibson describes affordances as correlated with the biological and physiological makeup of different organisms and, indeed, the ecological niches populated by these systems. Among the examples he gives are ones that involve a range of surfaces:

If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different. (Gibson 1986: 127)

Gibson presents meaning as existing in the world as it pertains to, not objects in-themselves, but how living systems relate to the world. Nevertheless, given the observer’s knowledge of the perceiving systems, there is a sense in which meaning is real and observable (or, at least, deducible). For Gibson, affordances “have to be measured relative to the animal” (Gibson 1986: 127). However, it is unclear how ecological or externalized meanings can permeate an animal’s actual experiences. Consider the following: a person perceives an apple tree. The crucial question is, of course, “What does that person see?” For Gibson the person perceives a particular something. Fair enough. But the nature of the something (or, if you prefer, what the tree affords) is not specified. Worse, what the tree affords is conditioned by, but irreducible to, the perceiver’s physiology. For instance, an average human observer may perceive the tree as inviting climbing or foraging – to name just two cases. It is therefore dangerous to assume that perception is instantiated in a given situation or an agent’s “direct perception” of an object. Were this so, a particular meaning would have to prevail. The view arises from ecological challenges to mainstream psychology. It was asserted that “we perceive […] objects insofar as we discriminate their properties or qualities” (Gibson 1986: 134). Ecological models rely on perceiving a given object as a particular something (and not as an abstract, ambiguous, or dubious entity). Accordingly, the model cannot offer definitive answers to a meaning that is experienced. It is unable to clarify what a person is actually perceiving in an externalized relation to the apple tree (i.e. to the fact that it is evident for the observer that the person is perceiving the tree). ^[13]

Steffensen and Harvey (2018) go beyond Gibson by making meaning observer dependent. On their view, ecological meaning is not only highly rudimentary but also determined by various evolutionary (i.e. DNA, a genotype, neurophysiological capacities, etc.) and embodied predispositions (i.e. habits based on a history of environment engagements). Steffensen and Harvey thus observe that “some organisms are able to sense magnetic fields and use these as a source of directional information” (Steffensen and Harvey 2018: 1–2). They go on to suggest that such organisms

possess nerve cells that respond to changes in magnetic field strength, much as some retinal cells respond to changes in the spectral properties of light. This sensitivity enables them to take advantage of the directional information intrinsic to the Earth’s magnetic fields. (2018: 2)

On Steffensen and Harvey’s view, minimal kinds of ecological meaning are no more than “the way that some medium appears from the perspective of a living system” (Harvey 2015). Accordingly, they emphasize how ecological meaning is relativized by what cognitive systems perceive. To my reading, however, such a view of “ecological meaning” remains too broad to account for interactivity. Indeed, rather than emphasize its uniquely human aspect, they suggest that human-specific interactivity is biological, above all, and “a property of relations between living organisms and their environments” (cf. Steffensen and Harvey 2018: 4). To their credit, Steffensen and Harvey mention how “linguistic meaning” emerges from its ecological counterpart (2018: 14–16). In that interactivity precedes language and yet is human-specific, it seems that we need a category of meaning which diverges from the species-general view of “ecological meaning.”

In turning to interactivity and languaging I invoke existential meaning. The term is fitting in that both phenomena are human-specific and connect organisms and environments in ways that are not determined by biological and/or physiological make-up. Rather, they open up a virtual meaning potential that changes from person to person. Physiology and embodiment thus comprise a necessary, not sufficient, basis for human styles of meaning-making. As Thibault (2019) has recently shown, the emerging selves in human subjects entail a “virtual internal ecology” that is ontologically open in that it is foundationally adaptive (Thibault 2019: 51). For Thibault, this ecology “shapes personal meaning” in the sense that an individual uses his or her virtual resources to connect with the selves of other individuals. In so doing, he or she participates in constituting relations of co-articulations with other selves in interactivity. Consequentially, these articulations come to constitute an interworld (2019: 52, 62). One should not, however, be misled into believing that a subject’s self-referential acts are thus isolated from other, non-self-specified relations. As Thibault also notes,

[t]he relational world of human selves is enacted and sustained by persons in their interactivity with the affordances of their social and cultural worlds. (2019: 52)

As such, processes pertaining to human selves ought not to be considered in isolation from how, at least in part, they are conditioned by social practices (2019: 50). This relation can be characterized decisively: personal meanings exist because there are existential ones. Further, existential meanings tie with social practices and human-specific reliance on the virtual and the nonlocal. As they are evoked by acting in the world, they set off understanding that makes languaging possible. As Wittgenstein (2009) insists, language as an activity is inseparable from social practices (and our capacity for agreement in judgments). Interactivity makes possible being-in language. So, although interactivity in-itself comes the fore only in specific circumstances, its decisive role first appears in childhood’s triadic engagements. Later, it enables all human-specific activities in that its role – and narrow sense – appears in meticulous description of cases that include problem-solving and human–computer interaction.

6 Conclusion

Interactivity and languaging are foundational to human living. Although they emerge at different times in the course of ontogenetic development, they co-contribute to defining the limits of our species. Interactivity precedes – and enables – linguistic know-how and ways of re-evoking wordings that are used in controlling human modes of expression (including, say, dance and music). What grants interactivity its unique potential is how it enables parties to hook up with virtual resources and, as they actualize experiential meaning, use the results to shape interactional trajectories. Their meaning potential is conditioned, in part, by socio-material practices and, in part, by the agent’s ever unfolding personhood. In cases such as infant socialization, interactivity is wide in that it grounds human-specific modes of action. It both enacts existential meaning and opens space later reworkings by drawing on linguistic constraints. As these will evolve with the play of personhood, they shape narrow modes of drawing on interactivity. As shown empirically, these appear, for example, in nonlinear behavioral trajectories of problem-solving and instances of human– computer interaction. It follows that, while not all human activity is dependent on interactivity in its pregnant or intersubjective sense, existential meaning always marks human living. A person’s present carries echoes of her past. As a result, even linear, routine-based engagements with the environment actualize interactivity. They ensure the human cognizer’s ability to link personhood to social norms and rules as well as linguistic resources that allow for perception, action, and imagining that draw on nonlocal phenomena.