Perspective switching as event affordance: The ontogeny of abductive reasoning
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Donna E. West
Donna E. West is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Linguistics at the State University of New York at Cortland (USA), teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, Cognitive Linguistics, and Spanish Phonology and Morphosyntax. For more than twenty-five years, she has been presenting and publishing in the field of Semiotic studies using Peirce’s sign system and has likewise drawn upon semiotic properties in the works of Karl Bühler and Jean Piaget. She is the first investigator to apply a developmental perspective to Peirce’s ten-fold division of signs; as such, her work offers empirical answers to phenomenological questions. Her 2013 book,Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play , published by Springer-Verlag, investigates the role of Index in the acquisition of demonstratives and personal pronouns. She is currently co-editing an anthology – the first interdisciplinary treatment of Peirce’s notion of habit.
Abstract
The present model identifies Index as the representational component driving children’s advances in abductive reasoning, capitalizing upon the means to subjunctivize within constructed events. As such, an essential semiotic device underlies the recognition of shifting perspectives to operationalize abductive reasoning within event profiles. Beyond using Index to establish the point of orientation (Origo), one “tries on” that Origo’s covert and overt orientation via deictic terms that encode Origo’s role as a conversational on-looker of an episode. This subjunctive competence entails taking note of cause-effect relations to anticipate the affective, social, cognitive, and physical viewpoints likely to be assumed by that Origo. Hypothesis-making then entails going beyond grounded experience to represent intermediate and final states of affairs for other Origos. Abductions require dynamically imaging how distinctive agents affect action schemes together with their relied-upon judgments to effectuate resultative states. The use of indexically grounded cognitions (given their role in preempting event relations) rivets the onlooker to the “why” of unexpected events and increases the likelihood that the guess of another within novel contexts is plausible. Shifting perspectives underlie abductions because they trigger defeasible but plausible explanations for puzzling events.
About the author
Donna E. West is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Linguistics at the State University of New York at Cortland (USA), teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, Cognitive Linguistics, and Spanish Phonology and Morphosyntax. For more than twenty-five years, she has been presenting and publishing in the field of Semiotic studies using Peirce’s sign system and has likewise drawn upon semiotic properties in the works of Karl Bühler and Jean Piaget. She is the first investigator to apply a developmental perspective to Peirce’s ten-fold division of signs; as such, her work offers empirical answers to phenomenological questions. Her 2013 book, Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play, published by Springer-Verlag, investigates the role of Index in the acquisition of demonstratives and personal pronouns. She is currently co-editing an anthology – the first interdisciplinary treatment of Peirce’s notion of habit.
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©2014 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Perspective switching as event affordance: The ontogeny of abductive reasoning
- Iconic semiosis and representational efficiency in the London Underground Diagram
- Deixis and personhood: Autism, intersubjectivity, and the fluidity-to-inelasticity hypothesis
- Tool use and the human mind: From basic to materially mediated operative intentionality
- Translation and other acts of meaning: In between cognitive semiotics and semiotics of culture
- Book reviews
- Still do not block the line of inquiry: On the Peircean way to cognitive semiotics
- Natural Propositions Naturalized
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Perspective switching as event affordance: The ontogeny of abductive reasoning
- Iconic semiosis and representational efficiency in the London Underground Diagram
- Deixis and personhood: Autism, intersubjectivity, and the fluidity-to-inelasticity hypothesis
- Tool use and the human mind: From basic to materially mediated operative intentionality
- Translation and other acts of meaning: In between cognitive semiotics and semiotics of culture
- Book reviews
- Still do not block the line of inquiry: On the Peircean way to cognitive semiotics
- Natural Propositions Naturalized
