It's been a while since I last posted. Although the other main blog doing this reading club, Mixing Memory has been too busy to post recently as well. I think I'll move on to chapter 4, because most of chapter 3 is pretty straightforward. I don't really want to belabour the point. However there is a really interesting discussion in chapter 4 regard joint attention and signs. Tomasello notes that
The joint attentional scene becomes those objects and activities that the child knows are part of the attentional focus of both herself and the adult, and they both know that this is their focus (it is not join attention if, by accident, they are both focused on the same thing but unaware of the partner). In this case such things as the rug and the sofa and the child's diaper are not part of the joint attentional scene, even though the child as an individual may be perceiving them basically continuously, because they are not part of "what we are doing." (98)
While they don't use this terminology, this sort of thing has been of interest to both pragmatic philosophers and some philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition. Rather than focusing in on Peirce as I did in previous chapters, I want to briefly turn to Heidegger. I was reading something very similar to this topic in Carman's book Heidegger's Analytic. In the chapter "Discourse, Expression, Truth" Carman is trying to argue for a particular interpretation of what Heidegger meant by discourse. It's a somewhat controversial topic as there isn't a lot of consensus on the topic. However I think Carman makes a very compelling case that lines up very similarly with what Tomasello is discussing. (See pg. 234)
Given my past discussions probably the best place to turn is to Heidegger's semiotics. It's a topic that he didn't write much on (unlike Derrida who did a lot - and who invoked Peirce a fair bit). Heidegger's example is the turn signal in a car. Now the turn signal is a sign but it doesn't show anything nor mean anything in a straightforward way.
Even if we turn our glance in the direction that the arrow shows, and look at something occurent in the region shown, even then the sign is not authentically encountered. (SZ 79)
Rather what the signal as sign does is provides a kind of overview of the situation. That is it "affords me 'an explicit overview' of the situation, not from some disengaged perspective, but in the midst of all its immediate practical demands. The sign does not just fit inconspicuously into an interlocking nexus of equipment; it organizes my sense of the situation as a whole." (Carman, 234) Quoting Heidegger,
The circumspective overview does not grasp what is available; what it achieves is rather an orientation in our environment....Signs of the kind we have described let what is available be encountered; more precisely, the they let some context of it become accessible in such a way that our concernful dealings take on an orientation and hold it secure. (SZ 79)
In other words, in terms of all the tools and things we encounter, the sign orients us in it. They provide a way of seeing tools as what they are and in their context and how to act within this world.
A sign is not a thing that stands to an other thing in the relation of showing; it is rather a piece of equipment that explicitly raises a totality of equipment into circumspection, so that together with it the worldly character of the available announces itself. (SZ 79 - 80)
Now all that Heidegger-speak can be confusing. The idea is that there are entities all around us that have potential uses. The sign as a sign is what lets things see them in their context as tools. Put an other way, the turn signal allows us to see the road, cars, and other things as what they are in a particular context. "The turn signal shows the how of the situation, and it does so in a way that is governed by the same standards and norms of the one that govern our demonstrative practices generally. So too, my response to the sign cannot be right and proper if I simply absorb it into the purposive structure of my own solitary activity. I must instead know how to acknowledge and reply to the gesture with meaningful and appropriate gestures of my own."
"There are, in short, two fundamentally different dimensions constituting the normative structure of significance. There is, to begin with the normative structure of our purposive activities as such, informing our ways and means of acting (our with-whiches and in-whiches) with reference both to our goals (our toward-thises and in-orders-to) and to the point of what we do, that is, to who we are (our for-the-sake-of-which). But there is also a dimension of normativity cutting across the first, governing not our pursuit of ends as such, but rather our interpretative expressions and gestures, which manage to make manifest the purposive structure of intelligilibility itself. There are norms not just for doing, that is, but also for showing and saying, and I believe Heidegger wants to insest that the latter cannot be reduced to the former." (Carman, 235)
I think this is true of Tomasello as well. While he doesn't bring it up much, I think some of his approaches are a kind of attack on many traditional types of philosophy. Views that almost certainly indirectly affect cognitive science.
I'll pick up this discussion in my next post, with more of a focus on what Tomasello says with respect to apes and humans.
Just a note that I have up a page listing all the blog posts that are part of the reading club. It's also in my right sidebar in the archive area as Reading Tomasello. If you aren't a member of the club but have a post at your blog on this book, please post a note there with a link.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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