Abstract
The evidence shows that human primates become (relatively) rational actors. Using a distributed perspective, we identify aspects of human agency that raise important questions for sociocognitive science. In humans, we argue, agency does not centre on individual agents. Cognitive, social and linguistic outcomes depend on skills in moving in and out of aggregates that bind people, artifacts, language and institutions. While recognising the value of symbol processing models, these presuppose the embodied events of human symbol grounding. At a micro level, humans coordinate with others and the world to self-construct by cognising, talking and orienting to social affordances. We trace the necessary skills to sense-saturated coordination or interactivity. As a result of perceiving and acting on the environment, human individuals use the artificial to extend their natural powers. By using verbal patterns, artifacts and institutions, we become imperfect rational actors whose lives span the micro and the macro worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Adults sing, converse, read books, discover new media, and are fooled by advertisements: wordings appear in dreams and silent thoughts. While not languaging, this is also what Love (2004) calls first-order language. In all of these activities formal patterns can be said to constrain expressive dynamics.
- 3.
Here a symbol can be defined as a cultural constraint that serves in taking the measure or others and/or in controlling one’s behaviour: many symbols are prosodic, gestural or enact what Goffman (1959) calls the interaction order.
- 4.
There is no clear evidence of when this occurs: however, there is abundant evidence that it is based on the skill of making and tracking phonetic gestures (Fowler and Rosenblum 1991; Fowler 2010). Further, since it is necessary to pretending it is likely that children begin to have the necessary experience in the second half of the second year.
- 5.
Wenger and Sparrow (2007) use experimental work to trace the social and bodily complexity of co-action—and its deep links with our sense of agency.
- 6.
One of the most remarkable facts about robots is that, already, they use human consciousness: this is exemplified, for example, when they learn to discriminate what we—but not they—see as colours (see, Cowley 2013). Building on this view, it can be argued that robots are of importance as linguistic informants (Cowley 2008).
- 7.
This depends on the observer’s point of view: in many respects, Kanzi remains distinctly a bonobo.
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Acknowledgements
Martin Neumann’s contribution was undertaken within the Project ‘Emergence in the Loop’ (EmiL: IST-033841) funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme of the European Commission, in the framework of the initiative “Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems”. Stephen Cowley’s draws much on the opportunity to contribute to a programme of scientific workshops on Agency and languaging (2010–2012) that were organised by the University of Jyväskylä (and sponsored by the Finnish Ministry of Culture).
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Neumann, M., Cowley, S.J. (2013). Human Agency and the Resources of Reason. In: Cowley, S., Vallée-Tourangeau, F. (eds) Cognition Beyond the Brain. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5125-8_2
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