Abstract
Interactional expertise is said to be a form of knowledge achieved in a linguistic community and, therefore, obtained entirely outside practice. Supposedly, it is not or only minimally sustained by the so-called embodied knowledge. Here, drawing upon studies in contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I propose that ‘derived’ embodiment is deeply involved in competent language use and, therefore, also in interactional expertise. My argument consists of two parts. First, I argue for a strong relationship among language acquisition, language use and the real world (i.e. the world accessible to the senses). Biological constraints in very early childhood anchor language to the body. These constraints are by-products of our evolutionary peculiarity that we gain because of our physical and psychological immaturity at birth. Thus, infancy is predominantly concerned with the bodily needs and experiences of the concrete while language acquisition takes place. Particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs ‘concrete’ language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Second, I argue that well-established concrete language implicitly and explicitly elicits mental representations, namely partial reactivations of sensorimotor states that occur during experience. These are stepping stones by which we subsequently make sense of expressions in new linguistic areas. Like any competent language user, the interactional expert, therefore, prompts multimodal imagination and re-enacts concrete experiences when acquiring linguistic knowledge pertaining to a specialist field. Finally, I outline the characteristics of those imaginative powers to identify mechanisms that improve interactional expertise and discuss the obvious relation between interactional expertise and ordinary knowledge acquisition after the concrete language stage.
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Notes
Of course, everyone agrees that the interactional expert does not know how to accurately perform certain acts pertaining to a specialist area.
Language does not exhaust knowledge. In the present context, emphasis is placed on expertise and the share of knowledge, and therefore on the conceptual part. This is knowledge that can be made explicit, that is more or less accessible to awareness and that is preferentially recoverable as propositional, rational statements, conceptualisations and symbols (e.g. Berry and Dienes 1993).
Of course, we have to be specific about what is competent language use. Here, it suffices that the very first edition of competent language use is concerned with the concrete.
Williams et al. (2009) make a partly overlapping claim, when pointing to higher mental processes as grounded in early experiences with the physical environment. Here, I attempt to soften the rigid interpretation of the evolutionary impact by emphasising interdependence on developmental aspects.
Since parental care has been vital to the survival of our species, stereotyped responses to babies are found in the human behavioural repertoire. Juvenile appearance, of which large eyes, small nose and chin are typical, is known to play an important role in the infant–adult relationship. Apparently, the possession of juvenile features, which are also rated as highly attractive, impels adults to judge specific age-appropriate abilities as relatively fewer, whereas unattractive facial features make adults judge specific age-appropriate abilities as higher (Boukydis 1981; Casey and Ritter 1996). As a result, juvenile appearance automatically elicits protective behaviours in adults.
The physical constraints of pregnant women indirectly define the developmental stages of newborns. Increased in utero growth makes metabolic demands on the mother and delivery through the birth canal places limitations on the circumference of the baby’s head at birth (Nettle 2002), which means that health issues related to the physique of adult women to some extent codetermine head size, the growth of neural tissue and the amount of preformed neural connections.
Not to forget, as rightly pointed out by one of the anonymous referees, being highly dependent on peers, infants crave and seek out social contact. At the beginning of life, however, social stimuli seem to follow the rules of the concrete, by revealing themselves through the senses.
The sensation of liquid going down the oesophagus is as universally human as is the possession of a hairless body and a flexible thumb. Feeding, swallowing and respiration are activities that occur in the upper aerodigestive tract. Sucking and drinking are the only kinds of feeding we are capable of when just born, which is different from the chewing, munching and grinding we all manage effortlessly later in life.
We face an enigma here. Concrete items are real because we sense them. And senses develop to sense real things.
In between those extremes are ‘items’ that present themselves to us through fewer dimensions, for example, the sun, which to us is primarily a visual object, although it might also affect the temperature detectors in the skin through radiation, and the summits of mountains, which we visually acknowledge at a distance but only a minority of us will ever encounter by the use of more senses since to know about them from perceptions entails closer contact. Stars seem to be even more distant examples of items we have conceptually grasped, but apart from the visual sense have no point of contact with us through our senses.
To what extent is the concrete an absolute fact of life? What if women could actually carry the load of fully mature infants without compromising their metabolisms or birth canals? Would children be born with complete behaviour patterns and no need for additional learning? Would interest in concrete matters become obsolete? Such humans would still be made out of flesh and blood. Elementary to living organisms is the existence of optimal ranges of parameters, such as pH concentration and temperature, to sustain the functioning of amino acids. Also indispensable is the influx of new material to obtain homeostasis and to prevent decomposition and death. In brief, all organisms stay alive by exchanging substances with the environment. The continuous fluctuation of diverse substances delicately controlled by the level of the concentration of central substances is the watermark of life. Such creatures would concern themselves with the concrete. Their ‘knowledge’ includes susceptibility to food items, shelter and temperature to respond appropriately. However, they would not need exposure to concrete items to accumulate distinguishing information of immediate survival value since categorisation had been evolutionarily installed. Here, robots designed to adequately respond to simple and few environmental stimuli present an example. Whether it is a weeding robot in agricultural households or a vacuum cleaner in a private home, the robot gives the proper response to the eliciting stimuli from day one.
Studies in developmental psychology support the argument of the ‘primacy claim’ of the concrete by showing that children actually seem to be guided by intersensory redundancy (also known as amodal information, which is not specific to one modality) when learning about the furniture of the world (Bahrick et al. 2004). This applies to, for instance, handclapping in which rate and rhythm is conveyed both visually and acoustically. After the establishment of the connections, unimodal input is sufficient for recognition. Studies on the impact of the unrecognised perception of haptic stimulation and cognition also seem to support such claims (Ackerman et al. 2010).
Even less do I wish to claim that sensory importance is exclusively with external stimulations since internal disturbances seem just as important. According to Borghi and Cimatti (2010), much of the scientific literature on embodied cognition fails to recognise that perception is possible without concomitant actions. When children learn about contingencies, they can ‘feel’ their bodies without being involved in external actions: “When we dance, we might “feel” our body even when no real interaction with external objects or entities take place” (p. 764). Part, if not most, of the learning potential of man is originally based on social interaction. In a very direct sense, could one not argue that stimulation within the womb, which sort of primes the infant, is social and in fact radically different from life as it proceeds outside the womb? At the moment the umbilical cord is cut, the responsibility of sensing when hunger threatens is no more a ‘mutual project’ one shares with one’s mother who is the person to take the necessary precautions. Inside the womb, temperature regulation, hunger and finding shelter have already been taken care of. Everything is in supply and any irregularity from the desired balance will be corrected. There are no immediate dangers to react to or requirements of which it is the responsibility of the foetus to amend. Nevertheless, the foetus explores and exercises his or her immature physical abilities and is entertained by sounds independently of his or her mother. At birth, the physical separation between mother and child establishes a distance and a physical barrier that individualises the newborn. Metaphorically put, to be born is to be excluded from Paradise. Outside the Garden of Eden, for the first time, one has to take action on one’s first-person experiences.
It seems that interactional expertise is attainable only for individuals who are already competent language users. Therefore, preverbal children cannot be considered interactional experts until they speak competently.
However, other factors independent of first-person experiences, such as the saliency of concepts, seem to be of crucial importance. The general linguistic theory Graded Saliency Hypothesis posits that a meaning is salient because of factors such as conventionality, frequency, familiarity and prototypicality. The salient meanings of expressions are always far more accessible than are non-salient meanings, irrespective of literality or non-literality since to decode non-salient meanings requires inferential processes (e.g. Giora 2002). This might also explain the so-called Mangrove effect, by which the properties of words sometimes actually determine our thoughts (Clark 1998).
How we actually transform implicit cognitive processes to become accessible to conscious explicit knowledge seems vital to imaginative skills and is far too comprehensive to be addressed in this paper. However, Goldman (2010) makes a note of this issue with respect to mind-reading skills and introspection and discusses whether introspection can be applied to unconscious states.
Be it a contributory or interactional expert.
The intentional approach to understanding presented here seems to imply an assessment of meanings behind the words as if language acts as a label to stick on reality. Although I acknowledge that language cannot be singled out as a phenomenon separate from the situation in which it is used, when interactional expert apprentices intentionally attempt to grasp what sentences in a conversation refer to, language seems to be used in exactly this way. Why? Because contributory expertise is knowledge about an actual state of affairs (for elaborations on this point, see Schilhab 2011). Moreover, special expressions will often refer to actual items and particular situations. Thus, the acquisition of interactional language will at least partly rely on the understanding of concrete items and situations (that is, it will invoke ‘concrete’ language). For example, when Japanese interpreters in the Brazilian steel industry were asked to interpret sentences with reference to a specific technical event, i.e. the spacing of rolls in a casting machine, they asked for so-called physical contiguity (Ribeiro 2007a, b), which is closeness to actual practices without being involved in those practices, in an attempt to understand what the expression meant. The utility of physical contiguity is especially high in cases of radically unfamiliar areas of expertise so that entirely novel understanding is obtained by observation (see also Schilhab 2007b). However, one should tend not to exaggerate the importance of vision at the cost of other perceptual qualities (see Ihde 2010).
As pointed out by one of the anonymous referees, the reason the expert speaks more clearly and in shorter sentences might in fact enhance the comprehensibility of the speaker’s utterances by increasing the perceptual accessibility. This might hold true simply because neither young children nor foreigners are in fact competent language users. However, impediments to normal understanding, as is the case of interactional apprentices, are more likely to invoke focused attention. Therefore, greater comprehensibility is the result of consciously controlled understanding, which is likely to involve the triggering of focused attention and imagination.
As explained, implicit re-enactment is automatically elicited in interactional expertise as a result of the embodiment of cognition and linguistic competence. When interactional experts overhear and participate in conversations in the linguistic community, speech-elicited images are likely to be invoked. However, as a first attempt to stipulate and address cognitive components in interactional expertise I selectively discuss voluntarily endorsed imagination.
Hassabis and Maguire (2007) list a number of cognitive functions that all crucially rely on scene construction as a common core process, which might account for a large proportion of the overlapping networks found in the neuroimaging studies of these functions. They include (p. 301):
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Episodic memory recall, episodic future thinking,
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Navigation (route planning and ‘wayfinding’),
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Imagination (richly imagining and visualising a new fictitious experience that is not explicitly temporal in nature and is not necessarily self-relevant, plausible or even possible),
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Default network, activated when no overt task is assigned,
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Viewer replay—the replay of an episodic-like memory but without a specific temporal time tag. This could be the recollection of an old TV series,
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Vivid dreaming—REM sleep, and
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Theory of mind—modelling the intentions of others.
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It is of particular interest that the quality of specific first-person experiences has an impact on the output of imagination. An fMRI study on how processes underlying imagery differ between novices and experts in a complex motor skill (the high jump) showed considerable divergence with respect to the involvement of motor areas such as the supplementary motor area (SMA) and primary motor cortex (Olsson et al. 2008). Subjects were asked to imagine the performance of a full jump, with special emphasis on certain stages, such as takeoff or clearing the bar. Moreover, the instructions clearly emphasised the first-person perspective, forcing participants to take an internal stance on imagination. Novices who did not have previous experience of the high jump showed more activation of visual, occipital and parietal areas, suggesting that they were more likely to take an external view of the task (watching the jumps from without as if out of the body). The activation of SMA, which is suggested to be responsible for internally guided actions both while executed and imagined, was lower in novices than it was in expert high jumpers (ibid.) (the activation of SMA during tennis imagery was also found in Owen et al. 2006). The difference between internal and external imagery seems significant to the activity of particular motor-related cortical areas. In a study by Stinear et al. (2006), subjects were asked to imagine seeing their thumbs moving in time with a metronome to produce external imagery (Visual Motor Imagery). This condition was compared with the internal imagery (Kinaesthetic Motor Imagery) in which subjects were asked to imagine moving their thumbs in time with the metronome and the feeling that it produced. Whereas the internal condition successfully activated the motor cortex, which is recruited during actual movements, the external condition did not. Apparently, the parietal cortex is implicated in converting sensory information to motor commands (Buneo and Andersen 2006). The inclination to take an external stance (outside the body) on imagining disagrees somewhat with studies on the ability to predict how people feel. In studies in which participants predicted whether thirst or hunger were more bothersome to hikers lost without food or water, participants showed bias towards their privately experienced states. According to the researchers, ‘people’s predictions of other people’s feelings are based on their predictions of their own feelings’ (Van Bowen and Loewenstein 2003, p. 1165). This, however, could be explained by differences in skill level in the two examples. Obviously, and in light of the evolutionary claims of this paper, we cannot be novices with respect to hunger and thirst (for a profound treatment of how we theorise about others’ minds, see Michael 2010).
The ‘sense-making’ aligns with parts of what is known as participatory sense-making (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009). Interactional sense-making includes several of the components known to participatory sense-making such as bodily resonance, affect attunement, coordination of gestures and facial and vocal expression. While participatory sense-making addresses interactors’ perception–action loops, interactional sense-making emphasises verbal and mentalising loops. A distinguishing feature of interactional sense-making is also the marked dependence on directed attention and conscious assessments of mutual comprehensibility and purely mental objects.
Notice that this scenario does not necessarily have to meticulously follow the rules of the outside world, but must meet the criterion of providing useable products, such as a productive reconstruction of reality to manage environmental encounters, which is the ultimate goal.
I take such mental tools to pertain to the concept of ‘second order cognitive dynamics’ as defined by Clark (2008, p. 58).
What does this imply with respect to our ability to acquire knowledge? If our instantaneous understanding of the moment depends on previous experiences, we are at risk of missing important and unique information pertaining to the moment and which has not yet been encountered. So, how do we keep the history by which we understand at bay? We need to be in harmony and open-minded to resist the superficial ‘pollution’ of already established memories to acquire information about the current situation. To relax and actively keep an open mind, which has recently been explored and demonstrated in garden therapy, seems optimal for learning and knowledge acquisition. A consequence of expanding this open-mindedness is partly the reduction of priming by already established memories to overflow the mind with preformed ‘interpretations’ (or thought structures), and partly the maintenance of unimpeded switching from one piece of information to the next to allow minimal amounts of constraints on the information flow. In this context, interpretation might not be all that appropriate an expression. The interpretation need not be intended but might arise from implicit cognitive structures established in early childhood. Much of our thinking is likely to be by rote and not deliberate. Open-mindedness might allow a greater sensitivity to the source of information impeding both automatic thinking routines and actual preformed trains of thought and reactions.
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Schilhab, T. Derived embodiment and imaginative capacities in interactional expertise. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 309–325 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9232-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9232-0