Calibrating bodies and cognition through interactive practice in a meaningful environment

Using as data videotapes of archaeologists working to see and map structure in the dirt they are excavating, meaning-making in the home of a man with severe aphasia, and sequences of actual talk-in-interaction, this talk will investigate action, cognition, language use and things as phenomena constituted through actual agent-object inter-action. Rather than viewing cognition as an abstract process lodged entirely within the mental life of sentient beings, language as a nonmaterial process situated within the psychological life of the individual, and things as mute, unmoving objects, this presentation will focus on the mutual constitution of actors, things, and communities within the ongoing organization of situated language use and dynamically unfolding activities. From such a perspective cognition emerges as a consequential and practical issue, for example as a part of the process through which both the world that is the focus a community's scrutiny, and other actors, are known in just the ways that allow the work of the community to be accomplished. It will be argued that both cognition and action emerge through the systematic transformation of environments that contain a range of structurally different kinds of resources that mutually interact with each other.