The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. Spontaneous co-speech gesture confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, while also forefronting intersubjectivity as an inherent and normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense. Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the nonpropositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Relevance: The view in this paper is constructivist as it argues for a middle-way understanding of meaning co-construction as neither internal nor external, but rather as multimodal and multi-body enacting.

This chapter considers the ethical and epistemological consequences of the enactive notion of “languaging” as whole-bodied, intersubjective sense-making. Making sense in language is defined as a process of moving from stable, shared sense, through idiosyncratic non-sense, to a locally produced, co-available or interactively afforded sense. Enactive concepts of autonomy, autopoiesis, adaptivity, and precariousness imply radical idiosyncrasy in how individuals incorporate the means and moves needed to cope in enlanguaged environments. Differences in sense-making style s predict misunderstanding in social interactions. How do participants of linguistic sense-making share meaning? Presenting meaning as a consequence of mindfulness and misunderstanding, this chapter attempts to include the interiority and variety of experience in descriptions of linguistic participatory sense-making. It gives semantic weight to particularity without losing sight of interactional sources of normativity and intentionality.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Critique of Barbieri’s Code Biology” by Alexander V. Kravchenko. Abstract: Kravchenko encourages language science to approach languaging as “a species-specific semiotic activity that has a biological function.” Languaging as a form of social agency is broader than semiosis but not necessarily “above” it nor driven by biological function. By focusing on participation and becoming, the enactive approach to linguistic bodies offers conceptual resources to bridge human and non-human sense-making without resorting to codes.

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making.

Key words: participatory sense-making, social interaction, linguistic sensitivities and powers, linguistic bodies, dialectical expansion model, wheel of languaging.