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Article history:
Received 9 March 2015
Received in revised form
15 July 2015
Accepted 19 July 2015
Available online xxx
When people talk about common ground, they invoke shared experiences, convictions, and emotions.
In the language sciences, however, common ground also has a technical sense. Many taking a representational view of language and cognition seek to explain that everyday feeling in terms of how isolated
individuals use language to communicate. Autonomous cognitive agents are said to use words to
communicate inner thoughts and experiences; in such a framework, common ground describes a body
of information that people allegedly share, hold common, and use to reason about how intentions have
been made manifest. We object to this view, above all, because it leaves out mechanisms that demonstrably enable people to manage joint activities by doing things together. We present an alternative view
of linguistic understanding on which appeal to inner representations is replaced by tracing language to
synergetic coordination between biological agents who draw on wordings to act within cultural ecosystems. Crucially, human coordination depends on, not just bodies, but also salient patterns of articulatory movement (wordings). These rich patterns function as non-local resources that, together with
concerted bodily (and vocal) activity, serve to organize, regulate and coordinate both attention and the
verbal and non-verbal activity that it gives rise to. Since wordings are normative, they can be used to
develop skills for making cultural sense of environments and other peoples' doings. On our view, the
technical notion of common ground is an illusion, because appeal to representations blinds theorists to
bodily activity and the role of experience. Turning away from how wordings inuence the circumstances,
skills, and bodily coordination on which interpersonal understanding depends, it makes premature
appeal to reasoning and internally represented knowledge. We conclude that outside its vague everyday
sense, the concept of common ground is a notion that the language sciences would be well advised to
abandon.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Distributed language
Common ground
Embodiment
Language stance
Radical embodied cognitive science
Synergies
Ecological psychology
Pragmatics
1. Introduction
Several years ago, the city of Washington DC was engaged in
contract negotiations with the local Teacher's Union. They went
smoothly, by all accounts, partly because of the way the city's lead
negotiator opened up discussion. Rather than begin with the
negotiation itself, she asked participants to talk about students who
had most affected them and their careers. She said afterwards that
the very beginning of the negotiation was a shared experience
around the ability to change children's lives, which had the effect
of highlighting the negotiators' shared concerns, values, and goals
(Turque, 2010). In everyday conversation, the feeling of having
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
0732-118X/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
1
Languaging is a term due to Maturana (1978), and indicates human vocal
activity that is organized by a history of interpersonal coupling within a community. This term is used to avoid invoking language, which can indicate, e.g., an
alphabet and a set of rules for combining its elements (as in Chomsky, 1965).
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
cutting board as you say it. This brings home that some of the situation's affordances2 are based in the precise timing of activity that
constitutes speech and gesture (Cowley, 1994, 2010). Making an
utterance is intended to shift the host's attention to her cutting
board by, for instance, inducing her to move her eyes towards it. If
you succeed, the cutting board becomes a transient focus of
attention and, in these circumstances, this may x the intended
sense. In such a case, linguistic understanding (i.e., coming to understand what it wanted) is relatively independent of the words
actually spoken, with sensorimotor coordination e something like
a neurophysiological alignment of visual attention e doing the
work.3 As in the Louvre example, there would be no need to invoke
CG-technical to explain the interaction in terms of the putative
alignment of private knowledge or mental content.
This is not an isolated case. In conversation, interlocutors' bodily
movement is coordinated through exquisitely skillful mutual
sensorimotor engagement (Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, & Richardson,
n, 2014; Ra czaszek2014; Fusaroli, Ra czaszek-Leonardi, & Tyle
Leonardi, De bska, & Sochanowicz, 2014; Wallot & Van Orden,
2011). Like other motor activity (Bernstein, 1967), interaction is
structured by networks of neuromuscular assemblages called
synergies, or naturally selected chunks of self-organizing
behavior (Kelso, 2009, p. 88). Synergies are relationships between physiological processes in which (i) the relationship displays
fewer dimensions of variation than the component processes do,
(ii) the components compensate for uctuations in one another's
activity such that the relationship itself remains stable, and (iii) the
whole assemblage is organized by an over-arching function. It is
worth emphasizing that synergies have no explanatory value in
themselves e they are mathematical descriptions of a pattern of
inter-dependence and mutual constraint among neuromuscular
elements. They constitute explanations only when accompanied by
an account of their organizing functions and the informational
constraints that underlie them. For instance, an explanation of a
centipede's leg movements would have to note, not just that the
movements are synergetically coordinated, but that their coordination serves the collective function of locomotion, which function
imposes physiological constraints on the legs by coupling their
movements to one another.
A consequence of this is that explaining coordination involves
identifying the over-arching function it realizes, and in living systems, such functions are typically nested e synergies are subcomponents of other synergies. Accordingly, they can serve as
functions for one another, as when joint-synergy constrains individual muscle-synergy during an arm movement (Kello & Van
Orden, 2009; Kelso, 1995; Latash, 2008; Riley, Richardson,
Shockley, & Ramenzoni, 2011). Some are intra-personal, like those
required to simultaneously move and focus our eyes, and others are
interpersonal, like the vocal-auditory synergies that regulate turntaking and co-speech. Intentional speech sounds arise as intrapersonal synergies (Kelso, Tuller, & Fowler, 1982; Kelso, Tuller,
Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Fowler, 1984), and speaking involves not
just vocal-auditory but eye, torso, and limb coordination between
persons (e.g., Fowler, Richardson, Marsh, & Shockley, 2008, pp.
2
In ecological psychology, affordances are a particular animal's opportunities
for action in a given setting. We accept Chemero's account of the concept (2009, Ch.
7).
3
The assumption that this goes on all the time is implicit in the eye-tracking
literature. We know that eye movements follow what is being indicate or talked
about, for the speaker as well as the hearer (e.g., Grifn & Bock, 2000; Hanna,
Tanenhaus, & Trueswell, 2003; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003), and that
this following is interpersonally coupled e in other words, the speaker's and
hearer's eye movements are similar (Dale, Kirkham, & Richardson, 2011;
Richardson & Dale, 2005; Richardson, Dale, & Kirkham, 2007).
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
4
Note that this assumption follows directly from rejecting CG-technical's reication of cultural practices, geographical and spatial locatedness, etc., as internally
represented knowledge.
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
5
Latour (1999) refers to functionally replicable body-external structures as
technological mediators, which inspired the phrase attentional technology.
6
This last point is the major difference between our view and the related view
presented in Ra czaszek-Leonardi's (2013) interpretation of Howard Pattee, on
which symbols e including words e are replicable constraints on dynamics.
While we are sympathetic to this perspective, we think Ra czaszek-Leonardi takes
too much for granted in writing about words as if they were a type of pattern. By
contrast, we understand Pattee's view as a functional view; anything that functions
as a replicable constraint is a symbol. Whether a given speech event in fact functions as a symbol will be a matter of the details of the situation, not a matter of a
person's having articulated sounds that an uninvolved observer would identify as
intelligible speech. The notion of attentional technology makes this explicit: the
organizational functions of wordings are phenomenological in nature.
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8
Please cite this article in press as: Cowley, S. J., & Harvey, M. I., The illusion of common ground, New Ideas in Psychology (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004