This article argues that the quantitative and quasi-experimental approach to evaluating public participation exercises is deficient in at least two respects. First, casting participants in instrumental terms excludes that participants have an experience and that this may be dramatic and emotional. If people are to be invited, even obliged, to participate, then this experience should be considered in event evaluation. Second, current evaluation frameworks tend not to be sensitive to what actually happened in terms of the actions of participants and how these influenced the proceedings and outcome, thus ignoring that such events are fora where positions, values, decisions, and so forth are constructed and constrained rather than simply reported. This article considers the possible contribution of dramaturgical, discourse and conversation analytic, and ethnographic and phenomenological approaches to evaluating participation exercises and illustrates their potential with data gathered during the U.K. "GM Nation?" public debate.
Abstract Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee's conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an "interactivity-based" approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi's (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee's symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel "interactivity-based" approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.
AbstractWe introduce this special issue on "Meaning making: Enactive, participatory, interactive, symbolic" by first pointing out where cognitive-semiotic and ecological approaches agree: meaning is to be construed as a dynamic, multiscalar phenomenon. We then review the six papers in relation to one another, revealing both overlaps and sites of possible tension. We view these tensions as foci for further development of cognitive semiotics in its aim to be a truly transdisciplinary science of meaning.
