Living as languaging: Distributed knowledge in living beings

Abstract

We trace life at different levels of organization and/or description: from protein ecosystems in the cell up to the cohabitation of individuals within and between historically established lineages. Ways of such cohabitation depend on experience of particular guilds or aggregates; they cannot be easily foretold from any basic level of description, they are distributed across all levels, and across all members of the community. Such phenomena of interactivity constitute a lived world which, we argue, represents a genuine analogy with domains of human cultures and languages. We draw an analogy with three levels of meaning as defined by Rappaport (2010) and make an attempt to show that life and languaging are virtually analogous. Contributions to this volume show that cognition arises not only ‘in the head’ but also as the result of living in a network of interactions-in the medium of languaging; language and languages cannot be separated from languaging, and our joint activities make sense because of how we concert our doings in a culture or what Thibault (2011) terms a social meshwork. Outcomes of such doings often depend also on differences that people find as meaningful cues to perform expertly or to construe wordings in a particular way. In other words, much depends on patterns that are extracted by living beings that dwell in a historical world of bodily experience, and of the community into which they are rooted. Indeed, in the context, these ideas will not seem controversial; however, in what follows, we propose taking a further step: we propose that analogical processes help all inhabitants of the biosphere/semiosphere to become valuable members such of living networks. Our approach may look as yet another contribution to the long list of holistic theories that compete without success with the reigning reductionist paradigm of biology. We, however, do not deny the explanatory power of contemporary biological theory: by stressing the role of historical bodily experience and of the “cultural” role of communities we strive towards a fuller understanding of life phenomena, much along the line the linguists undertook from the vocabularies through semiotics up to languaging. We invite the reader to take an excursion from the “central dogma” and neodarwinian explanation of evolution, towards what we believe is a more complete view of the living, that extends through 9 orders of magnitudes (or "73 octaves of nature’s music”, as poetically expressed by Ho (1993)) and from nanoseconds to 4 billions of years. Our extension to the distributed view is to argue that what goes for cognition and language also applies generally to life.