
Contents
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Language as Niche Construction Language as Niche Construction
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Social-Rationalist Inferentialism and Its Discontents Social-Rationalist Inferentialism and Its Discontents
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Language Embodied Language Embodied
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Articulating Objects Articulating Objects
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Discursive and Other Practices Discursive and Other Practices
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Cite
Abstract
Languages are biological phenomena. Humans coevolved and codevelop with linguistic expressions in communicative use, as lineal patterns of behavioral and material niche construction salient in human developmental environments. This chapter argues that prominent pragmatist conceptions of language that begin with discursive practices are insufficiently pragmatist. They take perception and action as interfaces between natural causality and normatively ordered social-discursive practices, with no constructive role for human biology. Robert Brandom’s social-rationalist inferentialism is illustrative in thereby failing to account for the objective accountability of discursive performances. The chapter nevertheless preserves Brandom’s technical semantic apparatus by turning his account inside out. It shows how language use is embedded in the world through people’s practical-perceptual involvement in discursively articulated developmental environments and vocative and recognitive engagement in concrete bodily interactions with others. Discursive practices also ostensively articulate people’s overlapping practical-perceptual environments into objects, properties, and relations as conceptual abstractions from world-involving bodily postures: other animals’ cognitively sophisticated holistic responsiveness to environmental affordances form evolutionary barriers to conceptual articulation. Discursive practices both have their own constitutive ends—ways of making sense—and their performances are integral to other practices, as materially salient components, performative contributions as speech acts, and expressions of their practice-constitutive ends.
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