New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8

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New Ideas in Psychology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych

The illusion of common ground

Stephen J. Cowley, Matthew I. Harvey*
Centre for Human Interactivity and the COMAC Cluster, Department of Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

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

* Corresponding author. Korslkkevej 5, Apt. 2, Odense S, DK 5220, Denmark.

E-mail addresses: cowley@sdu.dk (S.J. Cowley), harvey@sdu.dk (M.I. Harvey).

shared ideas, assumptions, or goals is often said to draw on

common ground. This feeling is seen as a starting point for
communicating or working together and is what we will refer to as
the lay view of common ground (CG-lay). Just as in our example,
the concept is imprecise, unclear, and highly exible, which may be
why it is useful in describing how people talk and think about
shared conversational projects. However, it is our contention that,
as a naturalistic object for study, enquiry, or explanation, CG-lay
identies little more than a feeling that arises in everyday
language-involving behavior (cf. Taylor, 2015).
This is not the dominant view in cognitive science, where there
is a long history of both philosophical and experimentally-oriented
efforts to develop a technical notion of common ground (CGtechnical) by placing CG-lay in an explanatory framework on
which knowing is conceptualized in terms of internal data storage
and logical reasoning. Within such a framework, interpersonal
understanding is construed as CG-technical, that is, as a mental

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.004
0732-118X/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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state or process that is somehow rendered common between two

minds. In Section 2, we contrast this account with one that turns
away from CG-lay by tracing the roots of human understanding to
radical embodiment. First, though, we sketch the case against CGtechnical, and against the representationalist framework that requires it by assuming both that human individuals are epistemically
and teleologically isolated and that language is fundamentally a
means of conveying information from one person to another (see
e.g., Descartes, 2009; Fodor, 1975; Locke, 1996; Newell, 1982;
Saussure, 2013).
Having made these assumptions, representational theorists are
forced to posit CG-technical to explain how linguistic understanding depends on peoples' shared circumstances and common experiences. Historically, two parallel representationalist traditions
have arrived at the notion of CG-technical by this process of
inference from a priori assumptions. The rst is philosophical
pragmatics, where CG-technical (also called mutual knowledge
and common knowledge) is conceived of as a known set of
propositions whose truth values can be used to evaluate the content expressed by an act of utterance (Abbott, 2008; von Fintel,
2008; Grice, 1989; Lee, 2001; Lewis, 1979; Schiffer, 1972;
Stalnaker, 2002). The second is computational psychology, where
CG-technical refers to the shared, as opposed to private, information an experimental setup makes available to a participant by
means of observation and reasoning (Barr & Keysar, 2005; Clark,
1996; Gibbs, 1987; Hollers & Stevens, 2007; Horton, 2005; Keysar,
1997; Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 1998).
From both perspectives, CG-technical reduces the world where
action occurs to a mentally represented, epistemic context. This is
done by construing bodily coordination, ecological embedding, and
distribution of activity as internal knowledge, or, in standard terms,
as mental representations of the contexts, circumstances, background information, and contingencies that are brought into play as
people speak and write. The model may also include the immediate
perceptual environment, experience with a language, general cultural knowledge of every kind, in-group knowledge or special
expertise, and what has already been said during current or prior
conversations. Within this representationalist framework, the
explanatory function of CG-technical is to posit internal computation and inference as the mechanism by which humans engage
with their environments and coordinate with each other. By
choosing to ascribe a technical sense to the familiar feeling of CGlay, a theorist or experimenter buys into a model where shared
understanding is abstract and divorced from any non-mental (or
non-computational) process.
Like many others e and here we must show our colors by
noting that we connect distributed language (e.g. Cowley, 2011a;
Hodges, Steffensen, & Martin, 2012) with ecological psychology
(e.g. Chemero, 2009) e we reject any approach that restricts its
explanatory tools to algorithms operating on abstract representational objects and instantiated in the brains of individuals (e.g.,
Gibson, 1979; Hutchins, 1995; Maturana & Varela, 1987; Ryle,
1949; Sellars, 1956; Wittgenstein, 1958). In this essay, we turn
to how representationalism distorts the phenomenon of language
by using CG-technical to account for even mundane behavior.
Above all, the idea of CG-technical imposes the view that humans
are isolated cognitive agents and that shared experiences come
from representing the world in the same way; on our distributedecological perspective, they simply come from inhabiting the
same sociocultural world. For instance, on a classic view it is said
to be our mutual knowledge (i.e., CG-technical) that the Louvre is
in Paris. By contrast, we claim that writing (or reading) the
Louvre is in Paris in this situation-for-action derives its force
from the Louvre's being located in Paris. The difference is between a fact about what an agent knows and a fact about where

an agent is located in space, time, their social networks, and their

sociocultural ecology.
In support of this perspective, we will sketch an alternative,
non-representational framework for the explanation of linguistic
phenomena. Section 2 argues that non-representational accounts
of language begin with embodiment and bodily coordination, and
that the current challenge for such an account is to get to grips
with the richly meaningful, experiential aspects of language.
Section 3 takes steps in this direction by identifying the ontogenetic routes of the relevant abilities, and conceptualizing them
in ecological terms. The purpose of this sketch is to demonstrate
that CG-technical is inadequate as an account of the feelings and
experiences used in lay talk of common ground. For this reason,
we regard the technical notion of common ground as a pernicious illusion which blinds researchers to crucial aspects of language and human understanding. It induces them to consider
explanations that ignore crucial constitutive elements of how,
in everyday life, people make effective use of linguistic
coordination.
2. Linguistic embodiment
Representationalism is increasingly challenged by approaches
based in radical embodiment (Chemero, 2009; Di Paolo, Rohde, &
De Jaegher, 2010, p. 42; Wilson & Golonka, 2013). A representationalist construes language in terms of abstract forms that are
said to be realized physiologically, and so holds that articulatory
movements are planned on the basis of represented knowledge
that the speaker wishes to convey about a shared situation. On an
embodied account, language is primarily constituted by movement and bodily coordination, and so linguistic activity is often not
planned at all. Rather, language is improvised as people navigate
and construe meaning-laden sensorimotor environments where
they act in the presence of, and with respect to, other people.
Language does not reduce to movement, because of its emotional
immediacy but also because, in languaging,1 people use sociocultural norms that inhere to acoustic and graphic patterns. Together
with emotion, these patterns function to regulate attention and
lived experiences. To illustrate this, we will refer throughout this
section to a focal scenario that, in terms of CG-technical, is
described as follows. Imagine that you are visiting a friend, and,
watching her chop vegetables for dinner, you say, Have you got a
second cutting board? If she responds by handing one to you, then
on the CG-technical view you now mutually know (i.e., have added
to your common ground) several new propositions, which include
the fact that she has got a second cutting board (which she knew
but you did not), the fact that you would like to help prepare
dinner (which you knew but she did not), the fact that there are
still more vegetables to chop (which her action implies), and so
forth.
2.1. Local coordination and synergies
The rst thing to note is that representationalist description
leaves out bodily activity. For the moment, let us set aside the
question of how vocal activity can normatively regulate attention,
and focus on the imagined situation's local physical dynamics.
Suppose that you articulate, not a name, but a demonstrative (have
you got another one of those?) and that you glance or nod at the

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).

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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).

273e274; Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003). The upshot of this is

that speaking and hearing are primarily organized by multi-level
bodily coordination, rather than being based in either the said or
the known (Cowley, 1994, 2014).
Nonetheless, in our cutting board example, bodily coordination
is only part of the story. Coordinating with your host requires,
among other things, that you both perceive cutting boards as part of
the act of chopping, and chopping as part of bringing about an
eventuality (i.e., eating) whose preparation can be shared (or
better, co-constructed). Cultural practices and values like these are
needed to explain how sounds become normative with respect to
motion, attention, and phenomenal experience (Cowley, 2014), and
it is not clear that their historical specicity can be adequately
accounted for entirely in terms of functional coordination.
2.2. Non-local and virtual patterns
These general considerations suggest that embodiment-based
explanations for languaging demand other explanatory tools apart
from synergies and coordination. Before addressing this, we will
clarify what we think they need to explain, focusing on two aspects
of verbal activity that differentiate it from other modes of languaging (e.g., from texting). The rst concerns how we attribute
sameness to discrete and recombinable verbal units (Love, 2007;
Ross, 2007), and the second concerns their experiential normativity. On this view, verbal activity is vocalization whose organizing
function is experiential e having to do with the replication of routines and abstract patterns e rather than strictly auditory and
articulatory. To aid in telling apart these aspects of verbal activity, we
distinguish words (strictly abstract objects, with typographic and
conceptual existence) from wordings, where the latter are nonce
events that are perceived and construed in relation to a person's
sociocultural experience. When speech events are recognized as
involving the same wordings, their identity relation can only be
dened phenomenologically. The speaker aims, not to produce an
acoustically identical sound (we would never be able to do this), but
to produce a pattern that can be treated as the same as another.
Once human children develop the capacity to do this, they can learn
to use articulatory actions to normatively affect experience. Once
infants perceive sounds as wordings, they modify the functions that
organize their movements, and by coordinating with other people,
they gradually re-organize attentional aspects of our engagement
with an environment in accordance with specic cultural norms
relating to attentional, imaginative, and affective activity. As an
illustrative example, one author recalls the sudden, shocking change
in avor brought about by his mother telling his infant self that the
mufn he was eating had been made from zucchini. Thus it seems to
us that languaging does not reduce to movement, and we claim that
neither experience nor its re-evocation can be wholly described in
terms of neuromuscular synergies.
Attentional normativity differs from mental content, because
wordings' effects on experience depend on individual histories of
encounters with a range of related events. This is why, for instance,
the meaning of a wording as it is used in a particular task will be
specic to that task, i.e., will be a concentration of the experiences
that make it up (Duran & Dale, 2014; Fusaroli et al., 2012; Mills,
2014; Mills & Healey, 2008). At issue here is how phenomenology
can stabilize bodily dynamics, which as a result can be used to affect
attention, emotion, and experience in exible ways.
We conceptualize that phenomenon in terms of non-locality.
Abstract entities like words, concepts, and cultural norms are said
to be non-local in that they are constituted by processes that play
out on timescales that are longer than those of human action and
interaction. Such sociocultural patterns are also non-located in
that they are ontologically dened by patterns of change in the

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activity of populations of individuals rather than by denite regions

of space-time (Steffensen & Cowley, 2010, pp. 336e348). To say that
languaging implicates non-local resources is thus to say that it is
intrinsically multi-scalar, and to stress that judgements of sameness allow sociocultural beings to display beliefs, knowledge and
various kinds of attitudes (see Steffensen & Pedersen, 2014; Uryu,
Steffensen, & Kramsch, 2013; Van Dijk & Withagen, 2015).4 Articulatory activity that plays out over seconds and tens of milliseconds
is embedded in events, structured by wordings that play out over
minutes and hours (e.g., conversations, daily tasks), and in ontogenetic and historical changes that are completed over years and
generations (e.g., the creation and maintenance of interpersonal
relationships, identity development, and linguistic change). While
interaction is lived, its dynamics are constrained by patterns that
unfold in longer-timescales. Consider: in our kitchen example, if
you were visiting your parents in your childhood home, you would
already know about extra cutting boards. If at the house of a friend
in Spain, you'd achieve a similar physical effect by articulating
esos in place of those. If the occasion were more formal, you
might not ask at all. These scenarios are differentiated by cultural
ecologies e by social role, by speech community, and by situational
conventions. Note that the constraints that are imposed on the
interaction do not reduce to organizational dynamics or local
physical contingencies.
One consequence of this multi-scalarity is that wordings are
concrete and observable both as acoustic or graphical patterns on
short timescales and as virtual patterns on longer, intergenerational timescales (Fowler, 2014; Port, 2010). Shorttimescale wordings are articulatory gestures, vocal-tract synergies
articulated to evoke word-objects and other linguistic units. Longtimescale wordings, by contrast, are community-level patterns
maintained by custom and text. The long-timescale patterns both
constrain and are realized by short-timescale patterns, through the
ontogenetic entrainment of individuals to the behavioral regularities of their fellows. As a result of this entrainment, the longtimescale patterns can be described as attractors in the phase
space constituted by the speaker's and hearer's coupled perceptual
and articulatory systems during conversations between community members (Thibault, 2011).
Explaining sameness and attentional normativity thus demands more than just an expansion in the scope of the dynamics
involved. This is because, in Gibson's (1979, p. 283) sense, wordings
are virtual objects or entities that are constituted by acts of
perception. As such, they supplement and transform the structural
and physical domain of ecological information. Virtuality is classically dened by pictures: an image of a pipe is not dened by the
structural properties of pipes, on any scale or set of scales. It is
neither the shape of the picture (an affordance of the surface) nor
what it represents that make it what it is. Rather, depicting is an
affordance in the surface. Whilst structural relations are necessary
to depiction, these fail to explain the relation between an image
and its subject. This is a phenomenology-based capacity, although
it is enabled by a person's sensitivity to visible structural relations.
An image's aboutness (i.e., its existence as an image rather than as
a patterned surface) is thus intrinsic to acts of perception; it is part
of how people look at an image, not a property of the image itself
, 2012). Magritte's ceci n'est pas un pipe was neither face(Noe
tious nor metaphorical (cf. Foucault & Magritte, 2008).
For Cowley (2011b), gaining skills with structural similarities is
the basis for later stages of learning to talk. After about 18 months, a

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.

child begins to hear one set of articulatory actions as the same as

another. In the context of whole-bodied human coordination, the
act of making phonetic gestures comes to grant, not an identity
relation, but degrees of inter-event structural similarity that permit
identication as sames. As with depiction, verbal sameness is
an affordance in, not of, acoustic patterns: auditory and visual
sensitivity to articulatory dynamics enable people to perceive
acoustic patterns as instances of repeatable actions. Their repeatability is dened by the function individuals perceive the articulatory gestures as having served, such as speaking a set of abstract
forms (as in reading aloud) or regulating experiential and bodily
aspects of the present situation in a way that can evoke past situations (permitting, among other things, referring). Wordings are
virtual in that they are constituted by the activity of their own
perception. Crucially, as wordings arise, their quality as affect and
movement enables them to disambiguate contexts and, in so doing,
take on senses that apparently t the situation.
3. Biological engagement with social norms
Our argument can be summarized thus Since linguistic understanding is not to be explained representationally by CG-technical,
we propose that it be rethought with respect to how human agents
coordinate multi-level bodily activity. Taking a distributedecological view, we treat wordings as crucial to human activity.
Even if described by and, perhaps, based in synergies, the phenomenology of wordings is crucial to non-local ways of understanding. Like pictures, wordings are intrinsically multi-scalar and
virtual. Accordingly, our focus turns to how bodily activity comes to
connect up with non-local and virtual patterns. Roughly, we replace
an idea of semantic content with a view of how agents use verbal
objects normatively as they manage bodily coordination and
interaction. During ontogenesis wordings and phenomenal experience come to be co-constituted, and these allow agents to
perceive, construct, and use cultural-ecological techniques. The
child gradually gains a capacity to perceive material patterns as
instances of ideas and concepts; in the case of (so-called) words,
the capacity is developed by hearing oneself speak wordings as one
makes and tracks articulatory movements. Not only are sociocultural patterns passed across the generations but, as a result, persons
use historical resources to individuate as having unique skills,
knowledge and beliefs. Accordingly, humans have become able to
think in terms of situations, objects and events and, just as crucially,
to describe and explain these as types that are referred to by
words. CG-lay, of course, is just such an explanation. However, like
many lay biases and beliefs (e.g. everything happens for a reason),
we deny it any place in naturalistic approaches to what language is
or how it works.
3.1. Becoming a person: from synergies to stance-taking
The ability to act with respect to customs, concepts, and norms
is social agency, or personhood, which is not necessarily coincident with biological adulthood. Human infants are already
persons on legal and moral grounds, but their personhood is
nascent, primarily because they differ behaviorally from adults and
even from children. Human developmental stages are among our
distinguishing evolutionary traits (Bogin, 1999), and it is well
known that after weaning at about two years of age, human infants
enter a stage of childhood that does not occur in related species. In
chimpanzees, for instance, weaning marks the boundary between
children and juveniles, with no intermediate stage. Although it
remains unclear how this evolutionary discontinuity emerged, it is
likely to be highly relevant for language development. In particular,
it may help to explain why humans, unlike other species, use

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cultural resources to establish group methods for manipulating and

using functional information.
From birth, infants rely on sophisticated interbodily coordination. In view of the above-mentioned work showing the importance of synergy to adults, this is less surprising than when rst
identied in the 1970s. For Colwyn Trevarthen (1979, 1998),
development leads to intrinsic motive formation that is grounded
in how infant-caregiver dyads enact learning based on how each
party is moved by the movements of the other. This allows infants
to manifest forms of understanding that take place between subjects. Although these lend themselves to description in terms of
intersubjectivity (i.e., as akin to how we talk about the understanding of conscious representation-using individuals), their basis
is plainly affective and kinesthetic. Communication with a three
month old is not amenable to explanation by CG-technical. What
we see in the rst weeks of life is an increasing sensitivity to
repeating actional patterns of cultural signicance (Froese &
Gallagher, 2012; Krueger, 2013; Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Tronick,
1989). They begin to notice and to enact musical and vocal patterns, showing a preference almost from birth for syllable-based
rhythms typical of their native languages (Nazzi, Bertoncini, &
Mehler, 1998). Engaging with those rhythms helps them become
entrained in simple patterns of turn-taking and joint movement e
for example, they start to reach for objects and anticipate when
they will be offered, they learn to enjoy the anticipation of repetitive stories, and so on.
But something that might be described using CG-lay does begin
to arise towards the end of the rst year (see Cowley, 2003, 2007 for
overview). As infants begin to participate in joint attending towards
objects, and the triadic (infant-caretaker-object) behavior this allows, they begin to act deliberately by attending to aspects of the
world that caregivers highlight as coherent objects-of-action. As
Piaget rst recognized, earlier sensorimotor modes of engagement
later form the basis for new deliberate action and perception (i.e.,
action with respect to entities dened by cultural norms). This
happens because shared action can lead to shared emotions; using
triadic behavior, children can be motivated to want what others
want and to direct their actions towards expected objects. They
learn to use new objects in familiar routines, as in giving games e
because these have self-sustaining social dynamics, children can
introduce new objects and learn that those, too, can be given and
received. So they not only become adept at directing and following
attention, they also begin to attend to aspects, as when they learn to
signal disgust at certain foods. As they begin walking, infants go and
get things, show a new interest in kinds of objects, and display
attitudes towards places and people they do not like. In Maturana's
(1970, 1978) words, infants become observers as they learn to
display intentions and gestures while manifestly acting on objects
(Maturana would say, by coordinating already-coordinated
actions).
These claims are all developmental commonplaces. In repeating
them here, our only aim is to stress that the child develops into a
person through direct experience of how particulars are regarded
and conceived of in the child's community. Presumably, this
experience is enabled by developmental changes in neural organization, and by later neural reuse and sensorimotor re-enactment
(Anderson, 2010; Danker & Anderson, 2010). Accordingly, there is
no need to posit abstract or propositional knowledge to account for
children's budding interest in classes of things e for example, one
of the authors used to display the movements of different windscreen wipers by moving his legs in the bath. Nor, we would argue,
is there any need for recognizing one's own intentions or interpreting those of others (Cowley, 2007).
Further, we stress that what goes for the world's particulars also
goes for the repeating, synergetic units of speech. Children may

show sensitivity to vocalizations in the rst weeks of life, and

recognize their names by the middle of the rst year. However, they
do not produce canonical syllables until later, and it is only around
the end of the rst year that these become abstraction-amenable
and open to description as words (Cowley & Spurrett, 2003;
Spurrett & Cowley, 2004). Gradually, as infants become more
person-like, they come to make and track utterances as utterances
of something. As argued elsewhere (e.g., Cowley, 2011b), children
begin to take a language stance e to treat articulatory actions as
being the same and as separable from their contexts of occurrence. These newly-abstract wordings play an increasing part in
utterance-activity, although they are still reliant on coordinated
bodily synergies and body-based skills in directing action. Children
begin to draw on wordings to disambiguate situations: they track
how others use wordings to learn about situationally rewarding
behavior. Put otherwise, they gain perceptual skills based on using
the phenomenality of speech or sign as they orient to the affordances of a social and language-saturated world. In later childhood,
of course, they gain many other capabilities. As they become skilled
with wordings, they come to give reasons for their actions, attribute
motives to others and, in late-modern societies, develop skills with
text and machine-based coding. They become fully edged persons.
Our case is that all the relevant skills e including so-called mindreading and literacies e can be traced to how children act/perceive
while attending to and using salient aspects of phenomenality (or
the ability to take a language stance). It is to this that we now turn.
3.2. The ecological functions of wordings
The power of wordings lies in their ecological functionality. The
human niche, our species-typical Umwelt, has evolved to encompass competing societies, groups, and individuals. As a result,
humans inhabit an extended cognitive ecology (Steffensen, 2011;
cf. Hutchins, 2014) lled with physical structures that carry
impersonal social meaning, including organizations, architecture,
technologies, and techniques, including wordings. These enable
persons to t their activity to the niche and (over time) to transform
its affordances. In broad terms, this idea is familiar: it appears in
claims that, for example, smartphones extend the mind. Metaphorically, it arises with the view that people use scaffolding to
alter cognitive capacities (Sterelny, 2010). But social resources are
not mass-manufactured parts that can be assembled into customizable agents. Rather, they are sensorimotor affordances that also
shape participation in cultural ecosystems (Hutchins, 2014). A line
of people is just that, but it might be a queue to one person and to
another, an opportunity to be the rst on the plane. The issue is
more marked when we ask how biological bodies exploit wordings.
Wordings can be transcribed and recorded, but in the moment that
we enact them their phenomenality links them, and us, with
population-level patterns and a sense of what matters at the time.
Probabilistic aspects of wordings (co-occurrence, typical acoustic
realization, etc.) inuence activity, in large part because their
affordance-potential has been created and stabilized with respect
to lived experience.
In light of these observations, we suggest that the organizational
function served by wordings is best captured by theorizing them as
a variety of attentional techniques (or technologies, where we are
concerned with inscription rather than vocalization), which is more
accurate than treating them as material scaffolds for action or as
undifferentiated coordinated activity (see Harvey, 2015). This reconceptualization of wordings builds on recognition that biological
systems are always distributed, in that they are constituted partly
from systems and processes outside the spatial bounds of their
bodies (Di Paolo, 2009). In many cases, the environmental structures that serve these functions are created deliberately by

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S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8

organisms in order to change their actional capacities (i.e., to

modify the layout of affordances around them). When this is so, the
structure and effect of the external system or process can be stabilized by inter-agent coordination and become functionally
replicable in multiple instances.5 These replicable functions might
be constituted in fast- or slow-changing substrates, as techniques
(practices) or technologies (artifacts or structures), respectively.
Organisms self-construct their own phenomenality, and for at least
some of them, techniques can be articulated, perceived, and used as
if they were sensorimotor objects even though they lack material
stability on experiential timescales. This makes them attentional
techniques, or interpersonally stable actions constituted as patterns
of attention. Wordings are prototypical attentional techniques.6
The idea here is that, by hypothesis, the fast coordination from
which speech-synergies emerge is complemented by slow coordination (among persons and technique-dependent actions) that
keeps wordings and their use within limits favored by a community
(cf. Ross, 2007, pp. 716e717). At least three aspects of wordings,
which are logically and to some degree operationally distinct, are
coordinated in this way. The rst is their phenomenological stability, which allows us to manipulate them as techniques. The
second is partial extrinsic attentional normativity; actions organized using wordings draw on norms other than those embodied
by the articulating agent. And the third is actional distance: given
those rst two features, wordings can be used to achieve action at a
spatiotemporal remove, especially in socio-ecologies where their
use is dened by a slow-changing visual substrate (i.e., by writing).
These three aspects are a general characterization of their organizational function, which in practice tends to involve creating situations e that is, sorting a material environment in terms of
attentional and cultural affordances. If this account is on the right
track, the slow-coordination of wordings and other techniques is a
highly signicant empirical phenomenon that is all too easily
concealed by unwary appeal to the technical notion of common
ground.
Attentional techniques are phenomenological patterns that
allow activity to be constrained by patterns on at least two very
different timescales. The rst is the scale of local interbodily coordination, involving synergies that stretch across multiple bodies
and modalities. Because it is constituted partly by these synergies,
the phenomenality of cutting board evokes reams of both related
and unrelated sensorimotor experiences. The second is the scale of
words. Some scholars identify coordination on these two scales e
notably, Carol Fowler (2013, 2014) holds that language use (her
term for distributed language) is to be explained as the instantiation of synergies among vocal articulators that have invariant
properties, like place and degree of constriction. For her, this
invariance grants articulatory acts an impersonal aspect which can
also be described by phonology. On our view, Fowler's work claries the basis for taking a language stance e gaining the ability to
attend to sounds as words e by specifying the mechanisms that
allow people to perceive syllabic events as wordings that co-occur

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.

with constantly changing and uctuating voice dynamics

(Abercrombie, 1967). It does not, however, account for how articulatory synergies take on their situated and normative force.
Accordingly, in our account, we stress phenomenality e for
instance, in listening to speech, we only sometimes attend to the
articulatory motions, and at other time attend to an event or situation being described, the emotional aspects of how they are said,
and so on. Phonology is just a small part of the coordination that
arises in the ow of talk. What is most important in Fowler's account is that it explains how speaking has nothing to do with
forcing mental intentions into phonetic form; in general, articulatory activity (for persons but not for infants) relies on primitive,
repeating, kinesthetic habits of vocal tract movement that
Browman and Goldstein (1989, 1992) call phonetic gestures.
Speech is sensorimotor activity that is controlled by these kinesthetic habits, although as we have seen, these are embedded in a
network of both intra- and interbodily synergies that affect
perception and emotion as well as articulation and other modes of
action.
The other aspect of wordings is their cultural, long-timescale
aspect, which individuals engage with through their personal histories of stance-taking and engagement in wording-regulated interactions. The cultural expertise involved in perceiving wordings is
just as fundamental as phonetic gesture, which is why one often
hears articulate vocalization without hearing wordings when in an
unfamiliar setting where you do not know the language (so to
speak). (This is one reason we adopt the distributed denition of
language as activity in which wordings derive from, but are not
identical to, the mechanisms that allow linguistic activity to be
described in phonological terms (as language use.) To be a person
presupposes an ability to develop skills for engaging with wordings
as future attractors (Thibault, 2011). That is, children gain from
becoming familiar with a community's practices and connecting
these with bodily and interbodily synergies, perceiving circumstances, and learning to anticipate the results of vocal and verbal
actions. The coordination and frustration of these processes produces courses of action created by applying attentional techniques.
For this reason, attentional techniques like wordings are able to
self-sustain through various people who draw on them as they
enact and develop routines while engaging directly with the world.
Indeed, given the routines and meta-routines that permeate human
lives e the many paths that have been (and will be) walked e a
language has been seen as a city (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958) or,
perhaps, a meshwork of cities (De Landa, 1997).
4. Conclusion: the illusion of common ground
A distributed-ecological framework for understanding language
shows how much is missed by accounts in terms of CG-technical,
and by the representational frameworks to which they are tied.
Neither linguistic understanding, nor the feeling of sharing an
experience rely on possession of overlapping internal knowledge.
Rather, we have argued, they come from being embedded in a
world where coordination uses wordings and other sociocultural
resources. The use of attentional techniques to create novel affordances accounts, in a general way, for adult conversation, literacy,
and private thought, and cognitive processes that the representationalist would attribute to the mind's alleged capacity to construct
common ground. But that claim is facile. It is implausible and
gratuitous to attribute linguistic understanding to chains of inferences that connect intentional states to reasoning which establishes common ground. Worse, it blinds us to linguistic
embodiment and the use of phenomenal experience. For this
reason, it also obscures how we capture and inuence each others'
attention, link this to experience and, in so doing, undertake solo

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S.J. Cowley, M.I. Harvey / New Ideas in Psychology xxx (2015) 1e8

and cooperative action. For all these reasons, CG-technical has no

explanatory value as a theory.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their
excellent and very detailed feedback on an earlier draft of the paper,
as well as one of the author's families for emotional and nancial
support during its writing.
This paper was not funded by any specic grants or organizations. We would, however, like to thank Mr. Harvey's family for
their emotional and nancial support during its writing.
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