Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for each other the grounds for immediate next action in the seemingly transparent give-and-take of ordinary conversation, empirical findings from the disciplines of Interaction Analysis suggest that “language” as it is actually realized in naturally occurring, everyday talk-in-interaction, may derive its semiotic efficacy more from the active co-participation of situated speakers in creating contexts of relevancy, constraint and possibility for each other’s immediate next re-shaping of the cybernetic surround than it does from the computational recombination of referential tokens within the bounds of some predetermined, category-structuring syntax.
The twin purposes of this article are to: (1) to serve as an introduction to some of the basic principles, methodologies and research data of Interaction Analysis, and (2) to attempt to situate such research and its findings within the broader study of meaning-making among living agents that is the goal of a Gregory Batesoninspired biosemiotics. Here I hope to show how the former can well illuminate latter’s efforts to explicate the principles whereby not only our human social worlds – but our very biological world itself – comes into being not as a “pre-given” in the furniture of the universe, but as a locally organized, massively co-constructed, participant-fashioned accomplishment in that universe instead.
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Favareau, D. (2008). Collapsing the Wave Function of Meaning: The Epistemological Matrix of Talk-in-Interaction. In: Hoffmeyer, J. (eds) A Legacy for Living Systems. Biosemiotics, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6706-8_12
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