Abstract
Mr. Ian Waterman, sometimes referred to as ‘IW’, suffered at age 19 a sudden, total deafferentation of his body from the neck down - the near total loss of all the touch, proprioception, and limb spatial position senses that tell you, without looking, where your body is and what it is doing. The loss followed a never-diagnosed fever that is believed to have set off an auto-immune reaction. The immediate behavioral effect was immobility, even though IW’s motor system was unaffected and there was no paralysis. The problem was not lack of movement per se but lack of control. Upon awakening after 3 days, IW nightmarishly found that he had no control over what his body did - he was unable to sit up, walk, feed himself or manipulate objects; none of the ordinary actions of everyday life, let alone the complex actions required for his vocation. To imagine what deafferentation is like, try this experiment suggested by Shaun Gallagher: sit down at a table (something IW could not have done at first) and place your hands below the surface; open and close one hand, close the other and extend a finger; put the open hand over the closed hand, and so forth. You know at all times what your hands are doing and where they are but IW would not know any of this - he would know that he had willed his hands to move but, without vision, would have no idea of what they are doing or where they are located.
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Notes
- 1.
The research described in this paper was funded by grants from the NSF STIMULATE, KDI, and HSD programs. We wish to acknowledge much input from collaborators on the IW gesture project: Jonathan Cole, Shaun Gallagher and Bennett Bertenthal.
- 2.
Movement by itself offers no clue to whether a gesture is ‘gesticulation’ or ‘pantomime’; what matters is whether the two modes of semiosis, linguistic form and gesture, simultaneously co-express one idea unit.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
The second round of experiments was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to Jonathan Cole and by funds from Ian Waterman.
- 6.
The presentation of speech and gesture events in this figure, by adding an extra panel and selecting the limits of rotation in each panel, improves accuracy without changing the analysis from that in McNeill (2005).
- 7.
The concept of a ‘minimal unit’ with the property of being a whole is from Vygotsky (1987, pp. 4–5).
- 8.
The reasons why semiotic opposition creates instability and initiates change include:
(a) Conflict (between semiotic modes: analog imagery/analytic categorical), and
(b) Resolution (through change: fueling thinking-for-speaking, seeking stability)
Simultaneous semiotic modes comprise an inherently dynamic psycholinguistic model.
- 9.
When gesture and speech synchronize, as in Figs. 1 and 4a, b, the two modes are in direct contact. If there is less than perfect synchrony, the ‘double essence’ of the same meaning in unlike semiotic modes can still stimulate unpacking. The ultimate criterion is whether an idea is embodied in two modes (with or without different aspects of the idea) that creates instability.
- 10.
Pointed out by Elena Levy. The quote (recovered thanks to Tae Kunisawa) is “That which is specific to this particular form of sound has remained unexplored. As a consequence, this research has not been able to explain why sound possessing certain physical and mental characteristics is present in human speech or how it functions as a component of speech. In a similar manner, the study of meaning has been defined as the study of the concept, of the concept existing and developing in complete isolation from its material carrier. To a large extent, the failure of classic semantics and phonetics has been a direct result of this tendency to divorce meaning from sound, of this decomposition of the word into its separate elements.” (Rieber and Carton 1987, p. 46).
- 11.
As suggested by the semantic satiation phenomenon (Severance and Washburn 1907, recovered thanks to Fey Parrill): staring at TREE, say, soon disrupts the word. It ceases to be a meaningful symbol and its actual material form seems to change perceptually. A ‘satiation effect’ for gestures would be equally interesting to document. Trying such an experiment, David McNeill deliberately repeated a gesture that seems typical of him (a gesture for the concept of a growth point, no less; see Parrill 2007), and almost immediately experienced a shift from significant symbol to mere hand rotation for the movement. If vulnerability to semantic satiation indicates the strength of the material carrier in a symbol, this gesture is strong indeed.
- 12.
The material carrier concept thus helps explain why sometimes there is no gesture. When no gesture occurs, we witness the lowest level of materialization.
- 13.
Müller views the metaphor dynamically, as a process by which the speaker and her listener generate metaphoricity in the context of the speech event; clearly a conception germane to the position of this book. The activation of the metaphor, and the semiotic impact of the sparking image, is a variable, dependent upon the speaker’s thought processes and the context of speaking. The gesture, as a material carrier, is an active component of this process.
- 14.
Most empirical-scientific conceptions - at least implicitly - infer that because (and after the fact of speaking itself) a communicative event can be divided up into different aspects by the linguistic scientist, a cognitive system necessarily also must process these aspects one by one (and therefore consecutively) before finding ways of integrating them into a coherent interpretation.
- 15.
Merleau-Ponty’s quotation is from Gelb and Goldstein (1925, p. 158).
- 16.
We are indebted to Jan Arnold for this quotation.
- 17.
This is Gallagher’s point with respect to IW when he states that the timing of his gestures vis-à-vis his speech acts remains intact because “[t]he co-expressiveness of the two modes (gesture and speech) contribute to their synchronization.” (2005:113)
- 18.
As this is a chapter on IW and gesture, we have focused on the manual modality. However, Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term ‘la geste’ cannot be unequivocally translated into ‘gesture’. La geste refers to any aspect of the body deployed to convey meaning. But of course, because Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language is one about bodily expression in general, anything said there holds for the manual modality too. Historically, manual gestures have been the principal focus of observation (there may be evolutionary reasons to expect the hands to be primary) but studies, especially recent ones, have included the head (McClave et al. 2008), gaze (McNeill et al. in press) and vocal gestures (Okrent 2002) within a single framework of semiosis. These can be powerfully unified with the conception that linguistic meaning is obligatorily conveyed with all the body in unison (and that it is the suppression of elements that is exceptional).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Mind Bridge project, founded by the European Commission under the sixth Framework programme, contract no. 043457
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McNeill, D., Quaeghebeur, L., Duncan, S. (2010). IW - “The Man Who Lost His Body”. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_27
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