Scaffolded Cognition, Basic Mentality and Language: Some non-representationalist insights from the later Wittgenstein
Abstract
Building on insights from the later Wittgenstein, this paper thematizes the non-representational basis of human language games. It considers how linguistic activity is enacted as a multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be adequately described solely by means of the central enactivist concepts of ‘sense-making’, ‘participatory sensemaking’ and ‘basic minds’. Rather, the argument goes, the human capacity for partaking in linguistic activity is bound to the faculty of understanding as well as doxastic and proto-doxastic attitudes that can be both explicit and implicit in linguistic utterances. The paper shows how such beliefs play a crucial role in allowing linguistically mediated cognition to scaffold social co-engagements. Further, they attest to the success of language-games by conditioning the satisfactory outcome of such games thus allowing not only their unhindered ongoing but also their reoccurrence.References
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