Stephen J. Cowley | The Cognition, Management and Communication Research Cluster, University of Southern Denmark | Centre for Human Interactivity, Department of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark | [email protected]
Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert ‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour (or languaging) grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers.
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Cited by
Cited by 14 other publications
Cowley, Stephen J.
2019. The Return ofLanguaging. Chinese Semiotic Studies 15:4 ► pp. 483 ff.
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2023. The Personal Repertoire and Its Materiality: Resources, Means and Modalities of Languaging. In New Materialist Explorations into Language Education, ► pp. 75 ff.
Farina, Almo
2022. Ecoscape vs. Landscape: Riding a Transition. In Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology [Landscape Series, 31], ► pp. 43 ff.
Fester-Seeger, Marie-Theres
2024. Human presencing: an alternative perspective on human embodiment and its implications for technology. AI & SOCIETY
Gahrn-Andersen, Rasmus & Stephen J. Cowley
2018. Semiosis and Bio-Mechanism: towards Consilience. Biosemiotics 11:3 ► pp. 405 ff.
Jensen, Astrid, Davide Secchi & Thomas Wiben Jensen
2022. A Distributed Framework for the Study of Organizational Cognition in Meetings. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Li, Jia, Sune Vork Steffensen & Guowen Huang
2020. Rethinking ecolinguistics from a distributed language perspective. Language Sciences 80 ► pp. 101277 ff.
Loaiza, Juan M., Sarah B. Trasmundi & Sune V. Steffensen
2020. Multiscalar Temporality in Human Behaviour: A Case Study of Constraint Interdependence in Psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Madsen, Jens Koed
2017. Time During Time: Multi-scalar Temporal Cognition. In Cognition Beyond the Brain, ► pp. 155 ff.
Nomura, Naoki, Koichiro Matsuno, Tomoaki Muranaka & Jun Tomita
2019. How Does Time Flow in Living Systems? Retrocausal Scaffolding and E-series Time. Biosemiotics 12:2 ► pp. 267 ff.
Nomura, Naoki, Tomoaki Muranaka, Jun Tomita & Koichiro Matsuno
2018. Time from Semiosis: E-series Time for Living Systems. Biosemiotics 11:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Ongstad, Sigmund
2023. The Challenge of Positioning Space and Time in Systemic Studies of Animal Utterances as Both Embodied and External Contexts. Linguistic Frontiers 6:3 ► pp. 1 ff.
Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme, Vicente Raja & Anthony Chemero
2021. Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”. Synthese 198:S1 ► pp. 115 ff.
Steffensen, Sune Vork & Matthew Isaac Harvey
2018. Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity. Cognitive Semiotics 11:1
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