Conversing As Action and Perception That Is Values-Realizing

Conversing is a physical-social-moral task that is defined by multiple values. Language, understood as an ecosystem, is defined by values such as clarity, coherence, comprehensiveness, and complexity (Hodges, 2009). Given that conversing is a values-realizing activity, humans speak in order to help others and themselves to differentiate, to integrate, to expand, and to complicate their actions and understandings of the world and their place and activities in it (Hodges, 2010). Thus, the values constraining utterances—the ones that encourage speakers to be articulate, efficient, meaningful, and interesting in what they say (Slobin, 1979)—are the very values that their conversation is intended to assist them in realizing. Thus, the function of conversing with each other is to pull all our actions, including linguistic ones, toward increasing clarity, coherence, comprehensiveness, and complexity.

Values-realizing theory (Hodges, 2007; Hodges & Baron, 1992) is not intended to be restricted to the human niche and its linguistic dimension, but it does encourage clarifying and enriching an appreciation for the specificity of humans and their talking together. How might linguistic activity be characterized in a way, such that it emerges from the larger values-realizing ecology in which it is situated, but in a way that is more explicitly social, personal, and moral? A variety of functions of language have been noted or been claimed as primary. For example, language allows people to persuade other people to agree with them or to do their bidding, as social psychologists usually assume. It allows for individuals to communicate (as most people think), or to think (as Chomsky so often communicates, Fowler, 2010). It improves the precision and range of coordination with others, as Clark (1996) and most ecological psychologists argue. Grice’s (1975) work and Tomasello’s (2008) appropriation and extension of it points to the cooperative function of language, and its role in collaborative projects. Some philosophers have asserted that the fundamental function of language is for asserting truths about the world (Givón, 1989). On the other hand, language provides crucial resources for narrative modes of thinking and story-telling, which Reed (1996) thought one of its most powerful possibilities. Persuasion, communication, thinking, coordination, cooperation, truth-telling, and narration are all important functions of linguistic skill, but it is worth considering the hypothesis that they are integrated by the larger-scale activities of caretaking and wayfinding (Hodges, 2007a, 2009).

Caretaking is to be careful for others and to be careful of others, or to be careful for practices and the goods entailed in and produced by those practices, while being careful of their dangers. Caretaking is a form of attention to protecting and enhancing the integrity of the goods that make it possible for an ecosystem with its ways of life, its inhabitants, and their projects to exist and to flourish (Hodges, 2007b). Wayfinding (e.g., Heft, 1983) is acting and perceiving over space-time scales that require moving beyond the horizon of the immediate surroundings. It involves the active orienting of perceptual systems to environmental information, and then using information that is revealed by that exploratory activity to guide further performatory and exploratory activity.

Recommended reading:

Hodges, B. H. (2007a). Good prospects: Ecological and social perspectives on conforming, creating, and caring in conversation. Language Sciences, 29, 584-604.