Ostension - 9780262028097

Ostension is bodily movement that manifests our engagement with things, whether wewish it to or not. Gestures, glances, facial expressions: all betray our interest in something.Ostension enables our first word learning, providing infants with a prelinguistic way to grasp themeaning of words. Ostension is philosophically puzzling; it cuts across domains seeminglyunbridgeable -- public--private, inner--outer, mind--body. In this book, Chad Engelland offers aphilosophical investigation of ostension and its role in word learning by infants. Engellanddiscusses ostension (distinguishing it from ostensive definition) in contemporary philosophy,examining accounts by Quine, Davidson, and Gadamer, and he explores relevant empirical findings inpsychology, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience. He offers original studies of fourrepresentative historical thinkers whose work enriches the understanding of ostension: Wittgenstein,Merleau-Ponty, Augustine, and Aristotle. And, building on these philosophical and empiricalfoundations, Engelland offers a meticulous analysis of the philosophical issues raised by ostension.He examines the phenomenological problem of whether embodied intentions are manifest or inferred;the problem of what concept of mind allows ostensive cues to be intersubjectively available; theepistemological problem of how ostensive cues, notoriously ambiguous, can be correctly understood;and the metaphysical problem of the ultimate status of the key terms in his argument: animatemovement, language, and mind. Finally, he argues for the centrality of manifestation in philosophy.Taking ostension seriously, he proposes, has far-reaching implications for thinking about languageand the practice of philosophy.