Abstract
How do material representations such as models, diagrams, and drawings come to shape and aid collective, epistemic processes? This study investigated how groups of participants spontaneously recruited material objects (in this case, LEGO blocks) to support collective creative processes in the context of an experiment. Qualitative microanalyses of the group interactions motivate a taxonomy of different roles that the material representations play in the joint epistemic processes: illustration, elaboration, and exploration. Firstly, the LEGO blocks were used to illustrate already well-formed ideas in support of communication and epistemic alignment. Furthermore, the material concretization of otherwise abstract ideas in LEGO blocks gave rise to elaboration: discussions, requests for clarification, and discovery of unnoticed conceptual disagreements. Lastly, the LEGO blocks were used for exploration. That is, the material representations were experimented on and physical attributes were explored resulting in discoveries of new meaning potentials and creative solutions. We discuss these different ways in which material representations do their work in collective reasoning processes in relation to ideas about top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes and division of cognitive labor.
About the authors
Johanne S. Bjørndahl is a Ph.D. fellow at Center for Semiotics (Aarhus University). She holds a BA in Linguistics and an elite MA in Cognitive Semiotics from Aarhus University. Main research interests are within social cognition, interaction studies, and the role of objects in human cognition, which she approaches from different perspectives involving cognitive science, cognitive anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics. She is currently involved in a research project called Joint Diagrammatical Reasoning in Language funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research - Humanities.
Riccardo Fusaroli is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Semiotics and Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University. He holds a Ph.D in Semiotics from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on investigating social interactions employing experimental setups and dynamical systems models. He has a particular interest in language as a complex adaptive system for social coordination, experimental semiotics, and social impairment in neuro-psychiatric conditions.
Svend Østergaard is a mathematician by training and a PhD in semiotics. He currently serves as an Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, Department for Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. His current research interests focus on dynamic models of social interaction and especially how language structure emerges as a result of interaction. He has published a number of articles on dynamic semiotics and the books Mathematics of Meaning (1997), about the use of catastrophe theory and mathematics in the study of semantics, and Kognition og katastrofer (1998), about cognitive linguistics and its relation to the theory of dynamic models.
Kristian Tylén has an educational background in cognitive semiotics (Aarhus University) and linguistics (University of Southern Denmark) and currently holds a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Semiotics and The Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University. His main research interests includes social coordination, meaning-construction and the role of objects in human cognition, which he approaches from a broad range of perspectives involving cognitive science, neuroscience, semiotics, and linguistics. Together with professor Frederik Stjernfelt (Copenhagen University), Kristian Tylén is currently coordinating a research project called Joint Diagrammatical Reasoning in Language funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research - Humanities.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
