The Big Project
I co-ordinate the Distributed
Language Group. We are a growing international group who are
promoting the distributed view of language. While local members
meet at Hertfordshire, we have clusters in several places across
the world and, from these, are organizing international meetings.
Broadly, we share two commitments. First, we all take a naturalistic
perspective. Second, we view language as providing a means of
transforming the relations between brains, bodies and world.
The group itself is distributed.
We do not aim to promote a specific theory or, indeed, to work
in any one interdisciplinary area. Since, we have tended to focus
on dynamics and grounding, we have built links between the language
sciences and robotics. Our ambitions, however, are to promote
the distributed view in providing new perspectives on both brain
and behaviour. While the Hertfordshire group works in cognitive
psychology, other projects reflect the DLG’s wider interests.
Historically, the DLG builds on
a working group founded by David Spurrett and Stephen Cowley in
1999. As mind AND world (mAw), we group organized conferences
on Integrational Linguistics and Distributed Cognition (Durban,
South Africa in 2003) and Distributed Cognition and the Will:
Individual Volition and Social Context (Birmingham, AL, 2005).
