Keynote Speaker: Bert Hodges
Thoughts made prior to the symposia.
In recent years, the study of human interactivity, language and cognition has been heavily influenced by recent developments in dynamical systems theory. Both theoretically and methodologically, this development has led to a rejection of individualist, internalist and intentionalist models of human behavior. Rather, the focus has shifted to supra-individual, systemic and ecological models in both interactional and cognitive studies. In these approaches, the unit of analysis is not individuals, but rather an array of dyads, groups, teams and systems, including infant-caregiver relations, situated activity systems, distributed cognitive systems, dialogical systems, organism-environment systems, and even ecosystems. The symposium takes a starting point in Bert Hodges’ Values-Realizing Theory (VRT). Building on James Gibson’s ecological psychology, VRT proposes that a supra-individual system is guided by values which define the boundary conditions of the system.