Agency and Consciousness in Discourse: Self-Other Dynamics as a Complex System

by Paul Thibault

Overview

Continuing the discussion he began in his 2004 Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Boyd, Thibault (linguistics and media communication, Agder U. College, Norway) explores how agency and consciousness are created and enacted in and through transactions between self and other. Such transactions are the central notion in the development of an adequate explanation of both agency and consciousness, he argues, and it is necessary to reconnect body-brain processes and interactions to the social and discursive practices that directly act upon and affect our body-brain systems in meaning-making activity. A central theme is how new emergent levels of organization come into existence between already existing scalar levels at the same time that existing levels are reorganized by the emergence of the new levels. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826492524
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/01/2006
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Paul J. Thibault is Professor in Linguistics and Media Communication, Agder University, Kristiansand, Norway.

Table of Contents

Preface1. Introduction2. The Semiotic Mediation of Consciousness in Social Meaning-Making3. Agency, Intentionality and Individuation in Infant Semiosis4. Reflexive (Self) Consciousness, Conscience, and the Dialogical Basis of Intrapersonal Moral Consciousness5. Dialogic Closure and the Semiotic Mediation of Consciousness in Ecosocial Networks6. Metaphor as Semiotic Re-Organization Across LevelsReferences