Concrete Lifeforms and Cognitive Archeology

Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2010), famously introduced the notion of a language-game to capture the open-ended, dynamical nature of linguistic conventions. The notion of a form of life is understood in the context of a broader pragmatic view of language, where meaning derives from use: To follow the rules of language is to participate in a broader network of social activity and expectations, it is (in anachronic terms) to enact a world defined beyond the boundaries of one’s own brain. We argue in the present paper that Wittgenstein’s “form of life” should be taken literally. Indeed, the rules of language are elements of a web of constraints over social activity, which successfully work to (re-)produce itself and therefore exhibit a hallmark of biological organization. In the present article, we propose a formally grounded account of how normativity is embedded in the human niche and derive arguments about the dynamics and study of material niche construction. In and of itself, embedded normativity derives from the deep relation between the subjective experience of agents and the exercise of intentionality, as exposed in recent research in computational phenomenology. Framing embedded normativity in the language of constraints allows us to make two crucial novel arguments. First, material landscapes are indeed carriers of normativity, properly speaking. Second, they are constitutive elements of social forms of life, here again properly speaking.