In addition to providing a contemporary framework for pragmatism, WST also provides a straightforward means of integrating cognitive science and anthropology. For example, in her comment on our paper Dr. Nagel points to the work of Timothy Ingold as a contemporary example of an anthropologist whose work can thicken our understanding of cognition and experience.
Knowing does not lie in the establishment of a correspondence between the world and its representation, but is rather immanent in the life and consciousness of the knower as it unfolds within the field of practice set up through his or her presence as a being-in-the-world. (2011, p. 159)
While WST couldn’t agree more with Ingold’s (2011) critique of correspondence approaches to the nature of knowledge, WST’s conceptualization of living systems as multi-scale, self-sustaining embodiments of the phylogenetic, cultural, social, and ontogenetic contexts within which they emerged and within which they sustain themselves provides a straight forward explanation of why knowing is, “…immanent in the life and consciousness of the knower…” (Ingold 2011, p. 159). Specifically, knowing is immanent in being-in-the-world because organisms, as embodiments of context, are knowledge (Jordan 2000). In short, they are world in world. Thus, as implied by Ingold, to be is to mean.
A potential advantage of WST’s approach to this issue is that it directly addresses the Hard Naturalism that underlies the correspondence-driven thinking Ingold (2011) critiques. That is, by problematizing the realist assumption of context-independent, intrinsic properties, WST asserts it is logically impossible for meaningless things to exist. That is, it is logically impossible to be and not mean. By engaging in this ontological spadework, WST does not suffer the risk of collapsing into Soft Naturalism, as does Ingold’s position, or any position for that matter, that attempts to establish the reality of experience without addressing Hard Naturalism’s assertion that meaning is not constitutive of reality.
In addition to addressing Ingold’s (2011) being-in-the-world approach to meaning, WST also addresses Dr. Nagel’s assertion that anthropology can thicken cognitive science by leading us to consider the continuous, un-ending influence that multiple scales of context (e.g., phylogenetic, cultural, social, and ontogenetic) have on the nature of bodies and meaning. She develops this point by referring to Susan Oyama’s (1985) assertion that in addition to inheriting genes, infants also inherent a heterogeneous collection of multi-scale contexts, including other persons, that continuously shape, and are shaped by, the developing individual. Oyama refers to this collection of contexts as a developmental system. While describing Oyama’s work, Dr. Nagel states:
This multi-scale, interaction-driven dynamics requires an approach that does justice to context-dependency, since it is a particular context that leads to the emergence of a specific phenotype. Neglecting the context would thus necessarily lead to a failure to understand the developmental system. (this collection, p. 6)
Again, we couldn’t agree more with Drs. Nagel and Oyama. What WST potentially adds to the notion of a developmental system is the idea that self-sustaining systems constitute embodiments of their developmental contexts. The advantage here is the same advantage we encountered when addressing WST’s relationship to Ingold’s (2011) being-in-the-world approach to meaning. By providing a coherentist ontology that renders reality inherently meaningful, WST constitutes a meaningful alternative to Hard Naturalism’s correspondence-driven assertion that reality is inherently meaningless. As a result, WST allows one to utilize Oyama’s (1985) notion of developmental contexts in a way that prevents one from having to explain how it is that developmental contexts render an inherently meaningless reality meaningful. Specifically, developmental contexts don’t have to render meaningless reality meaningful because, according to WST, all phenomena are context dependent and, therefore, inherently meaningful.