Doing inspecting in interaction: seeing the physiognomy of an object

ABSTRACT

This study explores the practice of doing inspecting an object, more specifically, the practice of leaning over an object that has been seen in a certain way. It offers a single-case analysis of two segments in which doing inspecting is done in an enhanced way, accompanied by touching the object. It argues that seeing the details of an object is done not necessarily to collect detailed information about the object but as a constitutive part of the ascribability of a specific action to the whole of the viewer’s concurrent verbal and other behavior. Seeing the details of an object is seeing the object in an entirely new fashion. Following the empirical analysis, its implications for some aspects of perception (multimodality of perception, perspectives, and the unity of the body) will be discussed. Data are in Japanese with English translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Levinson (2012) for the notion of ascribing an action to an utterance (and/or embodied behavior).

2. Certainly, the recipient of a request formatted as a “can-you” question may accept the request with an “I can” response. However, if it is an acceptance of the request, this response will sound like a hesitant rather than willing acceptance only focusing on the possibility or ability. In contrast, the designer in the example rather enthusiastically responds with the emphatic adverb zenzen, translated as “absolutely.”

3. It is not very clear from the video what exactly the owner is touching; the shape of the owner’s fingers, combined with her talk, enables the conjecture that it is a tag.

4. Another support for this analysis is provided by the two appearances of tatoeba (“for instance”) in lines 07 and 10. It appears that the owner, in line 07, abandons the incipient indication of an example of changing prices that finally appears in lines 10 and 12. If the example appeared in line 10, it could not be heard as part of an inquiry about the possibility of rewriting prices in tiny spaces; it would rather be heard as more straightforwardly concerning changing prices as such. By letting the inquiry about the possibility of rewriting precede the indication of the example, the owner (re)constructs the example as the example of rewriting.

5. See Coulter (1979) for the notion of ascribing perception to a person.

6. Mondada (2021, p. 60) distinguished between multimodality and multisensoriality in the following way: Multimodality refers to the multiplicity of linguistic and embodied resources that participants mobilize for interacting together in intelligible ways…. Multisensoriality refers to the sensorial experiences of participants as they engage in sensing the world and each other. Certainly, when we read a book while holding it, we multisensorily (or multisensorially) experience the book. However, many “synesthetic” phenomena, such as seeing the rigidity of glass, may not be multisensory (although they are definitely multimodal) in that we do not tactilely feel the rigidity. Furthermore, all cases of seeing are essentially multimodal as far as they are always accompanied by the proprioception of the viewer’s movements and positions of eyeballs and other body parts. However, we are not sure whether they always involve multiple senses. Therefore, we prefer the term multimodality as a general term for discussing the issues related to perception and perceptual experiences. Of course, this is not a criticism of Mondada’s use of the notion of multisensoriality.

7. “It is not clear how these experiences [e.g., experiencing one’s own reactions to defeat and failure from an observer perspective – a note added] are best interpreted – whether as a nonegocentric form of direct perception in Gibson’s (1979) sense or as the products of instantaneous reconstruction—but it is clear that they exist” (Nigro &Neisser, 1983, p. 469; emphasis added).

8. Moreover, what the owner in Excerpt 2 multimodally perceives in the temporal and spatial voluminosity of the bodily configuration oriented to the prospective action of rewriting in tiny spaces is the structures of the spaces that afford that action. From this, one may further argue that she “directly perceives” (Gibson, 1979) these action-affording structures independent of the images or representations that she may happen to have about them.

9. We would add that for the same reason, Gestalt theory cannot provide an adequate account of synesthetic experiences either. See also note 6.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (20K02131).