How systemic cognition enables epistemic engineering.

Epistemic engineering arises as systems and their parts develop functionality that is construed as valid knowledge. By hypothesis, epistemic engineering is a basic evolutionary principle. It ensures that not only living systems identify the differences that make differences but also ensure that distributed control enables them to construct epistemic change. In tracking such outcomes in human life, we stress that humans act within poly-centered, distributed systems. Similar to how people can act as inert parts of a system, they also actively bring forth intents and vicariant effects. Human cognitive agents use the systemic function to construct epistemic novelties. In the illustration, we used a published experimental study of a cyborg cockroach to consider how an evoneered system enables a human subject to perform as an adaptor with some "thought control" over the animal. Within a wide system, brains enable the techniques to arise ex novo as they attune to the dictates of a device. Human parts act as adaptors that simplify the task. In scaling up, we turn to a case of organizational cognition. We track how adaptor functions spread when drone-based data are brought to the maintenance department of a Danish utility company. While pivoting on how system operators combine experience with the use of software, their expertise sets off epistemically engineered results across the company and beyond. Vicariant effects emerge under the poly-centered control of brains, persons, equipment, and institutional wholes. As a part of culture, epistemic engineering works by reducing entropy.

Manual handling risks associated with the care, treatment and transportation of bariatric patients and clients in Australia.

To gain an understanding of the factors that affect the risks and the adoption of risk control measures during the care of bariatric patients, focus groups were conducted in rural and metropolitan locations in Australia. It was found that the manual handling injury risk to carers is influenced by the design of the environments within which patient movement is undertaken; the limited range of handling equipment available for use with bariatric patients; and the efficacy of organizational procedures and training. Adoption of risk controls is hampered by the absence of a standard definition of the term 'bariatric' and limitations in the use of weight and body mass index in definitions. There are gaps in information flow during the bariatric patient journey through the health-care system and a lack of knowledge about how to safely manage the unique needs of bariatric patients.

The rise of languaging.

In this paper, we turn to languaging, defined here as activity in which wordings play a part. On such a view, while activity is paramount, people also orient to acts of vocalization as wordings. These physical wordings can be used as tools that shape attending, with recourse to neither mental representations nor symbols that store and transmit information. The view is consistent with macroevolutionary continuity and will be used to challenge appeal to a major evolutionary transition to 'language'. On the languaging view, like many modern social primates, hominins have long undertaken encultured activities. Infants, human and nonhuman, act epistemically and, by so doing, align skills with objects to practice. They develop a 'stance' to pragmatic, goal-directed action. In human ontogenesis, we argue, both epistemic action and the stance-taking are extended by vocalizing. Caregiver-infant coordination enables vocalizing to be integrated with acting, attending, perceiving and managing one's attention. Infants also self-entrain vocalizing through 'babble'. Once the developmental threads unite, social reaching (Bates, 1976) favors a special stance to articulatory gestures (one that allows wordings to be made and heard). Just as in orienting to cultural tools, a child grasps a community's ways-with-wordings. The latter often express abstract relations which we can illustrate with modern non-literate use of reciprocal expressions. In Australian and Pacific languages, reciprocals sustain coordinating that, for speakers, is neither symbolic nor arbitrary. Further, cross-linguistic comparison shows the same 'patchy distribution' of reciprocals that characterizes primate tool use. Of course, we do not deny that, in many language games, people can undertake activity that makes symbolic use of wordings. In modern literate societies, abilities based on social reaching are further extended into skills that use notational practices (e.g. letters, numbers, graphics). This opens up whole new fields or domains of languaging. Yet, ostensive use of symbols is plainly a cultural invention - not a direct legacy of hominin evolution.

Reading: How Readers Beget Imagining.

We trace reading to an embodied synthetic process that drives the rapid scales of imagining. As sensorimotor engagement with written artifacts permeates experience, it sharpens the sensibility that brings forth understanding. We thus trace material engagement with written artifacts to fine control over saccadic eye movements and voicing that draws on humans or what the Greeks knew as aisthesis. In reading, we identify aisthesis in how prereflective judgments punctuate the flow of engagement with written documents. While the study of reading often begins with "texts," we start with how written artifacts are put to use. We use cognitive ethnography to trace reading to how fine multiscalar coordination enables readers to engage with written artifacts such as books. Our ethnography of reading provides descriptions of how readers use sensorimotor activity to integrate understanding with saccading and actual or imagined vocalization in ways that show how reading connects sensorimotor schemata with highly skilled use of written artifacts. By pursuing the power of rapid multiscalar dynamics, we complement views of reading as slow-scale subjective experience. Rather than focus on interaction between a reader and an imagined author, we turn to coordinating with an affordance-rich environment. Human prereflective judgments demonstrably use collective experience with written signs. In fine-grained analysis of authentic data, we therefore track kinesthetic experience to how a child's vocalizations beget understanding and, at once, imagining. These observations show how engagement brings life to written signs by connecting other peoples' pasts with the use of gaze, gesture, voice, and touch. While describing saccades and bursts of vocalizing, we reach beyond analogies with interaction and, in so doing, the multiscalar approach takes enactive-ecological work beyond the slow interactional and social scales or reported experience. Imagining arises as readers use multiscalar happenings to bind the anticipated, the seen, and collective aspects of experience.

How peer-review constrains cognition: on the frontline in the knowledge sector.

Peer-review is neither reliable, fair, nor a valid basis for predicting 'impact': as quality control, peer-review is not fit for purpose. Endorsing the consensus, I offer a reframing: while a normative social process, peer-review also shapes the writing of a scientific paper. In so far as 'cognition' describes enabling conditions for flexible behavior, the practices of peer-review thus constrain knowledge-making. To pursue cognitive functions of peer-review, however, manuscripts must be seen as 'symbolizations', replicable patterns that use technologically enabled activity. On this bio-cognitive view, peer-review constrains knowledge-making by writers, editors, reviewers. Authors are prompted to recursively re-aggregate symbolizations to present what are deemed acceptable knowledge claims. How, then, can recursive re-embodiment be explored? In illustration, I sketch how the paper's own content came to be re-aggregated: agonistic review drove reformatting of argument structure, changes in rhetorical ploys and careful choice of wordings. For this reason, the paper's knowledge-claims can be traced to human activity that occurs in distributed cognitive systems. Peer-review is on the frontline in the knowledge sector in that it delimits what can count as knowing. Its systemic nature is therefore crucial to not only discipline-centered 'real' science but also its 'post-academic' counterparts.

Linguistic embodiment and verbal constraints: human cognition and the scales of time.

USING RADICAL EMBODIED COGNITIVE SCIENCE, THE PAPER OFFERS THE HYPOTHESIS THAT LANGUAGE IS SYMBIOTIC: its agent-environment dynamics arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints. As a result, co-action grants human agents the ability to use a unique form of phenomenal experience. In defense of the hypothesis, I stress how linguistic embodiment enacts thinking: accordingly, I present auditory and acoustic evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk, first, in fine detail and, then, in narrative mode. As the parties attune, they use a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings. The latter arise in making and tracking phonetic gestures that, crucially, mesh use of artifice, cultural products and impersonal experience. As observers, living human beings gain dispositions to display and use social subjectivity. Far from using brains to "process" verbal content, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources. On this distributed-ecological view, language can thus be redefined as: "activity in which wordings play a part."

Manual handling risks associated with the care, treatment and transportation of bariatric (severely obese) clients in Australia.

Carers of bariatric (morbidly obese) clients are exposed to manual handling injury risk throughout the journey that such clients take within the healthcare system. To identify the factors that affect risks associated with bariatric clients and the subsequent adoption of risk control measures focus groups were conducted in two Australian state capitals: a suburban region of Melbourne and a large regional Victorian town. Participants, were recruited from within the primary health care sector, ambulance services, fire services and funeral businesses. It was found that the risks to which nurses, ambulance officers, fire fighters, and funeral industry employees are exposed are significant. The injury risk is influenced by the nature and design of the range of environments within which client movement is undertaken; the limited range of handling equipment available for use with bariatric clients; and the efficacy of organisational procedures and training. Adoption of risk controls is hampered by the absence of a standard definition of the term ``bariatric'' and the gaps in information flow during the bariatric client journey through the health care system. Various definitions of bariatric are applied in different sectors and there are limitations to the use of both weight and body mass index in those definitions.