Dankert Vedeler

Bio: Dankert Vedeler is an academic researcher from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Life course approach & Dialogical self. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 12 publications receiving 215 citations. Previous affiliations of Dankert Vedeler include Uppsala University.

Human Development in the Life Course: Introduction: melodies of living

Abstract: Music is one of themain creations of human beings – they create it and live with it. Hence selecting the metaphor of a melody to be the core of our story of the human life course is not an accidental choice. Our lives are filled with melodies of various kinds and functions – ranging from the lullabies mothers sing to their babies to get them to sleep to the neverending flow of Christmas carols played in pre-New Year shopping places, to our own individual humming of favourite melodies when involved in somemundane activity. Themelodies of church bells, calls to prayer from the minarets of the mosques or marching bands leading public events are all examples of how deeply music saturates our lives. Melodies have permanence. If you know the music of Elvis Presley, Bach, Robert Smith or Ray Charles, then you will recognize immediately, after a few notes, a new or unknown version of one of their pieces. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with visual art, you will recognize in any museum, and at first sight, a piece as a Matisse, a Rembrandt or a Bruce Neumann.We live in a world of patterns –musical or visual – that we have created out of the need to live our human lives. Why is this so? Let us propose that it is a matter of style and of motives. In the musical creations by Shostakovich, for example, there is a certain atmosphere, coming from the composer’s time, his life in central Europe, his familiarity with traditional Moravian music as well as emerging jazz. Yet there are also, like a signature, little motives or musical phrases that appear, with all kinds of variation, inmost of his pieces – a specificmelody. Similarly, we identify people’s writing, or we recognize old friends from afar because of their general silhouette or their way of moving. If there is something so unique in each person’s externalization – their movements, paintings, expressions – than there is probably something unique, too, about their lives. And indeed, there is a unique way in which each of us lives through our life: how we understand it, what sorts of question we

Intentionality during Infancy and Early Childhood, Development of

Abstract: The usual distinction between philosophical intentionality and psychological concrete intentions is here disregarded. That allows for a broader approach for studying the development of intentionality. Cognitive science, relying heavily on the concept of representation (e.g., goal representations), is compared to dynamic systems approach, which does not need to assume representations. As an alternative to a description of the development of concrete intentions in terms of goal directedness, that is, in terms of representations, dynamic systems approach opens for a perspective on the development of intentionality that provides better insight to the complexity and adaptability of human intentional behavior.

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Abstract: Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Social Cognition, joint attention and communicative Competence from 9 to 15 months of age

Abstract: At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various ways. These behaviors have mostly been studied separately. In the current study, we investigated the most important of these behaviors together as they emerged in a single group of 24 infants between 9 and 15 months of age. At each of seven monthly visits, we measured joint attentional engagement, gaze and point following, imitation of two different kinds of actions on objects, imperative and declarative gestures, and comprehension and production of language. We also measured several nonsocial-cognitive skills as a point of comparison. We report two studies. The focus of the first study was the initial emergence of infants' social-cognitive skills and how these skills are related to one another developmentally. We found a reliable pattern of emergence: Infants progressed from sharing to following to directing others' attention and behavior. The nonsocial skills did not emerge predictably in this developmental sequence. Furthermore, correlational analyses showed that the ages of emergence of all pairs of the social-cognitive skills or their components were inter-related. The focus of the second study was the social interaction of infants and their mothers, especially with regard to their skills of joint attentional engagement (including mothers' use of language to follow into or direct infants' attention) and how these skills related to infants' early communicative competence. Our measures of communicative competence included not only language production, as in previous studies, but also language comprehension and gesture production. It was found that two measures--the amount of time infants spent in joint engagement with their mothers and the degree to which mothers used language that followed into their infant's focus of attention--predicted infants' earliest skills of gestural and linguistic communication. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of social-cognitive development, for theories of language development, and for theories of the process by means of which human children become fully participating members of the cultural activities and processes into which they are born.

From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work

Abstract: 1. Teams and the transformation of work 2. Disturbance management and masking in a television production team 3. Teamwork between adversaries: coordination, cooperation, and communication in a court trial 4. Displacement and innovation in primary care medical teams 5. Crossing boundaries in teacher teams 6. Knowledge creation in industrial work teams 7. Teams, infrastructures, and social capital 8. From iron cages to webs on the wind 9. Knotworking and agency in fluid organizational fields.

KARL BUHLER: THEORY OF LANGUAGE: The representational function of language

Abstract: Karl Buhler (1879-1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of this century. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) has been praised widely and gained considerable recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. The work has, however, resisted translation into English partly because of its spirited and vivid style, partly because of the depth and range of analysis, partly because of the great erudition of the author, who displays a thorough command of both the linguistic and the philosophical traditions. With this translation, Buhler's ideas on many problems that are still controversial and others only recently rediscovered, are now accessible to the English-speaking world.Contents: The work is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four “axioms” or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the “organon model”, the base of Buhler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by: Translator's preface; Introduction (by Achim Eschbach); Glossary of terms and Bibliography of cited works (both compiled by the translator); Index of names, Index of topics.