rejects active or new behaviours on its part by cutting off its vocalisations and
movements with dominating signals of her own. She largely restricts approval signals,
including relaxing the crowding, and reducing the magnitude of her gesturing, as well as
expressing comfort through vocalisation, facial signalling and touch, to moments when
the infant begins to quieten down. It’s not particularly surprising, then, that it does
quieten down.
The mother’ s behaviour includes salient, repeated, features which are apt for learning.
Her patterns of hand gesturing, for example, could at the outset be iconic of the whole
episode including her behaviour and the infant’ s becoming quiet, but, when repetition
allows the gesture to be individuated and recognised in its own right, go on to become an
indexical cue that quietness should follow. The infant’ s responses then become indexical
for the mother of the degree to which the child is co-operative, well-behaved, or, more
plainly, ‘good’. Caregiver descriptions of infant behaviour at these times, manifest either
in their explicit vocalisations to the child, including references to being ‘good’, or
references to possible disciplinary sanctions such as ‘kuza baba manje’ (‘where’s your
father now?’) or, in interviews following the video-taping, show that infant behaviour
even at this early age is being classified in line with culturally specific expectations of
good and bad behaviour. And a crucial part of what makes for a ‘good’ child is
responding in ways sensitive to what caregiver behaviour is actually about, strikingly in
controlling episodes such as the one just described, which make possible the earliest
ascriptions of ‘obedience’, ‘co-operativeness’ and so forth.
These ascriptions are over-interpretations. They are, though, necessary over-
interpretations, insofar as they motivate caregivers to imbue their own behaviour with
regularities manifest regularities in their own behaviour which are then available as
structure in the interactional environment for (learning by) the infant. A further episode
from our data, in this case concerning a child of around four months, illustrates this point
about over-interpretation. In it an infant repeatedly vocalises in ways which to its
mother, at least, are suggestive of its saying ‘up’. Each time she says ‘up?’, or ‘you want
to go up?’ and after a few repetitions she lifts the child. Prior to the lifting, there is little
evidence that the child actually wants to be lifted, or that it has its attention focussed on
anything in particular, except perhaps its own experiments in vocal control. When it is
lifted, though, it beams widely. Whatever it did want, if anything, it is now, we suggest,
one step closer to figuring out how to behave in ways that lead to its being lifted up.14
Still on the subject of lifting, consider the common gesture made around the eighth
month by infants who want to be picked up (that is, who subsequently smile or otherwise
show approval when they are picked up following such a gesture): a simultaneous
raising, or flapping, of both arms (see Lock 1991). This gesture is not simply copied
from common adult behaviours. In the terms we are using here it is partly iconic, in
virtue of being a common posture of infants while they are in fact being held up, and
partly indexical, in virtue of being able to stand on its own as an indicator of ‘being up’,
as well as being symbolically interpretable as an invitation to lift, or a request to be
lifted. Such gestures are, importantly, serviceable label candidates, in virtue of being
amenable to disembedding from behaviour, and eventually coming under deliberate
control. An infant need not want to be lifted the first few times it makes such a gesture, it
has only to be able to notice that the gesture tends to be followed by liftings.
If and when such learning takes place, it does so in the affectively charged environment
we have briefly described. We want to bring discussion of the current example to a close
by suggesting a way in which these interactions should be regarded as a further example
of how minds can be extended through action. Clark and Chalmers’ suggestion is that
paradigmatically mental states and processes can be realised by structures and resources
external to the brain. The world beyond the skull of any individual includes, of course,
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