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  • Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II by Lawrence J. Hatab
  • Robert S. Leib
HATAB, Lawrence J. Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality, and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. xiii + 313 pp. Cloth, $130.00

—For Hatab, proto-phenomenology describes the “first world” of a potentially phenomenological investigator—that time in human life before one has the means or aim of thematizing experience [End Page 384] from an explicitly philosophical standpoint. As such, this second installment in Hatab’s proto-phenomenology series is not about conscious knowers and believers, but about questioning backward, beyond the horizon of theoretical activity. Hatab argues that the first world has positive contours of its own, disputing many accounts of early childhood and of preliterate cultural milieux as deficient, undeveloped, or as on the way to rationality and literacy. His aim is thus to recoup certain ways of knowing and participating in culture that are often covered over by the modern posit of a natural, self-contained, self-consciously rational subject. This volume will be valuable as a stand-alone work for those interested in phenomenological methods, early cognitive development, primary language acquisition, and the cultural effects of widespread literacy.

As in the first volume, Hatab employs a consistent and contemporary set of terms circling around the posit of our “dwelling” in language, a concept that emphasizes the intimate connection between experience and the world. While clearly derived from Martin Heidegger, whose works Hatab has studied for “almost fifty years,” his notion of dwelling has been refined into a grounding concept particularly his own, stripped of the later Heidegger’s ontological concerns. He acknowledges that theoretical works about modes of nonlinguistic or nontheoretical experience present special questions about access to their objects. Nonetheless, he argues that proto-phenomenology remains productive as a hermeneutic enterprise—as “an explication of something implicit”—by employing indicative concepts, which point to “what is shown” in a child’s behavior or in practices of preliterate cultures. Taken as a hermeneutical concept, dwelling indicates the immersed and immersive “personal-social-environing world,” the triadic context out of which humans spin normative social structures, cultural values, existential meaning, and even scientific facts.

Chapter 1 is a summary of the first volume, which makes this book more or less self-contained. It provides succinct discussions of core notions in phenomenology, such as the lived world, projection, temporality, embodiment, and pluralism. Hatab also offers a concise glossary of key terms at the end. A reader approaching this work with systematic concerns should review this lexicon carefully after reading chapter 1 to solidify his sense of the whole before diving into the topical considerations, which drive the remaining chapters.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the primacy of embodied perceptual experience, beginning at birth, and on the typical development of language in children. These chapters are especially recommended for those with an interest in experimental philosophy or those in philosophy-adjacent fields, like developmental psychology or cognitive science, who are interested in imagining new experiments using the core insights of phenomenology.

Chapter 2 applies the lexicon of proto-phenomenology to the stage of “pre-reflective dwelling” typical of infants and young children, which Hatab argues “improves upon standard approaches to child development [End Page 385] that have emphasized exclusive conditions, scientific experimentation, and theoretical models of mentality.” The emphasis on empirical research here and in the chapter that follows betrays, I think, a desire for theories of development formulated using phenomenological concepts from the ground up. Hatab contents himself with things as they stand, however, identifying the resonances between his framework and recent “naturalistic” studies on role-playing, empathy, and interpersonal development conducted in the child’s normal environment and in interactions with caregivers.

Chapter 3 turns to language acquisition as an extension of prelinguistic, embodied, perceptual activities. Hatab provides interesting discussions of empirical studies that reveal the importance of imitation, joint attention, and habituation for a child’s original “immersion” in the world. Vygotsky’s theory of personal development is especially welcome here, as are Hatab’s discussions of temporality as an emergent property of language, and of how children learn to lie.

Chapters...

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