Building intellectual infrastructure to expose and understand ever-increasing complexity

This paper comments on the expanded repertoire of techniques, conceptual frameworks, and perspectives developed to study the phenomena of gesture, bodily action and other modalities as related to thinking, learning, acting, and speaking. Certain broad issues are considered, including (1) the distinction between “contextual” generalization of instances across context (of virtually any kind—numeric, situational, etc.) and the generalization of structured actions on symbols, (2) fundamental distinctions between the use of semiotic means to describe specific situations versus semiosis serving the process of generalization, and (3) the challenges of building generalizable research findings at such an early stage in infrastructure building.