This paper argues that institutions are higher-level autonomous systems enacted by patterns of participatory sense-making. Therefore, unlike in the standard equilibrium theory, institutions are not themselves thought of as behavioural patterns. Instead, they are problem domains that these patterns have brought forth. Moreover, these are not merely any patterns, but only those devoted to maintaining a specific strategy of problem solving, called the strategy of ‘letting be’. The latter refers to, following Hanne de Jaegher, a balance between underdetermination and overdetermination (...) of individual behaviour by a collective. Such an understanding of institutions becomes an option once a hybrid ‘equilibrium + rules’ theory of institutions, such as the one proposed by Frank Hindriks, is supplemented with insights from enactivism. In this light, drawing a connection between these two areas is the additional, meta-theoretical goal of this paper. This connection is beneficial, I argue, in particular since it allows for a satisfactory, in-depth account of the normative character of institutions as well as their local character. (shrink)

I argue for an enactive account of musical experience — that is, the experience of listening ‘deeply’(i.e., sensitively and understandingly) to a piece of music. The guiding question is: what do we do when we listen ‘deeply’to music? I argue that these music listening episodes are, in fact, doings. They are instances of active perceiving, robust sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of sonic structures within musical pieces. Music is thus experiential art, and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘we listen to music (...) with our muscles’. This paper attempts to explicate and defend this claim. First, I discuss enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition generally. Next, I apply an enactive model of perceptual consciousness to the experience of listening to music. To clarify what is at stake, I use Peter Kivy’s ‘enhanced formalism’ as a philosophical foil. I then look at how the animate body shapes musical experience. (shrink)

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied (...) action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime (...) trails that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of (...) dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.

This chapter offers the beginning of an enactive account of auditory experience—particularly the experience of listening sensitively to music. It investigates how sensorimotor regularities grant perceptual access to music qua music. Two specific claims are defended: (1) music manifests experientially as having complex spatial content; (2) sensorimotor regularities constrain this content. Musical content is thus brought to phenomenal presence by bodily exploring structural features of music. We enact musical content.

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on (...) human becoming as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to emotion are rare and to anxiety and anxiety disorder even more. This article aims to show how an enactive paradigm might be helpful in solving some problems in the clinical and scientific understanding of anxiety and anxiety disorder. I begin by pointing at a number of relevant clinical features of anxiety and anxiety disorder and by sketching how and why anxiety theories have difficulties with doing justice to these features. I specifically focus on two themes: (...) a) how to conceptualize anxiety as the expression of a dynamical interaction with the environment instead of as just a reaction to the environment (or to... (shrink)

Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of (...) social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. This process may be described (1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents; (2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality. Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood. (shrink)

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant (...) to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care. (shrink)

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social (...) cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in (...) order to generate a sense of the conceptual space in which this research is going on. I focus on the concepts of sense-making, Umwelts, affordances, cultural niches, epistemic actions, environmental scaffolding, and mental institutions. Despite differences in focus and detail these influences share an underlying world-view; that cognition is relational and world-involving. This way of thinking has clear resonances with dominant approaches in non-Western philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to generate in the reader a sense of this shared extended-enactive world-view in order to open up a space for communication between approaches. (shrink)

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st (...) and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation. (shrink)

The need for a model -- Currently available models in psychiatry -- Introduction to enactivism -- Body and mind - and world -- The existential dimension and its role in psychiatry -- Enriched enactivism : existential sense-making, values, and socio-cultural worlds -- Enactive psychiatry : psychiatric disorders are disorders of sense-making -- An enactive approach to causes, diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

This chapter describes the concept of enactive memory, which is quite new but increasingly discussed in contemporary philosophy of memory. Although the enactive approach has been used to investigate several memory sys- tems, e.g., procedural memory, episodic mem- ory, and autobiographical memory, this chapter focuses only on the enactive approach to epi- sodic memory because most of the current debate on enactive memory is about this mem- ory system. Section “Introduction” specifies what type of enactive (...) memory is discussed in this chapter. Section “The Concept of Enactive Memory” introduces the concept of enactive memory, clarifies its central theoretical com- mitments and goals, and describes how enactivists have explained episodic remember- ing. Section “The Philosophical Context of Enactive Memory” provides a brief contextu- alization of the enactive approach to memory with respect to approaches and theories with which, for one reason or another, it shares some theoretical insights, like the embodied, the extended, and the distributed approach, and the simulation theory. Section “Forgetting as a Challenge for Enactive Memory” explains why forgetting poses an important explanatory challenge to the enactive approach to memory and describes one philosophical proposal that has been developed to address this challenge. Section “Summary” provides a summary of the chapter, mentions some ongoing projects on enactive memory, and identifies some topics that advocates of the enactive approach to memory may want to investigate in the future. (shrink)

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make (...) it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions. (shrink)

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We end by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, in particular with respect to addiction research. (shrink)

The theory of autopoiesis is central to the enactive approach. Recent works emphasize that the theory of autopoiesis is a theory of sense-making in living systems, i.e. of how living systems produce and consume meaning. In this chapter I first illustrate (some aspects of) these recent works, and interpret their notion of sense-making as a bodily cognitive- emotional form of understanding. Then I turn to modern emotion science, and I illustrate its tendency to over-intellectualize our capacity to evaluate and (...) understand. I show that this overintellectualization goes hand in hand with the rejection of the idea that the body is a vehicle of meaning. I explain why I think that this over-intellectualization is problematic, and try to reconceptualize the notion of evaluation in emotion theory in a way that is consistent and continuous with the autopoietic notion of sense-making. (shrink)

In this paper I advance an enactive view of affectivity that does not imply that affectivity must stop at the boundaries of the organism. I first review the enactive notion of “sense-making”, and argue that it entails that cognition is inherently affective. Then I review the proposal, advanced by Di Paolo, that the enactive approach allows living systems to “extend”. Drawing out the implications of this proposal, I argue that, if enactivism allows living systems to extend, then (...) it must also allow sense-making, and thus cognition as well as affectivity, to extend—in the specific sense of allowing the physical processes underpinning these phenomena to include, as constitutive parts, non-organic environmental processes. Finally I suggest that enactivism might also allow specific human affective states, such as moods, to extend. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of the cognitive niche and distinguishes the latter from the metabolic niche. By using these posits I unpack certain ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, especially for its original formulation proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosh. Drawing on the ontology of location, boundaries, and parthood, I argue that enacting the world can be seen as the process of cognitive niche construction. Moreover, it turns out that enactivism—as seen through the lens of the conceptual (...) framework proposed in the paper—considers cognition as a kind of connection between the subject and the world. This post is pointed to as the key idea laid down in enactivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the problem of the self through bringing together the insights, while correcting some of the shortcomings, of Indo–Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. I begin with an examination of the Buddhist theory of non-self ( anātman ) and the rigorously reductionist interpretation of this doctrine developed by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism. After discussing some of the fundamental problems for Buddhist reductionism, I turn to the enactive approach to philosophy of mind (...) and cognitive science. I argue that human beings, as dynamic systems, are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy. Therefore, human beings are not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them. I critically examine Francisco Varela’s enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas in support of this view. I argue, in contrast, that while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally I sketch a Buddhist-enactivist account of the self. I argue for a non-reductionist view of the self as an active, embodied, embedded, self-organizing process—what the Buddhists call ‘I’-making ( ahaṃkāra ). This emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. In Buddhist terms, I will develop an account of the self as dependently originated and empty, but nevertheless real. (shrink)

What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive (...) communicative approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction and communication, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. To build an ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the affordance-based approach of the skilled intentionality framework (SIF). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances in the sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. The human econiche offers a whole (...) landscape of affordances, and situated individuals respond to a field of relevant affordances. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing. Predictive processing accounts indicate that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors. Autistic persons depend heavily on current sensory information and less on prior beliefs and cannot attune to stable regularities. To reduce uncertainty, they over-rely on routines, strict habits, and a familiar environment—a predictable ecological niche they construct. I argue that skilled intentionality gives us the framework from which to analyze the autistic field of affordances. Autistic patterns of affordance-related bodily states of action readiness are only sensitive to very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip in well-known situations. Autism is to be understood as a disorder of bodily normativity. Taking this approach helps us figure out what neurotypical people can do to attune their environment in order to scaffold the needs of autistic individuals by redesigning the landscape of affordances. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we (...) argue, entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between basic and higher (...) cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main (...) purpose of this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of theenactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of (...) this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

This mixed methods research study investigated if explicit instruction could affect EFL teachers’ perceptions and practices of classroom justice considering its three-dimensional conceptualization based on the social psychology theories of justice, encompassing the distributive, interactional, and procedural justice. To this end, 77 Iranian English as a Foreign Language teachers, chosen through maximum variation sampling, attended a four-session online justice-training course. The data were collected both before and after the course intervention through close- and open-ended questionnaires. Quantitative data analysis results, obtained (...) through running paired samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signed ranks tests, indicated that except for the distributive component, the treatment was effective in significantly enhancing the Iranian EFL teachers’ procedural, interactional, and total classroom justice perceptions. Content analysis of the posttest qualitative data, done through MAXQDA, revealed that the participants approved the course usefulness, its significance, and uses of justice enactment strategies in their classroom. Furthermore, they confirmed positive changes in their conceptions and practices of justice because of attending the course and showed enthusiasm in attending more such courses in the future. The convergence of the quantitative and qualitative results in this study demonstrated the effectiveness of the justice-oriented training course for enhancing EFL teachers’ just classroom behaviors. Hence, the results would be fruitful for teacher educators aiming to promote the pre- and in-service EFL teachers’ professional effectiveness through explicit instruction on classroom justice and its use in teacher education programs. (shrink)

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this (...) impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment (which is sometimes labeled “basic” cognition) depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative (...) explanatory gap between basic and higher cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

Context: The founding idea of neurophenomenology is that in order to progress in the understanding of the human mind, it is indispensable to integrate a disciplined study of human experience in cognitive neuroscience, an integration which is also presented as a methodological remedy for the “hard problem” of consciousness. Problem: Does neurophenomenology succeed in solving the hard problem? Method: I distinguish two interpretations and implementations of neurophenomenology: a light or “mild” neurophenomenology, which aims at building correlations between first-person descriptions and (...) neural recordings, and tries to evaluate the validity of first-person descriptions through objective criteria; and a deep or radical neurophenomenology, which aims at investigating the process of co-constitution of the subjective and the objective poles, within lived experience, and tries to evaluate first-person descriptions through processual criteria. Results: While mild neurophenomenology does not solve the hard problem, radical neurophenomenology solves it by dissolving it. Exploring the early stages of phenomenal processes such as the emergence of a perception or an idea highlights: a dimension of experience where the separation usually perceived between the subjective and the objective poles vanishes; micro-actions that instant after instant create and support this process of co-constitution, which Varela called “enaction.” This involves on the one hand experiencing concretely the dissolution of the hard problem, and on the other hand verifying the theory of enaction in lived experience. Implications: Radical neurophenomenology is a research programme that enables us to investigate precisely the mutual unfolding of the subjective and objective poles, from its most primitive phases such as perceptual events, to its latest phases such as the co-construction of scientific objectivity and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and (...) language is not an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that the enactive approach presents open-ended cultivation of virtue as embodied, contextualized, and dynamic know-how and destabilizes an individualist metaphysics. Putting this framework to work, we turn to the interactional challenges of conversations that concern differences and that involve potentially oppositional parties, offering a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. Finally, we make explicit Rankine’s normative project of mindful navigation of multiple perspectives in an interaction. We abstract three interrelated spheres of participatory intervention: location, language, and labor. These also indicate routes for empirical investigation into complex perspective-taking in dynamic interactions. (shrink)

This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, (...) and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Enactive approaches highlight the deep interdependency of brains, action, agency, and environment in shaping the world we inhabit. This perspective goes beyond input-output models of cognition, postulating instead closed loops of action and perception framed by the agent-environment complementarity. As a unique, dynamical, system, no representational recovery is required for cognitive-behavioral experience to take place.

Following the philosophy of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if (...) distributed) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cognition. It does so first (...) by articulating a diachronic constitutive account for how embodied engagement can play a constitutive role in social cognition. It then proceeds to consider an objection; the causal-constitutive fallacy (Adams & Aizawa 2001, 2008; Block 2005) against enactive social cognition. The paper proceeds to deflate this objection by establishing that the distinction between constitution and causation is not co-extensive with the distinction between internal constitutive elements and external causal elements. It is then shown that there is a different reason for thinking that an enactive account of social cognition is problematic. We call this objection the ‘poverty of the interactional stimulus argument’. This objection turns on the role and characteristics of anticipation in enactive social cognition. It argues that anticipatory processes are mediated by an internally realised model or tacit theory (Carruthers 2015; Seth 2015). The final part of this paper dissolves this objection by arguing that it is possible to cast anticipatory processes as orchestrated as well as maintained by sensorimotor couplings between individuals in face-to-face interaction. (shrink)

The notion of “enaction,” as originally expounded by Varela and his colleagues, was introduced into cognitive science as part of a broad philosophical framework combining science, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy. Its intention was to help the researchers in the field avoid falling prey to various dichotomies bedeviling modern philosophy and science, and serve as a “conceptual evocation” of “non-duality” or “groundlessness: an ongoing and irreducible circulation between the flux of lived experience and the search of reason for conceptual invariants, is (...) to function as conceptual evocations of this back-and-forth exchange between knowing and being. However, if this overall framework is discarded, as is often the case in contemporary accounts, enaction loses its radical impetus and becomes mellowed down to yet another version of naturalized epistemology. Implications: Taking the notion of enaction seriously implies a radical shift in our conceptions of science and knowledge, as it encompasses a theoretical and existential move away from a detached observer to embedded and engaged cognizer. Thus, our manner of thinking can no longer be considered in isolation from our manner of being, which indicates a deep interconnection between epistemology and ethics, and may entail profound changes in the definition of the aims, methods, and values of the research community: self-transformation as a consequence of, and condition for, understanding. Constructivist content: The target article advocates a critical approach to realist presuppositions in contemporary science and philosophy, and emphasizes a deep interrelation between being and knowing, between ethics and epistemology. (shrink)

Using an enactive approach to trail runners’ activity, this study sought to identify and characterize runners’ phenomenological gestalts, which are forms of experience that synthesize the heterogeneous sensorimotor, cognitive and emotional information that emerges in race situations. By an in-depth examination of their meaningful experiences, we were able to highlight the different typologies of interactions between bodily processes (e.g., sensations, pains), behaviors (e.g., actions, strategies) and environment (e.g., meteorological conditions, route profile). Ten non-professional runners who ran an ultra-trail running (...) race (330 kilometers, 24,000 meters of elevation gain) volunteered to participate in the study. Data were collected in two steps: (1) collection of past activity traces (i.e., race maps, field notes and self-assessment scales) and (2) enactive interviews using the past activity traces in which the runners were invited to relive their experience and describe their activity. The enactive interviews were coded using the course-of-experience methodology to identify the phenomenological gestalts that emerged from activity and scaffolded the runners’ courses of experience. The results revealed that runners typically enact three phenomenological gestalts: controlling global ease, enduring general fatigue and experiencing difficult situations, and feeling freedom in the running pace. These phenomenological gestalts were made up of specific behaviors, involvements and meaningful situated elements that portrayed various ways of achieving an ultra-endurance performance in the race situation. They also highlighted how runners enact a meaningful world by acting in relation to the fluctuations in physical sensations and environmental conditions during an ultra-trail race. Practical applications for preparation, race management and sports psychology interventions are proposed to enrich the existing recommendations. In conclusion, this approach provides new research perspectives by offering a more holistic grasp of activity in trail running through an in-depth analysis of athletes’ experience. In doing so, we may expect that runners can connect these typical gestalts to their own personal experiences and stories as trail runners in order to sustain a viable approach to their sport. (shrink)

We propose a new conceptualization of pain by incorporating advancements made by phenomenologists and cognitive scientists. The biomedical understanding of pain is problematic as it inaccurately endorses a linear relationship between noxious stimuli and pain, and is often dualist or reductionist. From a Cartesian dualist perspective, pain occurs in an immaterial mind. From a reductionist perspective, pain is often considered to be “in the brain.” The biopsychosocial conceptualization of pain has been adopted to combat these problematic views. However, when considering (...) pain research advancements, paired with the work of phenomenologists’ and cognitive scientists’ advanced understanding of perception, the biopsychosocial model is inadequate in many ways. The boundaries between the biological, psychological, and social are artificial, and the model is often applied in a fragmented manner. The model has a limited theoretical foundation, resulting in the perpetuation of dualistic and reductionist beliefs. A new framework may serve to better understand and treat pain. In this paper, we conceptualize pain as a 5E process, arguing that it is: Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Emotive, and Extended. This perspective is applied using back pain as an exemplar and we explore potential clinical applications. With enactivism at the core of this approach, pain does not reside in a mysterious immaterial mind, nor is it an entity to be found in the blood, brain, or other bodily tissues. Instead, pain is a relational and emergent process of sense-making through a lived body that is inseparable from the world that we shape and that shapes us. (shrink)

In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancière’s response to Arendt’s aporetic account of human rights, situating this in (...) relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancière, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoë) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoë and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancière ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancière’s approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life. (shrink)

Abstract:I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are (...) hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction. (shrink)

This article discusses R. G. Collingwood’s account of re-enactment and Donald Davidson’s account of radical translation. Both Collingwood and Davidson are concerned with the question “how is understanding possible?” and both seek to answer the question transcendentally by asking after the heuristic principles that guide the historian and the radical translator. Further, they both agree that the possibility of understanding rests on the presumption of rationality. But whereas Davidson’s principle of charity entails that truth is a presupposition or heuristic principle (...) of understanding, for Collingwood understanding rests on a commitment to internal consistency alone. Collingwood and Davidson diverge over the scope of the principle of charity because they have radically different conceptions of meaning. Davidson endorses an extensional semantics that links meaning with truth in the attempt to extrude intensional notions from a theory of meaning. Since radical translation rests on a truth-conditional semantics, it rules out the possibility that there may be statements that are intelligible even though based on false beliefs. Collingwood’s account of re-enactment, on the other hand, disconnects meaning from truth, thereby allowing for the possibility of understanding agents who have false beliefs. The paper argues, first, that Davidson’s account of radical translation rests on inappropriately naturalistic assumptions about the nature of understanding, and that Davidson commits this error because he develops his account of radical interpretation in response to an epistemological question that is motivated by a skeptical concern: “how can we know whether we have provided the correct interpretation?” Second, that in the twentieth century far too much philosophizing has been driven by epistemological concerns that have obscured attempts to provide adequate answers to the sort of conceptual question with which Collingwood is concerned, namely: “what does it mean to understand?”. (shrink)

New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind—those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has had some success in understanding how (...) sports skills and expertise are acquired. But, REC approaches appear to encounter a natural obstacle when it comes to understanding skill acquisition in knowledge-rich, conceptually based domains like the hard sciences and mathematics. This paper offers a proof of concept that REC’s reach can be usefully extended into the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially when it comes to understanding the deep roots of such learning. In making this case, this paper has five main parts. The section “Ancient Intellectualism and the REC Challenge” briefly introduces REC and situates it with respect to rival views about the cognitive basis of learning. The “Learning REConceived: from Sports to STEM?” section outlines the substantive contribution REC makes to understanding skill acquisition in the domain of sports and identifies reasons for doubting that it will be possible to apply the same approach to knowledge-rich STEM domains. The “Mathematics as Embodied Practice” section gives the general layout for how to understand mathematics as an embodied practice. The section “The Importance of Attentional Anchors” introduces the concept “attentional anchor” and establishes why attentional anchors are important to educational design in STEM domains like mathematics. Finally, drawing on some exciting new empirical studies, the section “Seeing Attentional Anchors” demonstrates how REC can contribute to understanding the roots of STEM learning and inform its learning design, focusing on the case of mathematics. (shrink)

I propose a systematic survey of the various attitudes proponents of enaction (or enactivism) entertained or are entertaining towards representationalism and towards the use of the concept “mental representation” in cognitive science. For the sake of clarity, a set of distinctions between different varieties of representationalism and anti-representationalism are presented. I also recapitulate and discuss some anti-representationalist trends and strategies one can find the enactive literature, before focusing on some possible limitations of eliminativist versions of enactive anti-representationalism. These (...) limitations are here taken as opportunities for reflecting on the fate of enactivism in its relations with representationalism and anti-representationalism. (shrink)

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design. This enactive framework is in part developed through the Material Engagement Theory (...) put forward by Lambros Malafouris, in part from the phenomenologically inspired philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Both advance temporality, technics and technique as key to understanding human creative imagination and their work can support each other in different ways; Stiegler allows for a theorisation of digital tools largely missing from the cognitive archaeology of Malafouris, whilst Malafouris provides a cognitive theory to further develop key ideas in Stiegler’s philosophy. Bringing their work together through Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, I develop the concept of enactive individuation and apply this to the analysis of a case of robotic design and fabrication from my fieldwork with digital architects and engineers. This case allows for further exploration of how enactivism might productively be extended into the digital realm by underscoring the explorative engagement at heart of even highly systematic work with computers and software. (shrink)