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Participatory Sense-Making: an enactive approach to social cognition

December 2007
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485-507

DOI:10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

Authors:

Hanne De Jaegher

Ezequiel Di Paolo

Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science

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.

Interaction influences coordination (interactional coordination), and coordination influences interaction or has a function for the interaction (functional coordination).

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Participatory sense-making

An enactive approach to social cognition

Hanne De Jaegher &Ezequiel Di Paolo

Published online: 5 October 2007

#Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract 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.

Keywords Social cognition .Enaction .Sense-making .Interaction process .

Coordination .Participatory sense-making .Autonomy

Introduction

Enaction is a promising and growing paradigm in cognitive science. However, there is

no well-rounded proposal for an enactive account of social cognition yet. This may

seem strange since enactivism, with its focused examination of the coupling between

agent and world and on experience as a full aspect of cognition and of cognition

research, seems to be a particularly promising arena for addressing unresolved

problems in the study of social cognition. Our aim in this paper is to sketch an

enactive account of social understanding that takes the properties of the interaction

process as its point of departure. In doing so, we hope to re-instill the notion of

‘interaction’–fashionable yet faded by casual usage –with a workable meaning.

Phenom Cogn Sci (2007) 6:485–507

DOI 10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

H. De Jaegher (*):E. Di Paolo

Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, Centre for Research in Cognitive Science,

University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

e-mail: H.De.Jaegher@sussex.ac.uk

Traditional approaches such as Theory of Mind theory and simulation theory have

had to endure anti-cognitivist arguments like the problems of homuncularity, the

absence of the body, and the threatening infinite regress of perspectives that are rule-

based at the pragmatic level and therefore can never account for meaning-generating

processes. Apart from that, there is a recognition that explanation and prediction may

not be at the centre of our everyday social practice. Over-emphasis on the latter skills

has led most of contemporary social cognitive science to paint a picture of individuals

who have to work out each other’s minds much like they do with scientific problems.

In this view, what counts as ‘social’differs from non-social problem-solving merely as

a matter of degree. These worries have led to a call for embodied alternatives, which

have been duly proposed. However, even though their proponents recognise the need

for a perspective change that does proper justice to the situatedness and embodiment

of the social subject, they often remain themselves methodologically individualistic.

That the importance of the interaction process is recognised in these circles is without

doubt (Gallagher 2001;2004;Hutto2004;2007;Ratcliffe2007;Thompson2001).

What we now need, however, is to move beyond recognition and work out what the

interaction process does for social cognition.

When we talk about social interaction in this paper, we refer to the face-to-face

encounters of everyday life. These encounters range from brief and superficial to

deep and extensive. At the affective level, they reach from leaving their participants

cold to changing their life forever. They take place in many different situations,

which can have more or less of an impact on what can and does get conveyed

between the interaction partners. We are concerned here with what, in social science,

is called the micro-level (not the macro-level of how societies form, live or change).

At this level, we focus on the common patterns found in the widest possible range of

social interactions, i.e. not restricted to linguistic or even human ones. Furthermore,

for reasons of simplification, we take as a model the dyadic interaction. We are

aware that interactions between more than two participants may present their own

characteristics, but we expect that many of the properties examined in this paper will

extend into those cases as well. With these caveats in mind we hope to lay a

foundation from which more specific future analyses can follow.

This intuitive scope has to be clarified by a proper definition of social interaction,

which we provide later in the paper. First, we introduce the enactive notion of sense-

making. Then we extend it into the social domain, passing through an analysis of the

interaction process in dynamical terms, and propose participatory sense-making as a

starting point for a richer account of social understanding. Finally, we outline some

implications emanating from this proposal.

Sense-making

There exist wider and narrower conceptions of ‘enaction’. Today we find a variety of

applications of this term, often sharing a family resemblance. In this paper, we

restrict its use to a well-defined set of ideas that together constitute a new approach

to cognitive science. These ideas have been articulated in the writings of Francisco

Varela and colleagues (Thompson 2007; Torrance 2005; Varela et al. 1991) and link

several themes centred around the role of life, self-organization, experience and the

486 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

animate body in shaping cognition as an ongoing and situated activity. When

referring to the enactive approach in this paper we will be referring specifically to

these central concepts.

Rather than being a set of all radically novel ideas, the enactive approach is better

construed as a synthesis of some new but also some old themes. Overall, the enactive

perspective is a kind of non-reductive naturalism. It sees the properties of living and

cognitive systems as part of a continuum and consequently advocates a scientific

program that explores several phases along this dimension. We identify five core ideas

that define the enactive paradigm. These are the mutually supporting concepts of

autonomy,sense-making,embodiment,emergence,andexperience (Di Paolo, Rohde

and De Jaegher 2007;Thompson2005,2007; Varela et al. 1991). We will not attempt

anything beyond the briefest of descriptions of these important concepts here.

The enactive approach takes as its point of departure the organizational properties

of living organisms that make them paradigmatic cases of cognisers. One such

crucial property is the constitutive and interactive autonomy that living systems

enjoy by virtue of their self-generated identity as distinct entities in constant material

flux. An autonomous system is defined as a system composed of several processes

that actively generate and sustain an identity under precarious conditions. To

generate an identity in this context is to possess the property of operational closure.

This is the property that among the enabling conditions for any constituent process

in the system one will always find one or more other processes in the system (i.e.,

there are no processes that are not conditioned by other processes in the network –

which does not mean, of course, that conditions external to the system cannot be

necessary as well for such processes to exist). By precarious we mean the fact that in

the absence of the organization of the system as a network of processes, under

otherwise equal physical conditions, isolated component processes would tend to run

down or extinguish. Similar constitutive and interactive properties have been

proposed to emerge at different levels of identity-generation, including sensorimotor

and neuro-dynamical forms of autonomy (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher 2007;

Moreno and Etxeberria 2005; Thompson 2007; Varela 1979,1997).

Such a view of cognitive systems as autonomous rejects the traditional poles of

seeing cognisers as responding to environmental stimuli on the one hand, and as

satisfying internal demands on the other –both of which fail to give the autonomous

agent its proper ontological status and subordinate it to a passive role of obedience.

A key principle of the enactive approach is that the organism is a centre of activity in

the world. The relation of emergence between novel forms of identity (e.g.,

integrated sensorimotor engagements as emerging from neural, bodily and

environmental dynamics) is one whereby the coupling between the emergent

process and its context leads to constraints and modulation of the operation of the

underlying levels (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher 2007; Thompson 2007;

Thompson and Varela 2001). Taking emergence seriously makes the enactive

approach very skeptical about the localisation of function at one level in specific

components at a lower level (homuncularity) and consequently it leads to the

rejection of ‘boxology’as a valid method to address the ‘how does it work’question.

For the enactive approach, cognition is embodied action. In a concrete and

practical sense, a cognitive system is embodied to the extent to which its activity

depends non-trivially on the body. This is close to expressing a tautology: cognition

Participatory sense-making 487

cannot but be embodied. But pointing to this has been (and still is) necessary in the

computational/representational climate that gave rise to the embodied turn in cognitive

science. Far from being a controlled puppet, the animate body is the autonomous locus

and means for significant activity. But in order for this message not to dilute, it is

important to do much more than just say that cognition is embodied (Sheets-Johnstone

1999). The debate must be moved to the concrete realm of seeing exactly how the

animate body in its world is a mind. Abstract discussions of embodiment tend to be

rather impoverished and defenders of the role of the body in cognition have often

easily fallen back into disembodied patterns of thought (see discussion in Di Paolo,

Rohde and De Jaegher (2007)). The same indictment applies to taking experience

seriously (see also the discussion of ‘corporeal impersonalism’by Colombetti 2007).

For enaction, experience is central both methodologically and thematically. Far from

being an epiphenomenon or a puzzle –as it is for cognitivism –experience in the

enactive approach is intertwined with being alive and enacting a meaningful world. As

part of the enactive method, experience goes beyond being data to be explained. It

becomes a guiding force in a dialogue between phenomenology and science, resulting

in an ongoing pragmatic circulation and mutual illumination between the two

(Gallagher 1997; van Gelder 1999; Varela 1996,1999).

All these ideas (which we have hardly done justice to) will play a role in a fully-

fledged enactive theory of social cognition. But the central notion that best facilitates

our initial steps is that of sense-making.

Already implied in the notion of interactive autonomy is the realisation that

organisms cast a web of significance on their world. An organism that regulates its

coupling with the environment does so because there is a direction that this process

is aiming at: that of the continuity of the self-generated identity or identities that

initiate the regulation. This establishes a perspective on the world with its own

normativity, which is the counterpart of the agent being a centre of activity in the

world (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher 2007; Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007;

Varela 1997; Weber and Varela 2002). Exchanges with the world are inherently

significant for the cogniser and this is a definitional property of a cognitive system:

the creation and appreciation of meaning or sense-making in short. The distinction

between a strictly physical encounter and a cognitive one is to be found in the

dimension of significance for the cogniser itself that is characteristic only of the

latter class, even though cognitive interactions are themselves also physical

processes. Like few ideas in the past, the concept of sense-making strikes at the

heart of what is to be cognitive.

Reaffirming the implications of autonomy, sense-making is an inherently active

concept. Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments,

which they then translate into internal representations whose significant value is to

be added later. Natural cognitive systems are simply not in the business of accessing

their world in order to build accurate pictures of it. They actively participate in the

generation of meaning in what matters to them; they enact a world. Sense-making is

a relational and affect-laden process grounded in biological organization. The idea

that metabolism creates a perspective of value on the world has been defended by

Jonas (1966) and recently elaborated scientifically in terms of the theory of

autopoiesis (Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007; Varela 1991,1997; Weber and Varela

2002). Hence it does not promote a fissure between affect and cognition.

488 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

Traditional distinctions between action and perception arise only as the

specialisation of phases in an act of sense-making. Several examples that illustrate

this point have been discussed in the enaction literature, but perhaps the simplest and

clearest one is that of perceiving the softness of a sponge (Myin 2003). The softness

of a sponge is not to be found ‘in it’but in how it responds to the active probing and

squeezing of our appropriate bodily movements (e.g., with the fingers or the palms

of the hand). It is the outcome of a particular kind of encounter between a

‘questioning’agent with a particular body (sponges are solid ground for ants) and a

‘responding’segment of the world. The confluence of lawful co-variations in this

dialogue stabilises the cogniser’s sense-making into an object. Movements are at the

centre of mental activity: a sense-making agent’s movements –which include

utterances –are the tools of her cognition.

Based on these core ideas, can we speculate on what might be the central

concerns of an enactive theory of social cognition? Such a theory would be

concerned with defining the social in terms of the embodiment of interaction, in

terms of shifting and emerging levels of autonomous identity, and in terms of joint

sense-making and its experience. This is in contrast to defining the problematic of

the social as the expansion of a very narrow perspective that focuses on a problem

that might be caricaturised as that of figuring out someone else’s intentions out of

our individual observations of them; a sort of Rear Window approach to the social.

As we will see below, even embodied criticisms of cognitivist theories tend to

subscribe to some version of this approach as the framework for asking questions

about social cognition. This removed cognitive problem belongs indeed to a theory

of social understanding, but it has unfairly defined the flavour of most of the field at

the expense of downplaying the role of more engaged forms of interaction. One of

the main objectives of this paper is to shift the focus towards a view that is not

exclusively defined by individual cognitive mechanisms.

Participatory sense-making

Although several researchers have already started to regard problems in social

cognition from embodied perspectives (Gallagher 2001,2005,2007; Hutto 2004;

Klin et al. 2003; Thompson 2001), one motivation for our proposal is the

observation that they have not yet gone far enough in taking the interaction process

as central. For example, Gallagher’s‘embodied practice of mind’(whereby our

embodiment allows for a direct perception of the expressiveness of the other’s body,

Gallagher 2005) does not yet integrate a rich account of the interaction process and

its role in social understanding, even though it certainly recognises its importance

(Gallagher 2004). Once the point is made that the interaction is crucial, the next

thing we need to do is to clarify why and how this is so.

An account of our social capacities based solely on expressiveness can explain

why babies become distressed when their previously very engaging mother suddenly

sits very still and puts on an immobile, neutral face (Tronick et al. 1979). But it

cannot explain why, when mother and baby interact via a double TV monitor, it

seriously upsets the baby when the live footage of his mother is suddenly replaced

with a recording of her behaviour earlier in the same interaction (Murray and

Participatory sense-making 489

Trevarthen 1985). Here, we can be certain that it is not expressiveness that is

lacking, but the ongoing engagement that has been unhinged. If this (the lack of

contingency) disturbs the baby as much as the suddenly expressionless mother,

something crucial must also be going on in the interaction process itself.

Experientially this is not surprising –interactions often have an affective dimension

in the sense that we can feel varying degrees of connectedness with the other.

Dynamics of coordination

In order to put the process of interaction at the centre of our investigation, we borrow

some concepts from dynamical systems theory. In particular, we spend some time

describing the phenomenon of coordination between coupled systems. This allows

us to view interactions as processes extended in time with a rich structure that is only

apparent at the relational level of collective dynamics. Once we understand how

coordination arises, is sustained, changes, and breaks down during social encounters,

we will be in a position to make a connection between these temporal aspects of

interaction and their consequences for joint and individual sense-making.

For our purposes, we take coordination to mean the non-accidental correlation

between the behaviours of two or more systems that are in sustained coupling, or

have been coupled in the past, or have been coupled to another, common, system. A

correlation is a coherence in the behaviour of two or more systems over and above

what is expected, given what those systems are capable of doing. For instance, when

we observe a crowd of people walking on a busy road, the fact that they walk is not

surprising, and we do not label this a case of coordination since walking is one of the

things people do on a road (as opposed to, say, flying). But if we find that they are

all walking in the same direction this could be a correlation, and if we suspect that

this is not by accident, we can hypothesise the presence of a coordinating factor (for

instance, an anti-war demonstration).

Coordination is a ubiquitous phenomenon in physical and biological systems.

Pendulum clocks, for instance, synchronise their oscillations when in each other’s

vicinity through the minute vibrations they provoke on the wall (Winfree 2001).

Several physical systems exhibit similar behaviour even when their coupling (the

amount of influence that a system’s variables have on another’s parametrical

conditions) is weak. In biology, we also find many paradigmatic cases of

coordination. For instance, Buck and Buck (1976) describe a species of firefly that

lives in Southeast Asia, in which the individual flashing behaviour is synchronised at

the group level through the visual influence of the collective flashing pattern on the

individuals. These examples are merely indicators of the myriad of systems that

coordinate when coupled collectively that have been heavily studied in physics,

mathematical biology and dynamical approaches to cognition (e.g. Kelso 1995;

Kuramoto 1984; Port and van Gelder 1995; Winfree 2001).

One common finding in almost all these studies is that coordination is typically

easily achieved by simple mechanical means and, when cognitive systems are

involved, it does not generally require any cognitively sophisticated skill. On the

contrary, it is often hard to avoid. For instance, when asking pairs of subjects to

avoid synchronous oscillations while swinging a pendulum with their arms, Schmidt

and O’Brien (1997) found that their oscillations were independent (uncoordinated)

490 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

when not looking at each other, but presented strong tendency to phase-lock when

they were allowed to look at each other. When coordination is observed we need not

postulate dedicated individual mechanisms that sustain it, but rather, in general, it is

a phenomenon to be expected under a variety of conditions if the systems possess

broadly similar properties. A commonly encountered characteristic is that coordina-

tion happens at multiple timescales (Winfree 2001). It is also important to note that

synchronization is not the only kind of coordination; many cases of appropriately

patterned behaviour, such as mirroring, anticipation, imitation, etcetera are general

forms of coordination according to our definition.

An important feature of coordination, particularly with regard to fluid social

interactions, is that it does not have to be absolute or permanent. There are degrees

of coordination and coupled systems may undergo changes in the level of

coordination over time. Kelso (1995) uses the notions of absolute versus relative

coordination to illustrate this point. He gives the following example. Imagine a child

and an adult taking a walk together. Due to their different body sizes, they would

naturally tend to walk at a different pace, but we often find that they remain together

overall. In order for this to happen, one or the other has to adjust either the frequency

of their step or the length of their stride. To keep up with each other, the adult may

now and then slow down a bit, and the child may skip a step or two. This kind of

coordination is “far more variable, plastic and fluid... than pure phase locking”

(Kelso 1995, p. 98). Pure phase locking is a form of absolute coordination, where the

synchrony is perfect: two series of events are perfectly entrained (e.g. pairs of

duetting tropical birds that sing in perfect antiphonal coordination, see for instance

Thorpe 1972). In absolute coordination, transitions in the coupling of the systems

take place from one stable, perfectly locking state to another, or to non-coordination.

Relative coordination, in contrast, has a much wider range of possibilities, as there

are no such transitions from one strictly coherent state to another. Systems in relative

coordination do not entrain perfectly. Instead they show phase attraction, which

means that they tend to go near perfect synchrony, and move into and out of the zone

that surrounds it. This is a common phenomenon in biology (Cook 1991; Haken and

Köpchen 1991). Coordination can be like a swaying into and out of states that are

close to stable, but not quite. Eventually, it may break down altogether.

The autonomy of social interaction

While coordination is common to various kinds of coupled systems, it is of

particular interest when trying to understand social encounters. This concept allows

us to claim that social interaction constitutes a proper level of analysis in itself.

Several researchers in social science have recognised the importance of different

forms of coordination for understanding social interaction. There is indeed a

tradition within social science championed by figures such as Erving Goffman,

Harvey Sacks and others that starts from an understanding of interactive encounters

(see e.g. Goffman 1972,1983; Sacks 1992; Sacks et al. 1974). A whole field of

study is dedicated to uncovering behavioural coordination in interaction going under

different labels such as interaction studies, conversation analysis, gesture analysis

(see Schiffrin 1994). Within this field there is a debate about how to delineate

behaviour into the units to study, with sometimes rather arbitrary choices influencing

Participatory sense-making 491

the results (for instance, Jaffe and Feldstein 1970). It is also the case, in general, that

such studies do not amalgamate into a theoretical framework that has much concern

for the individual cogniser as such.

In order to bridge what we perceive as a gap between the social science and

cognitive science perspectives, we need to articulate how the individual and social

levels interrelate. The concept of coordination helps us to understand the social

interaction as an ongoing process. We must go beyond a view that defines interaction

as simply the spatio-temporal coincidence of two agents that influence each other. We

must move towards an understanding of how their history of coordination demarcates

the interaction as an identifiable pattern with its own internal structure, and its own

role to play in the process of understanding each other and the world.

Something that is not so common in cases of purely physical coupling, but that

we find in the social domain, is that patterns of coordination can directly influence

the continuing disposition of the individuals involved to sustain or modify their

encounter. In this way, what arises in the process of coordination (e.g. gestures,

utterances and changes in intonation that are sometimes labelled as back-channeling

or turn-repair, etc.) can have the consequence of steering the encounter or facilitating

(or not) its continuation. And the particular unravelling of these dynamics itself

influences what kinds of coordination are more likely to happen. This is due to the

fact that the interactors are highly plastic systems that are susceptible to being

affected by the history of coordination. When this double influence is in place (from

the coordination onto the unfolding of the encounter and from the dynamics of the

encounter onto the likelihood to coordinate) we say we are in the presence of a

social interaction. This emerging level is sustained and identifiable as long as the

processes described (or some external factor) do not terminate it.

In accordance with the core ideas of enaction, the above description is nothing

less than that of an emergent and autonomous process (Di Paolo, Rohde and De

Jaegher 2007; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Varela 2001; Varela 1979). It is,

however, typically a fleeting one. Even though normal social encounters, for

instance conversations, may only last a few minutes, our point is that during that

period they may organize themselves according to the two avenues of influence just

described: the agents sustain the encounter, and the encounter itself influences the

agents and invests them with the role of interactors. The interaction process emerges

as an entity when social encounters acquire this operationally closed organization. It

constitutes a level of analysis not reducible, in general, to individual behaviours.

This perspective bypasses the circularity that arises from pre-conceiving individuals

as ready-made interactors. Individuals co-emerge as interactors with the interaction.

This brings us to the further requirement for calling an interaction properly social.

Not only must the process itself enjoy a temporary form of autonomy, but the

autonomy of the individuals as interactors must also not be broken (even though the

interaction may enhance or diminish the scope of individual autonomy). If this were

not so, if the autonomy of one of the interactors were destroyed, the process would

reduce to the cognitive engagement of the remaining agent with his non-social

world. The ‘other’would simply become a tool, an object, or a problem for his

individual cognition (such a situation would epitomise what we have diagnosed

traditional perspectives on social cognition as suffering from: namely, the lack of a

properly social level).

492 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

We propose the following definition of social interaction:

Social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous

agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it

constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational

dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents

involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced).

The transfer of body heat, for instance when waiting for the bus at a crowded

stop, is not a social interaction. In this case, there is coupling between the agents, but

the coupling is not actively regulated by the agents involved so as to affect this

coupling itself. Bumping into each other on a busy street is not a social interaction in

the first instance, but it can become one once one or both of the parties start to

regulate the ensuing coupling. A conversation about a sponge is a social interaction,

because the participants decide upon the topic together, regulate beginning, course

and ending of the dialogue, and their autonomy (neither as living beings, nor as

conversation partners) is not destroyed in the process.

Thus, social interaction has two characteristics: (1) there is a coupling, which is

regulated so as to generate and maintain an identity in the relational domain. Thus,

the resulting relational dynamics are autonomous in the strict sense of precarious

operational closure given in this paper and define events and processes as either

internal or external to the interaction. And (2) the individuals involved are and

remain autonomous as interactors. In order to illustrate the autonomy of the

interaction, it is easy to think of interactions in which the participants have an

interest in sustaining it (e.g., an interesting conversation, an enjoyable dance). But

these would not exemplify the point well enough. It is much better to think of a

situation where the individual interactors are attempting to stop interacting but where

the interaction self-sustains in spite of this.

Consider the situation in a narrow corridor when two people walking in opposite

directions have to get past each other. They have to decide whether to continue walking

as they are, or shift their movement to the right or to the left. Occasionally, such

encounters unfold like this. Instead of choosing complementary movements that would

allow them to carry on walking, the individuals move into mirroring positions at the same

time. This unintended coordinated change in individual position creates a symmetrical

mirroring relation. This symmetry, in combination with the spatial constraints of the

corridor, increases the likelihood that the next move will also be a mirroring one (there

are not many other moves available). Thus, the coordination maintains a property of the

relational dynamics that forces the individuals to keep facing each other and

consequently to remain in interaction (in spite of, or rather because of, their efforts to

break from this situation). In addition, the interaction promotes individual actions that

tend to maintain the symmetrical coordination. Coordinated sideways movements

conserve symmetry and symmetry promotes coordinated sideways movements.

We may describe this relation as the mutual influence between coordination

patterns and the interaction process (Fig. 1). Here, the coordinated lateral shifts in

position are functional for the continuation of the interaction (not for the interactors’

intentions!) and so we call them functional coordination. And the relational

symmetry present in the interaction promotes certain patterns of coordination

(interactional coordination). Only when the symmetry is broken through some

Participatory sense-making 493

channel different from lateral position shifting (e.g., when one person invites the

other to move first) does the interaction finally break down. While it lasts, the

interaction shows the organization described above in terms of the mutual influence

between the individual actions and the relational dynamics. Here, we see that

interaction is not reducible to individual actions or intentions but installs a relational

domain with its own properties that constrains and modulates individual behaviour.

As we said above, there is a tendency in current approaches to social cognition to

acknowledge the importance of the interaction (see e.g. Gallagher 2001;Hutto2004;

Pickering and Garrod 2004), but as long as there is no explicit and focused attention to

this relational domain as illustrated in the example above, this emphasis on interaction

remains vacuous. In many of these approaches, the interaction seems merely an

addendum to a position that departs from what is really still an individualistic

perspective. In our opinion, any approach that mentions interaction, but fails to go into

the relational dynamics of the interaction process in detail, is simply not an interactive

account and probably not even a social one, despite the goodwill driving it. There are

other approaches that go further and not only recognise the importance of the

interaction but see in it a central and irreducible component of social cognition (e.g.

Auvray et al. 2006; Cowley 2007;Fogel1993;Gilletal.2000;Hobson2002;

Ratcliffe 2007; Shanker and King 2002; Trevarthen 1979; Tronick 2005). However,

what is still lacking is the articulation of a theoretical and methodological framework

that takes the interaction process as its point of departure. With the concept of

coordination and how it enables us to explicate the autonomy of the interaction

process, we have taken an alternative, inherently social route.

At the same time, it is vital to avoid the error of considering only the interaction

and ignoring the individual elements in it. Hence our emphasis on the autonomy of

the interactors throughout their engagement with each other in order for the

interaction to be considered properly social. For example, couple dancing involves

moving each other, making each other move, and being moved by each other. This

goes for both leader and follower. Following is part of an agreement and does not

equate with being shifted into position by the other. If the follower were to give up

her autonomy, the couple dancing would end there, and it would look more like a

doll being carried around the dance floor. The same goes for conversations: each

partner must engage from an autonomous standpoint. If conversational autonomy

were given up, neither partner would be able to influence the other. There are,

Fig. 1 Interaction influences coordination (interactional coordination), and coordination influences

interaction or has a function for the interaction (functional coordination)

494 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

however, interactions where one agent attempts to break (at least partly) the

autonomy of the other (e.g. coercion and torture). They do not always achieve this

goal, however, and when they do, in our view, they cease to be social at that point.

By escaping from the methodological individualism prevalent in today’s cognitive

science (Boden 2006), our perspective offers an important implication for

fashionable theories of social cognition. There is a strong tendency in recent

embodied proposals to rely on neurological mechanisms such as so-called mirror

neurons when explaining social understanding. Unfortunately, such explanations do

not address the need to see the interaction as a structured and structuring process. A

subject’s mirror neurons fire when he performs a goal-directed action and when he

perceives someone else doing it (Gallese et al. 1996). Even if these explanations had

no problems (but see de Vignemont and Singer 2006; Georgieff and Jeannerod

1998), in our view they remain within the problem-framework of a detached

individual trying to figure out the other; what we have earlier called the Rear

Window position. The problem of how such a figuring out participates in and is itself

shaped by coordination dynamics remains untouched. Appropriate correlations in

social activity are what we are trying to explain. Transferring their cause to a neural

correlation is simply to re-describe the problem. Explanations based on mirror

neurons provide no more than a snapshot view of how recognition of intentional

action could work. The problem is that the same recognition could equally be part of

a coordinated or un-coordinated period in an interaction, and the difference between

the two could not therefore be explained by this mechanism. It is this difference that,

we argue, plays a crucial role in how the interaction unfolds.

A similar problem results from attempts to explain social cognition by other forms

of pre-given coordination (i.e., coordinated tendencies of behaviour that pre-date the

encounter). These undoubtedly exist. How else would we be able to account for

situations where persons who have never met show the same table manners? In cases

like this, some level of structural congruence between these persons is already

present before the encounter thanks to previous interaction with culturally prevalent

behavioural norms –what Bourdieu calls the habitus (Bourdieu 1990). Even though

certain pre-dispositions to coordinate can play a great role in everyday interactions, a

view based on pre-dispositions foregoes the need and capacity to account for all the

possible influences on an interaction; biological, bodily, emotional, situational, and

cultural. A pre-disposition for a particular coordination may break down as a result

of these influences in a given situational context. An account of social cognition

should be able to explain how we cope with this, and we propose that this coping

happens in interaction. Imagine two people from France –where (for the sake of

We must acknowledge here that by autonomy of the interactors we should understand a possibly multi-

dimensional complex of identities that co-exist in what we call a subject, from his physical body, his

sensorimotor integration, his function in the interaction, to his broader contextual, relational and historical

roles. Complex interactions may result in the loss of the autonomy associated with a specific identity but

they are still social as long as other autonomous identities remain in interaction (e.g., a conversation where

an employee loses his job is a definitive blow to the sustained identity of the employee as such, but not to

the social agent that still enjoys his autonomy to express his reaction to the situation). We expect that even

though the proposed distinction holds in general (encounters are not social if an interactor’s autonomy is

lost), specific instances must be unpacked carefully in terms of what identities are at play in what we have

loosely termed an interactor.

Participatory sense-making 495

argument) people kiss each other on the cheek when saying goodbye –who meet for

the first time in Britain –where they both have been living for a number of years,

and where (again for the sake of the argument) strangers or even friends never kiss in

such situations. What will they do? We may expect a tension between the pre-

coordination given by their French habit and the present context. Faces may move in

probingly and cheeks may turn. Whether these two people kiss is determined by

their interactional coordination right there and then. On any other occasion the

outcome may be different. It is much like the two people attempting to pass each

other in the corridor. The solution depends on how the interaction and the individual

intentions eventually achieve (or not) a coordination.

In this section we have conceived of the interaction as an autonomous process.

One advantage of this view is that it allows us to understand the history of

coordination, breakdowns, and recoveries at different levels as elements that shape

the interaction throughout its history. Sustained interactions can be expected to have

undergone several instances of loss and regain of coordinating structures, each of

them leaving the interactors slightly better able to remain in such interaction or

reinitiate it –experientially, we often perceive some interactions as improving over

time, and the recovery from a breakdown as a sort of learning in which our previous

moves acquire new contextual significance. Viewing interactions from this

perspective is akin to understanding the growth of an adaptive system. Such a view

allows us to connect interaction dynamics with sense-making. We now turn to how

meaning is generated and transformed in social interactions.

Sense-makers interacting

In the previous subsection we have described how coordination happens in physical,

biological and social systems. Now we ask the question: how does coordination

affect the picture of social understanding? How does the physical, interactional

coordination of behaviour, in particular movements, relate to our capacity to share

meanings and to understand each other?

Previous work has looked at the relation between patterns of coordination and

affect. This is already a way of connecting the interaction dynamics with the

dimension of significance for the interactors. An initial proposal is that periods of

high temporal coordination (manifested in the form of synchrony of movements and

speech) relate to periods of high rapport between the interactors (Condon and

Ogston 1971; Kendon 1990). This observation seems intuitively right as it is indeed

possible to generally associate well-coordinated engagements with typically positive

affective experiences. Further research, however, has proposed that it is actually a

moderate amount of coordination that correlates most strongly with positive affect

(Jaffe et al. 2001). Everyday experience, though, seems to indicate that correlations

between rapport and coordination are not unequivocal. A highly-charged verbal fight

can sometimes demonstrate a good degree of coordination without the corresponding

affect being positive. The relation between patterns of coordination and their

implications for meaning should perhaps not be approached in terms of general

mappings between the two domains but rather in terms of how the processes

involved in the grasping and generation of meaning are affected by coordination

during interaction.

496 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

In socially interactive situations, coordination affects individual sense-making.

Individuals are constantly engaged in sense-making activity and this is also true in

social encounters. As an activity, sense-making is intentional and expressive; it is

essentially embodied in action. Thus, it is directly affected by the coordination of

movements in interaction. Indeed, the activities of sense-making may themselves

become coordinated. If regulation of social coupling takes place through

coordination of movements, and if movements –including utterances –are the

tools of sense-making, then our proposal is: social agents can coordinate their sense-

making in social encounters. This means that the sense-making of interactors

acquires a coherence through their interaction and not just in their physical

manifestation, but also in their significance. This is what we call participatory

sense-making: the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby

individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-

making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own.

The coherence of sense-making activities and the coordination patterns that

enable it do not relate as simple mappings but in a range of ways that can be

conceived as sitting on a spectrum of participation (see Fig. 2). On one end of the

scale, we find cases where sense-making remains largely an individual activity that

is at most modulated by the existence of coordination in interaction. At the other end

of the spectrum, where participation is highest, we find the sophisticated cases where

we fully and directly participate in a joint process of sense-making and the whole

sense-making activity becomes a shared one.

In what ways does coordination affect the process of sense-making? Firstly, we

can illustrate how the patterns of coordination (and breakdowns in coordination) can

directly influence the significance of a situation for the individual sense-makers.

Consider a dialogue over a low quality video conferencing line where there is a short

time delay. Pauses between turns are unavoidable in this channel. But even when the

interactors are aware of these technical constraints, they are often affected by the

potential significance of a pause as they may not be certain of its cause. This kind of

situation shows how properties of the interaction dynamics may alter the sense-

Fig. 2 Spectrum of degrees of participation in sense-making

Participatory sense-making 497

making of each individual without this change being intended by either. Consider the

following conversation (Ruhleder and Jordan 2001, p. 121):

A: That was a pretty good presentation.

(Pause)

A: If you’re into that kind of work.

B: Well, I suppose someone has to do it.

Because B did not respond immediately, A –anticipating a disagreement –

rephrased what she said, slightly diminishing her praise, and thus altering its

meaning. B, who may have initially shared A’s enthusiasm has now adjusted to the

more moderate view. This example illustrates two things: (1) how the individual

sense-making activities become adjusted through the situation and how a shift in

meaning is in this case created by the interaction dynamics and not just the

individuals, and (2) that a crucial element in this adjustment is the (here temporal)

coordination in the interaction. It becomes clear that much of our sense-making in

interaction relies on continuously appropriate coordination, since breakdowns of

such coordination can alter the meaning and progression of the interaction.

This situation is not only manifested in the presence of external breakdowns of

coordination. It is often the case that breakdowns emerge from the dynamics of the

interaction even when the interactors are actively trying to avoid it. Misinter-

pretations about the intentions of others often provoke responses that are themselves

misinterpreted, leading the interaction into a spiralling dynamics likely to engender a

general breakdown. Examples of this abound in literature, we find a very clear one in

Ian McEwan’s recent novel On Chesil Beach (an account of a disastrously failed

sexual encounter by a couple on their honeymoon). Granic (2000) describes similar

run-away processes at a developmental timescale in her investigation of how

relationships between parents and child can turn sour even if this is not the intention

of either party.

Moving right on the qualitative scale of participation proposed in Fig. 2,we

encounter situations where, through coordination of sense-making, one of the

interactors is oriented towards a novel domain of significance that was part of the

sense-making activity of the other. Such cases of orientation are ubiquitous. Calling

attention to what is salient to one of the interactors and not yet the other is achieved

by the purposeful modulation of the sense-making of one interactor (who, for

instance, is visually scanning in search of a lost object) by the other (who grabs his

attention and points to it). We can see a similar phenomenon in the regulation of

affect between mother and infant, which is more explicit in the dimension of

extended temporal coordination. Stern describes an example. A mother repeats the

phrase “I’m gonna getcha”to her infant, each time stretching the temporal interval to

the next utterance and the phrase itself (Stern 2002/1977, p. 114). Stern says that this

“increases the discrepancy from the expected”for the infant and the infant becomes

more and more excited (ibid.). In his explanations, Stern seems to oscillate between

emphasising the interaction as a process and attempting to explain it in terms of

individual cognitive capabilities. He says “there could be no such effect…unless the

infant had some mechanism for timing the beat and forming a temporal estimate of

when the next beat should fall”(ibid.). It is not necessary to go that far. In the view

presented here, the infant is oriented towards a change of affective state through his

498 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

participation in coordination with the mother’s tempo. This could not have happened

if the mother were not herself attuned to the infant’s response or if the infant for

some reason was not able to sustain the interaction dynamics in this particular

engagement. The above example can be explained in terms of relative coordination

as described in the section “Dynamics of coordination”whereby, like the adult and the

child walking together, the tempos of mother and child exhibit the property of phase

attraction through their mutual coupling. This explanation would not require the

positing of any specialised individual cognitive capability. If pendulum clocks can do

it without mechanisms for “timing the beat”and “forming a temporal estimate”, why

can’t babies? In our perspective, what infant and mother do in this example is

possible through the interaction alone. It may well be that they both have capabilities

for entering into a temporal interaction with an external event or object, but no more

than this is needed. What makes it a case of orientation is the mother’s intended

regulation of the relative coordination and through it of the baby’s sense-making.

Intermediate between the cases of direct orientation and regulatory orientation, we

could place the following description by Currie that does justice to the fragility and

brittleness of this process. He describes a beautiful example of the subtlety of an

everyday social interaction. A man and a woman come to agree on a perspective on

their current, shared experience, and they do this with minimal gesturing or uttering.

Upon arriving at their holiday destination, Janet stands in front of the open window

and takes an appreciative breath of the air, in such a way as to make sure that John

perceives it. It is clearly a communicative act.

What does Janet mean by doing this? That the air is fresh? The freshness of the

air is already evident to John. Janet is arranging things so that she and John

attend to the freshness of the air, in a way that is mutually manifest to both of

them. But Janet is doing more: she is adjusting John’s cognitive and affective

take on the world: trying to get John to see the world in somewhat the way she

is currently seeing it. There is a small, highly salient portion of the world visible

to both of them, and Janet wants John to attend to that portion of it in the way

that she is attending to it: appreciatively, gratefully, with excitement at the

possibilities for the holiday that has just begun. She does not want to convey

any propositions to John: she wants him to notice certain things; to engage

imaginatively with certain possibilities which these things present; to see these

things and possibilities as valuable in certain ways. She wants John to frame the

visible world in a certain way. It would be vastly impractical –perhaps

impossible –for Janet to try to say all this, to make explicit the way she wants

John to frame the bit of world they are looking at. It would also be pointless:

the minimal gesture does the job very well (Currie 2007).

In these cases of orientation the orientee does not relate to the orienter as someone

who is trying to figure out her individual actions like a detached observer. Rather, it

is through a process of coordination and modulation of sense-making activities that

the orientee is directly affected by the orienter’s intentions and sense-making and

therefore he does not need to figure out what these intentions are in order to respond

accordingly. A coordinated response already embodies a practical understanding.

There is no need for John to attempt to decypher Janet as she directly calls his

attention to the intended meaning. But for this to happen the response must be

Participatory sense-making 499

attainable from the domain of possibilities of the orientee so that he can

autonomously turn towards it. In order to be oriented, the orientee cannot be totally

passive. He is a sense-maker himself. In her turn, the orienter must not only grasp

the other’s sense-making but must skilfully act so that the right modulation comes

about. The more participation is required, the more the orienter may find herself

changing her own sense-making in the process. The interactions between mother and

infant described above involve more participation than the first case where a simple

gesture to look over there keeps the orienter’s sense-making virtually unchanged.

The picture is at the same time more parsimonious and richer than the individualistic

portrait of interaction as the mutual figuring out of intentions.

An even more radical possibility towards the right-hand side of Fig. 2is when

interactors move beyond the coordination (e.g., orientation) of individual sense-

making activities and become engaged in a joint process of sense-making. Here

meaning is created and transformed through patterns of coordination and break-

downs. The phases of action and perception typically used to describe individual

sense-making now acquire collective aspects and sense is created through the

stabilization of patterns of joint activity. When such patterns lawfully stabilise some

invariant relation the perceptual result is jointly constructed, and novel meanings

may be established in interaction. In this kind of activity the interactors engage in the

highest degree of participation in sense-making.

High level of participation in sense-making, like orientation, is also ubiquitous. It

happens in all kinds of human social contacts to the extent that it is rather difficult to

see. Many obvious cases come to mind (e.g., collaborating in a joint research project,

reaching an agreement after group negotiation, making a shopping list or improvising

a dish together). But these examples are hard to unpack. To illustrate participatory

sense-making, we must drastically reduce the complexity of the situation.

Consider the game of charades. This is a game of pantomimes: players have to

‘act out’a phrase without speaking, while the other members of the same team try to

guess what the phrase is. Imagine that the phrase is the title of a film with two

words. There are well-established gestures for indicating this (e.g., emulating an old

camera by rotating the right hand in small circles in front of the eye, and indicating

the number two by tapping the arm with two fingers). These gestures are readily

interpreted. The player starts miming the second word. With his fingers he draws a

large square in the air in front of him. Someone suggests “box”. He gestures “no”.

Another guesses “picture”, again no. He changes the gesture, drawing the big square

again and then moving his hands together to the centre of the square and pulling his

closed hands towards him while opening his arms outwards. “Cupboard.”

“Wardrobe.”He gestures “no”but adds a waving ‘almost there’movement of the

hand. Then he makes the same square, puts his hands in the middle, but now pushes

Participatory sense-making is not restricted to human social interactions. Many social animals build up

coherences of significance by engaging in coordinated displays, such as circle-walking in wolves where

potential contenders size each other up by making turns around each other (Moran et al. 1981), their intention

to fight or not being affected by the emergent coordination. Even in simple models in evolutionary robotics

the discrimination between different significant contexts can be performed through appropriate coordination

between individuals (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher 2007; Quinn 2001). Recent work modelling the

detection of social contingency in minimal agents shows in explicit terms how individual perception alters its

meaning as a result of social coordination (Di Paolo, Rohde and Iizuka 2007).

500 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

his hands forwards and outwards with an opening movement and then leans

forwards with his upper body and moves his head and gaze from left to right. The

right answer comes: “Window!”Then he points to his back with his thumb over his

shoulder. “Rear Window!”

This situation begins very much like the examples of orientation. The player

intends to orient his team-mates. In the beginning this is easy thanks to established

conventions. The first attempt at gesturing a window is misinterpreted. The player

now must improve the situation by adding to the initial gesture something more

specific, so he gestures the opening of a window. The team-mates do not yet guess

the right answer, but their guesses show that they have understood the ‘opening’

aspect. Now the player can improve on this partial re-affirmation of his intended

meaning and he gestures the act of opening the window again, but this time

outwards (avoiding previous misinterpretations); he stresses the gesture by looking

out. Now they guess correctly. As the interaction unfolds, what started off as

orientation becomes more symmetrical since all interactors have to adjust their

sense-making in a way that converges towards the ‘right’gesture and the ‘right’

interpretation. The new meaning of the gesture is jointly constructed during

interaction and evolves through patterns of coordination and breakdowns. It is

now available to the interactors for futher use and possible transformation (imagine

when film titles like Room with a View or Through a Glass Darkly come up).

Of course, the game of charades is not the same as interactions in daily life. It is

guided by rules that prescribe certain kinds of interaction (i.e. non-verbal). The

example, however, illustrates the possibility of meanings being generated and

transformed during interaction. This also happens in everyday situations where

sustained interactions (e.g., in couples, between friends, family members, work-

mates) develop their own language and shared perspectives. A certain reference may

develop over time (cf. Levin and Kitty’s dialogue using the first letters of words,

written in chalk, in chapter 13, part 4 of Tolstoy’sAnna Karenina). Such an

intimately shared referent comes about precisely through what we conjecture goes

on in the highest realms of participation in sense-making.

While it is clear that making sense together may happen in situations where the

interactors are collaborating towards this goal, it is even more convincing to think of

situations where sense-making is done purely in the interaction without the

individuals even being aware of how it is happening. Recent experimental studies

in dyadic interaction show exactly this (Auvray et al. 2006; Di Paolo, Rohde and

Iizuka 2007). In these experiments, two blindfolded participants interacting in a

shared minimal virtual environment are asked to recognise the presence of each

other. The only possibility to act is to move the cursor left and right along a virtual

‘tape’that wraps around. Subjects sense the presence of an object or the other player

only through a touch sensor whenever their own cursor ‘steps’on them. To make the

task non-trivial, there is also a static object of the same size as the other subject on

the tape (fixed lure), as well as a mobile object that shadows the motion of each

participant at a constant distance (attached lure). The problem to be solved is

therefore not only distinguishing moving from non-moving entities along the tape

using the touch feedback, but distinguishing between two entities that move exactly

the same, only one of which represents the ‘sensing’position of the other subject.

The momentary sensory patterns therefore do not suffice to distinguish the three

Participatory sense-making 501

entities that may be encountered. The only clue to tell whether a sensation is caused

by the other subject or not is the change of sensation over time in response to the

subject’s own motion. It is conceivable that, from an individual point of view, the

problem could be solved by detecting this relational contingency. This is not what

happens. Even when the movement of the attached lure and the other partner are

indistinguishable, recognition still occurs, because both participants are looking for

each other. The findings show that recognition relies on sensorimotor coordination,

rather than on an individual’s capacity to express a confident judgement on whether

a stimulus is actually caused by the partner or not. When subjects encounter a

stimulus they tend to oscillate around it and these scanning movements only remain

stable in the case that both subjects are in contact with each other. A subject could be

fooled by the partner’s attached lure, but only to the point that the partner remains

more or less on the spot (one-way coupling). This situation is unstable as the partner

(unaware that his shadow is being scanned) will eventually move away to continue

the search. Only when the two-way interaction is established (i.e. when both subjects

are in direct contact) does the situation become globally stable. Hence the solution to

the cognitive task is established because both partners are searching for each other,

but it does not rely on individuals performing any kind of perceptual recognition

between responsive and non-responsive objects. They find each other almost

inadvertently. The sense-making that solves the task only happens at the level of the

collective dynamics.

The spectrum of participation in sense-making sketched here covers a very wide

range of possibilities in social encounters, from third person observations of others’

behaviours, to development of properly jointly created meanings. By taking the core

enactive ideas seriously and focusing on the dynamics of the interaction process we

have seen how an approach to social understanding can be based on unpacking the

relation between coordination and sense-making along its many possibilities.

Discussion

In this paper we have established a set of ideas that together lay the foundations for a

radical reorientation in approaches to social cognition. Many of these ideas

undoubtedly deserve further elaboration and improvement. In this final section we

limit ourselves to briefly mentioning some implications and directions for

development; they remain speculative at this stage.

A central question arising from this proposal is that of clarifying further the

relations between autonomy, agency, interaction, and intersubjectivity. Since new

domains of sense-making can be opened up through participation, these can affect

the individual and social identity of the interactors. Our dynamical view can provide

a novel theoretical link between the social and individual domains for advancing on

this issue. One possible route for this is developmental. The dynamics of interaction

can span multiple timescales: from coordination patterns in interaction, over single

and recurring interactions, to histories of interaction (relationships). Ontogenetically,

we need to explain how the early embodied, highly affective interactions between

mothers and infants eventually lead all the way up to the capacity for full-blown

adult conversations and the use of symbolic inscriptions with all their intricacies and

502 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

subtleties (Cowley 2007). Until now, there is no unified account that can encompass

the whole range of social capacities from primary intersubjectivity to the highest

reaches of human language and social cognition. We think there is potential for the

enactive approach presented here to advance on this problem. What this approach

does ensure, in contrast to non-interactive proposals, is an explicit two-way link

between individual and social processes, leaving open the possibility for individual

cognitive skills to have dual or even purely social developmental origins. This is a

strictly closed avenue for approaches that are not properly interactive, be they

embodied or not.

Social skills, under the enactive view, are by definition relational. Although

agents can have different individual potentials for entering into an interaction, this

potential is not fixed and can be modulated by actual interactions. This is an

implication of having established the autonomy of the interactional domain.

Sometimes otherwise socially stilted persons are able to interact very well with

particular others or in certain situations. As we have seen, it is easy but often

misleading to infer individual level cognitive capabilities in order to explain

interactional phenomena. This same lesson applies to social skills. It is easy to make

individuals fully responsible for aspects of a social interaction; to infer competence

from performance. But this misses the part of responsibility that corresponds to the

interaction itself. This simple systemic insight can have implications for approaching

disorders with a social aspect such as autism where individual predispositions

undoubtedly have an effect on social encounters, but less attention has been paid to

the dynamics of the latter for better understanding, diagnosing and treating the

disorder (see De Jaegher 2006).

Relatedly, we implicitly hold the view (but have not argued for it) that other social

aspects of cognition, including those that are third-personal or observational, can be

understood through the interaction either in a direct or derivative sense. Proponents

of embodied alternatives have recognised the importance of this latter point. In

accordance with Gallagher’s suggestion in his (2001) paper, and those of other

researchers, we hold that third-person observational social capacities develop on the

back of interpersonal social capacities. Our proposal should help to elaborate on the

implications of this realisation. By now it should be clear that we have turned

the traditional approaches on their head and instead of going from third-personal

situations into the interaction, we take the opposite route. Even outside direct social

interaction, sense-making can be expressive and this is at play in third-personal

social aspects of cognition. To complement this, an observer of a social

phenomenon, even though he can indeed be a passive bystander as it were, is qua

sense-maker always in some way, even if minimally, engaged with the other whose

behaviour he is observing.

The enactive perspective, therefore, questions the traditional axiom that others are

non-transparent to us. We have demonstrated how the sense-making that underlies

social understanding can itself be coordinated and extended in interaction. But how

is the other experienced according to this view? We have seen the example of the

squeezing of a sponge as a now almost paradigmatic instance of enactive perception.

Unlike a sponge, the other-in-interaction is not fully and lawfully constituted by my

sense-making activity. The sponge becomes an object in itself when confronted by

my sense-making. It is experienced as complete as far as my practical interests are

Participatory sense-making 503

concerned. By contrast, from a purely individual perspective, the other-in-interaction

is available to me in this way only partially. Her autonomy demands frequent re-

adjustments of my individual sense-making. When interaction and individual

intentions coordinate, we feel mutually skilful to navigate the interaction: we

experience a kind of transparency of the other-in-interaction. But when, for a variety

of reasons, a breakdown occurs, and until a new coordination is attained, we

experience the other as opaque. Keeping the interactors’autonomy as an essential

requirement of the social achieves in this way a correspondence with the

phenomenological insight of the alterity of the other (e.g. Zahavi 2005). We don’t

experience the other-in-interaction as totally obscure and inaccessible, nor as fully

transparent (like an object fully constituted by my sense-making activity), but as

something else: a protean pattern with knowable and unknowable surfaces and

angles of familiarity that shapeshift as the interaction unfolds. Those patterns of

change are influenced by my own participation in the emergence and breakdown of

joint relational sense-making, hence they are not totally alien. My actions contribute

to define the other-in-interaction not so much as my squeezing contributes to the

experience of softness of the sponge but rather in ways that do not necessarily settle

into a lawful relationship. I must alter my actions contextually in order to re-

encounter the other and in the process, sometimes, be encountered myself when her

sense-making unexpectedly modulates my own. This recursive effect on my actions

describes the co-modulation of self-in-interaction and other-in-interaction. Others

have pointed to the co-determination of self and other (Thompson 2001; Thompson

and Varela 2001). We concord, but choose to call this mutual modulation instead so

as not to imply a self-sufficiency of the social domain that obscures the interplay

between the autonomy of the interaction process and that of the interactors.

Our approach also has practical implications. It reinforces certain styles of

studying social cognition from the interaction (e.g. conversation analysis), but

looking at coordination dynamics in its many guises (not just linguistic). For this,

experimental approaches that minimalise and control sensorimotor coupling (such as

the perceptual crossing studies of Auvray et al. 2006) are likely to yield the most

interesting results in support of the ideas presented here. Combined dynamical

systems and robotics modelling and novel measures of interaction (Di Paolo, Rohde

and Iizuka 2007) have already shown their value at complementing such empirical

studies. The measurement of coordination is an enormously important issue, where

inspiration could be taken from movement analysis and neuroscience. Measuring

coordination however, needs to be complemented by a disciplined approach to the

experience of interaction, including experiences such as connectedness. Our enactive

proposal favours an approach that combines empirical research in psychology and

social science with dynamical and synthetic modelling and phenomenology.

Conclusions

The task of elaborating a strong and coherent enactive theory of social cognition can

only be sketched in this paper. We believe that the enactive approach can say very

specific things about social cognition. It can do so by two non-traditional starting

moves: first, by providing the tools that allow us to recognise the interaction process

504 H. De Jaegher, E. Di Paolo

as establishing an autonomous domain, and second, by defining cognitive

engagement as the activity of sense-making. The interplay between these initial

moves is what we have attempted to develop here. It is, however, only an initial

analysis and much further work will be needed.

By positing the process of interaction as an emergent autonomous domain, our

enactive proposal, paradoxically, devolves an autonomy to social agents that was

never thematised by previous approaches to social cognition: that of participation.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Stephen Cowley, Marek McGann and Steve Torrance for

their very helpful comments on this paper.

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Sensing Movement: Contemporary Dance Workshops with People who are Blind or have Low Vision and Dance Teachers

Preprint

Full-text available

Mar 2025

Dance teachers rely primarily on verbal instructions and visual demonstrations to convey key dance concepts and movement. These techniques, however, have limitations in supporting students who are blind or have low vision (BLV). This work explores the role technology can play in supporting instruction for BLV students, as well as improvisation with their instructor. Through a series of design workshops with dance instructors and BLV students, ideas were generated by physically engaging with probes featuring diverse modalities including tactile objects, a body tracked sound and musical probe, and a body tracked controller with vibrational feedback. Implications for the design of supporting technologies were discovered for four contemporary dance learning goals: learning a phrase; improvising; collaborating through movement; and awareness of body and movement qualities. We discuss the potential of numerous multi-sensory methods and artefacts, and present design considerations for technologies to support meaningful dance instruction and participation.

General practice specialty decision-making: a system-level Australian qualitative study

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2025

Background Ensuring sufficient supply of general practitioners (GPs) is critical for servicing increasing healthcare demands. Heightened by pandemic conditions, chronic shortages of GPs persist globally. Whilst many factors reinforcing general practice specialty choices are known, system-level understanding of GP career decision-making influences across medical training requires investigation. Aim To explore specialty choice rationales through career selection narratives of recently registered Australian GPs, using a system-level perspective. Design & setting Semi-structured interviews were selected for in-depth explorations of GP specialty choice rationale. Within Australia, medical specialty training choices are typically made after both university medical education and mandatory one-to-two year prevocational (hospital-based) training is completed. Method Interviews were conducted online with GPs who had completed all training in the last 10 years. De-identified and verified transcripts underwent participant checking. Deductive framework analysis using career counselling constructs, and inductive thematic analysis were performed. Results There were 25 participants. Career counselling constructs provided system-level understanding of GP specialty decision-making processes. Large gaps in GP career information were highlighted throughout medical training for many participants. Overcoming negative medical narratives about general practice was necessary for most in choosing a GP career. However, positive experiences with GP communities or work created insights into the broad flexibility of GP person-specialty fit. Conclusion GP work experiences and personal GP connections could counteract prominent negative narratives about GP careers. However, lack of systemic and regular exposure to GPs throughout medical training is a critical barrier that should be addressed through sustained policy and professional interventions.

Performing Bad Scaffolds: Exploring Dynamic Imaginative Niches

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2025
Topoi

In this proposal, we present the folkloric performance of the Egetmann Pageant in Tramin as what we call a dynamic imaginative niche.We outline a notion of monstrous figures as “forms of trust” (cf. Ingold 2013). We suggest that the participatory enactment of such figures scaffolds material and interpersonal affective niches (Colombetti and Krueger 2015) for coping with future threats. We will develop a methodology of drawings and analysis in which we situated the monstrous figure, the Schnappviecher, in the context of both contemporary agro-pastoral communities in northern Italy and the 1940s under the influence of Himmler’s National Socialist cultural program. As we will illustrate, the enactment of “monstrous figures” in different historical situations can come to scaffold radically different feelings of belonging and shape who is included or excluded from a community. We will argue how interpersonal dynamics, of at first sight similar “socio-material niches” can either become an affirmation of rigid “bad moral habits” (Dewey 1916) or can scaffold communal exploration of new ways of relating to future threats, by affording moments of surprise in the participatory enactment of the monster.

Epistemological Implications of a System—Theoretical Understanding for Sustainability Models

Article

Mar 2025
SYST RES BEHAV SCI

Stefan Stumm

In the sense of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global efforts to create a sustainable society will not be sufficiently successful under the current geopolitical and socio‐economic trends. For this reason, recent sustainability research has increasingly focused on systemic coherence, the subject of cognition, and psychological and epistemological aspects. With regard to the sustainability discourse, this article proposes a perspective based on systems theory's findings in its enactivist interpretation. It understands this as a joint process of sense‐making that must be actively maintained on an ongoing basis. Scientific knowledge and human experience are not described as mutually exclusive and informing spheres but as part of the world of experience actively spanned by the organism in its self‐execution, which inherently involves ambiguities and complexity reductions that leave the subject and object undetermined. Such an understanding of systemic thinking should help to prevent the process of sustainable development itself from being called into question when some goals are inevitably missed.

Using T-pattern analysis to map classroom interactions: a case study of student and teacher learning-orientation

Article

Mar 2025

Linguistic relativity from an enactive perspective: the entanglement of language and cognition

Article

Mar 2025
LANG SCI

The Ontology of Ecological Cognition

Book

Feb 2025

Konrad Werner

Love as a Gateway to Being: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Insights on the Therapeutic Relationship

Chapter

Feb 2025

Historical Criminology, Historical Time, and Embodiment: A Phenomenological Intervention

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Feb 2025
BRIT J CRIMINOL

Daniel Gyollai

This article aims to broaden the theoretical perspective of historical criminology in a twofold way: 1) it introduces Martin Heidegger's notions of temporality and historicity to further clarify how the unity of future, past, and present structures our everyday lives; 2) and relatedly, drawing on phenomenological approaches to embodiment, it outlines how culture and tradition are passed down over generations by means of collective body memories. To demonstrate how this plays out in practice, the article uses examples of the colonial past influencing contemporary social policy. It explains how violence stemming from the colonial period, in general, may live on and continue to shape encounters between police and marginalised communities, and how that maintains the boundaries between in-and out-groups.

Communities of hope: design-led innovation for landscape decision-making

Article

Feb 2025
LANDSCAPE RES

In Search of the Enactive: Introduction to special issue on Enactive Experience, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4) December 2005, pp. 357-368

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2005

Steve Torrance

In the decade and a half since the appearance of Varela, Thompson and Rosch's workThe Embodied Mind,enactivism has helped to put experience and consciousness, conceived of in a distinctive way, at the forefront of cognitive science. There are at least two major strands within the enactive perspective: a broad view of what it is to be an agent with a mind; and a more focused account of the nature of perception and perceptual experience. The relation between these two strands is discussed, with an overview of the papers presented in this volume.

Rethinking Commonsense Psychology

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2007

Matthew Ratcliffe

Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1979

Framing Narratives

Chapter

Jul 2007

Gregory Currie

The human world is replete with narratives - narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narratives are essential for the constitution of human selves. This volume brings together nine original contributions in which the individual authors advance, develop and challenge proposals of these kinds. They critically examine the place and importance of narratives in human lives and consider the underlying capacities that permit us to produce and utilise these special artifacts. All of the papers are written in a non-technical and accessible style.

The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology

Chapter

Jul 2007

Daniel D. Hutto

The Logic of Practice

Book

Jun 1990

Pierre Bourdieu

The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology

Article

Mar 2007

Daniel Hutto

Psychologically normal adult humans make sense of intentional actions by trying to decide for which reason they were performed. This is a datum that requires our understanding. Although there have been interesting recent debates about how we should understand ‘reasons’, I will follow a long tradition and assume that, at a bare minimum, to act for a reason involves having appropriately interrelated beliefs and desires.

Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective

Book

Dec 2005

Dan Zahavi

What is a self? Does it exist in reality or is it a mere social construct—or is it perhaps a neurologically induced illusion? The legitimacy of the concept of the self has been questioned by both neuroscientists and philosophers in recent years. Countering this, in Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi argues that the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness. He investigates the interrelationships of experience, self-awareness, and selfhood, proposing that none of these three notions can be understood in isolation. Any investigation of the self, Zahavi argues, must take the first-person perspective seriously and focus on the experiential givenness of the self. Subjectivity and Selfhood explores a number of phenomenological analyses pertaining to the nature of consciousness, self, and self-experience in light of contemporary discussions in consciousness research. Philosophical phenomenology—as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others—not only addresses crucial issues often absent from current debates over consciousness but also provides a conceptual framework for understanding subjectivity. Zahavi fills the need—given the recent upsurge in theoretical and empirical interest in subjectivity—for an account of the subjective or phenomenal dimension of consciousness that is accessible to researchers and students from a variety of disciplines. His aim is to use phenomenological analyses to clarify issues of central importance to philosophy of mind, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and psychiatry. By engaging in a dialogue with other philosophical and empirical positions, says Zahavi, phenomenology can demonstrate its vitality and contemporary relevance. Bradford Books imprint

Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics

Book

Jan 2001

Arthur T. Winfree

1980 Preface * 1999 Preface * 1999 Acknowledgements * Introduction * 1 Circular Logic * 2 Phase Singularities (Screwy Results of Circular Logic) * 3 The Rules of the Ring * 4 Ring Populations * 5 Getting Off the Ring * 6 Attracting Cycles and Isochrons * 7 Measuring the Trajectories of a Circadian Clock * 8 Populations of Attractor Cycle Oscillators * 9 Excitable Kinetics and Excitable Media * 10 The Varieties of Phaseless Experience: In Which the Geometrical Orderliness of Rhythmic Organization Breaks Down in Diverse Ways * 11 The Firefly Machine 12 Energy Metabolism in Cells * 13 The Malonic Acid Reagent ('Sodium Geometrate') * 14 Electrical Rhythmicity and Excitability in Cell Membranes * 15 The Aggregation of Slime Mold Amoebae * 16 Numerical Organizing Centers * 17 Electrical Singular Filaments in the Heart Wall * 18 Pattern Formation in the Fungi * 19 Circadian Rhythms in General * 20 The Circadian Clocks of Insect Eclosion * 21 The Flower of Kalanchoe * 22 The Cell Mitotic Cycle * 23 The Female Cycle * References * Index of Names * Index of Subjects

Emotional regulation of interaction between two-month-olds and their mothers

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Jan 1985

Participatory Sense-Making: an enactive approach to social cognition

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