Scientific Observation Is Socio-Materially Augmented Perception: Toward a Participatory Realism

Abstract

There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. (2) Psychology: the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution interface, as tactile sensations of the proximal interface are transformed into vision-like experience of a distal object. (3) Biology: the “projection” that brings forth an animal’s Umwelt, as impressions on its body’s sensory surfaces are reconfigured into perception of an external object. This similarity between the effects of scientific practice and interface-use on the one hand, and of sensorimotor interaction on the other, becomes intelligible once we accept that skillful engagement with instruments and interfaces constitutes a socio-material augmentation of our basic perceptual capacity. This enactive interpretation stands in contrast to anti-realism about science associated with constructivist interpretations of these three phenomena, which are motivated by viewing them as the internal mental construction of the experienced object. Instead, it favors a participatory realism: the sensorimotor basis of perceptual experience loops not only through our body, but also through the external world. This allows us to conceive of object experience in relational terms, i.e., as one or more subjects directly engaging with the world. Consequently, we can appreciate scientific observation in its full complexity: it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like tool-use and perceiving more generally—is irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving.

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Citation: Froese, T. Scientific
Observation Is Socio-Materially
Augmented Perception: Toward a
Participatory Realism. Philosophies
2022,7, 37. https://doi.org/
10.3390/philosophies7020037
Academic Editors:
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Marcin
J. Schroeder
Received: 28 February 2022
Accepted: 29 March 2022
Published: 30 March 2022
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philosophies
Essay
Scientific Observation Is Socio-Materially Augmented
Perception: Toward a Participatory Realism
Tom Froese
Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University,
1919-1 Tancha, Onna 904-0495, Okinawa, Japan; tom.froese@oist.jp
Abstract:
There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object
experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery
in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object.
(2) Psychology
:
the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution interface, as
tactile sensations of the proximal interface are transformed into vision-like experience of a distal
object. (3) Biology: the “projection” that brings forth an animal’s Umwelt, as impressions on its
body’s sensory surfaces are reconfigured into perception of an external object. This similarity
between the effects of scientific practice and interface-use on the one hand, and of sensorimotor
interaction on the other, becomes intelligible once we accept that skillful engagement with instruments
and interfaces constitutes a socio-material augmentation of our basic perceptual capacity. This
enactive interpretation stands in contrast to anti-realism about science associated with constructivist
interpretations of these three phenomena, which are motivated by viewing them as the internal mental
construction of the experienced object. Instead, it favors a participatory realism: the sensorimotor
basis of perceptual experience loops not only through our body, but also through the external world.
This allows us to conceive of object experience in relational terms, i.e., as one or more subjects directly
engaging with the world. Consequently, we can appreciate scientific observation in its full complexity:
it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like
tool-use and perceiving more generally—is irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving.
Keywords:
mind–body problem; sensory substitution; direct perception; enactive cognition; tool-use;
fact–value gap; philosophy of mind; cognitive science; philosophy of science; consciousness
I would just like to leave you with this reminder: when we adopt a paradigm in cognitive
science, we enact a shared world—and enact ourselves into the bargain.
John Stewart (1942–2021)
1. Introduction
In this essay, I pay homage to John Stewart’s contributions to the philosophy of science,
by tracing the subject–object relationship through his interdisciplinary reflections. Stewart
was fond of provocatively claiming that a value-neutral science would be without value
(for a recent statement, see [
1
]). Even the production of mere instrumental value, such as
technological gimmicks, would not be enough. Science should aspire to be an intellectual
authority that provides guidance as to the layout of reality and affords inspiration for the
future of humanity. Striving for these deeper values means that, ultimately, we cannot
ignore the most foundational problem of all: how do we, ourselves, as we subjectively live
our own existence, fit into this scientific worldview [2]?
In modern science there is little, if any, room for subjectivity in the material universe.
In particular, advances in biology and neuroscience are highlighting tensions with our lived
experience, including undermining our otherwise recognized status of being persons who
act for reasons [
3
]. However, if a scientific worldview were to eliminate our subjectivity
from reality, like a naïve realism that only assigns reality to objects fully describable by
Philosophies 2022,7, 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7020037 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 2 of 13
physics, it would have the self-defeating consequence that there can be nothing rational
about that scientific enterprise! This is because, like the human lifeworld more generally,
science depends essentially on our capacity for consciousness—to perceive the world
and to collectively reason to decisions accordingly. However, in much of science, there
is little recognition of the importance of this foundational problem, i.e., that we still do
not understand how subjects and objects can meaningfully coexist, such that our lived
mental life as such can make a difference in the objective world, and vice versa. Without
substantial progress on this core problem, we are faced by a failure of science to understand
the conditions of its own possibility. In other words, the stakes are high, both scientifically
and existentially.
In response to this situation, this essay aims to motivate an alternative position to
naïve realism in the philosophy of science, namely, by assigning a constitutive role to the
observing subject, but without thereby falling into the opposite extreme of an agnostic or
even anti-realist stance. It aims to overcome the traditional dispute between this kind of
anti-realism and realism by developing a middle ground—a kind of participatory realism,
which is a realism that is both subject- and world-involving.
2. A Stalemate in the Philosophy of Science
Two major approaches in the philosophy of science, which we will refer to as objec-
tivism and constructivism following Stewart’s analysis [
4
], have been in a long-standing
stalemate regarding how to best conceive the subject–object relationship. Worse, when their
assumptions are unpacked and pushed to their logical extremes, each approach turns out
to have drawbacks that make them less than ideal for scientific worldviews.
Objectivism aims to explain our experience of reality in completely observer-independent
terms. However, if the subjectivity of the observer continues to be left out of the natural
order—e.g., by being identified with just another objective mechanism, or even eliminated
completely—we give up the essentially subjective quality of our own existence too soon.
There should also be room in the natural world for human subjects who can make a
difference to unfolding events based on their normative evaluations, and who can hence be
held accountable for their actions and decisions. This is especially evident if we do not want
science to be in tension with practices of responsible decision making, be they in politics,
daily life, or even in science itself [
1
]. Granted, we may never completely understand the
basis of our own agency, or fully solve the mind–body problem, but it is also important
to note that an acceptance of the possible limits of our scientific understanding is not the
source of this tension with lived experience. What we need to avoid is objectivism’s overly
narrow conception of reality, i.e., a naturalism that excludes subjectivity by definition, and
which thereby already rules out in principle the mere possibility of a subject being able to
make a difference in their own right [5,6].
Constructivism aims to explain our experience of reality in completely observer-
dependent terms [
7
]. However, if a place for subjectivity in naturalism is bought at the
expense of the notion of objectivity, such that it can no longer transcend the domain of
our experience, we go too far to the other extreme and undermine science in a different
way. It becomes hard to explain why science advances the way it does, why there is a
difference between facts and opinions, why there can be broad consensus about scientific
knowledge among people with diverse personal and cultural backgrounds, and why scien-
tific knowledge translates into technology that works [
8
]. Constructivism, especially in its
“radical” constructivist formulations, does grant that not everything goes, and that there are
observer-independent constraints, yet it remains agnostic about these constraints, nor does
it allow that our lived experience can be directly constituted or shaped by the world or by
other people [
9
]. However, if we do not make conceptual space for non-subjective reality to
be part of the basis of our experience even in principle, we give up on the hard problem of
consciousness prematurely [
10
]. More disturbingly, we would place an insurmountable gap
between the reality our own stream of consciousness—ourselves—and the reality of others
and of the world. Again, granted, we may never completely understand the nature and

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 3 of 13
boundaries of consciousness, but this relative ignorance should not impel us to accept an
overly narrow conception of subjectivity that ignores the possibility of a world-involving
basis of subjective experience; this would be in direct tension with our everyday experience
that we can engage with objects (and, more importantly, other people!) that exist beyond
our personal experience of them.
In sum, despite the starkly opposing orientations of these two approaches regarding
the relationship between subject and world, they share some deeper undesirable premises
and implications. Each in their own way fails to do justice to the full complexities of our
lived experience of reality—namely, of being conscious subjects embodied in an objective
world. In essence, while objectivism rejects the possibility that subjectivity plays a role
in the observer-independent world, radical constructivism leaves out the possibility that
the observer-independent world plays a role in subjectivity. These approaches thereby
promote two distinct one-sided pictures of reality, each with its own theoretical blind
spots. Ultimately, their schism prevents them from better grappling with the complex
entanglements of natural and human factors that are inherent in reality, and hence makes
them unsuitable perspectives for making substantial progress in science.
It is helpful to think of these impoverished visions of reality as two sides of the same
old Cartesian dualist coin; they are symptoms arising from the same scientifically unre-
solved mind–matter problem [
11
]. Objectivism tries to overcome that substance dualism by
reducing everything to observer-independent matter, while constructivism tries to overcome
that substance dualism by reducing everything to the observer-dependent mind; and yet,
each side cannot fully reduce the other into itself: objectivism must always access the
world from an observer-dependent perspective, while constructivism must always appeal
to observer-independent constraints.
Given this shared diagnosis of philosophical ashes of a failed dualism, I propose that
we need to step outside of the original dualist binary trap altogether. We need to search for
an alternative starting point from which to develop a scientific account that respects the
existence of both human subjectivity and worldly objectivity, whereby they are irreducibly
and meaningfully related to one another, jointly participating in shaping reality. In the
following I will offer some steps in this direction.
I propose that a fruitful path toward this alternative starting point is to address the
unresolved mind–matter dualism indirectly—namely, by way of overcoming its contempo-
rary, metaphysically sanitized heir: cognitivist internalism. Descartes famously thought
the linkage between the conscious mind and physical matter was to be found inside the
brain, and this localization is still the default assumption for the majority of cognitive
scientists today. Both objectivism and constructivism—each in its own way—also assume
that the basis of experience is restricted to the inside of the brain/subject. It is this premise
of internalism regarding the basis of our experience that motivates objectivism’s ideal to
recover an external universe that is in itself observer-independent, just as it motivates
constructivism’s insistence that this is an impossible ideal, given that we could never step
outside of the internal to confirm whether it matches the external; but what if the core of the
mind–body problem, dating back to the origins of modern science, is the expulsion of the
mind from the “external” world into a hidden “internal” realm? What if the basis of mind,
and of perceptual experience more specifically, is actually relational and world-involving?
The rest of cognitive science has been developing more inclusive alternatives, com-
monly known as radical embodied or enactive cognition (e.g., [
12
–
16
]). From the per-
spective of these theoretical advances, the subject’s living body is necessary—but not
sufficient—for experience, and the environment plays a necessary role as well. This leads
to a rejection of brain-centrism in cognitive science, and to the adoption of a more en-
compassing framework, which treats an agent’s behavior as a relational property of the
agent’s brain–body–environment system as a whole [
17
]. The rejection of internalism also
breaks down the oversimplified separation between observer-dependence and observer-
independence, as the mind is instead treated as a regulated form of organism–environment

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 4 of 13
interaction, such that the world itself can make a difference to our experience [
18
], and our
experience can make a difference to the world [5].
3. Three Case Studies of Object Experience
The beginnings of a philosophy of science that seeks to go beyond these classic oppo-
sitions can be found in Stewart’s contributions to enactive cognitive science (e.g.,
[6,19]
),
which centers on the idea that the mind is realized by embodied interaction in the world.
Varela had started to develop this new approach, following on from his more constructivist
work with Maturana, with a radical guiding vision: “to the extent that we move from
an abstract to a fully embodied view of knowledge, facts and values become inseparable”
([
20
], p. 260). In other words, the stated ambition of the enactive approach is to overcome
the fact–value gap—which has haunted modernist intellectual life at least since the work
of David Hume [
21
]—while similarly avoiding the collapse of the fact–value distinction
altogether, as has occasionally happened in constructivist or postmodern discourse.
However, we can also see in Varela a lingering bias for the internal over the external,
as he continues: “To know is to evaluate through our living, in a creative circularity”
([
20
], p. 260). Much will hang on precisely where the boundaries of “our living” are
conceived, especially since Maturana and Varela had traditionally identified the boundary
of an autopoietic system with its material surface [
22
]. If so, then brain-centrism would be
extended into an organism-centrism, but nonetheless it would stop short of extending into
the world and, hence, would remain a form of internalism. Indeed, there has been sufficient
ambiguity on this point that some critics have attributed an internalist/subjectivist stance
to this line of work [
23
–
25
]. More recently, proponents of the enactive approach have
started to spell out in what sense this is better understood as a world-involving account,
e.g., [
3
,
26
–
28
], and this conceptual clarification has gone hand in hand with a fruitful
encounter with the concept of direct realism, as developed by some branches of analytic
philosophy and by ecological psychology, e.g., [29,30].
Stewart’s philosophy of science defends a stance that “is neither ‘internalist,’ nor
‘externalist,’ but rather seeks to go beyond the opposition between them” ([
19
], p. 18).
Indeed, this ambition to go beyond the internalism/externalism dichotomy is one of the
key motivations for why the enactive approach adopted phenomenological philosophy
as an alternative to radical constructivist philosophy [
31
,
32
], and without this dichotomy,
nothing stands in the way of the natural world itself participating in the process by which an
object shows up in our perceptual experience and, by extension, in scientific observation. In
this way, clarifying that perception is world-involving is of broader relevance, as it pertains
to how we should understand the scientific process, including our interactions with other
people. Indeed, Varela had long emphasized that it is more accurate to explicitly refer to
an observer community rather than an observer [
33
], and as Stewart liked to highlight,
cognitive science is inherently reflexive, as we are scientific observers investigating the basis
of observation; therefore, a change in paradigm in this field has implications for science
as a whole, e.g., [
4
]. In order to make these reflections more concrete, in the following I
will develop this notion of world-involvement as it pertains to our experience of objects in
terms of three of Stewart’s favorite conceptual “hobby-horses” [34].
3.1. Latour’s Concept of Inversion
Latour and Woolgar’s [
35
] classic sociological and ethnographic study of modern
laboratory life found that the problem faced by scientists is that “at the frontier of science,
statements are constantly manifesting a double potential: they are either accounted for
in terms of local causes (subjectivity or artefact) or are referred to as a thing ‘out there’
(objectivity and fact)” (p. 180). Accordingly, they investigated the process of scientific
discovery, during which the double potential of a statement becomes stabilized into a fact:
“Once the statement begins to stabilise, however, an important change takes place.
The statement becomes a split entity. On the one hand, it is a set of words which
represents a statement about an object. On the other hand, it corresponds to an

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 5 of 13
object in itself which takes on a life of its own. [
. . .
] Consequently, an inversion
takes place: the object becomes the reason why the statement was formulated in
the first place. [
. . .
] Once splitting and inversion have occurred, even the most
cynical observers and committed relativists will have difficulty in resisting that
the “real” [object] has been found [ . . . ].”
([35], pp. 176–177)
However, Latour and Woolgar’s aim is precisely to provide a constructivist position
that resists such appeals to reality. A key contribution of their research is to highlight the
role of socio-material practices in the scientific creation of facts. They make it evident that
facts are the product of a complex process in the lab. However, they emphasize this role
of the socio-material practices to the extent that they end up provocatively concluding
that factual statements match external objects because “they are the same thing”. Latour
and Woolgar realize that this threatens to collapse the objective into the subjective, and
they hasten to clarify that they reject a simple relativist position, and do not wish to say
“that facts do not exist nor that there is no such thing as reality” (ibid., p. 180). Their main
point is, rather, that a scientific object’s appearance of “‘out-there-ness’ is the consequence of
scientific work rather than its cause” (ibid., p. 182). As such, their primary aim is to account
for an experiential change during the process of scientific discovery.
It is an important insight that scientific work can change our perception of the world,
and that this process is itself amenable to scientific investigation. However, we do not
need to fully subscribe to their interpretation. A more reasonable interpretation of the
socio-material conditions necessary for the appearance of “out-there-ness”, in combination
with their concession that facts and reality may exist after all, is that scientific access to
objects does not come for free; when science makes contact with aspects of reality outside
of our everyday spatiotemporal scales, this is a complex achievement that requires both
mastery and the use of the appropriate concepts and equipment. Both the subjective and
objective aspects of scientific activity have to come together in just the right ways such that
a statement about the world can become recognized as a fact by the observer community.
However, Latour and Woolgar insist on a more extreme interpretation, as they advise
that “it is important to eschew arguments about the external reality and outside efficacy
of scientific products to account for the stabilization of facts” (p. 183). This kind of
bracketing may be a useful ethnographic technique if one’s aim is to reveal the socio-
material conditions of scientific discovery, but Latour and Woolgar take it too far, and
thereby end up with a one-sided account. This prevents them from recognizing that
rightfully granting a more prominent role to the “local causes” they identified does not
require excluding the world itself from contributing to the establishment of a sense of
reality “out there”.
In addition, they appeal to the fragility of facts to defend their rejection of such a
world-involving account of scientific discovery, but it does not follow from the possibility
that statements can be mistaken that facts cannot be world-involving. On the contrary, the
fallibility of statements is an essential part of science’s capacity for self-correction, which
arguably improves its grip on the world and, hence, increases its world-involvement.
Interestingly, Latour and Woolgar’s skeptical argument from the fragility of scientific
facts has the same form as the classic “argument from illusion” against direct realism in the
philosophy of perception. In response to the latter, we can similarly reject its unjustified
attempt at a generalization of fallibility: that we sometimes do misperceive does not
entail that perception is never world-involving [
28
]. Conversely, the similarity of these
arguments suggests a comparable similarity between observation and perception; scientific
observation could then be fruitfully conceived as a socio-material augmentation of the basic
perceptual process, rather than only as a socio-material construct.
The development of this conceptual connection could have already occurred in the
context of Stewart’s work, but unfortunately it remained a latent potential and, hence, is
important future work for the enactive approach. Stewart’s [
36
] brief reply to Beaton’s [
30
]
world-involving account of the sensorimotor basis of perceptual experience only rehashes

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 6 of 13
Latour and Woolgar’s classic constructivist account of the scientific processes. He thereby
misses the opportunity to confront the internalist assumptions of that constructivist ac-
count with Beaton’s world-involving proposal, which is actually quite similar in spirit
to Stewart’s [
19
] own call to go beyond the opposition between internalism and exter-
nalism. Stewart and Beaton both reject the postulation of internal constructs as the sole
basis of perceived reality, in favor of basing perception directly in distributed organism–
environment interaction. Accordingly, we still need to better articulate the consequences of
this enactive, world-involving account of perception for our understanding of the scientific
process. A step in the right direction is to reconsider the role of technology in perception in
a world-involving way.
3.2. Bach-y-Rita’s Concept of Externalization
It will be useful to further bring out this latent connection between scientific observa-
tion and perceptual experience by considering an intermediate case, namely, the way in
which tool-use generally tends to shape the user’s perceptual experience, as particularly
exemplified by sensory substitution devices. Importantly for our comparison with scientific
observation, the Compiegne group, of which Stewart was a part, has long argued that such
interfaces perform the role of “perceptual supplementation” rather than “sensory substi-
tution” [
37
], and that this makes them illustrative of a broader class of “mind-enhancing”
tools [
38
], including pen and paper, sketchpads, or calculators [
39
]. Thus, we have not
moved far from the kind of scientific activity analyzed by Latour.
Sensory substitution devices were first studied by Bach-y-Rita et al. [
40
] using the
Tactile Vision Substitution System, which translated an array of black/white pixels obtained
from a camera into an array of on/off vibratory actuators placed on their back. They found
that a user’s mastery of this device gives rise to perceptual experience, whereby the local
causes of sensory stimuli are externalized to distal objects:
“Our subjects spontaneously report the external localization of stimuli, in that sen-
sory information seems to come from in front of the camera, rather than from the
vibrotactors on their back. Thus, after sufficient experience, the use of the vision
substitution system seems to become an extension of the sensory apparatus.”
([40], p. 964)
This account of the externalization of local stimuli is strikingly similar to Latour
and Woolgar’s account of scientific observation as involving splitting and inversion. It
is suggestive of the possibility that scientific instrumentation may similarly become an
extension of our perceptual processes. Indeed, for Stewart [
10
], the value of sensory
substitution devices is precisely that they can be used as a scientific instrument—one that
enables us to examine the embodied sensorimotor dynamics involved in perceiving, and
to do so under minimalist conditions (see, e.g., Figure 1), thereby allowing us to make an
informative comparison with the sensorimotor activity of simpler creatures, such as the
tick (more on this below).
For the moment, let us consider in more detail Bach-y-Rita’s pioneering research with
the Tactile Vision Substitution System, which for the Compiegne group provided two
fundamental results that inspired their own research program:
“(i) If the camera is immobile, placed on a table, the discriminatory capacities of
the subjects remain very limited; and the stimuli are perceived on the surface of
the skin.
(ii) If the camera is actively manipulated by the subject, the subjects exhibit
spectacular capacities to recognize shapes; and the objects are perceived in a
distal space, “out there” in front of the subject.”
([31], p. 941)

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 7 of 13
Philosophies 2022, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 7 of 13
Figure 1. The augmented sensorimotor relation of perception spans the organism, coupling devices,
and the environment. The coupling device could be any kind of tool, but the extension of perceptual
experience becomes more marked with the skilled use of mind-enhancing tools, including sensory
substitution devices and the advanced instrumentation used in scientific observation. Figure re-
drawn from Lenay and Steiner [31].
For the moment, let us consider in more detail Bach-y-Rita’s pioneering research with
the Tactile Vision Substitution System, which for the Compiegne group provided two fun-
damental results that inspired their own research program:
“(i) If the camera is immobile, placed on a table, the discriminatory capacities of
the subjects remain very limited; and the stimuli are perceived on the surface of
the skin.
(ii) If the camera is actively manipulated by the subject, the subjects exhibit spec-
tacular capacities to recognize shapes; and the objects are perceived in a distal
space, “out there” in front of the subject.” ([31], p. 941)
This phenomenon of externalization or distal attribution to something “out there”
has been systematically studied, and can occur even when observers do not have any prior
knowledge of the link between their actions with the device and the resulting variations
of stimulations [41]. Accordingly, like Latour and Woolgar’s analysis of the discovery of
a previously unknown scientific object, we find that in the case of using a sensory substi-
tution interface there are local/subjective aspects that, under suitable conditions, give rise
to the experience of an outer/objective entity. Crucially, this distal attribution does not
come for free; for a distal object to be perceived as such requires the subject’s acquisition
and active deployment of user expertise:
“During the initial phase when the device is first employed, the attention of the
user is drawn to the tactile stimuli on the skin. In fact, as long as the stimuli are
controlled by the experimenter, the user remains unable to detach his attention
from the stimuli. However, if the user himself is able to move the camera, then
progressively, after 10–15 h of practice, he comes to perceive objects situated at
a distance in front of him. At this point, there is a clear distinction for the subject
between the tactile stimuli (which are sometimes a source of irritation) on one
hand, and on the other the perception of an object out there in front of him.”
([31], p. 941)
A comparison with Latour’s own status as a novice in the lab, and as someone who
insisted on remaining a detached observer, is instructive. Latour “was thus in the classic
position of the ethnographer sent to a completely foreign environment” ([35], p. 273). As
Lynch ([42], p. 503) has argued, Latour’s approach will “sever the transivity of technical
practices to their real-world objects of study”; hence, we can understand why for Latour
it seemed that “a scientist’s activity is directed, not toward ‘reality,’ but toward these op-
erations on statements.” ([35], p. 273). In fact, the expert scientists also had this response
to his apprenticeship. With respect to his difficulty with understanding reports, “they ar-
gued that the observer was baffled because of his obsessive interest in literature had
Figure 1.
The augmented sensorimotor relation of perception spans the organism, coupling devices,
and the environment. The coupling device could be any kind of tool, but the extension of perceptual
experience becomes more marked with the skilled use of mind-enhancing tools, including sensory
substitution devices and the advanced instrumentation used in scientific observation. Figure redrawn
from Lenay and Steiner [31].
This phenomenon of externalization or distal attribution to something “out there” has
been systematically studied, and can occur even when observers do not have any prior
knowledge of the link between their actions with the device and the resulting variations of
stimulations [
41
]. Accordingly, like Latour and Woolgar’s analysis of the discovery of a
previously unknown scientific object, we find that in the case of using a sensory substitution
interface there are local/subjective aspects that, under suitable conditions, give rise to the
experience of an outer/objective entity. Crucially, this distal attribution does not come for
free; for a distal object to be perceived as such requires the subject’s acquisition and active
deployment of user expertise:
“During the initial phase when the device is first employed, the attention of the
user is drawn to the tactile stimuli on the skin. In fact, as long as the stimuli are
controlled by the experimenter, the user remains unable to detach his attention
from the stimuli. However, if the user himself is able to move the camera, then
progressively, after 10–15 h of practice, he comes to perceive objects situated at a
distance in front of him. At this point, there is a clear distinction for the subject
between the tactile stimuli (which are sometimes a source of irritation) on one
hand, and on the other the perception of an object out there in front of him.”
([31], p. 941)
A comparison with Latour’s own status as a novice in the lab, and as someone who
insisted on remaining a detached observer, is instructive. Latour “was thus in the classic
position of the ethnographer sent to a completely foreign environment” ([
35
], p. 273). As
Lynch ([
42
], p. 503) has argued, Latour’s approach will “sever the transivity of technical
practices to their real-world objects of study”; hence, we can understand why for Latour
it seemed that “a scientist’s activity is directed, not toward ‘reality,’ but toward these
operations on statements.” ([
35
], p. 273). In fact, the expert scientists also had this response
to his apprenticeship. With respect to his difficulty with understanding reports, “they
argued that the observer was baffled because of his obsessive interest in literature had
blinded him to the real importance of the papers: only by abandoning his interest in the
papers themselves could the observer grasp the ‘true meaning’ of the ‘facts’ which the
paper contained.” (ibid., p. 75). The same consideration of the need for transparency
regarding the basis of experience applies to the use of lab equipment: “The material setting
both makes possible the phenomenon and is required to be easily forgotten” (ibid., p. 69).
In analogy with the sensory substitution case, if the user is intent on focusing on the
local stimulations produced by the interface in a detached manner, and/or puts the control
of the interface into the hands of the experimenter, then from the perspective of that naïve

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 8 of 13
user the proximal device will not become transparent, and the distal object will fail to
become present in experience. In general, what is required for object perception to occur
is that the subject is skillfully engaged in a world-directed interaction. This perceptual
process can be supported in various ways, and sensory substitution devices serve as an
illustrative example of the role that tools—and our socio-material practices in general—can
play in shaping how subject and object relate to one another. Lenay et al. also point to the
importance of a user community in constituting a meaningful perceptual experience when
using such devices [
43
], similar to the role of an observer community in science. In this
way, we again start to see that the discovery process identified by Latour and Woolgar may
be a variation of the externalization process identified by Bach-y-Rita et al. Ultimately, both
are forms of socio-materially augmented perception.
3.3. Von Uexküll’s Concept of Projection
If the preceding analysis is on the right track, then we are close to securing the
foundations of an account of science that does justice to both subject and object. Scientific
observation is a socio-materially augmented form of object perception, yet for this to be a
solid account, more conceptual work still must be done to fully stabilize the foundations,
meaning to clarify the world-involving basis of perception.
As we have already discussed, despite the fact that the enactive approach has always
emphasized the importance of organism–environment interaction, when it comes to a
detailed explanation of the perceptual process, emphasis has typically been placed on the
side of the organism [
44
]. To be fair, the basis of perception is no longer said to be within
the brain, but it is often not quite clear how far the basis extends instead. Often it seems as
if the basis has only extended to the outer boundary of the body, such that what matters to
perception is the internal constitution of the organism—and especially the input–output
pattern that plays across its sensorimotor surface. We can see this ambiguity in Stewart’s
work when he claims that “what the world ‘is’ for the organism amounts to neither more
nor less than the consequences of its actions for its sensory inputs; this, in turn, clearly
depends on the repertoire of possible actions.” ([
45
], p. 3). The basis of perception certainly
includes changes in sensory organs, but if it only includes those changes then it cannot
be world-involving in any meaningful sense. It is possible that Stewart inherited this
ambiguity regarding the status of the lived world from von Uexküll’s [
46
] classic analysis
of the sensorimotor basis of the Umwelt. One of his favorite examples was the tick:
“Here is the story. The female tick climbs to the end of a branch, and
. . .
waits.
If she gets a whiff of butyric acid, she lets herself fall; if she does not fall onto
a hairy surface, she climbs up again onto a branch and starts over. If she does
fall onto a hairy surface, she crawls until she finds a smooth surface. When she
does find a smooth surface, she sticks her proboscis into the surface. If she finds
underneath a liquid at roughly 37 ◦C, she sucks up the liquid to satiety.”
([47], p. 57)
Interestingly, for von Uexküll each of these different functional circles involves a
process of externalization (in German: Hinausverlegung, occasionally also translated as
transposition, reassignment, or projection). Here is an example:
“The skin glands of the mammal are the bearers of perceptual meaning in the
first cycle, since the stimulus of butyric acid releases specific receptor signs in
the tick’s receptor organ, and these receptor signs are projected outside as an
olfactory cue.”
([48], p. 324)
Exactly how von Uexküll conceived of this process of projection is ambiguous, and
the status of his concept of the Umwelt therefore remains an active area of debate [
49
].
Certainly, interpretations of the Umwelt that are compatible with the participatory realism
promoted by the enactive approach and ecological psychology are possible [
29
]. On the
other hand, it could also be interpreted in purely internalist, subjectivist terms. As Fultot

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 9 of 13
and Turvey [
50
] argue, it is likely that von Uexküll considered externalization to consist of
a two-step process, whereby local activation of a receptor sign leads to the internal creation
of a perceptual cue, which is then attributed to the environment in such a way that the
organism can use it as standing for that external stimulus.
The form of this two-step process is similar to Bach-y-Rita et al.’s account of the change
in experience associated with mastering a sensory substitution device, and it matches even
more closely Latour and Woolgar’s account of the change in status of a statement into a
fact during the process of scientific discovery, which also involves a two-step process of
the “doubling” of a scientific statement into a scientific object, followed by an “inversion”
of the causal order such that the object “out there” ends up being given precedence over
the local causes. Thus, we arrive again at the conclusion that these accounts derive their
argumentative force from their logical consistency with an internalist starting point, rather
than from doing justice to the empirical phenomena that they aim to describe.
However, once we reject internalism, an alternative account suggests itself: during
these successful perceptual processes, the quality of the agent–environment interaction is
transformed; the agent’s grip on a specific aspect of the world is improved, and this allows
that aspect to be grasped as a distal object. From this point of view, the local activity is still
a necessary part of the process, but its role is fundamentally different: it no longer serves
as the input for the internal construction of a putative object, but rather becomes part of
the coupling through which the object is disclosed to experience. Of course, precisely how
the object will make its appearance in experience will depend on how it is approached;
experience is always perspectival, and this much of constructivism is retained. However, as
Stewart also recognizes, this is not the only relevant dependence: “A point worth making
here is that an Umwelt is not created by the organism alone, nor by the environment, but
through the characteristic relation between the organism and its environment.” ([
47
], p. 58).
It is this insistence on an organism–environment relation, without an internal doubling
or other intermediaries, that enables us to conceive of an enactive, world-involving, and
world-directed account of perception without double-talk [51].
Noë [
18
] has long been developing such an enactive account; he argues that a per-
ceptual relation must satisfy the conditions of both movement-dependence and object-
dependence—that is, “we are perceptually in touch with an object when our relation to
the object is highly sensitive to how things are with the object and to the way what we do
changes our relation to the object” (pp. 22–23). In this way, the subjective and objective
aspects of perception can be integrated into a unified account of how we find ourselves in
the world: perceptual experience not only discloses how things are (objectivity), but also
reflects how the perceiver relates to how things are (subjectivity): “When we encounter
the world, we do so by encountering how it perceptually appears from here. We experience
how things are, and we experience how they merely seem to be.” (p. 68). For example, we
perceive a whole coffee cup even if we always only ever immediately see one of its profiles
from our perspective. It is our skillful engagement with the world that enables this contri-
bution of subject- and world-involvement to become integrated into object perception, and
it is our awareness of others’ possible complementary perspectives that plays a constitutive
role in our perception of the object being “out there” in the world [52].
4. From Perception to Scientific Practice
This enactive theory of perception is a productive middle ground for the philosophy
of science—a sensorimotor basis of perception that loops through the body and the world
makes it reasonable to accept the constructivist insight that object perception is always
perspectival, while also accommodating the objectivist’s appeal to the world’s reality such
that the object transcends this perspective. In addition, the basic perceptual relation through
which we get a grip on the world can be transformed and empowered in different ways,
which is a consideration especially relevant for a theory of scientific practice. It is beyond
the scope of this essay to systematically develop this consideration in detail, but there is
room for a few pointers for future work.

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 10 of 13
For the case of human perception, technics plays a particularly important constitutive
role, but one that is already prefigured in other forms of life in the inventive creativity at
play in organismic adaptation [
53
]. For our purposes, we are specifically interested in how
the scope of the perceptual relation can be augmented with the skilled use of certain kinds
of coupling devices, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Despite their many differences, sensory substitution devices and scientific instruments
belong to the same broad category of coupling devices that augment our perception of the
world. They do so by enabling skilled users to become sensitive to changes in their relation
to the world that would otherwise remain inaccessible to them, and when these changes are
responded to appropriately, they permit the user to get a grip on a previously inaccessible
aspect of the world. This contact is experienced qualitatively as more perceptual when
the contact is more direct, but even highly spatiotemporally, socially, and technologically
mediated forms of sensorimotor interaction are never completely severed from the world.
On the contrary, the kind of detached object perception that is most relevant for scientific
observation is arguably a social achievement, which essentially depends on participatory
sense-making [
54
]. In addition, it seems advisable to consider the scientific instruments
supporting observation as participating in the coupled agent–environment system, and to
treat the resulting observation as a relational property of that system [
55
]. The mediation
afforded by scientific tools has long been a topic of post-phenomenology [
56
], but it remains
to be seen how the enactive approach can address these specific forms of mediation on
its own terms. More generally, it is crucial to explicitly include this irreducibly relational
perspective in the interpretation of observations; the enactive approach to the philosophy
of science is a situated approach [57].
Another important outstanding topic is how to include linguistic thought processes
into such a world-involving account of the scientific process. One attractive possibility is
to scale up basic perception–action loops by appealing to the right kind of socio-material
affordances, such that they become linguistically enabled [
58
]. Noë similarly argues that
some forms of thinking, at their core, retain a perceptual relation to the world: “Thought can
be extended perception when one deploys sensorimotor skills (presumably in conjunction
with other sorts of skills and knowledge) to achieve access to something or someone very
remote.” (2012, p. 27). An intriguing implication of conceptualizing thought in this manner
is that, for Noë, such world-involvement places strict constraints on the form that the
thought process can take. For example, he observes that “in the way I am now thinking of
[something absent], it would not be possible to think of something nonactual.” (p. 27). If
so, then we could expect that scientists are forced to change their way of thinking once a
statement changes its status from positing a possibly nonactual object to connecting with
an actual object, and this is indeed what Latour and Woolgar observed to occur on such
occasions, when “even the most cynical observers and committed relativists will have
difficulty in resisting that the ‘real’ [object] has been found” (p. 177). This possibility of
world-involving thought as another form of augmented perception is an exciting topic for
future research.
5. Conclusions and Outlook
In the end, human experience of the world is a subject-, other-, and world-involving
achievement, and this co-dependent basis of experience means that its limits are not within
our brain–body and its supposed internal constructs—we genuinely relate to the worldly
objects of our perception. We are at home in the world, and science is a sophisticated
socio-material elaboration of this more basic situatedness.
Accordingly, no one-dimensional account of scientific facts will do; the scientific
process cannot be reduced to the subjective perspectives and social conditions that enable
it, nor can we take ourselves completely out of this process in the hope of elevating the
targets of scientific investigation to observer-independent objects, as if they were uncovered
by a “view from nowhere”. This enactive approach to the philosophy of science is more
humane because it does not undermine the lifeworld that makes science possible in the

Philosophies 2022,7, 37 11 of 13
first place, and it does not stop there, given the reflexivity of the sciences of the mind. If this
world-involving theory of observation is on the right track, then it also promises to lead to
better science in practice. We need to explicitly incorporate the fact that our experience of
the world—including during scientific observation—is always perspectival:
“When we try to understand reality by focusing only on physical things outside
of us, we lose sight of the experiences they point back to. The deepest puzzles
can’t be solved in purely physical terms, because they all involve the unavoidable
presence of experience in the equation.” [59]
Importantly, an anti-realist interpretation of this irreducible presence of experience is
blocked by the complementary insight that experience is also world-involving. The next
step is to put this enactive approach to observation to the test and to turn it into a workable
research program, including stepping outside of the traditional disciplines of cognitive
science altogether—it is time for an enactive approach to physics.
For example, following phenomenological philosophy, Noë highlights that a defining
characteristic of the reality of the world is that it is inexhaustible in principle from any and
all perspectives, no matter the scale: “In the large, in the small, no experienced quality is so
simple that it can be taken in all at once. The world is structured and complex and it always
outstrips what can be taken in a glance” ([
18
], p. 95). The fact that the objects of experience
transcend our perspective in this way is most parsimoniously explained by appealing to
their dual status as being a part of the world while participating in the basis of experience.
This transcendence of the real is characteristic of our everyday perceptual experience, but it
similarly applies to scientific observation.
Consequently, it becomes intelligible why physics runs up against irreducible unob-
servables and indeterminacy when it socio-materially augments our perceptual relation
with the world to its smallest and largest scales. At these scales, the limitations on ex-
perience imposed by the transcendence of the real can no longer be ignored, such as at
the scale of cosmology when we try to grasp the entire universe as a whole [
60
], or at the
quantum scale when we try to grasp the properties of an elementary particle all at once [
61
].
The discovery that the world in principle escapes our grasp in these extreme situations of
scientific observation ceases to be mysterious. Instead, such observational limitations are
an expected consequence of the world-involving basis of perception; hence, they come to
be seen as reassuring evidence in support of a participatory realism [
62
]: we are real, so is
the world, and so is our interaction.
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Acknowledgments:
Maria Gohlke drew the illustration of Figure 1. Pierre Steiner provided detailed
constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Members of the Embodied Cognitive
Science Unit helped to fine-tune the final version.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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