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The Ontological Constitution of Cognition and the Epistemological Constitution of Cognitive Science: Phenomenology, Enaction, and Technology
Abstract
A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social.
This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science.
Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science.
ContributorsRenaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson
Bradford Books imprint
The incorporation of external tools during a sports activity can be analyzed through the dynamics of appropriation. In this study, we assumed that appropriation could be documented at both the phenomenological and behavioral scales and aimed to characterize trail runners’ interactions with five carrying systems (i.e., backpacks proposing different ways of carrying water) in an ecological setting. The runners ran a 3-km trail running loop, equipped with inertial sensors to quantify both their vertical oscillations and those of the carrying systems. After the trials, phenomenological data were collected in enactive interviews. Results showed that (1) the runners encountered issues related to the carrying system, whose emergence in their experiences while running revealed the interplay between the tool’s transparency (i.e., when runners provided no account of the carrying system) and opacity (i.e., when runners mentioned perceptions of disturbing system elements), and (2) when the runners carried the water bottles on the pectoral straps, they felt the system bouncing in an uncomfortable way, especially in the less technical parts of the route. We therefore investigated the low- and high-order parameters of coordination by computing the vertical accelerations and the acceleration couplings between the carrying system and the runners in order to identify coordination modes. The congruence between the runners’ experiences and the behavioral data was noted in terms of (1) the system’s vertical oscillations (i.e., low-order parameters) and (2) the couplings between the accelerations of the runners and the backpacks (i.e., high-order parameters). Our results demonstrated that the appropriation process was shaped by the interactions between the runners’ activity, the environment and the physical properties of the tool. These interactions occurred in fluctuating phases where the runners perceived the carrying systems as more or less incorporated. Our results highlighted how tool incorporation is revealed through changes in its transparency/opacity in the actor’s activity.
We live in a world filled with material objects, and certainly, the workplace and occupational training are no exception. The purpose of this chapter is to show the value of seriously examining the presence and contributions of technical objects within the context of occupational education and training. The concern is that when objects are freed of their status as mere artefacts – that is, as things having undergone even the slightest human transforming action – and are instead granted the status of technical object, their decisive role in work in the expansiveness of activity, as an ongoing process of growth, can be more fully understood. This chapter introduces some lessons learnt from Francophone perspectives, but also presents emerging conceptions that are opened up by notions such as appropriation and individuation. It is organised into four main parts: We first review the assumptions of the enactive approach and describe how these assumptions differ from objectivist ontology. Then, we examine the concepts of mode of existence and beings of technology to then explain our conception of technical objects. Third, we address the constitutive role of artefacts in learning and development. Finally, some consequences for educational research are discussed. Through this chapter, we aim to elaborate the following: the inaptness of the subject–object dichotomy, the heuristic nature of hybridity that makes human beings ‘technical beings’, the necessity to explore seriously the beingness of technical objects, the triple individuation that characterises the transformation of human activity, the key role of technics in defining standards and training contents, the centrality of appropriation as the fundamental transformation in the activity of actors in training and the potential value of training design as technical invention. Such a wide-ranging genetic interpretation of the relationship between humans and their environment is needed to build future adult education that engages with both social and technological transformations and their appropriation in a perspective that takes into account the omnipresence of individuation.
The modern landscape of computing has rapidly evolved with breakthroughs in new input modalities and interaction designs, but the fundamental model of humans giving commands to computers is still largely dominant. A small but growing number of projects in the computational creativity field are beginning to study and build creative computers that are able to collaborate with human users as partners by simulating, to various degrees, the collaboration that naturally occurs between humans in creative domains (Biles, Leonardo, 36:43–45, 2003; Lubart, Int J Hum Comput Stud, 63:365–369, 2005; Hoffman and Weinberg, Shimon: an interactive improvisational robotic marimba player. In: CHI’10 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, pp 3097–3102, 2010; Zook et al., Understanding human creativity for computational play. In: 8th ACM conference on creativity and cognition, 2011; Davis et al., Building artistic computer colleagues with an enactive model of creativity, 2014). If this endeavor proves successful, the implications for HCI and the field of computing in general could be significant. Creative computers could understand and work alongside humans in a new hybrid form of human-computer co-creativity that could inspire, motivate, and perhaps even teach creativity to human users through collaboration.
The present article deals with how the processes of learning and development can be taken into account in the design of everyday things. The objective is to encourage designers to consider the role of appropriation in their work in order to anticipate: (1) the integration of technical tools, objects and devices into a variety of spheres of activity; and (2) the long-range transformations initiated by the use of these things. We hope that this article will encourage exchanges between designers and researchers in the field of lifelong learning, as we are firmly convinced that mutual enrichment is likely and certainly desirable between the fields of design and learning theory. We also assume that making appropriation the basis for design will encourage reforms in the design of training situations.
The cognitive sciences are increasingly coming to terms with the embodied, embedded, extended, and experiential aspects of the mind. Exemplifying this shift, the enactive approach points to an essential role of goal-directed bodily activity in the generation of meaningful perceptual experience, i.e., sense-making. Here, building on recent insights into the transformative effects of practical tool-use, we make use of the enactive approach in order to provide a definition of an enactive interface in terms of augmented sense-making. We introduce such a custom-built interface, the Enactive Torch, and present a study of its experiential effects. The results demonstrate that the user experience is not adequately captured by any standardly assumed perceptual modality; rather, it is a new feeling that is mediated by the design of the device and shaped by the overall situation of the task. Taken together these findings show that there is much to be gained by synergies between engineering and the cognitive sciences in the creation of new experience-centered technology. We suggest that the guiding principle should be the design of interfaces that serve as a transparent medium for augmenting our natural skills of interaction with the world, instead of requiring conscious attention to the interface as an opaque object in the world.
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