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Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play
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
... As Di Paolo et al. [2010] point out, while enactivist views are being much more widely embraced, there's a worry that this is because they're being watered-down or misconstrued in an attempt to make them more compatible with other views. While I hope to resist exactly that move here, the degree to which Montemayor's focus on autonomy, embeddedness, and embodiment correspond to the five core ideas in the enactive approach is worthy of examining. ...
... This needs much more unpacking than can happen here, but the word "intrinsically" is doing a lot of important work. Similarly, in describing enactivism's notion of autonomy, Di Paolo et al. [2010] emphasize the same kind of intrinsic motivation; they say, "Fundamentally, they [living organisms] can be autonomous only by virtue of their self-generated identity as distinct entities" [p. 37]. ...
... The ways enactivism talks about this kind of environmental entwining span a number of key points in this approach. Di Paolo et al. [2010] sum it up well when they say of embodiment, "… for the enactivist, the body is the ultimate source of significance; embodiment means that the mind is inherent in the precarious, active, normative, and worldful process of animation, that the body is not a puppet controlled by the brain but a whole animate system with many autonomous layers of self-constitution, self-coordination, and self-organization and varying degrees of openness to the world that create its sense-making activity" [p. 42]. ...
This short paper traces some convergences between the ontologies of mind and AI presented in Carlos Montemayor’s Precis for The Prospect of Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence and Enactivism, with a focus on autonomy, embeddedness, perspective, and social interaction. I argue that it is surprising that Montemayor does not engage with any of the traditional 4e ontologies here, especially enactivism, considering his strong reliance on biology and autonomy in carving up intelligence and consciousness.
... The results are also in line with Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher [17] who propose sensemaking as an inherently active process, in which people "participate in the generation of meaning through their bodies and action, often engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions; they enact a world." [17]. ...
... The results are also in line with Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher [17] who propose sensemaking as an inherently active process, in which people "participate in the generation of meaning through their bodies and action, often engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions; they enact a world." [17]. In this phase of the DIGI-Sense project, we recognize the active, collaborative, sensible and embodied aspects of the process, and the enactment of a world in the bodily actions to enact the digital representation of the movements in the lines and drawings. ...
... In this phase of the DIGI-Sense project, we recognize the active, collaborative, sensible and embodied aspects of the process, and the enactment of a world in the bodily actions to enact the digital representation of the movements in the lines and drawings. In this sense, based on the data we can identify sensemaking processes through the body and enactivism [17] that can be of relevance in digital transformation processes. ...
When tackling digital transformation, Digital Sensemaking, as researched in the DIGI-Sense project, empowers humans to reflect on the meaning from an intertwined cognitive, aesthetic, and body perspective. Sensemaking is fundamental for meaningful (work) experience of individuals and organizations. Digital means can play a central role to give meaning to processes, shared experiences, and to rationalize established routines. As embodiment, materiali-ties, movements, and aesthetics are core to sensemaking, we have designed and explored a corresponding artscience installation. It implements the idea that collective digital drawing is a form of par-ticipatory sense-making that emerges from embodied, dynamical and collaborative interactions between co-performers. Performers could exert control over expressing drawings, by coordinating their movements with one another. This functionality is integrated in a setting with increasing task complexity-to further stimulate social collaboration and create rich visual feedback. In this way digital sensemaking could become an essential means for the encounter between two persons to sketch a common ground of their activity spaces.
... One core tenet of the cognitive science theory of enaction is that meaning is built through interaction with the environment [39]. Agents engage in a process called sense-making, or regulating their interaction based on coordination and feedback from the environment to maintain their autonomous identity [33]. ...
... Agents engage in a process called sense-making, or regulating their interaction based on coordination and feedback from the environment to maintain their autonomous identity [33]. Meaning emerges during sense-making while agents cast a web of significance [39] onto the environment through their interactions and the results of those actions in sensorimotor loops [34,38,80,83]. These sensorimotor loops develop into sensorimotor contingencies, such that sensory data is understood in terms of bodily constraints and capabilities. ...
This paper describes the AI Drawing Partner, which is a co-creative drawing agent that also serves as a research platform to model co-creation. The AI Drawing Partner is an early example of a quantified co-creative AI system that automatically models the co-creation that happens on the system. The method the system uses to capture this data is based on a new cognitive science framework called co-creative sense-making (CCSM). The CCSM is based on the cognitive theory of enaction, which describes how meaning emerges through interaction with the environment and other people in that environment in a process of sense-making. The CCSM quantifies elements of interaction dynamics to identify sense-making patterns and interaction trends. This paper describes a new technique for modeling the interaction and collaboration dynamics of co-creative AI systems with the co-creative sense-making (CCSM) framework. A case study is conducted of ten co-creative drawing sessions between a human user and the co-creative agent. The analysis includes showing the artworks produced, the quantified data from the AI Drawing Partner, the curves describing interaction dynamics, and a visualization of interaction trend sequences. The primary contribution of this paper is presenting the AI Drawing Partner, which is a unique co-creative AI system and research platform that collaborates with the user in addition to quantifying, modeling, and visualizing the co-creative process using the CCSM framework.
... If we inquire about the nature of autonomous subjects, enactive research stands out since it has taken autonomy as one of its core ideas (Thompson & Di Paolo, 2014;Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher 2010;Beer & Di Paolo, 2023). Moreover, it develops an approach to autonomy that stresses the embedded and enacted nature of human cognition. ...
... Therefore, the enactive idea of autonomy has two aspects: (a) autopoiesis and (b) the regulation of relations with the environment. 9 These aspects are related to enactivism's core concepts of sense-making, adaptivity, emergence, embodiment, and experience (Di Paolo, Rohde & De Jaegher 2010). In particular, sense-making, adaptivity, and awareness are crucial for the normative relation with the environment central to autonomy. ...
Large parts of the Western philosophical tradition, powerful in Kant’s transcendental conception, have reserved the concept of autonomy for rational subjects that think and act on reasons. While this captures an essential aspect of autonomy, the dimensions of embodiment and vulnerability remain unreflected or are subsumed under the heteronomous conditions of the human subject. If the conception of autonomy, though, doesn’t start with the concept of a rational subject but from the perspective of living beings, autonomy and vulnerability seem intrinsically connected, as Jonas’ (1973; 1997) concept of “needful freedom” suggests. This article argues for a deep connection between human autonomy and vulnerability. Methodologically, the argument follows the life-mind-continuity thesis (Thompson, 2007) and lays out the embodied account of autonomy that enactivism offers. Two crucial moments are: 1. The organism can distance itself from the environment. 2. This enables it to establish its own norms. However, the norms of bodily self-regulation also render the organism vulnerable. This conception, though, needs specification for capturing human autonomy. As enactivists like E. Thompson assume, phenomenology is essential to theorizing about human autonomy. I will develop a phenomenological concept of autonomy starting from three notions of selfhood (Zahavi, 2008) and arguing for a central role of the reflective self for human autonomy. Reflection grounds both moments of autonomy: Self-distancing and the possibility of taking a stance by relying on reasons. In the phenomenological sense, autonomy is thus the ability to respond to reasons for which reflection is necessary. However, this ability is bound to a particular form of vulnerability that manifests in some psychopathologies. This vulnerability will be shown in conclusion by Blankenburg’s reflections on the role of autonomy in mental diseases.
... These advances highlight the relational and embodied nature of prereflective experience, emphasizing that it is situated not only within individual consciousness but also within social, environmental, and bodily contexts. Furthermore, concepts like empathy theory and mind-in-life, as discussed by Di Paolo, Rohde, and Jaegher (2010), point to the challenges of capturing pre-reflective experiences in a way that integrates both individual and intersubjective dimensions. ...
... Finally, the enactive approach introduced by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (2017) shifts phenomenology toward an understanding of mind as enacted through interaction with the environment, emphasizing the dynamic relationship between organism and world (Di Paolo, Rohde & Jaegher, 2010). Their mind-in-life concept, which integrates biological and phenomenological perspectives, is crucial for Phenomenological Mapping, as it highlights the environmentally embedded and enacted nature of pre-reflective consciousness. ...
Exploring the nuanced and often elusive realm of pre-reflective consciousness presents a methodological challenge, as it involves capturing experiences that arise prior to reflective thought and language. This article introduces Phenomenological Mapping, an innovative research method designed to systematically study the pre-reflective dimensions of human experience. Grounded in the foundational theories of Edmund Husserl (2012), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2013), and Martin Heidegger (1992, 2008), the approach also integrates contemporary perspectives from Dan Zahavi (1999, Contemporary Phenomenology and Qualitative Research5(1), 1–17, 2021), Shaun Gallagher (2006, 2017), and Evan Thompson (2010, 2017). Drawing upon advancements in neurophenomenology, embodied cognition, and intersubjectivity, Phenomenological Mapping provides a structured framework for accessing and analyzing pre-reflective consciousness. This methodology guides researchers through a sequence of eleven phases, from initial preparation and contextualization to data collection, analysis, and integration. It employs Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied perception, and Heidegger’s exploration of being-in-the-world. The approach is further enriched by Zahavi’s intersubjectivity, Gallagher’s work on embodiment, and Thompson’s continuum of consciousness. By utilizing multisensory data collection techniques—such as visual diaries, audio recordings, and experiential practices—Phenomenological Mapping offers a multi-dimensional approach to analyzing subjective experience. This research contributes a novel methodological tool to phenomenology, facilitating an empirical investigation that remains faithful to the philosophical foundations of pre-reflective consciousness while bridging empirical and theoretical domains.
... In talking about reentrant processes, Thompson (2007, p. 13) explicitly asserts "the nervous system … creates meaning." Enactivists (e.g., Thompson, 2007;Di Paolo et al., 2010) sometimes clarify that other processes like metabolism are involved in cognition or that meaning arises from relationships between internal dynamics and the environment. We will see that Dewey (1934) and Gibson (1966) agree, locating meaning in an ecological domain that is defined in relation to an organism's capacities and needs. ...
... If, on the one hand, enactivists mean that value is generated internally within organisms, then the assertion that they are slipping into Modern era subjectivism has merit. But certain enactivists deny this, indeed claiming to repudiate the inner-outer divide (e.g., Di Paolo et al., 2010). So, if, on the other hand, they mean that the world manifests ...
This article argues that Dewey expresses what seems to be a core enactive commitment to constructivism: that creatures do not encounter pre-existing realities but bring them out by altering their surroundings. He adds that constructivism does not obviate realism because changes, once introduced, really are there in relation to a creature’s capacities. This poses a dilemma. If enaction primarily entails altering the external milieu, then the movement repeats pragmatism, also collapsing a basis upon which many of its authors differentiate their outlooks from ecological psychology’s realism. Yet if constructive activity is largely interior, as enactivists’ language sometimes suggests, then critics may be right in saying that the movement backslides into early Modern solipsism. A broader argument is that enactivists sometimes perpetuate what James characterizes as monistic halfway empiricism. Here, the risk is that researchers hold positions not because of evidence but regardless of it, or stipulate terminological definitions that exclude opposing views ahead of time. Even physics remains ununified, and there may be room for combining antagonistic accounts of mind. Or maybe normally hostile positions like enactivism and functionalism are, with some terminological reframing, reconcilable. The article also touches on historical matters, such as the fact that American philosophy and enactivism have Asian and evolutionary influences, or that they react against common schools. The purpose is to clarify the movements in question and identify where enactivists engage in something like halfway empiricism by orienting themselves against enemies based more in fiction than fact.
... What implications will the understanding of a bodily subject for motor control and skill acquisition have for the inclusion of intersubjectivity and inter-corporeal relationships between the child and the physical therapist (PT)? The aim of this paper is to describe and discuss an enactive theoretical framework, which brings the child as a subject into focus, as a means answering the above questions (Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009;Di Paolo et al., 2010. ...
... Neither does the child passively receive information from her environment but rather actively participates in the generation of Frontiers in Psychology 09 frontiersin.org meaning in what matters to her and appears relevant and significant for her goals and intentions (Di Paolo et al., 2010). The softness, hardness, etc. of toys and other objects in the world are not to be found 'in them' but in how these objects respond to the child's active manipulation (touching, probing, shaking, squeezing, etc.) through her perceptual bodily movements of 'I can' (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019; Sørvoll et al., 2022). ...
Theories of motor control and skill acquisition strongly influence and guide various fields of clinical practice. In last decades, changes in theoretical frameworks related to the conceptualization of brain plasticity, functional structures within the child, and environment have led to a revision of therapy approaches progressing from therapist-driven to child-initiated approaches. Even though theoretical frameworks and clinical practice are closely linked to the child’s body, the profession has paid less attention to theories concerning the body’s role and status in interpersonal relationships when fostering motor control and skill acquisition in children. In this theoretical paper we discuss the theoretical frameworks of motor control and skill acquisition that currently guide clinical practice. Through highlighting valuable contributions of these theories, we explore theoretical and practical benefits pediatric physical therapy can acquire by taking an enactive approach as a means to bring the child as a subject into focus. We rely on enactive concepts of embodiment, autonomy, and participatory sense-making in our exploration to provide an extended understanding of motor control and skill acquisition shaping our beliefs about what counts in therapeutic encounters in pediatric physical therapy.
... They also highlight play as social and interactive learning activities. From our enactive stance (Varela et al., 2016;Froese and Di Paolo, 2011;Di Paolo et al., 2010), we interpret that the PPTs acknowledge play as fundamental to children's sense-making and learning across domains and as a vital component of therapy. When play and therapy can emerge together and co-exist, it fosters engagement, builds trust in the PPT-child relationship and becomes a vehicle for children's skill development and sense of mastery. ...
Introduction
Play is a way for children to develop and learn about themselves in conjunction with the world. Using play as part of pediatric physical therapy is broadly recommended. This study investigates this integration of play and seeks to answer the research question: How do pediatric physical therapists (PPT) understand and manage embedding play in pediatric physical therapy with children aged 0–3?
Methods
This is a qualitative study in which we connect to an enactive theoretical framework. We interviewed 14 PPTs about their use of play, including video-elicited questions while viewing recordings of their therapy sessions. Our results were developed through an abductive thematic analysis.
Results
The PPTs acknowledge play as a foundation of children’s learning and a vital component of physical therapy. They explain that play and therapy often co-exist and intertwine, but they also experience tensions when they strive to make play therapeutic. The PPTs find it taxing to engage in play with children who present with limited interaction and play skills, and voice concern for children who struggle to engage in interactional play.
Discussion
Trusting play and letting play emerge through shared sense-making can resolve challenges and enable PPTs to discover new therapeutic opportunities. A child’s striving and overcoming of resistance can be infused with playfulness and make play thrive. We invite PPTs to experiment with the emerging opportunities and boundaries between therapy and play during treatment sessions. Respect for the child’s autonomy, attention to the child’s play experience, and repairs of interactional mismatches are crucial in this process. Therapeutic guidance and mutuality in interactions can empower children to learn to play to learn new skills and experience mastery as they explore and venture beyond what they already know.
... The empirical evidence of experiments shown here supports this idea. A parallel could be established with the concept of play, which can be understood as a 'rule-breaker' activity of the constraints of a stable and self-equilibrating regime of behaviours which has no concrete goals 35 . A model as the one presented here could be used for exploring life-like autonomous behaviour without the need for explicit internal representations, goals, or rule-based behaviour. ...
Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality suggests that there may be general principles inducing this behaviour, yet there is no well-founded theory for understanding how criticality is generated at a wide span of levels and contexts. In order to explore how criticality might emerge from general adaptive mechanisms, we propose a simple learning rule that maintains an internal organizational structure from a specific family of systems at criticality. We implement the mechanism in artificial embodied agents controlled by a neural network maintaining a correlation structure randomly sampled from an Ising model at critical temperature. Agents are evaluated in two classical reinforcement learning scenarios: the Mountain Car and the Acrobot double pendulum. In both cases the neural controller appears to reach a point of criticality, which coincides with a transition point between two regimes of the agent's behaviour. These results suggest that adaptation to criticality could be used as a general adaptive mechanism in some circumstances, providing an alternative explanation for the pervasive presence of criticality in biological and cognitive systems.
... Appraisal is an activity of individuals as organized wholes fully embodied and embedded in a world, irreducible to the functioning of particular organs or organ systems. Far from being an internal, behind-the-scenes processing of and conferral of meaning upon information or driver of an individual's action, appraisal is the action of individuals embedded in their worlds (Colombetti, 2014;Dewey, 1895;Di Paolo et al., 2010). To understand appraisal, therefore, requires grounding in the real-time dynamics of individuals as living bodies acting in and coupled to their real-world contexts. ...
Given its clinical significance, horror should occupy a prominent place within emotion theory. However, conceptualizations of horror within psychological science are relatively underdeveloped and conceptually confused. Through conceptual analysis of the disparate literature on the emotion, we seek to establish horror as a qualitatively distinct mode of engagement with the world and to remedy its over-intellectualization, as evident in many prior accounts. Given its etymology, we first address horror's characteristic immobilization—at the level of stereotypical facial configuration and action readiness—before analyzing horror's formal object and appraisal structure. In the process, we critique schema accounts of the emotion and argue for conceptualizing horror pre-reflectively by grounding it in appraised violations of the practical dynamics of social engagement.
... Vi er inspireret af antropologiske og faenomenologiske perspektiver på krop og bevaegelse, der antager, at mennesket og verdenen er relationelt knyttet til hinanden og konstituerer sig gensidigt i en løbende, dynamisk proces (Gebauer & Wulf, 2001;Di Paolo et al, 2010;Gallagher, 2017). Bevaegelse af kroppen er en grundlaeggende del af menneske-verden-relationen og afgørende for, hvordan vi opfatter verden og os selv. ...
Med afsæt i en empirisk undersøgelse analyserer artiklen, hvilke bevægelsespraksisser der er til stede i dagtilbud. I artiklen anvendes et bevægelsesbegreb der tilstræber at balancere mellem en opfattelse af, at alt er bevægelse, fx at trække vejret, og snævre forståelser som betragter bevægelse som regelbaserede idrætsaktiviteter eller som ren og skær fysisk aktivitet. Artiklen foreslår tre overordnede måder at forstå bevægelsespraksisser i dagtilbud på. Det handler om funktionel, struktureret og “fri” bevægelse. De tre kategorier bliver diskuteret i forhold til tre formålsdomæner, som Gert Biesta foreslår, at al pædagogik og uddannelse bør orientere sig imod. Hensigten hermed er at komme nærmere en forståelse af, hvordan pædagogisk personale kan arbejde med bevægelse indenfor de tre kategorier på en meningsfuld måde både for børnene og dem selv.AbstractMovement practices in daycareBased on an empirical investigation, the article investigates movement practices in Danish day care. The article’s concept of movement aims to balance between a broad understanding of movement as everything, e.g. breathing, and narrow understandings, which consider movement as rule-based and sport-like activities or as sheer physical activity. The article proposes three general ways of understanding movement practices in day care: functional, structured and “free” movement. The three categories are discussed against three educational domains, which Gert Biesta suggests is involved in all pedagogy and education to varying degrees. The aim is to better understand how educators can work with movement within the three categories in a way that is meaningful to both children and educators themselves.
... Qeios ID: KOVD1Z.3 · https://doi.org/10.32388/KOVD1Z.3 5/20 of Gibson (1979), modern cognitive science tends to favor the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) paradigm of cognition (Bateson, 2000). The resulting view of consciousness as a phenomenon that is structured and shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments (Hanna and Thompson, 2003;Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008;Di Paolo et al., 2010;Silberstein and Chemero, 2012;Newen et al., 2018;Damasio, 2021) is both credible and useful . Which agents, alive or not, have consciousness -and if living, whether consciousness is reducible to neural processes or encompasses a more expansive phenomenological experience -are ongoing debates (Velmans, 2020). ...
While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. The purpose of this essay is to specify the major points on which in my opinion there is widespread though not universal agreement, as proposed benchmarks for the current state of consciousness research across the phylogenetic spectrum. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awareness_ _and focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. However, three major mysteries about phenomenological experience that remain unresolved are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the process that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.
... Building on the phenomenological approach of Varela (1991;Thompson and Varela, 2001) and the ecological psychology of Gibson (1979), modern cognitive science tends to favor the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) paradigm of cognition (Bateson, 2000). The resulting view of consciousness as a phenomenon that is structured and shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments (Hanna and Thompson, 2003;Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008;Di Paolo et al., 2010;Silberstein and Chemero, 2012;Newen et al., 2018;Damasio, 2021) is both credible and useful . Which agents, alive or not, have consciousness -and if living, whether consciousness is reducible to neural processes or encompasses a more expansive phenomenological experience -are ongoing debates. ...
While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. The purpose of this essay is to specify the major points on which in my opinion there is widespread though not universal agreement, as proposed benchmarks for the current state of consciousness research across the phylogenetic spectrum. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awarenessand focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. However, three major mysteries about phenomenological experience that remain unresolved are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the process that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.
... Um sistema enativo [Thompson 2010, Di Paolo et al. 2010] deve contemplar os aspectos de: autonomia, onde sua operaçãó e independentemente, porémé influenciado pelas interações com mundo que o cerca; embodiment, significando que deve existir como uma entidade física e interagir diretamente com o ambiente; emergence, que se refere como a cognição emerge internamente e as regras, leis e mecanismos que regem o comportamento das partes que compõem o sistema; experiência, que retoma o histórico de interação que está a sua volta (ações no ambiente e as perturbações que o afetam advindas do ambiente); e fazer sentido, que busca sentido no conhecimento acumulado pelas interações para predizer novas ações. ...
Neste trabalho introduzimos o conceito de aula socioenativa, inserindo a dimensão digital, embutida na física de uma sala de aula, permitindo que aqueles que estavam nela pudessem expor e visualizar os sentimentos do coletivo da classe. O compartilhamento de emoções e a sua percepção afeta a dimensão social, reconfigurando-a e realimentando a dimensão digital que se modifica e retorna ao físico e social da sala. Um sistema com as dimensões social, física e digital foi estabelecido numa Sala de Recursos Multifuncional em 6 encontros. As crianças compartilharam suas emoções utilizando o Físico e visualizaram numa luminária a última emoção compartilhada, bem como num mosaico a mistura das emoções. A professora atuou no social para articular os sentimentos trazidos no início da aula, modificando a forma de atuar, quando necessário. Resultados ilustram as formas como a aula se tornou socioenativa com o feedback entre as três dimensões.
... Building on the phenomenological approach of Varela (1991;Thompson and Varela, 2001) and the ecological psychology of Gibson (1979), modern cognitive science tends to favor the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) paradigm of cognition (Bateson, 2000). The resulting view of consciousness as a phenomenon that is structured and shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments (Hanna and Thompson, 2003;Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008;Di Paolo et al., 2010;Silberstein and Chemero, 2012;Newen et al., 2018;Domasio, 2021) is both credible and useful which consciousness is embedded (or from which it is enacted)? ...
While the study of consciousness has had a controversial history and, until recently, a pessimistic prognosis, recent views within the neuroscientific community suggest that a maturing if incomplete scientific understanding of consciousness is close at hand. Most published definitions of consciousness boil down to a focus on it as a process arising in a nervous system engaged with a body and its environment, giving rise to subjective (personal) experience. A broad consensus on the phenomenology of consciousness sees it consisting at a minimum of (1) awarenessand focused attention, (2) unity of perception, (3) qualitative variations in content, (4) mental causation, and (5) a sense of self. There is also broad agreement that the substrate of consciousness requires sizeable, complex nervous systems organized into several hierarchical levels of processing. Further insight is gained by reconstructing the evolution of subjective phenomenological experience ― most likely from multiple origins, hosted by a diversity of body and brain architectures, and diverging into markedly different forms across the animal kingdom. The three major mysteries that remain about phenomenological experience are (1) the neurological correlates of consciousness, (2) the apparent gap between phenomenology and mechanism, and (3) the agent that monitors the brain activity admitted into consciousness.
... An organism that meets the environment on its own sensorimotor terms brings forth or enacts what counts as a meaningful world (Thompson 2005: 418). "Exchanges with the world are inherently significant for the cognizer and this is the definitional property of a cognitive system: the creation and appreciation of meaning or sense-making in short" (Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher 2007). In this respect, cognition in humans with evolved brains and nervous systems, living in environments with others and with formed social structures, will be different from cognition in nonhuman animals. ...
An introduction to the 4Es -- embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition.
... This path has rarely been explored even by enactive approaches. In fact, while some authors recognize the active role of object affordances in shaping play, dynamically influencing organismic constraints, as exemplified, for example, in the actionperception-action relation ( [Rucinska & Reijmers, 2015]), others suggest that materials may act as an initial trigger, but meanings are then detached from their immediate presence ([DiPaolo et al., 2010]). We wish to highlight instead that similar to organismic, social, and cultural constraints, materials may actively shape child play. ...
... It implied that EFL learning in authentic contexts including physical environment and culture could provide more meaningful cognitive supports rather than in the traditional in-door classrooms. Moreover, according to Enactivism theory which combined constructivism and cognition, learning environment and cognition are inseparable where students are not only absorbed knowledge from the environment passively but also interact with the environment actively to obtain knowledge [7]. Therefore, study in an authentic context could provide more meaningful cognitive support rather than in the traditional in-door classrooms. ...
Despite the importance of English in various aspects of life, students learning English as a foreign language often lack sufficient opportunities to practice speaking in their daily lives. To address these issues, this study proposes an innovative mobile app called Ubiquitous English (UEnglish) that facilitates English speaking learning in authentic contexts anytime and anywhere. Leveraging advanced technologies, UEnglish incorporates automatic speech recognition (ASR), cloud machine translation (MT), and text-to-speech (TTS) functionalities. The primary aim of this study is to assess the impact of UEnglish on students’ English speaking ability, specifically focusing on the quality and quantity of their spoken English when describing comic pictures and authentic pictures. To investigate the learning behaviors and the influence on English speaking learning achievement in this study, 56 fifth-grade students were employed, including 28 students in an experimental group (EG) using UEnglish and 28 students in a control group (CG) with a paper-based teaching method. The results indicated that, after the experiment, EG outperformed CG and EG had significant differences in the quality and quantity of English speaking in the context of describing comic pictures and authentic pictures. Students’ learning portfolios revealed that EG students not only could use more English words and more complex sentences to express their thoughts but also easily applied what they learned when encountering similar contexts. Our findings suggested that authentic contextual English learning with UEnglish was helpful for students to practice speaking English related to their surroundings.
It has been recently proposed that memory studies should move beyond focusing on explicit, identity-creating, and backward-looking forms of collective memory, such as commemorative remembering, and pay more attention to implicit memory processes within social groups. This article demonstrates that, in taking this advice, one would throw the baby out with the bathwater. Revisiting Bartlett's theory of remembering from the perspective of contemporary enactivist accounts of cognition, it argues that no form of collective memory is independent of identity and all forms of collective remembering have an implicit aspect. More specifically, the significance of the collective past and group identity are dynamically and reciprocally constructed through a history of habitual interactions within the group. On this view, group identity is maintained by a highly embodied system of collective interactive schemas that are constantly re-actualised in the ever-changing social, cultural, and political environment. It follows that commemorative remembering, as a paradigmatic example of such collective habits, is better described as an adaptive, future-oriented becoming than merely a backward-looking, explicit recollection of memories.
AI in Society provides an interdisciplinary corpus for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) as a global phenomenon that transcends geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Edited by a consortium of experts hailing from diverse academic traditions and regions, the 11 edited and curated sections provide a holistic view of AI’s societal impact. Critically, the work goes beyond the often Eurocentric or U.S.-centric perspectives that dominate the discourse, offering nuanced analyses that encompass the implications of AI for a range of regions of the world. Taken together, the sections of this work seek to move beyond the state of the art in three specific respects. First, they venture decisively beyond existing research efforts to develop a comprehensive account and framework for the rapidly growing importance of AI in virtually all sectors of society. Going beyond a mere mapping exercise, the curated sections assess opportunities, critically discuss risks, and offer solutions to the manifold challenges AI harbors in various societal contexts, from individual labor to global business, law and governance, and interpersonal relationships. Second, the work tackles specific societal and regulatory challenges triggered by the advent of AI and, more specifically, large generative AI models and foundation models, such as ChatGPT or GPT-4, which have so far received limited attention in the literature, particularly in monographs or edited volumes. Third, the novelty of the project is underscored by its decidedly interdisciplinary perspective: each section, whether covering Conflict; Culture, Art, and Knowledge Work; Relationships; or Personhood—among others—will draw on various strands of knowledge and research, crossing disciplinary boundaries and uniting perspectives most appropriate for the context at hand.
The research aims to systematize the current scientific evidence on methodologies used to investigate the impact of indoor built environment on well-being, focusing on Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) variables such as thermal comfort, air quality, noise, and lighting. This systematic review adheres to the Joanna Briggs Institute framework and PRISMA guidelines to assess empirical studies that incorporate physiological measurements like heart rate, skin temperature, and brain activity, captured through various techniques in real-life contexts.
The principal results reveal a significant relationship between the built environment and physiological as well as psychological states. For instance, thermal comfort was found to be the most commonly studied IEQ variable, affecting heart activity and skin temperature. The research also identifies the need for a shift towards using advanced technologies like Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) for capturing real-time physiological data in natural settings.
Major conclusions include the need for a multi-level, evidence-based approach that considers the dynamic interaction between the brain, body, and environment. The study advocates for the incorporation of multiple physiological signals to gain a comprehensive understanding of well-being in relation to the built environment. It also highlights gaps in current research, such as the absence of noise as a studied variable of IEQ and the need for standardized well-being assessment tools. By synthesizing these insights, the research aims to pave the way for future studies that can inform better design and policy decisions for indoor environments.
This study provides a detailed account of dilemmas experienced by community organizers arising from the tension between political and educational objectives within the community organizing social action approach. We address the way these dilemmas emerge during nonviolent direct action (NDA), and the associated organizers' valuative processes. Within the course-of-experience framework, we conducted direct field observations, video recordings, and self-confrontation interviews with French organizers promoting housing rights in working-class communities. After outlining six episodes experienced as dilemmatic by these organizers, we offer an in-depth analysis of two enacted prototypical dilemmas. Findings reveal the cruciality of the organizers’ emotions during NDAs, and that organizers tend to prioritize short-term political goals over longer-term goals of collective radical education/emancipation processes. We discuss findings through two main drivers for organizers’ training: the risk of becoming a winner-almighty organizer instead of promoting actual grassroots participation, and the impact of anger and indignation in ethical reasonings during NDAs.
Amid global geopolitical realism pushing for a race of hegemonic rivalry nowadays, an outflow of global human talents is a pressing organizational concern. Our study draws attention to the underexamined phenomenon of the exit of foreign directors from their host countries during geopolitical tensions. Theorizing from a sensemaking logic, we posit that the deterioration of bilateral political relations serves as an unexpected event that activates foreign directors’ schemas for dual identity conflict, propelling them to react behaviorally to such identity threats by exiting the board in the host country. In addition, we further posit that the sensemaking process is contingent on how the foreign director draws cues from the embedded social context, including organizational identification, socialization and homophily effect, and socioemotional climate. Our empirical analyses from a sample of 1,014 foreign directors in China from 1999 to 2018 provide strong and robust support for the hypotheses. This study instills important theoretical insights into the transcending impacts of international relations and geopolitics, international governance and foreign directors, and the situated cognitive process of sensemaking regarding the intertwining effects of cognitive schema and social contexts.
The last three decades of work in cognitive science have challenged the idea that thinking occurs entirely in the head, claiming instead that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. The claims of 4E cognition challenge the dominance of computational approaches to cognition, and music scholars have explored Gibson's notion of affordances to propose a new understanding of musical performance as primarily grounded in action. This Element draws from paradigms such as enactive cognition, cybernetic and systems-theoretical approaches, phenomenological perspectives on practice, Gibson's theory of affordances, and aspects of the author's own practice as a multi-instrumentalist to consider cases of how the interface between musician and instrument influences performance.
Together, ecological psychology and enactivism can explain imagination as being driven by affordance competition. This paper presents synaptic plasticity as a hotspot for the respective historicity. First, (i) affordances are introduced as directly perceptible on the ecological view, and as co-created by an individual on the enactive view. After pointing out their compatibility, (ii) empirical underpinnings of the historicity of affordance competition are summarized and followed by a non-representational interpretation thereof. They are used to explain: (iii) What affords imagining? After discussing both van Dijk and Rietveld’s in 2020 non-representational answer and McClelland’s in 2020 representational one, I propose a more general explanation: a stand-off between competing affordances can be resolved by imagination, driven by affordance competition. Arguably, (iv) the sensorimotor traces of previous interactions (e.g., strengthened synapses) can be repurposed as representations – grounding even representational explanations in an ecologized enactive framework.
O presente texto se trata de uma discussão a respeito do emprego do conceito de condições de possibilidade advindo da Psicopatologia Fenomenológica para além da compreensão da estrutura da consciência para se pensar a intervenção psicoterapêutica em uma perspectiva fenomenológica. Para esse fim a condição de liberdade é discutida em relação a como o humano é abordado em diferentes formas de psicoterapia, destacando a condição de negatividade da liberdade em uma compreensão existencial. Discute-se a necessidade de ampliar a dialogicidade da psicoterapia fenomenológica com perspectivas contemporâneas que se fundamentam no mesmo horizonte conceitual como a própria Psicopatologia Fenomenológica e a posição externalista da consciência presente na posição enactivista da cognição. Por fim, a discussão a respeito da intervenção clínica é realizada a partir de uma vinheta clínica de uma pessoa com estrutura borderline. Compreende-se que esse texto não esgota a necessidade de se pensar a intervenção clínica que considere as condições de possibilidade em uma perspectiva psicoterapêutica, mas que incite mais produções nesse sentido.
This article aims to discuss the writing and exchange of letters as a research-intervention strategy. The research counted on the participation of 24 graduate students in master's and doctoral courses at universities in southern Brazil. Students were invited to write about their training experiences for teaching throughout their master's and / or doctorate. We propose that epistolary writing constitutes an interesting research strategy as it engenders processes of attention to oneself and of shared production of meanings among correspondents.
The paper attempts to show that Predictive Processing (PP), despite recent attempts by its proponents to ward off accusations that lead to skepticism (Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press, Clark, A. (2019). Replies to critics: In search of the embodied, extended, enactive predictive (EEE-P) mind. In M. Colombo, E. Irvine, & M. Stapleton (Eds.), Andy Clark and his critics (pp. 266–302). Oxford University Press), is susceptible to undesirable skeptical consequences of a Kantian (rather than Cartesian) character. Specifically, I shall argue that Clark’s version of PP is susceptible to a particularly Kantian version of skepticism in which the external world directly revealed by PP generative models is a phenomenal one in the Kantian sense: A world perceived and conceived as external, but at the same time essentially ‘internal’ in its categorial form, where this ‘internality’ only diverges from Kant in that it is a consequence of evolution. It will be suggested that these skeptical consequences can be avoided by articulating a more nuanced notion of the boundary between mind and world in PP, namely, one that differentiates an ontological from an epistemological understanding of the boundary between mind (generative model) and world. Moreover, it will be argued that in order to avoid Kantian skepticism, we must construe the very distinction between the phenomenal world and the world as it is in itself in non-metaphysical, pragmatic terms, as a framework condition for epistemically coordinating empirical inquiry within an ever-changing and unpredictable world. As a bonus, this view seems capable of accommodating the insights of autopoietic enactivism without buying into the latter’s controversial ‘transcendental idealist’ organism-relative ontology.
Ha llegado el momento. Las demandas de ideas más profundas y de integración entre (sub)disciplinas son históricamente comunes en las ciencias humanas, pero se han hecho más fuertes y urgentes a la luz de la actual crisis de replicación en psicología y campos afines. Muchas contribuciones al debate actual sobre el futuro de las ciencias humanas han hecho hincapié en la necesidad de mejores fundamentos y síntesis transdisciplinares, junto con una reforma metodológica esencial. Los diálogos de buena fe a través de la brecha cognitivo-social ayudarán a satisfacer directamente esta demanda. A través del contenido de este libro se pretende aportar a dilucidar estas cuestiones y plantear rutas de investigación y puntos de encuentro. Cada capítulo encadena con el siguiente de forma transdisciplinar, para que el lector libere su mente para el entendimiento de la Sociedad Cognitiva.
A core issue of embodiment is the question of how phenomenal and agentive consciousness relates to external forms of behavior. Instead of biasing the question in terms of the “hard problem” as to why and how consciousness arises from brain processes (D. Chalmers), it is suggested to ask for psychophysical correlations in a metaphysically neutral way. This, however, demands (1) to explore both sides of the problem with equivalent precision and depth—not only the physical—and (2) to develop a metaphysically neutral tool to formalize them in a consistent way. Concerning (1), the basic structure of mental micro-activities found in first-person studies on cognitive processes suggests extending the scope of qualia as a mark of consciousness. In the context of Structure Phenomenology (H. Witzenmann), functionally negative phenomenality experienced in ambiguous or meaning-deprived situations and inner agentive qualia of mental activities are correlated with the decompositional signature of sensory-neural processing and synchronized neural oscillations. Concerning (2), G. Günther’s Transclassical Logic is briefly introduced and deployed to integrate the mental, psychophysical, and physical contextures in a three-valued formal framework which also includes enacted and embodied aspects. The emerging picture rebalances first-person and third-person aspects of cognition by functionally separating and dynamically integrating them, thus revitalizing the neurophenomenological research agenda with new experimental proposals and concrete hypotheses.
Play has positive effects on children’s well-being and development. Play heroes, in Danish, called “Legeheltene”, have worked, for the last 7 years, to improve play and movement for hospitalized children in Danish hospitals. However, the significance of this novel Danish intervention is insufficiently researched. This phenomenological-hermeneutic study explored how children experience interacting with a play hero when hospitalized at a Danish paediatric unit. Combined observations and interviews were performed with children from two paediatric departments. Data were analyzed with inspiration from the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Three themes were identified: “A sense of familiarity,” “From loneliness to connectedness,” and “Becoming more powerful.” Children experience that interaction with play heroes is existentially meaningful. Through playful activities, children experience that they are connected to their daily lives outside the hospital and their true selves. Bridges to children’s everyday lives are built, leading to an improved sense of freedom, security, and the ability to manage difficult aspects of their hospital stay. Engagement with play heroes provides children with an experience of well-being and can be a positive direction in care provided to hospitalized children.
This paper argues that institutions are higher-level autonomous systems enacted by patterns of participatory sense-making. Therefore, unlike in the standard equilibrium theory, institutions are not themselves thought of as behavioural patterns. Instead, they are problem domains that these patterns have brought forth. Moreover, these are not merely any patterns, but only those devoted to maintaining a specific strategy of problem solving, called the strategy of ‘letting be’. The latter refers to, following Hanne de Jaegher, a balance between underdetermination and overdetermination of individual behaviour by a collective. Such an understanding of institutions becomes an option once a hybrid ‘equilibrium + rules’ theory of institutions, such as the one proposed by Frank Hindriks, is supplemented with insights from enactivism. In this light, drawing a connection between these two areas is the additional, meta-theoretical goal of this paper. This connection is beneficial, I argue, in particular since it allows for a satisfactory, in-depth account of the normative character of institutions as well as their local character.
Hay una pequeña, pero creciente, comunidad de investigadores que abarca un espectro de disciplinas unidas en su rechazo al aún dominante paradigma computacionalista en favor del enfoque enactivo. El marco teórico de este enfoque se centra en un conjunto de ideas, como la de autonomía, creación de sentido, emergencia, corporeización y experiencia. Estos conceptos están encontrando aplicaciones nuevas en un rango de áreas diversas. Un tema candente ha sido el establecimiento de un enfoque enactivo a la interacción social. El propósito principal de este artículo es servir como un punto de entrada avanzado a estos desarrollos recientes. El artículo logra esta tarea de una manera doble: (I) proporciona una síntesis sucinta de las ideas y los argumentos centrales más importantes en el marco teórico del enfoque enactivo y (II) usa esta síntesis para refinar el enfoque enactivo a la interacción social. Se propone una nueva definición operacional de interacción social, la cual no solo enfatiza la agencia cognitiva de los individuos y la irreductibilidad del proceso mismo de interacción, sino también la necesidad de una acción regulada conjuntamente. Se sugiere que esta concepción revisada de 'interacción sociocognitiva' puede brindar el término medio necesario desde el cual entender la confluencia de valores biológicos y culturales en la acción personal.
Bibliografía sobre: La mente más allá de la representación: las múltiples caras de la cognición corporizada y las teorías de las 4E Las fuentes bibliográficas que se presentan a continuación han sido seleccionadas de acuerdo con los siguientes criterios: a) Fuentes seminales, aquellas que, si bien no pertenecen propiamente al corpus de las ciencias cognitivas contemporáneas, son obras que contienen y han generado ideas claves para criticar al cognitivismo. b) Los textos clásicos, aquellas referencias obligadas en cuanto a las distintas perspectivas de la cognición (corporizadas, enactivas, extendidas o situadas). c) Los debates contemporáneos, las fuentes que presentan argumentos críticos en sus análisis para distinguir diferencias, afinar precisiones conceptuales y adecuaciones empíricas a las corrientes actuales.
In the last few decades, urban mobility has been explored by a broad spectrum of research tackling it from different perspectives. It also served as the inspiration for many literary works that, in some cases, voiced issues of marginality. This chapter employs two literary Hindi works, Bahurūpiyā śahar and Iśq meṁ śahar honā, as material to inquire on how the access to urban transport, especially the public ones, influences the daily life of Delhites. The texts focus on young people, basti dwellers and resettlement colonies’ residents. The analyzed works highlight the importance of the access to public transportation for the individual’s emancipation, both in economical and private terms. Further, they bring out the instances of the residents who have been evicted and forcibly relocated to other parts of the city. The chapter addresses issues of urban mobility and cross-cultural contacts in Delhi and in its liminal areas. In so doing, it highlights the differences in the perception of the public transportation of the city as well as the different accounts of the city’s areas and demonstrates that an unbalanced access to public transportation increases inequalities among the residents.
Theories of embodied cognition suggest that a shared environment and ongoing sensorimotor interaction are central for interpersonal learning and engagement. To investigate the embodied, distributed and hence dynamically unfolding nature of social cognitive capacities, we present a novel laboratory-based coordination task: the BallGame. Our paradigm requires continuous sensing and acting between two players who jointly steer a virtual ball around obstacles towards as many targets as possible. By analysing highly resolved measures of movement coordination and gaming behaviour, game-concurrent experience ratings, semi-structured interviews, and personality questionnaires, we reveal contributions from different levels of observation on social experience. In particular, successful coordination (number of targets collected) and intermittent periods of high versus low movement coordination (variability of relation) emerged as prominent predictors of social experience. Importantly, having the same (but incomplete) view on the game environment strengthened interpersonal coordination, whereas complementary views enhanced engagement and tended to generate more complex interactive behaviour. Overall, we find evidence for a critical balance between similarity and synchrony on the one hand, and variability and difference on the other, for successful engagement in social interactions. Finally, following participant reports, we highlight how interpersonal experience emerges from specific histories of coordination that are closely related to the interaction context in both space and time.
I focus on an early article by Francisco Varela, "Not one, not two", to argue that his non-dualistic epistemology entails a paradigm shift towards a fundamentally co-embodied, and thus social view of self. Varela argued that the mind-body duality could be resolved by understanding the mind as embodied. Both Varela and Thompson have later elaborated on this and suggested an enactive, essentially embodied view of the self in terms of self-organized, organismic autonomy. I will argue that the enactive view of the self remains ambiguous with regards to the role of social interactions: are they constitutive for the minimal self-organization of the self or do they only play a shaping, secondary factor ? I rely on Varela's epistemology in "Not one, not two" to support my argument that the minimal self-organizational network that is the human self entails both individual bodily and joint co-embodied processes so that the self is already and constitutively social.
El enactivismo es una rama de las perspectivas cognitivas corporizadas que sostiene que la cognición emerge del acoplamiento que se da entre el organismo y su entorno. Este enfoque podría ofrecer una mirada alternativa para comprender aspectos de la memoria que representan desafíos para los abordajes tradicionales. La presente revisión bibliográfica busca avanzar en el tema a través de preguntas sobre cómo se genera, cómo se mantiene en el tiempo y para qué sirve la memoria. En el artículo se sintetizan las bases conceptuales del enactivismo para posteriormente revisar investigaciones que discuten sobre los procesos constructivos y las bases sensoriomotoras de la memoria y, finalmente, investigaciones que problematizan la formación y evocación de recuerdos sociales y colectivos.
This paper is an investigation into the possibility of institutional agency and proceeds via the elaboration of two, nested claims. First, if genuine agency is attributable to certain social institutions, it would not be the full-blown, intentional agency that characterizes human activity, but would rather fall under a minimal modality of agency. Moreover, since enactivists aim to articulate minimal conceptions of agency that are applicable across the sphere of the living, this suggests that such accounts of minimal agency might additionally be brought to bear onto some institutions. The second claim concerns which of two ideally typical enactivist accounts of minimal agency can more promisingly be applied to our institutions. Where some enactivists endorse a Jonasian account of minimal agency, which stresses a protentive, forward-looking orientation to a self-persistence goal, other enactivists apply a retentive ideal type of minimal agency, the norms of which are founded on a backward-looking responsiveness to precedent. By way of a critical analysis of structural functionalism, I argue that the retentive approach better explains the kind of agency that would be expressed by some institutions. I also claim that some philosophers, including Christian List, Philip Pettit and Ronald Dworkin, have independently come to the conclusion that institutional agency is retentive agency.
How do literary works speak across historical distance? When critics attempt to answer this question, they typically invoke biological metaphors that testify to the inability of formal or historical categories alone to explain the mystery of how literary works reach across the boundary between life and death. This essay investigates the embodied cognitive processes that enable literary time travel by undertaking a neurophenomenological analysis of the relation between aesthetic experiences and their neural correlates. A neurophenomenological approach can clarify what eludes formalist and historicist accounts by correlating the intersubjective interactions that constitute aesthetic experience and the transpersonal biocultural processes underlying them. This essay explains how phenomenological theories of reading and aesthetic experience relate to neuroscientific research in four areas: embodied simulation; action understanding; brain-to-brain coupling; and the anti-entropic organization of "free energy" in predictive processing. Correlations between phenomenological theories of consciousness and neuroscientific findings about cognition show how the experience of interacting with past lives as we read is supported by embodied neurobiological processes that are ubiquitous in our everyday cognitive lives and that aesthetic experiences activate and exploit.
This interdisciplinary article involves the intertwining of multiple theoretical areas that explore an anti-colonial reading of the fallacies of the Zionist narrative. The article also initiates new directions in postcolonial studies, while focusing on two counter-current travel memoirs about Palestine, by Salman Abu Sitta and Miko Peled. The article shows how the memoirists’ thinking can challenge Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine. These counter-current travel memoirs lay the groundwork for new perspectives in post-colonial and memory studies. The article also reads the two counter-current memoirs by allowing interactions between human agents and the cognitive ecosystem to reproduce cognitive cartographies of Palestine.
Explanatory diversity is a salient feature of the sciences of the mind, where different projects focus on neural, psychological, cognitive, social or other explanations. The same happens within embodied cognitive science, where ecological, enactive, dynamical, phenomenological and other approaches differ from each other in their explanations of the embodied mind. As traditionally conceived, explanatory diversity is philosophically problematic, fueling debates about whether the different explanations are competing, compatible, or tangential. In contrast, this paper takes the perspective of embodied cognitive science as its starting point and accordingly approaches explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenomenon to be understood. Recent work has explored how the view of cognition as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cognitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagreements. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explanations as disembodied entities that compete with one another, and instead thinking in terms of different explanatory styles as embodied practices of explaining, many of which might be legitimate and warranted independently of whether and how the explanations themselves relate to one another.
This Element discusses contemporary theories of embodied cognition, including what has been termed the '4Es' (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition). It examines diverse approaches to questions about the nature of the mind, the mind's relation to the brain, perceptual experience, mental representation, sense making, the role of the environment, and social cognition, and it considers the strengths and weaknesses of the theories in question. It contrasts embodied and enactive views with classic cognitivism, and discusses major criticisms and their possible resolutions. This element also provides a strong focus on enactive theory and the prospects for integrating enactive approaches with other embodied and extended theories, mediated through recent developments in predictive processing and the free energy principle. It concludes with a brief discussion of the practical applications of embodied cognition. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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