3. The Enactive Approach of Sense-making

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-155
Keyword(s):  
Sense Making ◽  
Enactive Approach

Neither Individualistic nor Interactionist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ezequiel Di Paolo ◽  
Hanne De Jaegher
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Hybrid Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Complex Forms

We summarize some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to social understanding and discuss some common misreadings of the notion of participatory sense-making. The emphasis on the role played by social interaction in the enactive perspective is sometimes misinterpreted as the adoption of an interactionist stance, whereby individual processes are less relevant. This is not the case, and we proceed to explain and exemplify the central role played by individual agency, subpersonal processes and subjective personal experience in the framework of participatory sense-making. This is clear from how social interaction is defined as involving the co-arising of autonomous relational patterns, not under the full control of any participant, but without loss of individual autonomy of those engaged in the social encounter. We discuss how interactive patterns can sustain a deep entanglement between brain, body and interactive dynamics during social engagement, as well as the functional role played in some case by collective dynamics. The enactive approach is neither individualistic, nor interactionist. However, we express skepticism regarding the usefulness of hybrid approaches, which perpetuate dualistic distinctions between mind and body. Instead, the tensions in the notion of participatory sense-making are elaborated dialectically, demonstrating how complex forms of social agency, including language, develop from the primordial tension in participatory sense-making.

An agential-narrative approach on art semiosis

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
Sergio Rodríguez Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Art Appreciation ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Extended Theory ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Semiotic Approach

Abstract In this article, a semiotic approach is proposed to explain how human agents use and give meaning to art in complex contexts. Inspired by the psycho-historical approach on art appreciation, which attempts to embrace psychological and cognitive aspects of art sense-making, as well as the art-historical context dependence of artworks, an extended theory is suggested: an agent's art use and interpretation can be described using three general categories of meaning grounding: phylogenetic recurrence, ontogenetic recurrence and collective recurrence. These categories explain how a certain meaning of a sign is possible and justifiable, supported by human agents' capabilities and purposes. This article also proposes that it is possible to narrate, using such categories of meaning grounding, how different agents enact art, that is, give meaning and act upon art in different circumstances. Finally, I offer some examples about how the model can be used in real art contexts. The objective of this narrative-enactive approach, even though it offers a limited and edited focus, is to offer an orderly and comprehensible method to explain the dynamic nature of art meaning and how biologic, individual and collective grounding and purposes intertwine.

scholarly journals Knowing Groundlessness: An Enactive Approach to a Shift From Cognition to Non-Dual Awareness

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Meling
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Context Dependency ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Science Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Statement ◽  
Underlying Principle ◽  
Reflexive Analysis

The enactive approach has become an influential paradigm in cognitive science. One of its most important claims is that cognition is sense-making: to cognize is to enact a world of meaning. Thus, a world is not pregiven but enacted through sense-making. Most importantly, sense-making is not a fixed process or thing. It does not have substantial existence. Instead, it is groundless: it springs from a dynamic of relations, without substantial ground. Thereby, as all cognition is groundless, this groundlessness is considered the central underlying principle of cognition. This article takes that key concept of the enactive approach and argues that it is not only a theoretical statement. Rather, groundlessness is directly accessible in lived experience. The two guiding questions of this article concern that lived experience of groundlessness: (1) What is it to know groundlessness? (2) How can one know groundlessness? Accordingly, it elaborates (1) how this knowing of groundlessness fits into the theoretical framework of the enactive approach. Also, it describes (2) how it can be directly experienced when certain requirements are met. In an additional reflexive analysis, the context-dependency and observer-relativity of those statements themselves is highlighted. Through those steps, this article exhibits the importance of knowing groundlessness for a cognitive science discourse: this underlying groundlessness is not only the “ground” of cognition, but it also can be investigated empirically through lived experience. However, it requires a methodology that is radically different from classical cognitive science. This article ends with envisioning a future praxis of cognitive science which enables researchers to investigate not only theoretically but empirically the “foundationless foundation” of cognition: groundlessness.

scholarly journals Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Mog Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Cognition And Emotion ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Extended Mind Thesis

This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making. We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.

Becoming animal: Children's physical play and dance improvisation as transformative activities that generate novel meanings

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Carolien Hermans
Keyword(s):  
Sense Making ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Dynamic Coupling ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Physical Play ◽  
Dance Improvisation ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

Abstract This article addresses the transformative potential of children's physical play and dance improvisation. Using the enactive approach as a theoretical framework, it is argued that play and dance improvisation trigger novel sense-making capabilities by a deep engagement with the environment. Both activities give rise to transformative forces, ways of becoming that create openings and passages through which one re-engages and re-connects with the environment. This article combines theoretical reflection with artistic practice. By intermingling the thinking with the doing, I hope to gain embodied insights in underlying mechanisms of both play and dance improvisation. First, I discuss the concept of transformation. Then I explore how the enactive approach can be helpful in understanding the emergence of new values and meanings in both play and dance improvisation through dynamic coupling. From here I move to my artistic practice. I present an auto-ethnographic research that consists of two events. The first event is a spontaneous play event of my 12-year-old daughter that serves as an entrance point to examine animal becomings as transformative forces. The second event is an improvised dance solo, in which I re-enact the animal becomings of my daughter. The aim is to grasp, in a corporeal sense, the transformative forces that are at work here.

Comment: How Your Own Becoming Feels

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 229-230
Author(s):  
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
Keyword(s):  
Sense Making ◽  
Human Becoming ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Enactive Approach

Mascolo (2020) successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participatory sense-making. I suggest that the need to understand emotions developmentally reveals a deeper link between affective life and human unfinishedness, namely, that emotions are collectively constituted ways of regulating human becoming.

scholarly journals Enacting Ought: Ethics, Anti-Racism, and Interactional Possibilities

Topoi ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
George N. Fourlas ◽  
Elena Clare Cuffari
Keyword(s):  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Know How ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
Participatory Intervention

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

scholarly journals Placebo From an Enactive Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iñigo R. Arandia ◽  
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Interpersonal Processes ◽  
Placebo Effects ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Social Traits ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Causal Chains ◽  
Embodied Cognitive Science ◽  
Gilbert Simondon

Due to their complexity and variability, placebo effects remain controversial. We suggest this is also due to a set of problematic assumptions (dualism, reductionism, individualism, passivity). We critically assess current explanations and empirical evidence and propose an alternative theoretical framework—the enactive approach to life and mind—based on recent developments in embodied cognitive science. We review core enactive concepts such as autonomy, agency, and sense-making. Following these ideas, we propose a move from binary distinctions (e.g., conscious vs. non-conscious) to the more workable categories of reflective and pre-reflective activity. We introduce an ontology of individuation, following the work of Gilbert Simondon, that allow us to see placebo interventions not as originating causal chains, but as modulators and triggers in the regulation of tensions between ongoing embodied and interpersonal processes. We describe these interrelated processes involving looping effects through three intertwined dimensions of embodiment: organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective. Finally, we defend the need to investigate therapeutic interactions in terms of participatory sense-making, going beyond the identification of individual social traits (e.g., empathy, trust) that contribute to placebo effects. We discuss resonances and differences between the enactive proposal, popular explanations such as expectations and conditioning, and other approaches based on meaning responses and phenomenological/ecological ideas.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document