The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

Phenomenology is not dead yet, at least not from the viewpoint of the “phenomenology-friendly”approach to the mind that has recently emerged in cognitive science: the “enactive approach” or “enactivism.” This approach takes the mental capacities, such as perception, consciousness and cognition, to be the result of the interaction between the brain, the body and the environment. In this, it offers an alternative to reductionist explanations of the mental in terms of brain activities, like cognitivism, especially computationalism, while overcoming the Cartesian dualism mind-world. What makes this approach so fruitful for a renewed philosophical consideration is its ongoing reference to Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies. It was said to be “consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point,” to be the “revival” of phenomenology, even a “Kuhnian revolution.” Evan Thompson argues that this approach “uses phenomenology to explicate mind science and mind science to explicate phenomenology. Concepts such as lived body, organism, bodily selfhood and autonomous agency, the intentional arc and dynamic sensorimotor dependencies, can thus become mutually illuminating rather than merely correlational concepts.” The phenomenological works seem to strike a chord with the enactive theorists. Are we witnessing the dawn of “The new Science of the Mind”?

Inédit 1 (1964): Réflexions sur les possibilités d’une description de l’histoire de la linguistique

The Wenner-Gren Foundation symposium “Revolution vs. Continuity in the Study of Language” invites speakers to discuss the applicability of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 essay to linguistics. Kuhn does well to posit an autonomous epistemological plane, to take account of the sociology of knowledge, and to focus on the history of structures rather than of fleeting events. On the other hand, he presents each science as essentially stagnant throughout most of time, and offers an atemporal and harmonious view of how one “paradigm” replaces its predecessor; Kuhnian history emerges as a succession of synchronies. The portrayal ignores that if paradigms emerge at successive moments, old and new overlap and coexist in tension. Constructing each science as an independent system, it also neglects dynamics that cross or connect disciplines, including generalized systems of thought, and outlooks common to an entire society at a given era.Whereas sciences today are familiar with synchronic systems, effective models of those structures’ diachronic transformation are lacking. Rather than Kuhn’s or Hegel’s a priori and overly general schemas, inductive approaches based on the linguistic analysis of scholarship or researchers’ autobiographical testimonies could provide better results. In the interim, adopting Braudel’s concept of history as encompassing events belonging to three distinct chronological orders ranging from quotidian to multi-secular, we can see that a Kuhnian revolution alters views characteristic of a discipline during a given period, but only changes portions of the overall field as it has developed throughout time. This conception reconciles synchrony and diachrony. Rather than prolonged periods of inactivity, we observe a constant scientific praxis which transforms paradigms defined as open, their possibilities always exceeding their extant realizations. Such paradigmatic variations cannot account for exceptional scientific revolutions which exceed their scale, such as the invention of writing, and which represent instead breakthroughs in a model’s effectiveness, in its ability to transform reality and human experience. The contemporary project for a structural semantics aims to achieve a second linguistic revolution by constructing a new language which can serve as the science of humanity, an anthropology comparable to the mathematics used in the life sciences.

RISE, GRUBENHUND: ON PROVINCIALIZING KUHN

Bilingualism was Kuhn's solution to the problem of relativism, the problem raised by his own theory of incommensurability. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific theories are separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension. There is no neutral ground from which to judge one theory fitter than another. Each is formulated in its own language and cannot be translated into the idiom of another. Yet, like many Americans, Kuhn never had the experience of moving comfortably between languages. “I've never been any good really at foreign languages,” he admitted in an interview soon before his death. “I can read French, I can read German, if I'm dropped into one of those countries I can stammer along for a while, but my command of foreign languages is not good, and never has been, which makes it somewhat ironic that much of my thought these days goes to language.” Kuhn may have been confessing to more than a personal weakness. His linguistic ineptitude seems to be a clue to his overweening emphasis on the difficulty of “transworld travel.” Multilingualism remained for him an abstraction. In this respect, I will argue, Kuhn engendered a peculiarly American turn in the history of science. Kuhn's argument for the dependence of science on the norms of particular communities has been central to the development of studies of science in and as culture since the 1980s. Recent work on the mutual construction of science and nationalism, for instance, is undeniably in Kuhn's debt. Nonetheless, the Kuhnian revolution cut off other avenues of research. In this essay, I draw on the counterexample of the physician–historian Ludwik Fleck, as well as on critiques by Steve Fuller and Ted Porter, to suggest one way to situate Kuhn within the broader history of the history of science. To echo Kuhn's own visual metaphors, one of the profound effects of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the field of history of science was to render certain modes of knowledge production virtually invisible.