Neoteny and Social Cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment

The chapter will address the notion of embodiment from a neuroscientific perspective, by emphasizing the crucial role played by bodily relations and sociality on the evolution and development of distinctive features of human cognition. The neurophysiological level of description is here accounted for in terms of bodily-formatted representations and discussed by replying to criticisms recently raised against this notion. The neuroscientific approach here proposed is critically framed and discussed against the background of the Evo-Devo focus on a little explored feature of human beings in relation to social cognition: their neotenic character. Neoteny refers to the slowed or delayed physiological and/or somatic development of an individual. Such development is largely dependent on the quantity and quality of interpersonal relationships the individual is able to establish with her/his adult peers. It is proposed that human neoteny further supports the crucial role played by embodiment, here spelled out by adopting the explanatory framework of embodied simulation, in allowing humans to engage in social relations, and make sense of others’ behaviors.This approach can fruitfully be used to shed new light onto non propositional forms of communication and social understanding and onto distinctive human forms of meaning making, like the experience of man-made fictional worlds.

Ornamental Feathers without Mentalism: A Radical Enactive View on Neanderthal Body Adornment

Evidence of feather extraction from scavenging birds by late Neanderthal populations, supposedly for ornamental reasons, has been recently used to bolster the case for Neanderthal symbolism and cognitive equivalence with modern humans. This argument resonates with the idea that the production and long-term maintenance of body ornaments necessarily require a cluster of abilities defined here as the material symbolism package. This implies the construction of abstract meanings, which are then mentally imposed to artifacts and socially shared through full-blown mindreading, assisted by a meta-representational language. However, a set of radical enactive abilities, mainly direct social perception and situated concepts, is sufficient to explain the emergence of ornamental feathers without necessarily involving the material symbolism package. The embodied social structure created by body ornaments, augmented through behavioral-contextual narratives, suffices to explain even the long-term maintenance of this practice without mentalism. Costly neurocentric assumptions conceiving the material symbolism package as a homuncular adaptation are eschewed by applying a non-symbolic interpretation of feathers as cognitive scaffolds. It will be concluded that the presence of body adornment traditions in the Neanderthal archaeological record does not warrant the cognitive equivalence with modern humans, for it does not constrain a meta-representational level of meaning.

The Emergence of Persons

I will present a model of persons as emergent forms of socio-cultural agency. Such a model requires a framework metaphysics that makes sense of the normative dynamic emergence of agents, which, in turn requires a metaphysics of process. I will also briefly address how this model of persons as interactive agents relates to persons as moral agents.

Selfhood, Schizophrenia, and the Interpersonal Regulation of Experience

This paper addresses the view that schizophrenia involves disturbance of the minimal self, and that this distinguishes it from other psychiatric conditions. I challenge the distinction between a minimal and an interpersonally constituted sense of self, through a consideration of the relationship between psychosis and interpersonally induced trauma. First of all, I suggest that even minimal self-experience must include a pre-reflective sense of what kind of intentional state one is in. Then I address the extent to which human experience and thought are interpersonally regulated. I propose that traumatic events, in childhood and/or in adulthood, can erode a primitive form of “trust” in other people that the integrity of intentionality depends upon, thus disrupting the phenomenological boundaries between intentional state types. I conclude that a distinction between minimal and interpersonal self is untenable, and that schizophrenia should be thought of in relational terms rather than simply as a disorder of the individual.

Neither Individualistic nor Interactionist

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.

The Role of Affordances in Pretend Play

Pretending is often conceptualized as an imaginative and symbolic capacity, positing mental representations in its explanation. This paper proposes an alternative way to explain pretending with the use of affordances, instead of mental representations, as explanatory tools. It shows that a specific notion of affordance has to be appropriated for affordances to play the relevant explanatory roles in pretense. This analysis opens up a discussion on the nature of affordances, clarifying how on various conceptions the environment and the animal play a role in shaping affordances. It then clarifies which notion is best compatible to explain pretending; the paper suggests that a particular conception of affordances as dispositional properties of the environment (a la Turvey 1992) can make affordances explanatorily useful. The paper then shows how the environmental affordances with animal effectivities, placed in the right context (formed by canonical affordances or other people), could form an explanation of basic kinds of pretend play (section 3). The paper is a proof of concept that some forms of cognitive activity, such as basic pretense, can be explained by embodied and enactive theorists without the need to posit mental representations. It emphasizes the non-trivial role of social and cultural factors in actualizing pretense, providing a crucial aspect of a coherent explanation of basic pretense.

The Extent of Our Abilities: The Presence, Salience, and Sociality of Affordances

We, in virtue of our sociability and plasticity, are especially open to altering and developing our capacities and abilities, thereby expanding the scope of available affordances. The distinctively dynamic and extensive nature of abilities for human beings, however, raises questions concerning the ontology of affordances, given their relativity to abilities, their being relative to abilities. These questions are particularly pressing since much of the power of the concept comes from the claim that affordances are real, that they exist in some sense. Resolution of these issues, I suggest, involves taking the temporal dimension of abilities and affordances seriously, particularly in terms of interaction across multiple temporal scales. Such a temporal perspective encompasses the modulating role of motivation, as well as questions concerning the presence and salience of affordances. I end by addressing abilities as they extend into, and are extended by, social interaction and coordination, and introduce the notion of joint affordances specifically, in contrast to the sociality of affordances more generally.

Continuity Skepticism in Doubt: A Radically Enactive Take

Radically Enactive Cognition, REC, holds that not all forms of cognition are content involving and, especially, not root forms. According to radical enactivists, only minds that have mastered special kinds of socio-cultural practice are capable of content involving forms of cognition. This paper addresses criticisms that have been leveled at REC’s vision of how content-involving cognition may have come on the scene. It responds, in the first section, to the charge that REC faces a fatal dilemma when it comes to accounting for the origins of content in naturalistic terms—a dilemma that arises from REC’s own acknowledgment of the existence of a Hard Problem of Content. In subsequent sections, the paper addresses the charge that REC entails continuity skepticism, reviewing this charge in its scientific and philosophical formulations. It is concluded that REC is not at odds with evolutionary continuity, when both REC and evolutionary continuity are properly understood. It is also concluded that although REC cannot completely close the imaginative gap that is required to answer the philosophical continuity skeptic it is, in this respect, in no worse a position than its representationalist rivals and their naturalistic proposals about the origins of content.

Consciousness, Culture, and Significance

The chapter offers a new view on consciousness and culture by investigating their relation to significance. Against the widespread restriction of consciousness to phenomenal aspects and that of culture to “thick description,” Durt argues that consciousness discloses aspects of significance, while culture encompasses shared significance as well as the forms of behavior that enact significance. Significance is intersubjective and constantly re-instantiated in new contexts of relevance rather than belonging to single individuals (cf. Gallagher, this volume). It is embedded in the shared world to which we relate by cultural forms of thinking and sense-making. Bringing together insights on the role of consciousness for the constitution of the world from Husserlian phenomenology with those on cultural forms of behavior by Wittgenstein and Ryle, Durt distinguishes different levels of significance accomplished by embodied consciousness and interaction. He explains that the real issue underlying “hybrid” concepts of the mind does not consist in embodied versus disembodied systems of production (cf. Di Paolo and De Jaegher, this volume), but in different levels of significance accomplished by consciousness and culture. Consciousness is embodied on every level, and it integrates different levels of significance.

Introduction: The Interplay of Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture

While traditional theories of cognition tend to conceive of mental capacities as disembodied or merely supervenient on brain states, in recent decades the insight has spread that mental processes cannot be confined to activities inside the skull alone. The paradigm of enactive embodiment endeavors to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving the cognizer as an embodied being and cognition as enactive. According to a well-known early definition, cognition depends on “the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities” (...