The general context of this writing is that of finding exits both from dualism and from reductive physicalism. Dualism—the attitude of seeing and taking things according to a fixed absolute distinction, with mind as invisible, conscious ‘containing’ the thought, feeling and sensation ‘hidden’ by body. Reductive physicalism—the attempt to grasp and be satisfied with body as left over by dualism's rape of its mentality, dualism's refusal to recognize the distinctiveness of point of view, as requiring a bodily mentality. Physicalism finally (...) supplants an ‘inner life’ within the bodily vacancy after all, as in traditional dualist image, but now understands that ‘inner’, ‘conscious’ life in the terms pertaining to processes in the brain, rather than as deeds, passions, thoughts, reasoning as within the general ‘imaginary’ of our several minds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Implicit Soul of Charlie Kaufman's AdaptationDavid L. SmithI don't know what else there is to write about other than being human, or, more specifically, being this human. I have no alternative. Everything is about that, right? Unless it's about flowers.—Charlie Kaufman 1There are some things that cannot be observed directly, even in principle: a single quark, the present moment, ones own eye. What Richard Rodriquez calls the "one (...) subject" of literature—"What it feels like to be alive" 2 —is perhaps another one of those things. A writer struggles to be true to something central about life—to catch it on the fly, to get it right. Some have reified this "something" as "the soul" or "the human spirit." Today, though, we mainly rely on placeholders: "it," for example, as in "do you get it?" or "what's it all about?"—a usage that flirts with the vanishing "it" of "it is raining," implying a source or substance behind phenomena in which we do not really believe but without which we cannot do justice to experience. In any case, the writer's attempt to represent this elusive heart of things is typically frustrated, done in by the slipperiness of words, the cludginess of the conventions of communication, and the waywardness of the imagination. Writing inevitably falls short of its deepest aims.Nevertheless, there is something deviously affirmative in this state of affairs. For if life is a thing that refuses to be observed, then isn't the very failure of literature, if consciously acknowledged, a way of staying true to it? Isn't the writer's disappointment an especially telling feature of "what it feels like to be alive?" Emerson, more clearly than most, understood how this trick is turned: "We grant that human life is [End Page 424] mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim?" 3 As noted above, "the soul" is a disposable term here. If you prefer, say simply "the human," "life," or "it." The point, in any case, is that the elusive subject which cannot be stated or represented directly may nevertheless be implied. If the human cannot be caught in a formula, it may be embodied or enacted in the ongoing work of creation.Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation is both an argument for and an example of this implicit realization of the human in art. Many viewers and even reviewers might see it as a poor candidate for humanistic interpretation along these lines. Most, in fact, have seen the film as little more than a clever postmodern puzzle-box, albeit one with great acting, deft direction, and a generous sense of humor. Its theme, after all, is the representation of representation. A book is being rewritten or adapted to become the film we are watching. The subject of that film is its own author's struggle to create it. The film further calls attention to its own artificiality by changing the rules of representation on us midway through. Its tone, style, and basic genre conventions shift when the author/protagonist begins to rethink his original purposes, undermining the credibility of all representational schemes in the process. Adaptation, in short, seems to be what the graduate-educated a decade ago might have felt comfortable calling "an endless play of simulacra," a text absorbed in its own textuality, a snake that eats its own tail. 4All of this is true enough, but it is not the whole story. The point of Adaptation, I will argue, is not simply the pleasure it takes in playing with issues of representation, but its clear sense of the human issues at stake in that play. Adaptation, that is, is not only about the way words tend to float free of the world. Rather, it is also a demonstration of the way a writer's basic goal can survive the wreck of her intentions, or the way that failed attempts to be true to life... (shrink)

Cho and Martinez-Martin’s (2023) “Epistemic rights and responsibilities of digital simulacra for biomedicine” presents a comprehensive overview of big data and AI in clinical medicine and research....

'Simulation, Simulacra and Solaris ' examines and contrasts the 1971 science-fiction film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky with the 2002 film Solaris by Steven Soderbergh. Our text argues for the significance of simulation and simulacra in relation to the conceptual framework of Solaris, adapting as our primary model Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra.

Digital simulacra present an entrancing vision of a research-rich future shorn of the messiness that comes from dealing with real live patients as part of the research enterprise—and in that sheari...

Cho and Martinez-Martin (2023) discuss the ethical challenges associated with the use of digital simulacra (also known as digital twins) in biomedicine, specifically focusing on the issue of episte...

This paper discusses various social simulacra or real illusions as a substitution for traditional ideologies. Unlike ideologies, simulacra do not pretend to give a true explanation of reality but take its place. They rely on sign codes that create a totality erasing any distinction between the original reality and its copies or interpretations. The new reality principle itself is a product of the simulacrum. Nevertheless, there is a way to go beyond this enchantment; it consists of three steps: (...) irony, parody, and grotesque. The grotesque is the final level of the dissolution of the simulacrum, disclosing the ugly realm hidden by the real illusion. (shrink)

Some considerations are urgent and others are not. Sometimes, we invite criticism if we neglect the urgency of our situation, even if our action seem adequate to respond to it. Despite this significance, the literature does not offer a satisfactory analysis of the normative structure of urgency. I examine three views of urgency, drawn from philosophical and adjacent literature, which fail to explain the distinctive criticism we face when we do neglect the urgency of our reasons. Instead, I argue that (...) urgent considerations pre-empt our deliberation about less urgent considerations. Urgency is then a metanormative phenomenon, setting standards for how we handle and respond to first-order considerations, requiring that we close deliberation. In the face of urgency, appropriate action is not enough. Commitment is called for. This is how we enact appreciation of our practical reasons, independently of our carrying out the action they call for. (shrink)

This chapter describes the concept of enactive memory, which is quite new but increasingly discussed in contemporary philosophy of memory. Although the enactive approach has been used to investigate several memory sys- tems, e.g., procedural memory, episodic mem- ory, and autobiographical memory, this chapter focuses only on the enactive approach to epi- sodic memory because most of the current debate on enactive memory is about this mem- ory system. Section “Introduction” specifies what type of enactive memory is discussed in this (...) chapter. Section “The Concept of Enactive Memory” introduces the concept of enactive memory, clarifies its central theoretical com- mitments and goals, and describes how enactivists have explained episodic remember- ing. Section “The Philosophical Context of Enactive Memory” provides a brief contextu- alization of the enactive approach to memory with respect to approaches and theories with which, for one reason or another, it shares some theoretical insights, like the embodied, the extended, and the distributed approach, and the simulation theory. Section “Forgetting as a Challenge for Enactive Memory” explains why forgetting poses an important explanatory challenge to the enactive approach to memory and describes one philosophical proposal that has been developed to address this challenge. Section “Summary” provides a summary of the chapter, mentions some ongoing projects on enactive memory, and identifies some topics that advocates of the enactive approach to memory may want to investigate in the future. (shrink)

I argue for an enactive account of musical experience — that is, the experience of listening ‘deeply’(i.e., sensitively and understandingly) to a piece of music. The guiding question is: what do we do when we listen ‘deeply’to music? I argue that these music listening episodes are, in fact, doings. They are instances of active perceiving, robust sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of sonic structures within musical pieces. Music is thus experiential art, and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘we listen to music with (...) our muscles’. This paper attempts to explicate and defend this claim. First, I discuss enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition generally. Next, I apply an enactive model of perceptual consciousness to the experience of listening to music. To clarify what is at stake, I use Peter Kivy’s ‘enhanced formalism’ as a philosophical foil. I then look at how the animate body shapes musical experience. (shrink)

The need for a model -- Currently available models in psychiatry -- Introduction to enactivism -- Body and mind - and world -- The existential dimension and its role in psychiatry -- Enriched enactivism : existential sense-making, values, and socio-cultural worlds -- Enactive psychiatry : psychiatric disorders are disorders of sense-making -- An enactive approach to causes, diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Cho and Martinez-Martin (2023) provide a thoughtful analysis of the epistemological and ethical implications of digital twin (DT) technology in biomedical research. However, they overlook the profo...

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality (FAIR), Raymond Tallis finds room in a law-abiding universe for a uniquely human form of agency, capable of envisioning and pursuing genuinely open possibilities, thereby deflecting rather than merely inflecting the course of events, in accordance with self-owned intentions, reasons and goals. He argues that the genuinely free human pursuit of such propositional attitudes depends on our acting from a “virtual outside”, at an epistemic distance from the physical world that reveals not only what is (...) the case, but that it is the case. The enactive approach in cognitive science and philosophy of mind aims to supersede the cognitivist traditional that has long dominated the field, by reframing cognition as an agentʼs immediate, embodied engagement with its environment. In an appendix of FAIR, Tallis argues that this approach risks both eliminating propositional attitudes, and collapsing the epistemic distance between agent and world. He concludes that if enactive theorists are to distinguish between genuinely pursuing an intention and merely responding to a stimulus, their corrective to cognitivism is in need of a correction of its own. This paper argues that such a correction is already to be found within the enactive literature, and furthermore, that it bears striking similarities to Tallis own account of what makes human agency unique. It is therefore concluded that the case for freedom set out in FAIR is compatible with the enactive approach. (shrink)

In this paper I advance an enactive view of affectivity that does not imply that affectivity must stop at the boundaries of the organism. I first review the enactive notion of “sense-making”, and argue that it entails that cognition is inherently affective. Then I review the proposal, advanced by Di Paolo, that the enactive approach allows living systems to “extend”. Drawing out the implications of this proposal, I argue that, if enactivism allows living systems to extend, then it must also (...) allow sense-making, and thus cognition as well as affectivity, to extend—in the specific sense of allowing the physical processes underpinning these phenomena to include, as constitutive parts, non-organic environmental processes. Finally I suggest that enactivism might also allow specific human affective states, such as moods, to extend. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We end by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, in particular with respect to addiction research. (shrink)

The “Value Alignment Problem” is the challenge of how to align the values of artificial intelligence with human values, whatever they may be, such that AI does not pose a risk to the existence of humans. A fundamental feature of how the problem is currently understood is that AI systems do not take the same things to be relevant as humans, whether turning humans into paperclips in order to “make more paperclips” or eradicating the human race to “solve climate change”. (...) Specifically, existing approaches approaches to alignment appear to be concerned with how AI might *solve* problems in the relevant way. This paper presents and explores an approach to alignment rooted in the Enactive Theory of mind. It offers an alternative conception of the alignment as “how do we make relevant to AI what is relevant to humans?” In this conception, alignment is concerned with building AI so that it *discerns* and defines the problem in the relevant way. In this way, the Alignment Problem is shown to be the same problem as the Frame Problem. The paper concludes with a consideration of tradeoffs between these conceptions of the alignment problem. (shrink)

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. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, 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. Contributors: Renaud 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. (shrink)

Emotion theorists tend to separate “arousal” and other bodily events such as “actions” from the evaluative component of emotion known as “appraisal.” This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called “enactive approach.” I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the (...) enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care. (shrink)

This chapter offers the beginning of an enactive account of auditory experience—particularly the experience of listening sensitively to music. It investigates how sensorimotor regularities grant perceptual access to music qua music. Two specific claims are defended: (1) music manifests experientially as having complex spatial content; (2) sensorimotor regularities constrain this content. Musical content is thus brought to phenomenal presence by bodily exploring structural features of music. We enact musical content.

The “Value Alignment Problem” is the challenge of how to align the values of artificial intelligence with human values, whatever they may be, such that AI does not pose a risk to the existence of humans. Existing approaches appear to conceive of the problem as "how do we ensure that AI solves the problem in the right way", in order to avoid the possibility of AI turning humans into paperclips in order to “make more paperclips” or eradicating the human race (...) to “solve climate change”. This paper proposes an approach to Alignment rooted in the Enactive theory of mind that reconceptualises it as "how do we make relevant to AI what it relevant to humans". This conceptualisation is supported with a discussion of 4E cognition and goes on to suggest that the Alignment problem and the Frame problem are the same problem. The paper concludes with a discussion of the tradeoffs of the different approaches to value alignment. (shrink)

This paper traces the development of enactive concepts of value and normativity from their roots in the canonical work of Varela et al. through more recent works of Ezequiel Di Paolo and others. It aims to show the central importance of these concepts for enactive theory while exposing a potentially troublesome ambiguity in their definition. Most definitions of enactive normativity are purely proscriptive, but it seems that enactive theories of cognitive agency and experience demand something more. On the other hand, (...) it is not clear that anything other than proscriptive normativity can be made compatible with the enactive tenet of autonomy and the rejection of representations. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as (...) that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to (...) generate a sense of the conceptual space in which this research is going on. I focus on the concepts of sense-making, Umwelts, affordances, cultural niches, epistemic actions, environmental scaffolding, and mental institutions. Despite differences in focus and detail these influences share an underlying world-view; that cognition is relational and world-involving. This way of thinking has clear resonances with dominant approaches in non-Western philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to generate in the reader a sense of this shared extended-enactive world-view in order to open up a space for communication between approaches. (shrink)

Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of (...) social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. This process may be described (1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents; (2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality. Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood. (shrink)

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st (...) and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation. (shrink)

The theory of autopoiesis is central to the enactive approach. Recent works emphasize that the theory of autopoiesis is a theory of sense-making in living systems, i.e. of how living systems produce and consume meaning. In this chapter I first illustrate (some aspects of) these recent works, and interpret their notion of sense-making as a bodily cognitive- emotional form of understanding. Then I turn to modern emotion science, and I illustrate its tendency to over-intellectualize our capacity to evaluate and understand. (...) I show that this overintellectualization goes hand in hand with the rejection of the idea that the body is a vehicle of meaning. I explain why I think that this over-intellectualization is problematic, and try to reconceptualize the notion of evaluation in emotion theory in a way that is consistent and continuous with the autopoietic notion of sense-making. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make (...) it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.1 (2006) 72-84 [Access article in PDF] "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene Dana L. Cloud Department of Communication Studies University of Texas, Austin Steve Macek Department of Speech Communication North Central College James Arnt Aune Department of Communication Texas A&M University In two recent articles, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," and "Rhetoric and Capitalism" (1998, 2004), Ronald Walter Greene pays considerable attention (...) to Marxist rhetorical theory, especially the work of Dana L. Cloud (1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2002) and James Arnt Aune (1994, 2001). These essays usefully point up what is at stake in the debate between poststructuralist theory and Marxism: whether an instrumental, class-based, socialist critical and political project is still feasible and necessary in today's world. Rejecting both Aune's Marxist-humanist approach and Cloud's more economic vision of agency, Greene claims that the changing character of global capitalism and recognition of the "constitutive power" of discourse render rhetorical criticism and practical politics on a Marxist basis untenable. Although we appreciate Greene's engagement with Marxism, we contend that the arguments sketched out in his essays are theoretically and politically flawed.First, Greene's criticisms are directed against a crude caricature of Marxist epistemology that obscures the complexity of theories of representation and ideology in the historical materialist tradition. Second, underwriting Greene's entire project are confused, and in some cases demonstrably false, assessments of the nature and historical trajectory of world capitalism and of the current prospects for class-based social movements. Finally, Greene endorses something like a democratic project but offers no normative criteria for such a project beyond the immanence of always-already present communicative agency and the excesses of joy afforded (to some) by the capitalist system. We will examine each of these shortcomings in turn. [End Page 72] Real Lies: The Complexity of Marxist Epistemology Greene and other poststructuralists charge Marxist theorists in the field of rhetorical studies with holding a dubious representational theory of truth.1 In contrast, Greene embraces a critical approach that examines "how rhetorical practices create the conditions of possibility for a governing apparatus to judge and program reality" and that views "what is in the true" as rhetorically produced (1998, 22). At odds with Greene's approach, Marxists claim that, in a range of ways, ideological discourses reflect, distort, and/or negotiate with the objective social realities, interests, and lived experiences of contending classes in capitalist society. Moreover, we believe that—by means of interpretive, historical, and empirical research—Marxist scholars and activists may develop fuller and more accurate theoretical "representations" of such realities and interests and of the various ways they shape our lives and our political struggles.2This is not to say, however, that the process is simple or mechanistic. Marxist critical practice retains the evaluative power of realism without laying claim to absolute or unmediated empirical knowledge; moreover, we do not believe that ideas are mechanistically generated epiphenomena of economic motive. Discourses, as any communication scholar would agree and as Greene points out, do have effects or "effectivities." Yet anyone interested in a normative political project (which Greene wishes to escape, a point to which we shall return) must recognize the possibility of falsehood. However, as Raymond Geuss (1981) argues, falsehood is not only a matter of empirical misrepresentation. In addition to epistemic falsehood, ideological discourses may exhibit both functional falsehood (referring to how even plausible ideas can bolster oppressive power) and genetic falsehood (ideas promulgated by those with ulterior motives, or intentional mystification).Similarly, analytic Marxist Jon Elster (1985) offers a view of ideology that regards discourses as more than simple epiphenomena of economic situations and struggles.3 Elster describes three overlapping forms of ideological production: the interest-based dissemination of distorted ideas, the failure of social imagination associated with widespread support for the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism, and the psychological comfort of palliative discourses such as religion and patriotism.4 Understanding how widespread adherence to common-sense ideas is accomplished is a project central to... (shrink)

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is (...) that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity. (shrink)

The paper discusses the concept of the cognitive niche and distinguishes the latter from the metabolic niche. By using these posits I unpack certain ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, especially for its original formulation proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosh. Drawing on the ontology of location, boundaries, and parthood, I argue that enacting the world can be seen as the process of cognitive niche construction. Moreover, it turns out that enactivism—as seen through the lens of the conceptual (...) framework proposed in the paper—considers cognition as a kind of connection between the subject and the world. This post is pointed to as the key idea laid down in enactivism. (shrink)

Psychiatry is enormously complex. One of its main difficulties is how to connect the wide diversity of factors that may cause or contribute to the problems at hand, factors ranging from traumatic experiences, dysfunctional neurotransmitters, existential worries, economic deprivation, and social exclusion, to genetic bad luck. Interventions are also diverse, with options including chemical or electrical treatment, therapies aimed at behavior change and those promoting insight. Much is still unknown: what are the causal pathways, which interventions work best for which (...) patients and why?In practice, many mental health care professionals work holistically in a pragmatic and eclectic way. Without using any explicit... (shrink)

This dissertation proposes the central elements of a Social Enactive Theory of Perception. According to SEP, perception consists in sensory-based practices of interaction with objects, events, and states of affairs that are socially constituted. I oppose the representational view that perception is an indirect contact with the world, consists of the passive receiving and processing of sensory input, is in need of constant assessment of accuracy, and is a matter of individuals alone. I share the basic enactivist insight that perception (...) is a type of activity, but I depart from standard enactivism on the grounds of its individualistic bias and its limited conception of activity. Instead of motor actions, I formulate the concept of perceptual practices as the appropriate framework to understand perception. Perception is woven into socially informed, contextual, sensory-based everyday activities, such as food, dance, and dress, and even seemingly independent, basic perceptual activities and concepts are constituted by such practices. Perceptual individual interactions instantiate social perceptual practices but are not just repetitions of a script. We perceive objects in virtue of perspectives or appearances, not in spite of them, and on this basis I offer SEPâs take on experience, properties, and contents. I conceive perceptual experience as finely grained interactions between subjects and objects, both of which are spatially, temporally, and pragmatically situated. Objects and their sensory properties are perceived dynamically and always in multiple appearances. Perceptual content offers a pragmatic specification of the perceptual objects in the specific ways they appear to subjects. For SEP, perception is normatively structured. SEPâs perceptual normativity is not a worry about a supposed constant threat that our perceptions be nonveridical, but about the placement of perceptual things in a system of possibilities and expectations, cast in terms of degrees of fulfillment of expectations and in a horizon of pragmatic significance, both of which are functions of the socially constituted interactions between a perceiver and a rich theory of appearances. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to emotion are rare and to anxiety and anxiety disorder even more. This article aims to show how an enactive paradigm might be helpful in solving some problems in the clinical and scientific understanding of anxiety and anxiety disorder. I begin by pointing at a number of relevant clinical features of anxiety and anxiety disorder and by sketching how and why anxiety theories have difficulties with doing justice to these features. I specifically focus on two themes: a) how (...) to conceptualize anxiety as the expression of a dynamical interaction with the environment instead of as just a reaction to the environment (or to... (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between basic and higher cognition. In this (...) paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of (...) this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

The linguistic path has been explored through several works. The present paper investigates a path underlain by the fictive motion phenomenon: The plateau goes east along the river. This itinerary, here called the ‘localization path’ discloses the FM of an item along a trajectory to highlight its immobility in space. This linguistic path is here inspected through a corpus-based analysis displaying the verbs come and go. If experiencing language is first vocal, this process also implies kinetic, non-verbal modalities. The languaging (...) experience will hence be explored through the interaction between language, space and the speaker’s body through an enactive approach. A prototypical syntactic configuration mirroring the interpretative grid of FM reality will be defined. Recurrent syntactic patterns revealing the way the speaker projects his own world through simplex models will highlight the way the complexity of visual scenari is converted into linguistic sequences. (shrink)

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of theenactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of this (...) paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action. (shrink)

Manipulation of physical models such as tangrams and tiles is a popular approach to teaching early mathematics concepts. This pedagogical approach is extended by new computational media, where mathematical entities such as equations and vectors can be virtually manipulated. The cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting such manipulation-based learning—particularly how actions generate new internal structures that support problem-solving—are not understood. We develop a model of the way manipulations generate internal traces embedding actions, and how these action-traces recombine during problem-solving. This model (...) is based on a study of two groups of sixth-grade students solving area problems. Before problem-solving, one group manipulated a tangram, the other group answered a descriptive test. Eye-movement trajectories during problem-solving were different between the groups. A second study showed that this difference required the tangram's geometrical structure, just manipulation was not enough. We propose a theoretical model accounting for these results, and discuss its implications. (shrink)

This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions (...) with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place. (shrink)

What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative (...) approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment (which is sometimes labeled “basic” cognition) depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between (...) basic and higher cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)