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Enactive Affectivity, Extended

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Abstract

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 (Topoi 28:9–21, 2009), 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 (vehicles) 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.

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Notes

  1. There are different versions of both internalism and externalism (see Hurley 2010). In this paper I am concerned only with “vehicle” internalism/externalism (as opposed to “content” internalism/externalism), which is about the location of the material vehicles taken to underpin mental states. I also adopt a relatively broad characterization of internalism, according to which vehicles outside the brain but within the organism still count as internal (whereas sometimes internalism is limited to the view that the vehicles of mental states are “brainbound”, i.e., remain within the brain).

  2. In recent years, the term “enactivism” has come to refer to a variety of related but different approaches—such as Noë’s (2004) “dynamic sensorimotor approach”, and Hutto and Myin’s (2013) “radical enactivism”. For the purposes of this paper I focus on the canonical version of enactivism, and in particular on its account of the relationship between life and mind.

  3. For different ways of challenging this view, see Stephan, Walter and Wilutzky (2014) and Colombetti and Roberts (2015) on how HEC can be applied to the affective domain.

  4. In what follows I summarize my own viewpoint (see Colombetti 2010, 2014). Other relevant discussions can be found in Varela and Depraz (2005) and Thompson (2007, chapter 12). Not much otherwise has been written about affectivity from an enactive perspective.

  5. Thompson and Stapleton (2009) and Di Paolo and Thompson (2014) also provide useful succinct introductions. For the full treatment, see Thompson (2007).

  6. It is thus not exact to call this strand of enactivism “autopoietic”, as Hutto and Myin (2013) do. Note also that the theory of autopoiesis does not feature in Varela et al. (1991).

  7. The term “Umwelt” as is used here comes from Jacob von Uexküll (1934/2010), where it refers to the world from the perspective of living organisms that inhabit it, or their “lived environment”. Uexküll distinguished between Umwelt and Umgebung, where the latter refers to the physical surroundings of the organism. Varela (1991) draws a parallel distinction between the “world” that is enacted or brought forth by the organism in sense-making, and the physiochemical “environment” in which the organism is situated. In this and other earlier works, Varela used the term “world-making” (rather than “sense-making”) to refer to the process of enacting a world of meaning.

  8. The qualification “basic” (Thompson 2011: 211; Di Paolo and Thompson 2014: 73) is meant to allow for the appearance of more complex forms of cognition in more complex organisms, including forms of human cognition dependent on organisms being situated in cultural symbolic contexts.

  9. Jonas (1966: 99) talked of the irritability of life to refer to its “sensitiveness to the stimulus”, and wrote that “irritability is the germ, as it were the atom, of having a world”.

  10. Radical enactivists (Hutto and Myin 2013) do reject the notion of “vehicles” of cognition, together with the one of “content”, because they see both notions as going hand-in-hand with computational-representationalist accounts of cognition. However, it is not clear that canonical enactivism needs to reject all talk of vehicles and contents. This is a point that promoters of canonical enactivism will need to clarify in the future. Here I only note that Thompson (2007: 59) seems willing to talk of “vehicles” in the sense of “the structures or processes that embody meaning”, provided we keep in mind that these are “temporally extended patterns of activity that can crisscross the brain-body-world boundaries, and the meanings or contents they embody are brought forth or enacted in the context of the system’s structural coupling with its environment”.

  11. There are several species of aquatic insects, commonly called “water boatmen”, that use this or other similar underwater respiration methods. Di Paolo refers to Thorpe’s (1950) study, which described amongst others the genus Aphelocheirus, which apparently has perfected this system of respiration.

  12. Equivalent notions can be found in Tolman (1932), Uexküll (1934/2010) and Koffka (1935).

  13. Gibson (1979) mentions Lewin’s notion of demand character as a precursor of his notion of affordances, but also emphasizes a main difference between the two: unlike Lewin’s demand characters, Gibson’s affordances do not depend on the organism’s needs (op. cit., 129–131). Relatedly, Gibson also claims that affordances should be characterized in terms of behaviour and biology, rather than experience or phenomenology. I think this claim is problematic, although I shall not develop this point here. See also Dreyfus and Kelly (2007) for a phenomenological take on affordances.

  14. Some readers will find this constitutive claim counterintuitive. One referee queried why I did not settle for the “more intuitive” view that the air bubbles causally support, or scaffold, both living and affective processes (but are not themselves part of the living system). The answer is that it is not the goal of this paper to settle the causal-constitution debate. This paper is structured so as to draw out logically (what I think are) the implications of the enactive approach for the material underpinnings of affectivity. As explained in the previous section, I think that enactivism’s characterization of life entails that living systems can extend, i.e., that appropriately integrated mediating structures can be part of living systems. My further point in this and the next section is that, if enactivism entails that life extends, then it also entails that affectivity extends. Personally, I do not find these claims counterintuitive, but in any case intuitions should not matter here, because in this paper the constitutive claims are derived logically as implications of enactivism’s characterization of life and sense-making. In other words, the arguments of this paper should be construed as a conditional: given enactivism’s account of life and cognition, it follows that affectivity can extend.

  15. For related discussions of this example, see Colombetti and Roberts (2015) and Roberts (2015).

  16. See also Zahavi (2011) for related questions about the role of phenomenology in enactivism, and its relation to natural science.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to participants of the AISB 2014 symposium on enactivism, and to Ezequiel Di Paolo, Tom Roberts, and two anonymous referees for their comments on early versions of this paper. Any remaining misunderstanding is entirely my responsibility. This work was partially supported by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013), project title “Emoting the Embodied Mind” (EMOTER), ERC Grant agreement 240891.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4RJ, UK

    Giovanna Colombetti

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Colombetti, G. Enactive Affectivity, Extended. Topoi 36, 445–455 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9335-2

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