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Phenomenology and naturalism in autopoietic and radical enactivism: exploring sense-making and continuity from the top down

  • S.I.: Gestalt Phenomenology and Embodied Cognitive Science
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Abstract

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience.

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Notes

  1. Thompson (2007), chapters 4–6. Henceforth cited as MiL.

  2. Cf. MiL 66ff. Sheredos (2017) provides a helpful clarification of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of structure, and a critique of Thompson’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty in MiL.

  3. In fact, Thompson equates the two already at MiL 126, before introducing Jonas. But it is clear that Jonas’ line of reasoning is meant to ensure the coextension of the biological and phenomenological dimensions of the life-mind continuity thesis.

  4. Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017). Henceforth cited as RE and EE respectively.

  5. See Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, p. 201ff.) for a historical and contemporary introduction to the phenomenological approach to understanding other minds. Of course, the general validity and specific details of the phenomenological view on other minds are debated by authors working both within and without the phenomenological tradition. See, e.g., Overgaard (2017a, b).

  6. De Jesus (2016a, p. 280ff). De Jesus distinguishes between anthropomorphism, anthropocentricism, and an anthropogenic approach, but for present purposes it will suffice to focus on the issue of anthropomorphism, which I take to be the central concern here.

  7. Thompson has argued that the ability of two living bodies to resonate with one another—empathy broadly construed, in the phenomenological sense—is a precondition of any science of life and mind rather than being a threat to such science (MiL 165; Thompson 2005). It could well be argued that it is phenomenology alone, with its attention to the way in which the minds of other organism are initially given to us through their embodied activity, that can assess the nature and validity of the kinds of scientific evidence upon which a theory of non-human mindedness can be based. As Thompson also points out, a crucial task for a phenomenological cognitive science is to critique the false consciousness of the sciences of life and mind in their temptation towards a naïve objectivism (Thompson 2011, p. 118).

  8. For an excellent recent discussion of pre-predicative sense with respect to predicative and propositional sense, see Inkpin (2016).

  9. In his review of Hutto and Myin’s Evolving Enactivism (2017), Thompson (2018) also draws attention to Hutto and Myin’s neglect of this level of phenomenological description. Thompson states that, while Hutto and Myin acknowledge a basic, object-oriented intentionality, they fail to discuss the mode of presentation that characterizes such intentionality. In their defense, Hutto and Myin do grant (1) that perception is aspectual (RE 113ff.—see below), (2) that environmental offerings are given with a certain significance for the organism (RE 8), and (3) that there may be a kind of phenomenal content that is not necessarily representational content (EE 11). However, these topics are not developed in Hutto and Myin’s work sufficiently to satisfy phenomenologically-minded enactivists.

  10. As examples of “lower animals,” Merleau-Ponty discusses medusas, marine worms, starfish, and sea anemones. In a somewhat unusual classificatory move, Merleau-Ponty, following von Uexküll, includes amoebas and paramecia, both unicellular organisms, among “lower animals”.

  11. Merleau-Ponty (1963, p. 112f.; 1964a, b, p. 75; 1973, p. 104, p. 119f.; 2010, p. 6f., p. 151, pp. 209–213, p. 345, p. 430).

  12. Kiverstein and Rietveld (2015) is a notable exception to this trend. Barandiaran (2017) and Barandiaran and Moreno (2006, 2008) also conclude that the animal level of sensorimotor autonomy is the one that is relevant to the AE notion of behavior, but they arrive at this conclusion for reasons more scientific than phenomenological. Stapleton and Froese (2016) emphasize the importance of the nervous system, highlighting discontinuities in the life-mind continuity thesis where notions of subjectivity and agency are concerned. And, their strong commitment to continuity notwithstanding, both Thompson (MiL 47-49, 243ff.) and Jonas (1966, p. 99ff.; 1968, p. 244ff.) emphasize the uniqueness of the animal sensorimotor form of life.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Shaun Gallagher, John Drummond, Maxime Doyon, Katsunori Miyahara, Robert Duffy, Samuel Kampa and Simon Rousseau-Lesage for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Helpful feedback was also provided by participants at the conference The World in Us: Gestalt Structure, Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition (7–9 July 2017, University of Edinburgh) and participants in Maxime Doyon’s seminar on enactivism at University of Montreal (Fall 2017). The paper benefited immensely from the thorough and insightful commentary provided by two anonymous reviewers for Synthese.

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    Hayden Kee

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Kee, H. Phenomenology and naturalism in autopoietic and radical enactivism: exploring sense-making and continuity from the top down. Synthese 198 (Suppl 9), 2323–2343 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1851-3

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