Abstract
Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Because the extended evolutionary synthesis is essentially pluralistic in its approach, and because it challenges central assumptions of traditional or modern evolutionary synthesis, one can argue that it is neither a synthesis nor an extension of the traditional view (dos Reis & Araújo, 2020). We, however, do not take a stance on that issue.
A similar view has been put forth by Konrad Werner (2020). Werner’s idea of construction of a cognitive niche is based on the distinction between metabolism and meta-metabolism (Moreno et al., 1997), where metabolic processes enable organisms to survive, and meta-metabolic ones guide organisms towards attractors and away from repellents, therefore aiding and enhancing metabolic processes. Werner argues that organism and niche are codetermined in two ways. First, the construction of a metabolic niche produces a stable, operationally closed, tenant. As organisms develop the capacities to act in their metabolic niches, they construct cognitive niches, which marks a second step of codetermination. Given Werner’s reliance on a distinction between metabolic and meta-metabolic processes, and given that cognition is understood as a process of the latter type, it follows that the conditions for the emergence of life are not the same as the conditions for the emergence of cognition. This seems to be incompatible with a strong construal of the life-mind continuity thesis, as it is defended in TEM and perhaps more notoriously by Thompson (2007) and more recently by Di Paolo et al (2018).
Whether or not this is a difference of kind or degree depends on whether other animals have a “theory of mind” like we do, that is, whether they are capable of ascribing intentional states to other animals. Research on the subject of animal cognition has been live yet controversial (see Heyes, 2015, for a historical overview and a methodological critique). In this argument, we do not rely on whether non-human animals have a theory of mind. We do rely, however, on the less controversial claim that there is something about human social behavior that sets us significantly apart from other animals.
We use ‘highly normative’ to distinguish it from the normativity present in non-human animals (see van de Waal, Borgeaud, & Whiten, 2013 for an example of socially inherited norms in apes).
Naturally, satisfactory explanation of how behaviorally modern humans came to existence is much more intricate than what we explore here.
Consider again the example above: at the neural level, Malafouris hypothesizes that manipulating clay tokens lead to a reorganization in the neural connectivity of the intraparietal area, specifically linking the anterior intraparietal area, which is responsible for manual tasks, with the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus and the angular gyrus, which are areas associated, respectively, with semantic associations and metaphorical thinking (see Malafouris, 2013, p. 115).
Of course, a skeptic about the external world could insist that we cannot know whether our actions are in fact real—maybe, their argument goes, we can only be sure about the content of some of our present-tense experiences. But that would imply a conception of mind as a disembodied entity, something that enactivists fundamentally reject.
We acknowledge that our proposal may not satisfy anti-realists who hold that entities postulated by physical theories are merely culturally enabled abstractions, so they are not objective or real in a sufficiently robust sense. As we have argued in Sect. 3.3, however, symbolic numerical counting, which is presumably a paradigmatic case of culturally enabled abstraction, is historically dependent upon material engagements. Therefore, it is not separable from our actions in the world. This, we believe, offers good initial grounds to resist the idea that theoretical entities are not real.
Similarly to enactivism, ecological psychology, which was originally developed by Gibson (1979/2015) has its roots on pragmatism. Ecological psychologists emphasize the role of agency in perceptual cognition and reject that organisms have to enrich information about distal physical structures through computations over mental representations. Despite these initial similarities, the authors of TEM took Gibson’s ideas to overemphasize the environmental side of the agent-environment relations, supposedly downplaying the organism’s role in cognition (Cf. Varela et al., 2016, pp. 203–204). Recently, Harry Heft (2020) argued for a divergence between the two approaches by reading enactivism under an idealist light, in contrast with Gibson’s professed realism. Despite their complicated past, recent developments indicate that ecological psychology and enactivism can be put to work together (Baggs & Chemero, 2021; Carvalho & Rolla, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2019; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Rolla & Novaes, 2020).
Natural drift should not be confused with genetic drift, which is the change in frequency of gene variants in the genetic compositions of populations due to the randomness of sampling, as opposed to genetic variation by adaptation.
These points can be summarized as (1) specific genes rarely determine the manifestation of isolated traits (linkage and pleiotropy), (2) development is determined by epigenetic factors, (3) genetic frequency is random in maintained population size (genetic drift), (4) some groups undergo very little changes over large timescales despite significant changes in the environment and high genetic diversity (stasis), and (5) there is a need for reconceiving the individual as a unit of selection.
Note that their criticism is directed towards what has been called empirical adaptationism, the view that natural selection is the main mechanism responsible for evolutionary changes. They do not affect (at least prima facie) explanatory and methodological varieties of adaptationism (see Godfrey-Smith, 2001; Orzack & Forber, 2017).
The extreme version of this tendency of isolating individual levels of analysis for explaining evolution and natural selection is the selfish gene hypothesis (Dawkins, 1976). Opposing views, such as evolution as natural drift (see also the notion of group selection in Wynne-Edwards, 1982), suggest that the understanding of the evolutionary process will involve ‘a clear articulation of various units of selection and their relations’ (Varela et al., 2016, p. 193).
As one anonymous reviewer brought to our attention, this definition of agency has a flair of circularity. Regarding this alleged circularity, we may follow Di Paolo et al., (2017, p. 127) in their definition of an agent as an autonomous system capable of modulating its environmental couplings in an adaptive manner. Because the elements of this definition are themselves defined in dynamical terms, not presupposing agency, this definition mitigates the charge of circularity.
References
Baggs, E., & Chemero, A. (2021). Radical embodiment in two directions. Synthese, 198(S9), 2175–2190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02020-9
Barrett, L. (2019). Enactivism, pragmatism…behaviorism? Philosophical Studies, 176(3), 807–818. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-01231-7
de Carvalho, E., & Rolla, G. (2020). An enactive-ecological approach to information and uncertainty. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00588
Crippen, M. (2020). Enactive pragmatism and ecological psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(October), 203–204. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.538644
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
De Jesus, P. (2018). Thinking through enactive agency: Sense-making, bio-semiosis and the ontologies of organismic worlds. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17(5), 861–887. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9562-2
Di Paolo, E. (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 429–452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-005-9002-y
Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaram, X. (2017). Sensorimotor life: An enactive proposal. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198786849.001.0001
Di Paolo, E., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. MIT Press.
dos Reis, C. R. M., & Araújo, L. A. L. (2020). Extended evolutionary synthesis: Neither synthesis nor extension. Biological Theory, 15(2), 57–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-020-00347-6
Etxeberria, A. (2004). Autopoiesis and natural drift: Genetic information, reproduction, and evolution revisited. Artificial Life, 10(3), 347–360. https://doi.org/10.1162/1064546041255575
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethiking the mind (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794325.001.0001
Gallagher, S., & Allen, M. (2018). Active inference, enactivism and the hermeneutics of social cognition. Synthese, 195(6), 2627–2648. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1269-8
Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2001). Three kinds of adaptationism. In Adaptationism and optimality (pp. 335–357). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609084.012
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London—Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 581–598. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1979.0086
Heft, H. (2020). Ecological psychology and enaction theory: Divergent groundings. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00991
Heras-Escribano, M. (2019). Pragmatism, enactivism, and ecological psychology: Towards a unified approach to post-cognitivism. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02111-1
Heyes, C. (2015). Animal mindreading: What’s the problem? Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22(2), 313–327. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0704-4
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content. The MIT Press.
Hutto, D., & Peeters, A. (2018). The Roots of remembering. In K. Michaelian, D. Debus, & D. Perrini (Eds.), New directions in the philosophy of memory (pp. 97–118). Routledge.
Ihde, D., & Malafouris, L. (2019). Homo faber revisited: Postphenomenology and material engagement theory. Philosophy and Technology, 32(2), 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0321-7
Kirchhoff, M. D., & Robertson, I. (2018). Enactivism and predictive processing: A non-representational view. Philosophical Explorations, 21(2), 264–281.
Kiverstein, J. D., & Rietveld, E. (2018). Reconceiving representation-hungry cognition: An ecological-enactive proposal. Adaptive Behavior, 26(4), 147–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712318772778
Laland, K. N., Matthews, B., & Feldman, M. W. (2016). An introduction to niche construction theory. Evolutionary Ecology, 30(2), 191–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-016-9821-z
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Feldman, M. W. (2000a). Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(1), 131–146. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00002417
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Feldman, M. W. (2000b). Niche construction earns its keep. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(1), 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0044241X
Laland, K., Uller, T., Feldman, M., Sterelny, K., Müller, G., Moczek, A., Jablonka, E., & Odling-Smee, J. (2014). Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Yes, urgently. Nature, 514, 161–164.
Laland, K., Uller, T., Feldman, M., Sterelny, K., Müller, G., Moczek, A., Jablonka, E., & Odling-Smee, J. (2015). The extended evolutionary synthesis: Its structure, assumptions and predictions. Proceedings. Biological Sciences/The Royal Society. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019
Lewontin, R. (2000). The triple helix: Gene. Harvard University Press.
Malafouris, L. (2013). How things shape the mind: A theory of material engagement. MIT Press.
Malafouris, L. (2014). Creative thinging: The feeling of and for clay. Pragmatics and Cognition, 22(1), 140–158. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22.1.08mal
Malafouris, L. (2019). Mind and material engagement. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9606-7
Maturana, H., & Mpodozis, J. (1992). Origen de las especies por medio de la deriva natural. Museo Nacional de História Natural.
Maturana, H., & Mpodozis, J. (2000). The origin of species by means of natural drift. Revista Chilena De Historia Natural, 73(2), 261–310. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0716-078X2000000200005
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. New Science Library/Shambhala Publications.
Moreno, A., Umerez, J., & Ibañez, J. (1997). Cognition and life: The autonomy of cognition. Brain and Cognition, 34(1), 107–129. https://doi.org/10.1006/brcg.1997.0909
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. MIT Press.
Noë, A. (2012). Varieties of presence. Harvard University Press.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction: The neglected process in evolution. In Monographs in population biology (Vol. 37). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt24hqpd
Orzack, S. H., & Forber, P. (2017). Adaptationism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 201). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Pigliucci, M., & Müller, G. (Eds.). (2010). Evolution: The extended synthesis. MIT Press.
Rolla, G., & Novaes, F. (2020). Ecological-enactive scientific cognition: Modeling and material engagement. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09713-y
Shapiro, L. (2011). Embodied cognition. Routledge.
Sterelny, K. (2010). Minds: Extended or scaffolded? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 465–481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9174-y
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E. (2018). Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/evolving-enactivism-basic-minds-meet-content/
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. The MIT Press.
Tomasello, M. (2014). A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press.
Turner, J. S. (2000). The extended organism: The physiology of animal-built structures. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.1019
Turner, J. S. (2016). Homeostasis and the physiological dimension of niche construction theory in ecology and evolution. Evolutionary Ecology, 30(2), 203–219. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-015-9795-2
van de Waal, E., Borgeaud, C., & Whiten, A. (2013). Potent social learning and conformity shape a wild primate’s foraging decisions. Science, 340(6131), 483–485. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1232769
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (2016). The embodied mind (Revised Ed). The MIT Press.
Villalobos, M., & Dewhurst, J. (2017). Why post-cognitivism does not (necessarily) entail anti-computationalism. Adaptive Behavior, 25(3), 117–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712317710496
Vörös, S., Froese, T., & Riegler, A. (2016). Epistemological odyssey: Introduction to special issue on the diversity of enactivism and neurophenomenology. Constructivist Foundations, 11(2), 189–203.
Ward, D., Silverman, D., & Villalobos, M. (2017). Introduction: The varieties of enactivism. Topoi, 36(3), 365–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9484-6
Werner, K. (2020). Enactment and construction of the cognitive niche: Toward an ontology of the mind-world connection. Synthese, 197(3), 1313–1341. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1756-1
Wynne-Edwards, V. (1982). Animal dispersion in relation to social behaviour. Oliver & Boyd.
Acknowledgements
We dedicate this paper to the memory of Humberto Maturana. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their positive remarks, suggestions and criticisms that have greatly improved the quality of this work. We would also like to thank the members of the Cognition, Language, Enaction and Affectivity group (CLEA) for commenting on previous versions of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rolla, G., Figueiredo, N. Bringing forth a world, literally. Phenom Cogn Sci 22, 931–953 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09760-z
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09760-z