Search

The purpose of this article is to introduce a design-based research (DBR) approach developed in the field of vocational and continuing education, which is grounded in a pragmatic and phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach to activity. As a design-based methodology, our activity-centered and enactive DBR approach aims to generate knowledge related to design and to identify relevant design principles. After detailing the particularities of an activity-centered and enactive DBR approach, we focus on the results pertaining to design knowledge by identifying two broad design principles for vocational education and training, and five enactivist inspired principles for training design. A significant practical implication for researchers and practitioners in vocational and continuing education and training is that these enactivist inspired design principles provide promising pathways to enhance the connectivity between (i) work experiences, (ii) work and training practices, and (iii) learning contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ethology, and more generally in the study of animal behavior, observations are theory-laden. A review of theories of animal behavior reveals that the animal is a variable object, shaped by variable levels of causality. This approach to animal behavior, which differs radically from the way psychology studies human behavior, is a consequence of the difficulty of treating animals as subjects in ethology, where they are most often studied in the third person. However, there is a subjectivist tradition in the study of animal behavior, influenced by a phenomenological background. Our aim to promote a at first person approach has led us to propose an etho-phenomenology based on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Francisco Varela's enaction theory and constructivist psychology. However, in order to legitimize this approach to animal behavior, we apply it here to behaviors that seem abnormal according to traditional explanatory frameworks, such as actospatiality, tail carrying in mice or expressing ambivalence displayed through color in octopuses. Furthermore, to explore issues such as human-animal communication, the etho-phenomenological perspective is combined with the notion of participatory sense-making, leading us to propose a theory of emotional hybridization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I focus on the concept of embeddedness as the background against which eros is a force and a power in and through interactions. To go beyond an internalist account of eros, I engage in a dialogue with some philosophical accounts of desire from an enactive perspective.This enables me to shed light on the location of the embodied tension as "in-between" lovers and "all-around" them. Crucial to this tensional account of embedded eros is the intertwining between self and others' becomings in processes of participatory sense-making. Through participatory sense-making lovers make their worlds, creating new ways of being and knowing in the ensemble. I advance some steps towards an enactive ethics of eros where, I claim, the cultivation of the space in-between and all-around lovers is the key to avoid the traps of a degenerated form of eros. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contextualisation research in entrepreneurship is on the rise. Scholars generally view it positively, as contextualisation allows for a better understanding of the bigger picture, whilst also concerns are voiced. However, contextualisation may lead to an overly fragmented field and its possible disintegration. This calls for 'the emergence of sensible approaches to contextualisation that provide guidance in balancing its benefits and costs' as reported by Welter et al. (Small Business Economics 52(2):319–330, 2019) which is the challenge we address in this Special Issue. More specifically, we argue that an investigation of the construction and enactment of contexts provides a path to better understand the identified tension. The aim of this Special Issue ties in with increasing calls in the entrepreneurship literature for going beyond agent centric views towards accounts that theorise the interconnections between agency and structure. Taken together, the articles in this special issue contribute to (1) a stronger grounding for entrepreneurship theories and concepts; (2) a more balanced conceptualisation of both agency and context; (3) a shift from the 'standard model' of entrepreneurship; and (4) context sensitive entrepreneurship methodologies and approaches. We end with identifying further research avenues. Plain English Summary: Contextualisation research in entrepreneurship is on the rise. With contextualisation we aim to understand the external environmental factors impacting entrepreneurial activities. Many scholars believe it provides a better understanding of the bigger picture, whereby others highlight that contextualisation may lead to an overly fragmented field and its possible disintegration. In this Special Issue, we argue that by investigating 'doing contexts', which are the making, unmaking, and remaking of sites for entrepreneurial action, we help to tackle this challenge. Taken together, the articles of this Special Issue contribute to (1) a stronger grounding for entrepreneurship theories and concepts; (2) a more balanced conceptualisation of both agency and context; (3) a shift from the 'standard model' of entrepreneurship; and (4) context sensitive entrepreneurship methodologies and approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen a development of a variety of approaches for examining lived experience in the context of cognitive science. However, the field of first-person research has yet to develop a pragmatic epistemological framework that would enable researchers to compare and integrate – as well as understand the epistemic status of – different methods and their findings. In this article, we present the foundation of such a framework, grounded in an epistemological investigation of gestures involved in acquiring data on experience. We examine the acts of turning towards one's experiential field and attending to experience within the process of reflection. We describe what we call the horizon of attending to experience by analogy to the "experimental arrangement" in quantum observation: this horizon, we argue, co-defines experiential phenomena that end up being observed and reported; at the same time, it itself forms an element of experience and is therefore amenable to phenomenological investigation. Drawing on the constructivist notion of enaction, we show that acknowledging the inherently constructive nature of attending to experience and accepting one's lack of epistemic access to the "original", observation-independent pre-reflective experience is not a dead end for first-person research when situated in a constructivist (but not relativist) understanding of the reflective act and its results. Expanding the notion of the horizon to encompass all epistemic acts involved in producing phenomenological data and final results of a first-person study (i.e., horizon of the method), we suggest some lines of inquiry that would allow researchers to identify and articulate horizons of particular methods, opening a way towards integrating past and future findings of different complementary first-person approaches into a comprehensive map of lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and adaptation by natural selection has got us used to considering organisms' features as solutions to problems set by the environment. However, no living system faces an outside reality independent of itself: organisms and groups of organisms, by their constitution and activity, specify the content, events and properties of the world in which they live. In this perspective—the theory of enaction—, the organism does not need to be optimal but simply viable, and it appears as a fundamental actor of the becoming of its lineage at the scale of phylogeny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal nature of structurally coupled systems in its analysis of organisms as developmental processes embedded within a developmental system. Through an enactive-developmental systems framing, this paper identifies the organizational features of cognizing systems in order to motivate a picture of how organism and environment co-determine and co-construct one another. I argue that organisms can be characterized as self-organizing, operationally closed, plastic systems ecologically embedded within a developmental system. In virtue of this organizational makeup, organisms actively engage in the modulation and assessment of their coupling with their environment: cognitive strategies that entail contextualized responses to variations across the web of interactions that comprises the developmental system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down to being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we call shared enaction of an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning (and while explaining them, they often imagine computers at work). But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren's (2002) idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower's being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article discusses shared epistemological characteristics of two distinct areas of research: the field of first-person inquiry and the field of quantum mechanics. We outline certain philosophical challenges that arise in each of the two lines of inquiry, and point towards the central similarity of their observational situation: the impossibility of disregarding the interrelatedness of the observed phenomena with the act of observation. We argue that this observational feature delineates a specific category of research that we call the non-trivial domain. Unlike the trivial domain, non-trivial research cannot assume the view from nowhere on which the observed phenomena could be regarded as existing independently of the process of observation. Presenting first-person inquiry and quantum mechanics as two of its examples, we show that non-trivial research violates several fundamental observational presuppositions of the trivial domain, exemplified in the principles of classical physics. Drawing on Niels Bohr's philosophy of quantum mechanics and the constructivist notion of enaction, we stress the constructive, participatory, and irreversible nature of observation in the non-trivial domain. We discuss the possibility of developing a non-representationalist epistemology of the non-trivial, and consider the implications of our discussion for research in the non-trivial domain, as well as for the general understanding of the scientific inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of 'higher' cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to 'affordances,' i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as 'higher' cognition in terms of engaging with affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that the enactive approach to ethics could benefit from engaging a dialogue with the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher who has given ethics a decisive role in the understanding of our social life. Taking the enactive approach of Colombetti and Torrance (PHEN 8:505–526, 2009) as a starting point, we show how Levinas' philosophy, with the key notions of face, otherness, and responsibility among others can complement and enrich the enactive view of ethics. Specifically, we argue that Levinas can provide, on the one hand, a phenomenological characterisation of ethics itself, of its nature and fundamental meaning, and on the other, an account of how sociality, affectivity and embodiment, as presented in Colombetti and Torrance's work, combine to bring about the ethical experience. However, we also point out that introducing Levinas to the enactive approach could be challenging. It is not obvious how sense-making and value-making, as centred (à la Jonas) on the precariousness and potential death of the subject, would account for the ethical experience as grounded (à la Levinas) on the precariousness and potential death of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incorporation of external tools during a sports activity can be analyzed through the dynamics of appropriation. In this study, we assumed that appropriation could be documented at both the phenomenological and behavioral scales and aimed to characterize trail runners' interactions with five carrying systems (i.e., backpacks proposing different ways of carrying water) in an ecological setting. The runners ran a 3-km trail running loop, equipped with inertial sensors to quantify both their vertical oscillations and those of the carrying systems. After the trials, phenomenological data were collected in enactive interviews. Results showed that (1) the runners encountered issues related to the carrying system, whose emergence in their experiences while running revealed the interplay between the tool's transparency (i.e., when runners provided no account of the carrying system) and opacity (i.e., when runners mentioned perceptions of disturbing system elements), and (2) when the runners carried the water bottles on the pectoral straps, they felt the system bouncing in an uncomfortable way, especially in the less technical parts of the route. We therefore investigated the low- and high-order parameters of coordination by computing the vertical accelerations and the acceleration couplings between the carrying system and the runners in order to identify coordination modes. The congruence between the runners' experiences and the behavioral data was noted in terms of (1) the system's vertical oscillations (i.e., low-order parameters) and (2) the couplings between the accelerations of the runners and the backpacks (i.e., high-order parameters). Our results demonstrated that the appropriation process was shaped by the interactions between the runners' activity, the environment and the physical properties of the tool. These interactions occurred in fluctuating phases where the runners perceived the carrying systems as more or less incorporated. Our results highlighted how tool incorporation is revealed through changes in its transparency/opacity in the actor's activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiophenomenology aims at refining the neuro-phenomenological approach created by F. Varela as a new paradigm, jointly based on Husserl's a priori dynamics of the living present and an experiment on anticipatory time-dynamics of visual motor perception. In order to do so, we will situate the paradigm of neurophenomenology at the cardio-vascular level, focusing on the emotional dynamics of lived experience and thus refining the dialogue, more precisely, the generative mutual constraints between first- and third-person analysis. In this article we present the theoretical hypothesis of cardiophenomenology, which places the bodily-emotional heartsystem at its core, as an intrinsic part of the cognitive system. The latter therefore needs to be enlarged in order to include an enactive embodied cardiac-affective dimension. Here we present five main arguments for the necessary inclusion of the bodily-emotional heartsystem in the cognitive system: first, two pragmatic operational arguments (experiential and methodological), then three theoretical ones (cognitive, homological and ontological-laden). A direct methodological-pragmatic consequence is the actual operativity of the generative mutual constraints based on an experiential (lived)-experimental (organic) continuity of the embodied cardiac-affective fold inherent in the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Human Orrery is a representation of the Solar System at a human scale, on which positions of planets over time are symbolized by different discs. Learners can then walk along the orbits of the planets with the right pace. This pedagogical tool uses the principles of enacted cognition to promote a better understanding of the scientific laws of dynamics. Enaction assumes that cognition is based on action. Applied to pedagogy, it implies that learning of concepts must be based on gestures and perceptions first. I applied during 2 years an enacted pedagogical sequence using our Human Orrery to different populations of learners. The main purpose was the understanding of velocity and inertia by KS4 classes (14-16 years old). Interviews and closed questions reveal a qualitative enhancement of the motivation and well-being of the learners during the enacted sequence. To evaluate further the impact of the enacted sequence, I formulated 2 open questions. The first one concerns the relation between distance, duration, and velocity through the period of planets. The second one focuses on inertia and gravity through the comparison of the free fall of an apple on Earth and the orbit of the Moon around Earth. The questions were asked to KS4 pupils after the enacted sequence (experimental classes) and to KS4, undergraduate and pre-teachers after a classical lecture on dynamics (demonstration classes). Quantitative analysis of the answers reveals specific cognitive insight, especially for students reasoning about velocity and trajectories. The general purpose of this paper is thus to illustrate the use of the Human Orrery in the context of science education in the classroom and to make a first, preliminary demonstration of its efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In biosemiotics, some oppose the study of sign relations to empirical work on bio-mechanisms. Urging consilience between these views, we show the value of Alain Berthoz's concept of simplexity. Its heuristic power is to present molecules, cells, organisms and communities as using tricks to self-fabricate by agglomerating 'simplex' bio-mechanisms. Their properties enable living systems (including observers) to self-sustain, adapt and, at best, to thrive. But simplexity also empowers agents to engage with their surroundings in novel ways. Life thus not only generates know-how but also social organisation. With languaging, people can act and inhibit: they can also simplexify. As a result, we can see a fruit as ripe, feel when things are awry or behave in ways likely to be judged to be apt. While all living beings make situated use of the historical and the local, humans also bind these with the use of both practices and artifacts. As a result, brains come to emulate what occurs in-between persons and their surroundings. In pursuing the basis for our powers, we focus on inhibition. This simplex trick enables a plant to use dormancy, a bird to learn, and a person to mesh languaging with other aspects of action/perception. Indeed, inhibition enriches human style phenomenology as impersonal resources are used to expand our epistemic horizons. Experience links a self-fabricating body, ancient bio-mechanisms, community-based concerns and epigenetically derived know-how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception as unconscious inference. If our interpretation is right, however, a Helmholtzian view of perception is incompatible with Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle. We argue that the free energy principle and the ecological and enactive approach to mind and life make for a much happier marriage of ideas. We make our argument based on three points. First we argue that the free energy principle applies to the whole animal-environment system, and not only to the brain. Second, we show that active inference, as understood by the free-energy principle, is incompatible with unconscious inference understood as analagous to scientific hypothesis-testing, the main tenet of a Helmholtzian view of perception. Third, we argue that the notion of inference at work in Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle is too weak to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception. Taken together these points imply that the free energy principle is best understood in ecological and enactive terms set out in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alva Noë's strategy to solve the puzzle of perceptual presence entirely relies on the principle of presence as access. Unaccessed or unattended parts or details of objects are perceptually present insofar as they are accessible, and they are accessible insofar as one possesses sensorimotor skills that can secure their access. In this paper, I consider several arguments that can be opposed to this claim and that are chiefly related to the modal status of action, i.e. the fact that the action that would secure access to the absent aspects is a possibility, something that can (or maybe could) be done. The main difficulty Noë's account must face is -as several situations demonstrate- that the action that should be performed for the absent aspects to be actually accessed does not have to be itself available for these aspects to be perceptually present. What matters for the absent aspects to be present is not their de facto (i.e. effective) accessibility, but their de jure accessibility. To overcome those difficulties, I propose to rely on a ternary model of the role of action possibilities in perceptual awareness. This model builds on Husserl's analysis of the role of perceptual circumstances in perception and connection between sense (Sinn) registering and horizontal intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we move beyond the problematic distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' cognition by accounting for so-called 'higher' cognitive capacities in terms of skillful activities in practices, and in terms of the affordances exploited in those practices. Through ethnographic research we aim to further develop the new notion of skilled intentionality by turning to the phenomenon of the tendency towards an optimal grip on a situation in real-life situations in the field of architecture. Tending towards an optimal grip is an inherently affective and dynamic phenomenon. It has been under explored in philosophy, despite its central place in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. When the architects experience discontent, attention is typically solicited by the affordances through which possible ways of continuing the improvement of the design can be explored. In various ways this tension or disequilibrium - fueling a tendency towards an optimal grip - is encountered in the complex architectural design practices that we observed. Based on our field material we distinguish between: a) grip in visual perception, b) grip on the design, and c) grip on 'how to design'. The move towards an optimal grip takes shape by joining forces with a landscape of affordances. This landscape includes, for instance, affordances for grasping a cup of coffee, affordances provided by a cardboard model to improve it, as well as for engaging with a person who is not physically present. Because they are skilled, the architects can be responsive to these different affordances in similar ways. Furthermore, in practice the architects are responsive to multiple affordances simultaneously. Through our analysis of the tendency towards an optimal grip we show that our surroundings contribute to skillful action and cognition in a far more complex way than is currently acknowledged in philosophy and cognitive science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying the recent focus on embodied and interactive aspects of social understanding are several intuitions about what roles the body, interaction processes, and interpersonal experience play. In this paper, we introduce a systematic, hands-on method for investigating the experience of interacting and its role in intersubjectivity. Special about this method is that it starts from the idea that researchers of social understanding are themselves one of the best tools for their own investigations. The method provides ways for researchers to calibrate and to trust themselves as sophisticated instruments to help generate novel insights into human interactive experience. We present the basics of the method, and two empirical studies. The first is a video-study on autism, which shows greater refinement in the way people with autism embody their social interactions than previously thought. The second is a study of thinking in live interactions, which provides insight into the common feeling that too much thinking can hamper interaction, and into how this kind of interactional awkwardness might be unblocked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enactivist accounts of language use generally treat concrete words in terms of motor intentionality systems and affordances for action. There is less consensus, though, regarding how abstract words are to be understood in enactivist terms. I draw on Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy to argue, against the representationalist paradigm that has dominated the cognitive scientific and philosophical traditions, that language is fundamentally a mode of participation in our world. In particular, language orients us within our milieus in a manner that extends into the depth of the idea-endowed world (where 'ideas' are construed in a specifically Merleau-Pontian sense). This conceptualization of language allows us to see that abstract words orient us bodily just as surely as concrete words do, albeit in a manner that is more diffuse across the entirety of given situations, as I will show with an example of abstract language use in Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. These insights are applied to some of the recent enactivist discourse to suggest some ways in which representationalism maintains a latent presence in this discourse. I conclude by pointing to developments in conceptual metaphor theory that can enrich our sense of how abstract language is involved in embodied understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the semiotic problem of how meaning is agentially grounded: how actual meaning is possible and is justifiably supported by agents' capabilities and purposes. This article is particularly focused on human agential grounding; however, to a great degree, insights presented here can be extended to other living beings. Specifically, agential meaning is examined here inside the framework of agentive semiotics and embodied, situated and enactive cognition theories, in line with the mind-life continuity general thesis (which intends to naturalize mind and experience). To offer clarity and methodological precision about agential grounding, three explanation categories (called recurrences) are proposed: phylogenetic recurrence, the evolutionary basis for corporal/embodied grounding; ontogenetic recurrence, the developmental basis for individual meaning grounding; and collective recurrence, the basis for meaning recognized, attributed and assigned inside social contexts. These recurrences are conceived as three types of general processes that constantly enclose possibilities for purpose and meaning emergence in humans. As a result of these types of recurrences, two categories of human agendas or purposes are also proposed: individual and collective. Finally, remarks about how these categories can be useful for semiotic analysis and further research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appropriation of digital artefacts involves their use, which has changed, evolved or developed beyond their original design. Thus, to understand appropriation, we must understand use. We define use as the active, purposive exploitation of the affordances offered by the technology and from this perspective; appropriation emerges as a natural consequence of this enactive use. Enaction tells us that perception is an active process. It is something we do, and not something that happens to us. From this reading, use then becomes the active exploitation of the affordances offered us by the artefact, system or service. In turn, we define appropriation as the engagement with these actively disclosed affordances-disclosed as a consequence of, not just, seeing but of seeing as. We present a small case study that highlights instances of perception as an actively engaged skill. We conclude that appropriation is a simple consequence of enactive perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a behavioral ontogeny for artificial agents based on the interactive memorization of sensorimotor invariants. The agents are controlled by continuous timed recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) which bind their sensors and motors within a dynamic system. The behavioral ontogenesis is based on a phylogenetic approach: memorization occurs during the agent's lifetime and an evolutionary algorithm discovers CTRNN parameters. This shows that sensorimotor invariants can be durably modified through interaction with a guiding agent. After this phase has finished, agents are able to adopt new sensorimotor invariants relative to the environment with no further guidance. We obtained these kinds of behaviors for CTRNNs with 3-6 units, and this paper examines the functioning of those CTRNNs. For instance, they are able to internally simulate guidance when it is externally absent, in line with theories of simulation in neuroscience and the enactive field of cognitive science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's dialectic of linguistic expression ()), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense (). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or 'linguistic' convention (McNeill , ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing community of researchers who are interested in establishing a science of the experiential or 'lived' aspects of the human mind. This shift from cognitive science to consciousness science presents a profound challenge to synthetic approaches. To be sure, symbolic artificial intelligence constituted the original foundation of cognitive science; subsequent progress in robotics has helped to pioneer a new understanding of the mind as essentially embodied, situated, and dynamical, while artificial life has informed the concept of biological self-organization. However, with regard to the development of a science of the experienced mind, the relevance of these synthetic approaches still remains uncertain. We propose to address the challenge of first-person experience by designing new human-computer interfaces, which aim to artificially mediate a participant's sensorimotor loop such that novel kinds of experience can emerge for the user. The advantage of this synthetic approach is that computer interface technology enables us to systematically vary the ways in which participants experience the world and thereby allows us to systematically investigate 'mind-as-it-could-be' from the first-person perspective. We illustrate the basic principles of this method by drawing on examples from our research in sensory substitution, virtual reality, and interactive installation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as 'enactivism' has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. () have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a 'joint process of sensemaking': just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing realization in cognitive science that a theory of embodied intersubjectivity is needed to better account for social cognition. We highlight some challenges that must be addressed by attempts to interpret 'simulation theory' in terms of embodiment, and argue for an alternative approach that integrates phenomenology and dynamical systems theory in a mutually informing manner. Instead of 'simulation' we put forward the concept of the 'extended body', an enactive and phenomenological notion that emphasizes the socially mediated nature of embodiment. To illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach, we replicate an agent-based model of embodied social interaction. An analysis of the model demonstrates that the extended body can be explained in terms of mutual dynamical entanglement: inter-bodily resonance between individuals can give rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals by modulating their intra-bodily conditions of behavior generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dance/movement therapy may be conceptualized as an embodied and enactive form of psychotherapy. The embodied enactive approach looks at individuals as living systems characterized by plasticity and permeability (moment-to-moment adaptations within the self and toward the environment), autonomy, sense-making, emergence, experience, and striving for balance. Enaction and embodiment emphasize the roles that body motion and sensorimotor experience play in the formation of concepts and abstract thinking. A theoretical framework and a perspective on professional practice in dance/movement therapy are herein offered as influenced by interdisciplinary embodied and enactive approaches deriving from cognitive sciences and phenomenology. The authors assert that dance/movement therapy, enaction, and embodiment fruitfully contribute to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music-that is, the way that we use music as an 'esthetic technology' to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or 'nested acoustic environment' that further affords possibilities for, among other things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a 'musical affordance'. Next, I look at how 'emotional affordances' in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at 'social affordances' in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take up the problem of the self through bringing together the insights, while correcting some of the shortcomings, of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. I begin with an examination of the Buddhist theory of non-self (anātman) and the rigorously reductionist interpretation of this doctrine developed by the Abhidharma school of Buddhism. After discussing some of the fundamental problems for Buddhist reductionism, I turn to the enactive approach to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that human beings, as dynamic systems, are characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy. Therefore, human beings are not reducible to the more basic mental and physical events that constitute them. I critically examine Francisco Varela's enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas in support of this view. I argue, in contrast, that while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally I sketch a Buddhist-enactivist account of the self. I argue for a nonreductionist view of the self as an active, embodied, embedded, self-organizing process--what the Buddhists call 'I'-making (ahaṃkāra). This emergent process of self-making is grounded in the fundamentally recursive processes that characterize lived experience: autopoiesis at the biological level, temporalization and self-reference at the level of conscious experience, and conceptual and narrative construction at the level of intersubjectivity. In Buddhist terms, I will develop an account of the self as dependently originated and empty, but nevertheless real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of artificial life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly integrate the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from the environment. This proposition does not however, resolve that of the relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making). Such reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues, thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern conception of enactive cognition is under discussion from the standpoint concerning the notions of nonlinear dynamics and synergetics. The contribution of Francisco Varela and his precursors is considered. It is shown that the perceptual and mental processes are bound up with the “architecture” of human body and nonlinear and circular connecting links between the subject of cognition and the world constructed by him can be metaphorically called a nonlinear cobweb of cognition. Cognition is an autopoietic activity because it is directed to the search of elements that are missed; it serves to completing integral structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making. We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Use cases have gained wide acceptance since the standardisation of the UML by the Object Management Group in 1997. This paper addresses the inadequacy of use cases for expressing intra-use case and inter-use case dependencies. We present a state-based approach for facilitating explicit consideration of such dependencies in use case descriptions, and a support tool is described, which provides enaction of the state-based use cases to support validation. We outline an industrial study involving the specification of real-time monitoring systems, wherein we demonstrate that enaction of the state-based use cases highlighted important dependency issues that had not been revealed within standard use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the potential of classical and connectionist computational concepts for explanations of innate infant knowledge and of its development. It focuses on issues relating to: the perceptual process; the control and form(s) of perceptual-behavioural coordination; the role of environmental structure in the organization of action; and the construction of novel forms of activity. There is significant compatibility between connectionist and classical views of computation, though classical concepts are, at present, better able to provide a comprehensive computational view of the infant. However, Varela's 'enaction' perspective poses a significant challenge for both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]