Enaction

Abstract

A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social. 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 (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), 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. ContributorsRenaud 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 Bradford Books imprint

Enacting Phenomenological Gestalts in Ultra-Trail Running: An Inductive Analysis of Trail Runners’ Courses of Experience

“…Meaning emerges from the coupling between the meaninful situation and the agent’s activity. From an enactive perspective, this idea of sense-making is crucial for understanding activity because it suggests that agents enact a meaningful world in which they articulate significations and ways of acting that emerge at the level of experience (Stewart et al, 2010). As Thompson (2005) suggested, experience should be the object of phenomenological analysis since the enactive approach assumes that the meaning that a person gives to what he/she is doing, feeling or thinking does not come from an external realm but is enacted in the interaction between agents and the situation.…”

“…In addition, Rosenthal and Visetti (1999) argued that instead of breaking down a phenomenon to identify the causal processes or isolated factors that explain phenomena, a phenomenological gestalt approach seeks to investigate the organization of activity as a whole that contains sense and unity - neither of which is divisible. In addition, the notion of gestalt is congruent with the enactive approach in the sense that activity is not prescribed by mental representations or motor schemes, but rather is understood as a co-determination through activity and situation (Stewart et al, 2010). …”

Music as a manifestation of life: exploring enactivism and the ‘eastern perspective’ for music education

“…In order to better understand what this entails we may begin by considering the work of a range of ecological and life-minded thinkers who understand cognition and ‘mind’ as a relational or ‘enactive’ process (Bateson, 1972; Varela et al, 1993; Thompson, 2007; Stewart et al, 2010). This perspective understands creative, living cognition not as a distinct disembodied category or in terms of dualistic-mechanistic Cartesian metaphors (e.g., the mind as computer).…”

Music and Its Inductive Power: A Psychobiological and Evolutionary Approach to Musical Emotions

“…Alternative embodied/enactive models of mind—such as the “4E” model of cognition ( embodied , embedded , enactive , and extended , see Menary, 2010)—have challenged this approach by emphasizing meaning-making as an ongoing process of dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment (Barrett, 2011; Maiese, 2011; Hutto and Myin, 2013). Relying on the basic concept of “enactivism” as a cross-disciplinary perspective on human cognition that integrates insights from phenomenology and philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, theoretical biology, and developmental and social psychology (Varela et al, 1991; Thompson, 2007; Stewart et al, 2010), enactive models understand cognition as embodied and perceptually guided activity that is constituted by circular interactions between an organism and its environment. Through continuous sensorimotor loops (defined by real-time perception/action cycles), the living organism—including the music listener/performer—enacts or brings forth his/her own domain of meaning (Reybrouck, 2005; Thompson, 2005; Colombetti and Thompson, 2008) without separation between the cognitive states of the organism, its physiology, and the environment in which it is embedded.…”