From autonomy to heteronomy (and back): The enaction of social life

Abstract

The term "social cognition" can be construed in different ways. On the one hand, it can refer to the cognitive faculties involved in social activities, defined simply as situations where two or more individuals interact. On this view, social systems would consist of interactions between autonomous individuals; these interactions form higherlevel autonomous domains not reducible to individual actions. A contrasting, alternative view is based on a much stronger theoretical definition of a truly social domain, which is always defined by a set of structural norms; moreover, these social structures are not only a set of constraints, but actually constitute the possibility of enacting worlds that would just not exist without them. This view emphasises the heteronomy of individuals who abide by norms that are impersonal, culturally inherited and to a large extent independent of the individuals. Human beings are socialised through and through; consequently, all human cognition is social cognition. The article argues for this second position. Finally, it appears that fully blown autonomy actually requires heteronomy. It is the acceptance of the constraints of social structures that enables individuals to enter new realms of common meaningfulness. The emergence of social life marks a crucial step in the evolution of cognition; so that at some evolutionary point human cognition cannot but be social cognition.

The enactive approach

“…One crucial aspect of this proposal, which we have neglected so far, is the constitutive role of culture. There is in fact a growing interest in culture within the enactive approach (e.g., Thompson 2007Thompson , 2001Steiner and Stewart 2009;Di Paolo 2009c), but clearly much more remains to be done. The aim of this final section is to very briefly sketch the outlines of what an enactive account of enculturated cognition could consist in, while pointing out some of the main challenges that must still be resolved.…”

“…In particular, it is missing what is specific about human kinds of sociocognitive interactions, namely that they always unfold within a cultural context. As Steiner and Stewart (2009) have emphasized, the latter kinds of socio-cognitive interactions can also include a form of heteronomy, i.e., the abiding by a heritage of pre-established social structures. Indeed, the claim that there are cultural values that guide our behavior and understanding points to a more general phenomenon, since the process of enculturation has similarly profound effects on our solitary behavior.…”

La dinámica “Cuerpo Común” como herramienta para el desarrollo endógeno de la comunidad indígena Shuar Yawi, Gualaquiza, Ecuador.

“…O sea, ser activa en términos de buscar instrumentos de auto-formación para leer e interactuar las emergencias producidas en la relación con el contexto (Senge y Sterman, 1992) (Steiner y Stewart, 2009). Una persona, un grupo, comunidad, organización que aprende (Argyris y Schon, 1988) puede activar procesos de deuteroaprendizaje (Bateson, 1976) que le ayuden a buscar visiones e instrumentos para responder a estos problemas sociales.…”

Content in languaging: why radical enactivism is incompatible with representational theories of language

“…They are emergent from the activity of agents, just as autonomous norms are, and ontologically they are observer-dependent in the same way. But because heteronomous norms emerge collectively from the activity of many agents, and often are focused on ways of using and approaching slow-changing environmental structures, they have a degree of agent-independence with respect to any particular agent (Steiner and Stewart, 2009). Heteronomous norms are social norms, and exist both as constituted from individual actions which affirm them as defaults, and as pre-existing constraints on those same actions (Giddens, 1984;Hutchby, 2001;Stiegler, 2010).…”