From sensorimotor dependencies to perceptual practices: making enactivism social

Abstract

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action-perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception, and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions, which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgensteininspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, music, etc. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi-and inter-modal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects' saliency, and modal-specific harmonylike relations.

Places for reasoning

“…Simultaneously, different geographies and sociocultural systems allow the emergence of places that generate particular and situated cognitive strategies. This resonates with the notion of perceptual practice described by Arango [7] in order to characterize the range of 'intersubjectively constituted, sensory-based practices of interaction with worldly objects' (p. 32) that operates within human communities, producing constraints on what, when and by whom affordances can be used. The same behaviour setting may provoke different actions for different agents at different times.…”

Socio-cultural norms in ecological psychology: The education of intention

“…For him, habits are often not just individual predispositions but have a social origin in customs, conventions, and norms. At this point, the notion of "perceptual practice" recently coined by Arango (2019) comes in handy. This notion aims to capture the idea that perception does not fully resolve itself in law-like perceptual information.…”

A little more social enaction than that: comment on Arango (2019)

“…Referring to the work of Evan Thompson (2007), but only to that work, he notes that while Thompson describes enactivism as being open to a role for sociality or culture in the formation of perceptions, no details about how perception can be socially structured or conditioned are provided. Autopoietic enactivism is thus dismissed as providing little more than ‘hand waving’ (Arango, 2019, p. 33).…”