Misplaced Pages

Enactivism

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Prenoetic (talk | contribs) at 03:15, 22 April 2014 (→See also). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 03:15, 22 April 2014 by Prenoetic (talk | contribs) (→See also)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
It has been suggested that Enaction (philosophy) be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since April 2014.

Enactivism argues that cognition depends on a dynamic interaction between the cognitive agent and its environment: "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world.

The use of the term enaction in this context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, who proposed the name to "emphasise the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre given world by a pre given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs". This was further developed by Thompson and others, to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment.

The initial emphasis of enactivism upon sensorimotor skills has been criticized as "cognitively marginal", but it has been extended to apply to higher level cognitive activities, such as social interactions. "In the enactive view,... knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with ts environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction... allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."

Enactivism is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism and Cartesian dualism.

Philosophical aspects

Enactivists criticize representational views of the mind and emphasize the importance of embodiment and action to cognition.
-Evan Thompson, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Toronto.

At a fundamental level, enactivism is anti-dualist. The self arises as part of the process of an embodied entity interacting with the environment in precise ways determined by its physiology. In this sense, individuals can be seen to "grow into" or arise from, their interactive role with the world. The self does not represent the world, but produces it through the nature of its unique way of interacting with its environment, stated the authors of The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience.

Francisco Varela, in 'The Tree of knowledge' proposed the term enactive "to designate this view of knowledge, to evoke the view that what is known is brought forth, in contra-position to the more classical views of either cognitivism or connectionism." Within the book, the analogies of The Razor's Edge and the Between Scylla and Charybdis are used to describe the "epistemologic Odyssey" between the notions of solipsism and representationalism. Enactivism, therefore is the middle ground between the two extremes . Maturana and Varela use this term to "confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.... to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions. Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves, as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close."

Similar theories of the growth of knowledge

Another current of biology-inspired theories of the growth of knowledge that are even more closely tied to Universal Darwinism in comparison to enactivism are those of evolutionary epistemologists, such as Karl Popper and Donald T. Campbell. In common with enactivism is their emphasis on both action and embodiment as sources of that knowledge which must reflect the environment well enough for the organism to be able to survive in it and which makes them competitive enough to be able to reproduce at sustainable rate in their environment.

Psychological aspects

McGann & others argue that enactivism attempts to equalize the explanatory role of the coupling between cognitive agent and environment with the traditional emphasis on brain mechanisms found in neuroscience and psychology. In the interactive approach to social cognition developed by De Jaegher & others, the dynamics of interactive processes are seen to play significant roles in coordinating interpersonal understanding, processes that in part include what they call Participatory Sense-Making. Recent developments of enactivism in the area of social neuroscience involve the proposal of The Interactive Brain Hypothesis where social cognition brain mechanisms, even those used in non-interactive situations, are proposed to have interactive origins.

Scholars with sympathetic ideas

Other related scholars

Yet other authors of similar "Natural Growth of Knowledge" theories

See also

Further reading

  • De Jaegher, H., and Di Paolo, E. A. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485 – 507.
  • Di Paolo, E. A., Rohde, M. and De Jaegher, H., (2010). Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play. In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne and E. A. Di Paolo (eds), Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 33 – 87. ISBN 9780262014601
  • Hutto, D. D. (Ed.) (2006). Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, phenomenology, and narrative. In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton (Series Eds.), Consciousness & Emotion, vol. 2. ISBN 90-272-4151-1
  • McGann, M. & Torrance, S. (2005). Doing it and meaning it (and the relationship between the two). In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton, Consciousness & Emotion, vol. 1: Agency, conscious choice, and selective perception. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 1-58811-596-8

References

  1. Ezequiel A Di Paolo, Marieke Rhohde, Hanne De Jaegher (2014). "Horizons for the inactive mind: Values, social interaction, and play". In John Stewart, Oliver Gapenne, Ezequiel A Di Paolo, eds (ed.). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. MIT Press. pp. 33 ff. ISBN 978-0262526012. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ Robert A Wilson, Lucia Foglia (July 25, 2011). Edward N. Zalta, ed (ed.). "Embodied Cognition: §2.2 Enactive cognition". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition). {{cite web}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
  3. Francisco J Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0262261234.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. Evan Thompson (2010). "Chapter 1: The inactive approach". Mind in life:Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind (PDF). Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674057517.
  5. Andy Clark, Josefa Toribio (1994). "Doing without representing" (PDF). Synthese. 101: 401–434.
  6. Ezequiel A Di Paolo, Marieke Rhohde, Hanne De Jaegher (2014). "Horizons for the enactive mind: Values, social interaction, and play". In John Stewart, Oliver Gapenne, Ezequiel A Di Paolo, eds (ed.). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. MIT Press. pp. 33 ff. ISBN 978-0262526012. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. Marieke Rohde (2010). "§3.1 The scientist as observing subject". Enaction, Embodiment, Evolutionary Robotics: Simulation Models for a Post-Cognitivist Science of Mind. Atlantis Press. pp. 30 ff. ISBN 978-9078677239.
  8. Radical Enactivism
  9. Burman, J. T. (2006). , Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(12), pp. 115-119. Full-text
  10. Francisco J Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262261234.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1992). The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding (Rev. ed.). Boston: Shambhala ; p255.
  12. Gary Cziko (1995) Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution (MIT Press)
  13. McGann, M., De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2013). Enaction and psychology, Review of General Psychology, 17(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0032935
  14. Gallagher, S. (2001) The practice of mind, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (5–7): 83–107
  15. Gallagher, S. (2005) How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  16. Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. Palgrave-Macmillan
  17. De Jaegher, H. and Di Paolo, E. A. (2007) Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485-507. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9
  18. De Jaegher H, Di Paolo E, and Gallagher S (2010). Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10), 441-447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009
  19. Di Paolo, E., De Jaegher, H. (2012) The Interactive Brain Hypothesis, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6:163. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00163
  20. Hanne De Jaegher
  21. Daniel Hutto
  22. Riccardo Manzotti
  23. Erik Myin
  24. Marek McGann
  25. Teed Rockwell
Categories: