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Enactivism argues that cognition depends on a dynamic interaction between the cognitive agent and its environment. It claims is that our environment is one which we selectively create through our capacities to interact with the world. "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. It has been suggested that it forms a new era in our thinking about many areas of knowledge, including our mind and consciousness.

The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation". The introduction of the term enaction in this context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, who proposed the name to "emphasize 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

Research is ongoing into how perception and action combine to allow us to perceive, and to have consciousness. Some authors are beginning to believe that perception has active elements, or even is itself an active intervention in the world. This is seen as a progressing of the phenomenological approach of Continental philosophy, while resolving debates centered on Cartesian Dualism of mind/matter.

"Enactivists criticize representational views of the mind and emphasize the importance of embodiment and action to cognition."
-Evan Thompson, while with Department 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 contraposition to the more classical views of either cognitivism or connectionism." Within the book, the analogy is made with The Razor's Edge (the impossibility of explaining cognitive phenomena based upon a world of objects on one side and the chaos of nonobjectivity on the other, p. 133) and the analogy of Scylla and Charybdis as an "epistemologic Odyssey: sailing between the Scylla monster of representationalism and the Charybdis whirlpool of solipsism" (p. 134). 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 mediate between the explanatory role of the coupling between cognitive agent and environment and 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.

An enactive view of perception

Alva Noë put forward an enactive view of perception. He wished to address the following issue. We perceive three-dimensional objects, on the basis of two-dimensional input, in a visual image which is clearly not three dimensional. How are we able to directly perceive their solidity and volume, not just their two dimensional outline or image?

Noë explains how we perceive this solidity (or 'volumetricity') by appealing to patterns of sensorimotor expectations. These arise from our agent-active 'movements and interaction' with objects, or 'object-active' changes in the object itself. The solidity is perceived through our expectations and skills in knowing how the object's appearance would change with changes in how we relate to it. He saw all perception as an active exploration of the world, rather than being a passive process, something which happens to us.

His theory has been opposed by several philosophers, notably by Andy Clark. Clark points to difficulties of the enactive approach in saying that action constitutes perception, rather than causes it. He also points to internal processing of visual signals, e.g. in the ventral and dorsal pathways, the two-streams hypothesis. This results in an integrated perception of objects (their recognition and location, respectively) yet this processing cannot be described as an action or actions.

Participatory sense-making

"An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behavior of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself", a view called 'participatory sense-making'. In cultural psychology enactivism is seen as a way to uncover cultural influences upon feeling, thinking and acting. Baerveldt and Verheggen argue that "It appears that seemingly natural experience is thoroughly intertwined with sociocultural realities." They suggest that the social patterning of experience is to be understood through enactivism, "the idea that the reality we have in common, and in which we find ourselves, is neither a world that exists independently from us, nor a socially shared way of representing such a pregiven world, but a world itself brought forth by our ways of communicating and our joint action....The world we inhabit is manufactured of 'meaning' rather than 'information'.

Educational aspects

The first definition of enaction was introduced by psychologist Jerome Bruner, who introduced enaction as 'learning by doing' in his discussion of how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn. He associated enaction with two other ways of knowledge organization: Iconic and Symbolic. The second use was by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.

Sriramen argues that enactivism provides "a rich and powerful explanatory theory for learning and being." and that it is closely related to both the ideas of cognitive development of Piaget, and also the social constructivism of Vygotsky. Piaget focused on the child's immediate environment, and suggested cognitive structures like spatial perception emerge as a result of the child's interaction with the world, while in a cultural context, Vygotsky suggested that the kind of cognition that can take place also is contingent upon its sociohistorical context. Enactivism in educational theory "looks at each learning situation as a complex system consisting of teacher, learner, and context, all of which frame and co-create the learning situation." Enactivism in eduction is very closely related to situated cognition, which holds that "knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used." This approach challenges the "separating of what is learned from how it is learned and used."

Scholars with sympathetic ideas

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

See also

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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
  • Tom Froese, Ezequiel A DiPaolo (2011). "The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society". Pragmatics and Cognition. 19 (1): 1–36. doi:10.1075/pc.19.1.01fro.
  • Steve Torrance, Tom Froese (2011). "An inter-enactive approach to agency: participatory sense-making, dynamics, and sociality". Humana. Mente. 15: 21–53.

References

  1. Mark Rowlands (2010). "Chapter 3: The mind embedded §5 The mind enacted". The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. MIT Press. pp. 70 ff. ISBN 0262014556. Rowlands attributes this idea to D M MacKay (1967). "Ways of looking at perception". In W Watthen-Dunn (ed.). Models for the perception of speech and visual form (Proceedings of a symposium). MIT Press. pp. 25 ff.
  2. 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)
  3. ^ John Protevi, ed, ed. (2006). "Enaction". A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. Yale University Press. pp. 169–170. ISBN 9780300116052. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
  4. ^ 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)
  5. ^ 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)
  6. 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.
  7. Andy Clark, Josefa Toribio (1994). "Doing without representing" (PDF). Synthese. 101: 401–434.
  8. 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)
  9. 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.
  10. Steve Torrance (December 2005). "In search of the enactive: Introduction to special issue on Enactive Experience" (PDF). Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 4 (4): 357–368.
  11. ^ Alva Noë (2004). "Chapter 1: The enactive approach to perception: An introduction". Action in Perception. MIT Press. pp. 1 ff. ISBN 9780262140881. Cite error: The named reference "Noe" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  12. Thomas Baldwin (2003). "Part One: Merleau-Ponty's prospectus of his work". Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Routledge. pp. 33 ff. ISBN 978-0415315869. I have tried against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness. These philosophies commonly forget - in favor of a pure exteriority or or a pure interiority - the insertion of the mind in corporeality...
  13. Evan Thompson (2001). "Empathy and consciousness" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 8 (5–7): 1–32. The theme of this article is that the individual human mind is not confined within the head, but extends throughout the living body and includes the world beyond the biological membrane of the organism, especially the interpersonal, social world of self and other. {{cite journal}}: line feed character in |quote= at position 87 (help)
  14. From promotional blurb for Richard Menary (ed.). Radical Enactivism: Focus on the philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto. ISBN 9789027241511.
  15. Burman, J. T. (2006). , Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(12), pp. 115-119. Full-text
  16. 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)
  17. Humberto R Maturana & Francisco J Varela (1992). "Afterword". The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding (Revised ed.). Shambhala Publications Inc. p. 255. ISBN 978-0877736424.
  18. Gary Cziko (1995) Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution (MIT Press)
  19. Marek McGann, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo (2013). "Enaction and psychology". Review of General Psychology. 17 (2): 203–209. doi:10.1037/a0032935.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  20. Shaun Gallagher (2001). "The practice of mind" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 8 (5–7): 83–107.
  21. Shaun Gallagher (2006). How the Body Shapes the Mind (Paperback ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199204168.
  22. Matthew Ratcliffe (2008). Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230221208.
  23. Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). "Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition" (PDF). Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 6 (4): 485–507. doi:10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9.
  24. Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo , and Shaun Gallagher (2010). "Can social interaction constitute social cognition?" (PDF). Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 14 (10): 441–447. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  25. Ezequiel Di Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher (June 2012). "The Interactive Brain Hypothesis". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7 (6). doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00163.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  26. Andy Clark (March 2006). "Vision as Dance? Three Challenges for Sensorimotor Contingency Theory" (PDF). Psyche. 12 (1).
  27. Steve Torrance, Tom Froese (2011). "An Inter-Enactive Approach to Agency: Participatory Sense-Making, Dynamics, and Sociality" (PDF). Human Mente. 15: 21–53.
  28. Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). "Participatory sense-making: an enactive approach to social cognition" (PDF). Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 6 (4): 485–507.
  29. Cor Baerveldt and Theo Verheggen (May 2012). "Chapter 8: Enactivism". The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. pp. 165ff. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396430.013.0009. ISBN 9780195396430. Whereas the inactive approach in general has focused on sense-making as an embodied and situated activity, inactive cultural psychology emphasizes the expressive and dynamically enacted nature of cultural meaning.
  30. Cor Baerveldt, Theo Verheggen (1999). "Enactivism and the experiential reality of culture: Rethinking the epistemological basis of cultural psychology". Culture & Psychology. 5 (2): 183–206.
  31. Roberto Pugliese, Klaus Lehtonen (2011). "A framework for motion based bodily enaction with virtual characters; §2.1 Enaction". Intelligent Virtual Agents:. Springer. p. 163. ISBN 9783642239731.
  32. Stephanie A Hillen (2013). "Chapter III: What can research on technology for learning in vocational educational training teach media didactics?". In Klaus Beck, Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, eds (ed.). From Diagnostics to Learning Success: Proceedings in Vocational Education and Training (Paperback ed.). Springer Science & Business. p. 104. ISBN 978-9462091894. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  33. Jerome Bruner (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674897007.
  34. Jerome Bruner (1968). Processes of cognitive growth: Infancy. Crown Pub. ISBN 978-0517517482.OCLC 84376
  35. Jeanette Bopry (2007). "Providing a warrant for constructivist practice: the contribution of Francisco Varela". In Joe L. Kincheloe, Raymond A. Horn, eds (ed.). The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology, Volume 1. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 474 ff. ISBN 9780313331237. Varela's enactive framework beginning with his collaboration on autopoiesis theory with his mentor Humberto Maturana enaction as a framework within which these theories work as a matter of course. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  36. ^ Bharath Sriraman, Lyn English (2009). "Enactivism". Theories of Mathematics Education: Seeking New Frontiers. Springer. pp. 42 ff. ISBN 3642007422.
  37. Wolff-Michael Roth (2012). "Epistemology and psychology: Jean Piaget and modern constructivism". Geometry as Objective Science in Elementary School Classrooms: Mathematics in the Flesh. Routledge. pp. 41 ff. ISBN 1136732209.
  38. Joe L Kincheloe (2007). "Interpretivists drawing on the power of enactivism". In Joe L. Kincheloe, Raymond A. Horn, eds (ed.). The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology, Volume 1. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 24 ff. ISBN 0313331235. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  39. Chris Breen (2005). "Chapter 9: Dilemmas of change: seeing the complex rather than the complicated?". In Renuka Vithal, Jill Adler, Christine Keitel, eds (ed.). Researching Mathematics Education in South Africa: Perspectives, Practices and Possibilities. HSRC Press. p. 240. ISBN 0796920478. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  40. Ad J. W. van de Gevel, Charles N. Noussair (2013). "§3.2.2 Enactive artificial intelligence". The nexus between artificial intelligence and economics. Springer. p. 21. ISBN 3642336477. Enactivism may be considered as the most developed model of embodied situated cognition...Knowing is inseparable from doing.
  41. ^ John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, Paul Duguid (Jan–Feb 1989). "Situated cognition and the culture of learning". Educational Researcher. 18 (1): 32–42.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Author web pages

  1. Hanne De Jaegher
  2. Daniel Hutto
  3. Riccardo Manzotti
  4. Erik Myin
  5. Marek McGann
  6. Teed Rockwell

External links

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