This paper deals with the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation between culture and experience holds that experience becomes “cultural” when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an “enactive” approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Both social psychologists who stress “sharedness” as the distinct mark of the social, and evolutionary psychologists who consider culture to derive from a uniform human mind, are criticized for overlooking the ongoing mutual tuning processes that give rise to socially and culturally patterned conduct.

Representationalism has defined the premise that cognition must involve a capacity to manipulate symbolic information. Although this approach has provided a good metaphoric and descriptive view of cognition, it ignores the distinct neural properties of the brain. This chapter has explored this problem by providing a more neurologically plausible account through the use of dynamical and chaotic systems theory. Symbols or representations were suggested to be epiphenomenonal to actual neural function and were considered as descriptions of behavior rather than cognition. Instead such entities were presumed to be embedded and decomposed in low level chaotic activity of the brain in such a manner that their localisation to specific neural entities was not a critical factor. The formation of knowledge, memories, or action was considered as an emergent property of distinct neural patterns of activity that result from the interaction of various neural groups.