Open peer commentary on the article “Enacting Enaction: A Dialectic Between Knowing and Being” by Sebastjan Vörös & Michel Bitbol. Upshot: Vörös and Bitbol provide a helpful account of the depths of enaction but their hagiographic rhetoric and neglect of important historical facts and recent developments work at cross-purposes to their account.
Thompson E. & Stapleton M. (2009) Making sense of sense-making: Reflections on enactive and extended mind theories. Topoi 28(1): 23–30. https://cepa.info/2290
This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making. We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.
Thompson E., Palacios A. & Varela F. J. (1992) Ways of coloring: Comparative color vision as a case study in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(1): 1–26. https://cepa.info/2075
Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision’s emphasis on optimally “recovering” prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception instead as the visual guidance of activity in an environment that is determined largely by that very activity suggests new directions for research.
Torrance S. (2005) In search of the enactive: Introduction to the special issue on enactive experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science 4(4): 357–368. https://cepa.info/2539
In the decade and a half since the appearance of Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s workThe Embodied Mind,enactivism has helped to put experience and consciousness, conceived of in a distinctive way, at the forefront of cognitive science. There are at least two major strands within the enactive perspective: a broad view of what it is to be an agent with a mind; and a more focused account of the nature of perception and perceptual experience. The relation between these two strands is discussed, with an overview of the papers presented in this volume.
In this paper, we trace the development of our theorizing about students’ mathematical understanding, showing how the adoption of an enactivist perspective has transformed our gaze in terms of the objects of our studies and occasioned for us new methods of data analysis. Drawing on elements of Pirie–Kieren (P–K) Theory for the Dynamical Growth of Mathematical Understanding, together with aspects of improvisational theory and the associated notion of coactions, we describe the ways in which we have moved from a focus on the individual learner to that of the collective. In particular, we identify how our research methods and methodology have evolved to enable us to transform our data in ways that allow us to identify, consider, and discuss collective mathematical action. Using a brief transcription of an extract of video-recorded data in which three Grade 6 students work together to find the area of a parallelogram, we share and discuss successive iterations of our data analysis process. We identify the ways in which we manipulate and rework transcriptions of group discourse to reveal the relationship between enactivist thought and processes of engagement with data involving groups of mathematics learners.
Towers J. & Proulx J. (2013) An enactivist perspective on teaching mathematics: Reconceptualising and expanding teaching actions. Mathematics Teacher Education and Development 15(1): 5–28. https://cepa.info/4320
We reject a trajectory approach to teaching that classifies “good” and “bad” teaching actions and seeks to move teachers’ practices from one of these poles to the other. In this article we offer instead a conceptualisation of mathematics teaching actions as a “landscape of possibilities”. We draw together terms commonly used in the literature to describe teaching strategies, and add our own, to offer an expanded view of teaching actions. We illustrate each with data extracts drawn from our various studies of mathematics teachers and classrooms, and explain how a range of teaching actions can be woven into a coherent teaching practice. Note that we are not talking about growth in teaching in this paper, nor about change in teachers’ practice over time. We aim to simply talk about and conceptualise teaching in ways that can broaden our understanding of it.
Turner P. (2016) Enactive cognition. Chapter 6 in: HCI Redux: The Promise of Post-Cognitive Interaction. Springer, Cham: 99–114. https://cepa.info/5717
The enactive account of cognition is the most mysterious strand of current thinking in this area. At its heart lie notions of embodiment, self-organisation, the environment and the proposition that we enact the world. As interesting as this is, enaction comes into its own when we discuss episodic memory, mental time travelling and niche creation. This chapter introduces the key ideas underpinning enaction and then illustrates their relevance to human-computer interaction. For example, when we recall the experiences offered by technology we rely on our episodic memories which provide us with a personal perspective. We do not just remember facts, we re-experience the events. This is an enactive perspective on memory. Similarly when we imagine how an item of technology might behave, it is likely that we are using our episodic memories to construct this. Finally, we construct niches – cognitive and technological – where we feel in control and safe and do so in a manner which is very similar to bringing forth (or enacting) the world. Enaction offers quite a different and very promising perspective on cognition and interactive technology.
This paper aims to provide a starting point for a non-representational approach to language. It will do so by undoing some of the reifying tendencies that are at the heart of the ontology of scientific psychology. Although non-representational theories are beginning to emerge, they remain committed to giving explanations in terms of ontological structures that are independent of human activity. If they maintain this commitment it is unlikely that they will displace representationalism in domains such as language. By following some of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, I explain the phenomenon of reification by carefully considering the formative, situational flow of language – thus without invoking representations. In this way, the paper sketches a direction of approach for a non-representational theory of language, undercutting the most important assumptions that justify an explanatory ontology devoid of human activity.
Van Dijk L., Withagen R. & Bongers R. M. (2015) Information without content: A Gibsonian reply to enactivist’s worries. Cognition 134: 210–214. https://cepa.info/5607
In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches – namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson’s later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the language surrounding information in ecological psychology has subsequently slipped into a more cognitivistic vocabulary. We argue that by considering ecological information not to be information about, but information for affordances, the notion of information can be fruitfully applied without invoking notions of content. Gibson’s later notion of information for perception, stresses the insight that in ecological theory there is no information in content, but only in use. It is suggested that radical cognition should embrace this notion of information without content, as doing so can help to situate the enactivist’s “basic mind” into large and complex scales of coordination.
Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view (EV) advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: (1) the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, (2) the argument against explanatory exclusionism, (3) the case for scientific benefits of representations, and (4) the charge of inconsistent ascription of representational status in EV. I argue that (1) the middleman was never cut in EV, and is controversial to boot, (2) otherwise equal, non-representational explanations have primacy over representational explanations, due to the lack of naturalistic grounds for representations and the unnecessarily ascribed cognitive load to the system. Further, I show that (3) puts the cart before the horse, and the arguments on offer are viciously circular. However, the final objection, (4) lays bare a deeper issue for EV. At the cost of giving up the middle position, however, the explanatory tools already available to EV can be shown to cover the work initially thought to require representation. I conclude that EV is best altered to be a non-representational theory of perception.