This opinion piece presents insights derived from research conducted in a radiology department in the United States. For several weeks I followed the head of department while making notes and occasionally discussing them with him. The main objective of this research visit was to study strategies of embodied cognition and the intersubjective ground for individual intentions in the process of image-based diagnosis in order to reveal the essential regularities and personalizations of diagnostic practices as performed by radiologists. I argue that my observation reveals how at least certain aspects of the diagnostic cognition focused on medical imaging are structured and may be improved.

Key words: phenomenology, ethnography, radiology, embodied cognition, enactivism, intersubjectivity

Open peer commentary on the article “Varela’s Radical Proposal: How to Embody and Open Up Cognitive Science” by Kristian Moltke Martiny. Upshot: Analyses of the epistemological premises of modern ethnography suggest that “opening up” cognitive science is problematic, caught between a theoretically impossible “translation” of another world view or culture and reverting to an autobiography. Rather, an ethnography might be viewed as a “poetic” expression of interpersonal experiences, whose writing is a new experience contributing to ongoing conversations with ethical value. In particular, one can adopt an instrumental perspective in which an ethnography is a tool for engineering design; thus the “opening” is manifest as applied science within a design collaboration.

This paper explores how discourse analysis can benefit from the main tenets of complexity theory: including its holistic (or systemic) perspective in the research of any object, always in relation to its emergency conditions; and transdisciplinarity as methodology. If applied to the study of discourse, it revitalizes ethnography as an empirical methodology, constructivism as a theoretical starting position, and the integration of discourse analysis with rhetoric, argumentation theory and semiotics, among other disciplines.

In this article we explore the role of pre-reflective, embodied, and interactive intentionality in joint musical performance. Putting together insights from phenomenology and current theories in cognitive science, we present a case study based on qualitative interviews with the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). A total of 12 hours of interviews was recorded, drawing on ethnography-related methodologies during tours with the DSQ in Denmark and England in 2012 and 2013, focusing mainly on their experience of perception, intentionality, absorption, selfhood and intersubjectivity. The analysis emerging from our data suggests that expert musicians’ experience of collective music-making is rooted in the dynamical patterns of perception and action that co-constitute the sonic environment(s) in which they are embedded, and that the role of attention and other reflective processes should therefore be reconsidered. In putting forward our view on ensemble cohesion, we challenge Keller’s and Seddon and Biasutti’s influential positions, maintaining that the cognitive processes at play in such intersubjective context are grounded in the concrete (inter)actions of the players, and are not reducible to processes and structures ‘in the head’. We argue that this is a significant step forward from more traditional accounts of joint musical performances, which often involve mental representations as principal explanatory tools – downplaying the embodied and participatory dimension of music-making – and we conclude that ensemble performance can take place without attention to either shared goals, or to the other ensemble musicians. We finally suggest that if other researchers want to understand what it is like to play with other musicians then they must shift their focus from Joint Musical Attention (JMA) to Joint Musical Experience (JME), facilitating the development of more ecologically valid models of collective musical performance.

Key words: collective musical performance, embodied knowledge, enactivism, ensemble, joint attention, joint musical experience, joint performance, musical communication, pre-reflective intentionality