Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action–perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions (SDPs), which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, and music. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and intermodal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of SDP: attentional focus, aspects’ salience, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.

Key words: enactivism, perception, practices, culture, intersubjectivity, pragmatism

In his comment, McGann argues that in my “From Sensorimotor Dependencies to Perceptual Practices: Making Enactivism Social,” I have overlooked a group of enactivist theories that can be grouped under the participatory sense-making label. In this reply, I explain that the omission is due to the fact that such theories are not accounts of perception. It is argued that, unlike participatory sense-making, the approach of the “From Sensorimotor Dependencies to Perceptual Practices” article does not focus on the perceptual aspects of things social, but on the social aspects that are constitutive of perception in general. I conclude by underscoring the central argument of the original article: that the adequate notion to make enactivism about perception social is that of “perceptual practices,” a social practices-based notion of perception.

Key words: enactivism, perception, sociality, practices, intersubjectivity, culture

In this part of our work about a comparison between Kelly’s personal construct theory and phenomenology, we enter the fields of psychotherapy and research. The topic of intersubjectivity, meant as original recognition of the other’s subjectivity, provides a backdrop for both phenomenological clinic and Kellyan psychotherapy. Though Kelly never used the term “intersubjectivity,” his theory and the corollary of sociality in particular, reveals a view of interpersonal relationships as intercorporeality, which is much closer to phenomenological ideas than to the cognitive ones. Depending on such commonality, in either cases clinical relationship is not viewed as an “aspecific factor” of psychotherapy, but as the essential tool for the care of other. Furthermore, the core role of intersubjectivity in scientific knowledge implies a radical revision of the criteria of research. Consistently with the intent of a science of experience, it is no more a matter of collecting data, as of accepting meanings. Psychological research has to refound itself in continuity with life and recognize the need for a real involvement and real interaction with the subjects, as far as to reverse the traditional relation between clinic and research. It is nonsense to conceive clinic as an applicative sector of a pure science because clinic, on the contrary, is the place where one can know, in first-person, those meaningful realities which take shape in the intersubjective exchange of ideas, in order to make them comprehensible and controllable. Relevance: The publication explores the dimension of intersubjectivity in phenomenology (starting from Husserl) and personal construct theory, and its relevance in psychotherapy and research.

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 “From Problem Solving to Problem Posing, and from Strategies to Laying Down a Path in Solving: Taking Varela’s Ideas to Mathematics Education Research” by Jérôme Proulx & Jean-François Maheux. Upshot: After a description of Varela’s four key points to a science of inter-being: embodiment, emergence, intersubjectivity and circulation, three questions are asked and briefly explored: Are these key points illustrated in the target article? What is a problem? And what could classrooms look like where knowing is doing?

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructivism as a Key Towards Further Understanding of Communication, Culture and Society” by Raivo Palmaru. Upshot: I discuss the solution proposed in the target article to the classic sociological problem of “intersubjectivity,” which is based on the conceptual triad of culture, socialisation and communication. From a constructivist perspective, I argue that Palmaru’s proposal does not advance on this matter. Erratum: The correct commentator's affiliation is "University of Chile”.

Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to – not categorizing speech sounds – but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. The caregiver of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’

Key words: agency, distributed cognition, distributed language, early child development, epigenetic robotics, intersubjectivity, language acquisition, symbol grounding

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. Spontaneous co-speech gesture confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches fail to appreciate, while also forefronting intersubjectivity as an inherent and normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense. Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the nonpropositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Relevance: The view in this paper is constructivist as it argues for a middle-way understanding of meaning co-construction as neither internal nor external, but rather as multimodal and multi-body enacting.

What makes it possible to affect one another, to move and be moved by another person? Why do some of our encounters transform us? The experience of moving one another points to the inter-affective in intersubjectivity. Inter-affection is hard to account for under a cognitivist banner, and has not received much attention in embodied work on intersubjectivity. I propose that understanding inter-affection needs a combination of insights into self-affection, embodiment, and interaction processes. I start from Michel Henry’s radically immanent idea of self-affection, and bring it into a contrastive dialogue with the enactive concepts of autonomy and (participatory) sense-making. I suggest that the latter ideas can open up Henry’s idea of self-affection to inter-affection (something he aimed to do, but did not quite manage) and that, in turn, Henry’s work can provide insights into underexplored elements of intersubjectivity, such as its ineffable and mysterious aspects, and erotic encounters

Key words: michel henry, affect, enaction, ineffability, inter-affection, interactive experience, intersubjectivity, participatory sense-making, self-affection, sexuality, social interaction

Open peer commentary on the article “Going Beyond Theory: Constructivism and Empirical Phenomenology” by Urban Kordeš. Upshot: I propose that getting the empirical study of subjective experience off to a good start requires an intersubjective approach, in both theory and method, where intersubjectivity is understood not in the standard science way of verification by others, but rather as participation in the investigation of how experience transforms when examining it together. I argue that this will greatly help do justice to and respect experience’s special transforming and transformative nature.