This article is a response to Alex North’s (2016) critique of radical social constructivism (RSC). North claimed that RSC was a movement in counseling that would be monumentally problematic in its future application to counseling theory. In this article, the author defends RSC and posits that RSC is closely aligned with the values of counseling. RSC encourages counselors to look at the social understanding of clients’ experiences as paramount to the behaviors they exhibit.

This paper discusses the phenomenological dimension of social understanding. The author’s general hypothesis is that complex forms of social understanding that biological agents especially humans show are based on two mechanisms: 1 the bodily, experiential dynamics of emphatic resonance and 2 the biographic reconstruction of a communication situation. The latter requires the agent’s bodily experiences as the point of reference for the reconstruction process. This hypothesis is derived from discussions in philosophy, natural sciences, and cognitive science on the social embodiment of cognition and understanding. Evidence comes from studies on social cognition in primates, infants, and autistic people that are interpreted in terms of the “mind-experiencing” hypothesis. The second part of the paper sketches an '‘interactive’’ experiment that investigates the dynamic coupling of a robot with its environment. This example is used to discuss the role of the human observer and designer as an active, embodied agent who is biased toward interpreting the world in terms of intentionality and explanation. The paper describes how this aspect can influence the processes of understanding and interpretation of the behavior of autonomous robotic agents. The author concludes by stressing the need to overcome the distinction between computationalism and phenomenology in order to develop complex artificial systems.

In this article, I sketch an enactive account of autism. For the enactive approach to cognition, embodiment, experience, and social interaction are fundamental to understanding mind and subjectivity. Enaction defines cognition as sense-making: the way cognitive agents meaningfully connect with their world, based on their needs and goals as self-organizing, self-maintaining, embodied agents. In the social realm, the interactive coordination of embodied sense-making activities with others lets us participate in each other’s sense-making (social understanding = participatory sense-making). The enactive approach provides new concepts to overcome the problems of traditional functionalist accounts of autism, which can only give a piecemeal and disintegrated view because they consider cognition, communication, and perception separately, do not take embodied into account, and are methodologically individualistic. Applying the concepts of enaction to autism, I show: (1) How embodiment and sense-making connect, i.e., how autistic particularities of moving, perceiving, and emoting relate to how people with autism make sense of their world. For instance, restricted interests or preference for detail will have certain sensorimotor correlates, as well as specific meaning for autistic people. (2) That reduced flexibility in interactional coordination correlates with difficulties in participatory sense-making. At the same time, seemingly irrelevant “autistic behaviors” can be quite attuned to the interactive context. I illustrate this complexity in the case of echolalia. An enactive account of autism starts from the embodiment, experience, and social interactions of autistic people. Enaction brings together the sensorimotor, cognitive, social, experiential, and affective aspects of autism in a coherent framework based on a complex non-linear multi-causality. This foundation allows to build new bridges between autistic people and their often non-autistic context, and to improve quality of life prospects.

Key words: autism, enaction, sense-making, participatory sense-making, embodiment, social interaction, coordination dynamics

I outline five criteria for an enactive account of intersubjectivity. First, it should do justice to social interaction processes and to subjectivity in its experiential, bodily, existential, and historico-sociocultural complexity. Second, an integrative intersubjectivity framework should connect physiological, neural, interactional, linguistic, and societal aspects and levels of explanation. This requires concepts and methodologies that span several different disciplines. Third, it should encourage applications and dialogue with experts in other sectors, such as teachers and therapists. Fourth, it should recognize the values that underlie it, so it can serve critical awareness of how it influences and is influenced by societal institutions and norms. Finally, because its subject matter is the ways in which people understand and deal with each other, it should be prepared to deal with ethical questions and dimensions. Then, I investigate how the state of the art in enactive intersubjectivity research fares in the face of these criteria.

Key words: social interaction, subjectivity, experience, connection, interacting, autonomy, sense-making, participatory sense-making, social understanding, constitutive factor

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.

Key words: Social cognition, enaction, sense-making, interaction process, coordination, participatory sense-making, autonomy.

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.

Key words: social cognition, enaction, sense-making, interaction process, coordination, participatory sense-making, autonomy.

Research on social cognition needs to overcome a disciplinary disintegration. On the one hand, in cognitive science and philosophy of mind – even in recent embodied approaches – the explanatory weight is still overly on individual capacities. In social science on the other hand, the investigation of the interaction process and interactional behaviour is not often brought to bear on individual aspects of social cognition. Not bringing these approaches together has unfairly limited the range of possible explanations of social understanding to the postulation of complicated internal mechanisms (contingency detection modules for instance). Starting from the question What is a social interaction? we propose a fresh look at the problem aimed at integrating individual cognition and the interaction process in order to arrive at more parsimonious explanations of social understanding. We show how an enactive framework can provide a way to do this, starting from the notions of autonomy, sense-making and coordination. We propose that not only each individual in a social encounter but also the interaction process itself has autonomy. Examples illustrate that these autonomies evolve throughout an encounter, and that collective as well as individual mechanisms are at play in all social interactions. We also introduce the notion of participatory sense-making in order to connect meaning-generation with coordination. This notion describes a spectrum of degrees of participation from the modulation of individual sense-making by coordination patterns, over orientation, to joint sense-making. Finally, we discuss implications for empirical research on social interaction, especially for studies of social contingency.

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in social cognition. We show that interactive processes are more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual.

Underlying the recent focus on embodied and interactive aspects of social understanding are several intuitions about what roles the body, interaction processes, and interpersonal experience play. In this paper, we introduce a systematic, hands-on method for investigating the experience of interacting and its role in intersubjectivity. Special about this method is that it starts from the idea that researchers of social understanding are themselves one of the best tools for their own investigations. The method provides ways for researchers to calibrate and to trust themselves as sophisticated instruments to help generate novel insights into human interactive experience. We present the basics of the method, and two empirical studies. The first is a video-study on autism, which shows greater refinement in the way people with autism embody their social interactions than previously thought. The second is a study of thinking in live interactions, which provides insight into the common feeling that too much thinking can hamper interaction, and into how this kind of interactional awkwardness might be unblocked.

Key words: experience of interacting, first-person methods, second-person methods, embodied methodology, embodiment, enaction, researcher as instrument, practical phenomenology, autism interacting and thinking, participatory sense-making.

Exerpt: In this essay, we provide an overview of the various claims defended by the enactive approach to intersubjectivity, from how social interactions can be defined operationally to how social understanding is rooted in participatory sense-making, even when we are not interacting with others. In contrast to prevailing views, the enactive approach does not put all the emphasis on individual capabilities to explain forms of social understanding and social action. This has often been interpreted as adopting an interactionist stance on intersubjectivity. It is indeed the case that social interaction patterns have not played a prevalent role in cognitive science and social neuroscience until recently, and in the light of this, a participatory as opposed to spectatorial stance still needs to be presented and defended.

Key words: Enactive approach, Intersubjectivity, Participatory sense-making, Social cognition, Social interaction