The present paper wants to show the extent to which prosody, or best, prosodies, as Firth (1948) put it, contribute in their own and specific ways to enaction, at various levels of operational closure. On the one hand prosodies (stress, accent, melody) are linked to speech and exchange in a non-escapable fashion, as opposed to gesture for example. Hearing speech implies hearing syllables, tones, intensity variations; it does not imply seeing face or gesture (though one may object the language-dependency of prosody – gesture pairings). Simon & Auchlin (2004) described the independent timings of parameters, such as pitch range, height and intensity, speech rate: the first two or three syllables of speech alone inform on speaker sex, age, mood, investment in speech, importance of speech for her, or intentionality; the meaning of the whole utterance is obtained much later, thus the first flow somehow frames the second which, in turn, may allow blending with previously accessed information. In that way, linguistic meaning incorporates prosodic manifestations. On the other hand, one of the most basic prosodic dimensions, namely speech rate (articulation rate + pauses) is properly speaking a shared dimension between speaker and hearer: no one can hear slowly, or more rapidly than the speaker speaks. Speech rate is properly un-escapable, or necessarily shared dimension in dialogue. Indeed, interpreting is constantly anticipating – but anticipations timing still depends upon speech rate. Note that speech rate is also un-escapable for the observer, provided (s) he enacts the discourse, turning herself into a participant in the piece of interaction (s) he wants to describe (Auchlin, 1999). Sharing the temporal grid, i. e. entering it, is essential to such now. Indeed, interactionists’ work (P. Auer, E. Couper-Kuhlen, F. Müller; M. Selting; J. Local, i. a.) precisely describe verbal interactions’’ ballet temporality. Yet, their descriptive claim, which constrains empirical work, deliberately rejects any kind of theoretical conclusion or generalization; and their need to '‘objectively’’ describe speech events firmly contradicts what is mandatory for the enactive approach, namely the epistemological experientialist turn, first posited by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). The present paper examines a couple of emblematic cases of prosodic enacting meaning experience that should contribute to grounding the concept, both on its epistemological and its empirical sides.

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality, rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents.

Key words: agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like “intentionality”, “rationality” or “mind”. However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: a) a system must define its own individuality, b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry) and c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable to meet the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook to the road that lies ahead in the pursuit to understand, model and synthesize agents.

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Temporal Puzzle: Metamorphosis of the Body in Piaget’s Early Writings” by Marc J. Ratcliff. Abstract: In this commentary, I would like to know more details of the role of temporality and the social dimension of the body in Piaget’s early works, notably on the content of the notebooks written by Piaget and his wife, Valentine. Through diachronic-synchronic concepts drawn from linguistics, I propose a discussion of the methodological problems of Piaget’s observation method, as presented by Ratcliff. In principle, taking a look at the methodological steps through these concepts could greatly contribute to the reflection on Piaget’s units of analysis and thus to his interpretation of the emergence and coordination of the multimodality of skills.

Open peer commentary on the target article “From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism” by Siegfried J. Schmidt. Upshot: I focus my commentary on the fundamental metaphysical issue that Siegfried J. Schmidt’s very stimulating paper addresses in §45 and particularly upon the relationship between the ontological status of the processes from which worlds emerge and the temporality of the objects to be found therein. I argue that Schmidt’s emphasis on world-forming processes raises many questions concerning the temporal stability of objects and the relationship between objects and actors belonging to different worlds. I suggest that some classic as well as contemporary thinkers (e.g., Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Foucault, and S. J. Gould) have faced similar problems and discuss how their answers could be integrated within Schmidt’s revised radical constructivism.

Upshot: I offer some clarification on how enactivism is related to naturalism, predictive processing and transcendental phenomenology, and I point to a paradox that requires further clarification with regard to the structure of intrinsic temporality and the nature of self.

The Cambridge (UK) Declaration on Consciousness, proclaimed on July 7, 2012 at a Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, states that there is natural intelligence, and by implication, mind in nature. The declaration marks a significant shift from portraying animal agency through a mechanistic lens. Many years before Bateson had argued that the key to eliminating animal-human dualism lies in an understanding of communication processes, that is, recognition and investigation of an implicate order without which animate existence would not survive. The first part of this article will discuss how communication yields real world patterns to which natural intelligence responds. Bateson is supported in this argument by Ruth Garrett Millikan, the founder of Biosemantics, who also demonstrates how the grasping of natural signs in recursive relational patterns generates meaningful interactions. The second part of this paper concerns mapping of multiple levels of organic existence and how a notion of heterarchical order is linked to communication processes in and between these multiple levels. This important switch of reference stems from Bateson transposing Warren McCulloch’s ideas about distributed memory. Bateson transforms McCulloch’s technical (computer-oriented) insight into a means for mapping redundancy in levels of communication feedback. Recent publications by scholars influenced by Bateson’s approach explain how communication processes coordinate non-transitive distribution of multiple layers of organization into heterarchies rather than hierarchies (Bruni & Giorgi, 2015, 2016). They show why the importance of the notion of heterarchy, with its dynamic synchronicity, has grown in recent years, especially in respect of the way in which genetics interrelates to microbiotic, epigenetic and environmental levels of organization. In addition, Nomura, Murunaba, Tomita, & Matsuno (2018) argue that synchronicity requires an altered understanding of temporality in the plant kingdom. An important addition to our understanding of time concerns the inter-subjective timing of organisms, as they negotiate localized coordination. The perspectives of inter-subjective time is one which extends beyond its usual correlates of subjectivity and objectivity, and modifies these perspectives that, until now, have fostered dualism. A final consideration is Bateson’s move to diminish dualism through an understanding of holographic coding. Its resonance of downward causation permits communication to be informative in the whole econiche, so permitting re-entry of ecosystemic form in order to resist fragmentation and competition among its parts (Harries-Jones, 2016a). Wohlleben (2016) provides an empirical example of this Gaia-like performance.

Key words: analog-digital consensus, circadian clocks, heterarchy, holographic coding, intersubjective time, millikan’s natural signs, proto-cognitive appraisal, redundancy, synchronicity

A biosemiotic view of living things is presented that supersedes the mechanistic view of life prevalent in biology today. Living things are active agents with autonomous subjectivity, whose structure is triadic, consisting of the individual organism, its Umwelt and the society. Sociality inheres in every living thing since the very origin of life on the earth. The temporality of living things is guided by the purpose to live, which works as the semantic boundary condition for the processes of embodiment of the subjectivity. Freedom at the molecular and cellular levels allows autonomy and spontaneity to emerge even in single cell organisms, and the presence of the dimension of mind in every living thing is deduced. Living things transcend their individualness, as they live in historically formed higher order structure consisting of the lineage-species and the society. They also transcend materiality, having the dimension of mind.

Key words: Subjectivity, Sociality, Triadic structure of subjectivity, Purposiveness, Microdynamic structural polymorphism, Freedom at the molecular and cellular levels

Open peer commentary on the article “The Past, Present and Future of Time-Consciousness: From Husserl to Varela and Beyond” by Shaun Gallagher. Upshot: In this commentary I invert Gallagher’s argument and argue that the account he gives of temporality should be applied to enactive cognition across the board. Instead of enactivising phenomenological accounts of time-consciousness, I suggest Gallagher ought also to be read as arguing for a temporalizing of enactive cognition.