Among the many ideas that go by the name of “enactivism” there is the idea that by “cognition” we should understand what is more commonly taken to be behavior. For clarity, label such forms of enactivism “enactivismb.” This terminology requires some care in evaluating enactivistb claims. There is a genu-ine risk of enactivist and non-enactivist cognitive scientists talking past one another. So, for example, when enactivistsb write that “cognition does not require representations” they are not necessarily denying what cognitivists claim when they write that “cognition requires representations.” This paper will draw attention to instances of some of these unnecessary confusions.

This chapter situates the conception of language (and communication) in enaction in the context of the research program of the cognitive sciences. It focuses on the formulation of the synthesis of hermeneutics and speech acts and the vision of language according to the metaphor of structural coupling. The exclusion of expressive speech acts in this design is problematized. An examination is offered of the critical steps to the theory of language as a reflection and the linguistic correspondence of cognitivism. We examine the foundations of the proposal in the line of language and social enaction as emergent phenomena which are not reducible to autopoiesis but which constitute a new neurophenomenological position in the pragmatic language dimension. A proposal is made for the integration of hermeneutic phenomenology with genetic and generative phenomenology in social semiotics. The inclusion of expressive speech acts based on the functions of language in the Habermas–Bühler line is also addressed. An opening is proposed of enaction to the expressive dimension of language and meaning holism with the referential use of language.

Key words: enaction, neurophenomenology, performative speech acts, expressive speech acts, background, meaning holism.

Enactivism is an emerging perspective both in cognitive science and in cultural psychology. Whereas the enactive approach in general has focused on sense-making as an embodied and situated activity, enactive cultural psychology emphasizes the expressive and dynamically enacted nature of cultural meaning. This chapter first situates enactivism within a tradition of expressivist thinking that has historical roots both in radical Enlightenment thought and Romantic reactions against the rationalization of human nature. It will then offer a view of our human biology that can be reconciled with an account of meaning as irreducibly normative. By emphasizing the consensual rather than the supposedly shared nature of meaningful conduct, enactivism avoids some of the classical pitfalls in thinking about culture. In the conclusion a genetic enactive psychology will be presented, which understands sense-making not as a mediated activity, but as a competence acquired through cultural training and personal stylization.

Key words: Enactivism, expression, consensual coordination, emotion, normativity, cultural training.

This paper deals with the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation between culture and experience holds that experience becomes “cultural” when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an “enactive” approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Both social psychologists who stress “sharedness” as the distinct mark of the social, and evolutionary psychologists who consider culture to derive from a uniform human mind, are criticized for overlooking the ongoing mutual tuning processes that give rise to socially and culturally patterned conduct.

Upshot: The authors offer a theory of agency that is general enough to apply to whole organisms and single cells, and meaningful enough to highlight problems that embodied cognition theory has overlooked. The authors insist that the interesting thing about minds is what goes on in between activities; this leaves unclear what a specifically enactivist empirical program could look like. But the book can be read as a contribution to a broader project of instituting a full-blown post-cognitivist science of the mind.

The concept of “autonomy,” once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind (Varela et al. in The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991), is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reasons for the contemporary neglect of autonomy as a relevant concept for enactivism. On the one hand, the concept of autonomy has too often been assimilated into autopoiesis (or basic autonomy in the molecular or biological realm) and the implications are not always clear for a dynamical sensorimotor approach to cognitive science. On the other hand, the foundational enactivist proposal displays a metaphysical tension between the concept of operational closure (autonomy), deployed as constitutive, and that of structural coupling (sensorimotor dynamics); making it hard to reconcile with the claim that experience is sensorimotorly constituted. This tension is particularly apparent when Varela et al. propose Bittorio (a 1D cellular automata) as a model of the operational closure of the nervous system as it fails to satisfy the required conditions for a sensorimotor constitution of experience. It is, however, possible to solve these problems by re-considering autonomy at the level of sensorimotor neurodynamics. Two recent robotic simulation models are used for this task, illustrating the notion of strong sensorimotor dependency of neurodynamic patterns, and their networked intertwinement. The concept of habit is proposed as an enactivist building block for cognitive theorizing, re-conceptualizing mental life as a habit ecology, tied within an agent’s behaviour generating mechanism in coordination with its environment. Norms can be naturalized in terms of dynamic, interactively self-sustaining, coherentism. This conception of autonomous sensorimotor agency is put in contrast with those enactive approaches that reject autonomy or neglect the theoretical resources it has to offer for the project of naturalizing minds.

Key words: Autonomy, enactivism, operational closure of the nervous system, sensorimotor constitution of experience, mental life, habit, sensorimotor autonomous agency, autonomist sensorimotor enactivism.

Connections among Varela’s theory of enactive cognition, his evolutionary theory of natural drift, and his concept of autopoiesis are made clear. Two questions are posed in relation to Varela’s conception of perception, and the tension that exists in his thought between the formal level of organization and the Jonasian notion of the organism.

Modern psychology has, to all intents and purposes, become synonymous with cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on the idea that the brain is a form of computer, whose job is to take in sensory input, process information, and produce motor output. This places the brain at a remove from both the body and environment and denies the intimate connection that exists between them. As a result, a great injustice is done to both human and nonhuman animals: On the one hand, we fail to recognize the distinctive nature of nonhuman cognition, and on the other hand, we continue to promote a somewhat misleading view of human psychological capacities. Here, I suggest a more mutualistic, embodied, enactive view might allow us to ask more interesting questions about how animals of all kinds come to know their worlds, in ways that avoid the (inevitable) anthropocentric baggage of the cognitivist viewpoint.

Key words: 4e cognition, behavior, anthropocentrism, comparative psychology.

Context: Direct realism is a non-reductive, anti-representationalist theory of perception lying at the heart of mainstream analytic philosophy, where it is currently generating a lot of interest. For all that, it is widely held to be both controversial and anti-scientific. On the other hand, the sensorimotor theory of perception (which is a specific development of Gibsonian approaches to perception) initially generated a lot of interest within enactive philosophy of cognitive science, but has arguably not yet delivered on its initial promise. Problem: I aim to show that the sensorimotor theory and direct realism complement each other, and that the result is a philosophically radical, but fully scientifically realised, theory of perception. Method: The article uses (non-reductive) philosophical analysis and discussion. It also draws on empirical evidence from the relevant cognitive sciences. Results: Direct realism can be augmented by sensorimotor theory to become a scientifically tractable alternative to the mainstream, representationalist research programme within cognitive science. Implications: The article aims to further clarify the philosophical importance of the sensorimotor approach to perception. It also aims to show that the apparently radical claim that we perceive objects themselves is amenable to normal scientific study. Constructivist content: Objects are analysed as a kind of collaboration between the world and the perceiver. On this account, we can never perceive outside the categories of our own understanding, but we do perceive genuinely outside our own heads. Thus, the approach here is not exactly constructivism, though it shares many goals and results with constructivism.

Key words: Sensorimotor theory of perception, direct realism, phenomenology, non-reductive ontology, consciousness.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers, led by Francisco Varela, were proposing an alternative vision of the immune system main behavior and function. I was part of this group. This new vision saw the immune system not as behaving distinctively with self and non-self or according to any dichotomy imposed a priori and from outside (the self-recognition vision), but rather as behaving in a unique way. From this indifferent behavior, any external impact would progressively been treated in two different ways, reactive and tolerant, but now, consequently and from inside the system (the self-assertion view). This paper will recall, through a very artificial simulation, the difference existing between these two visions. Also at that time, we believed that, from an engineering perspective, this new vision, emphasizing more the adaptability and the need for endogenous constraints than the recognition and the defensive ability, although less obvious to accept than the classical defensive one, should be more beneficial. These last ten years proved that we haven’t been convincing enough, and in this paper I resume the crusade.