Hanne De Jaegher is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science. She investigates theoretical, methodological, epistemic, and phenomenological issues in interdisciplinary research on subjectivity and intersubjectivity, in terms of participatory sense-making. She currently holds a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind & Society, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain, and is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and at the University of Sussex, UK.
Cuffari E. C., Di Paolo E. & De Jaegher H. (2015) From participatory sense-making to language: There and back again. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14(4): 1089–1125. https://cepa.info/4351
The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making.
Cuffari E. C., Di Paolo E. A. & De Jaegher H. (2021) Letting language be: Reflections on enactive method. Filosofia Unisinos 22(1): 117–124. https://cepa.info/7637
Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.
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.
De Jaegher H. (2015) How we affect each other: Michel Henry’s “pathos-with” and the enactive approach to intersubjectivity. Journal of Consciousness Studies 22(1–2): 112–132. https://cepa.info/5641
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
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.
De Jaegher H. (2018) The intersubjective turn. In: Newen A., De Bruin L. & Gallagher S. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 453–468.
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.
De Jaegher H. & Di Paolo E. (2007) Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4): 485–507. https://cepa.info/2387
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.
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.
De Jaegher H. & Di Paolo E. A. (2008) Making sense in participation: An enactive approach to social cognition. In: Morganti F., Carassa A. & Riva G. (eds.) Enacting intersubjectivity: A cognitive and social perspective to the study of interactions. IOS Press, Amsterdam: 33–47. https://cepa.info/323
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.
De Jaegher H. & Froese T. (2009) On the role of social interaction in individual agency. Adaptive Behavior 17(5): 444–460. https://cepa.info/4717
Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.