Enactivism is a position in
cognitive science that argues that
cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting
organism
In biology, an organism () is any living system that functions as an individual entity. All organisms are composed of cells (cell theory). Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and ...
and its environment.
It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198).
[ "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: ''they enact a world''."][ These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science.][ How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about ]free will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
remains a topic of active debate.[
The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation".][ The introduction of the term ''enaction'' in this context is attributed to ]Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesi ...
, Evan Thompson
Evan Thompson (born 1962) is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with W ...
, and Eleanor Rosch
Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider;"Natural Categories", Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, (May 1973), p. 328. born 1938) is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, s ...
in ''The Embodied Mind'' (1991),[ who proposed the name to "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs".][ This was further developed by Thompson and others,] to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment.[ However, some writers maintain that there remains a need for some degree of the mediating function of representation in this new approach to the science of the mind.]
The initial emphasis of enactivism upon sensorimotor skills has been criticized as "cognitively marginal",[ but it has been extended to apply to higher level cognitive activities, such as social interactions.] "In the enactive view,... knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with its environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction...hat
A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...
allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."[
Enactivism is closely related to ]situated cognition Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift ...
and embodied cognition
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognit ...
, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of c ...
, and Cartesian dualism Cartesian means of or relating to the French philosopher René Descartes—from his Latinized name ''Cartesius''. It may refer to:
Mathematics
*Cartesian closed category, a closed category in category theory
* Cartesian coordinate system, moder ...
.
Philosophical aspects
Enactivism is one of a cluster of related theories sometimes known as the ''4Es''.[ As described by ]Mark Rowlands
Mark Rowlands (born 1962) is a Welsh writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He i ...
, mental processes are:
* Embodied involving more than the brain, including a more general involvement of bodily structures and processes.
* Embedded functioning only in a related external environment.
* Enacted involving not only neural processes, but also things an organism ''does''.
* Extended into the organism's environment.
Enactivism proposes an alternative to dualism as a philosophy of mind, in that it emphasises the interactions between mind, body and the environment, seeing them all as inseparably intertwined in mental processes.[ The self arises as part of the process of an embodied entity interacting with the environment in precise ways determined by its physiology. In this sense, individuals can be seen to "grow into" or arise from their interactive role with the world.][
:"Enaction is the idea that organisms create their own experience through their actions. Organisms are not passive receivers of input from the environment, but are actors in the environment such that what they experience is shaped by how they act."][
In ''The Tree of Knowledge'' Maturana & Varela proposed the term ''enactive''][ "to evoke the view of knowledge that what is known is brought forth, in contraposition to the more classical views of either cognitivism][ or connectionism.][ They see enactivism as providing a middle ground between the two extremes of ]representationalism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of conscious experience;Lehar, Steve. (2000)The Function of Consc ...
and solipsism
Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known an ...
. They seek to "confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis
Praxis may refer to:
Philosophy and religion
* Praxis (process), the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realised
* Praxis model, a way of doing theology
* Praxis (Byzantine Rite), the practice of fai ...
of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.... to find a ''via media'': to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions. Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves, as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close." 'Tree of Knowledge'', p. 241Another important notion relating to enactivism is autopoiesis. The word refers to a system that is able to reproduce and maintain itself. Maturana & Varela describe that "This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems" Using the term autopoiesis, they argue that any closed system that has autonomy, self-reference and self-construction (or, that has autopoietic activities) has cognitive capacities. Therefore, cognition is present in all living systems. This view is also called autopoietic enactivism.
Radical enactivism is another form of enactivist view of cognition. Radical enactivists often adopt a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of basic cognition. Basic cognitive capacities mentioned by Hutto and Myin include perceiving, imagining and remembering. They argue that those forms of basic cognition can be explained without positing mental representations. With regard to complex forms of cognition such as language, they think mental representations are needed, because there needs explanations of content. In human being's public practices, they claim that "such intersubjective practices and sensitivity to the relevant norms comes with the mastery of the use of public symbol systems" (2017, p. 120), and so "as it happens, this appears only to have occurred in full form with construction of sociocultural cognitive niches in the human lineage" (2017, p. 134). They conclude that basic cognition as well as cognition in simple organisms such as bacteria are best characterized as non-representational.
Enactivism also addresses the hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to d ...
, referred to by Thompson as part of the ''explanatory gap
In the philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the proposed difficulty that physicalist philosophies have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel subjectively when they are experienced. It is a ...
'' in explaining how consciousness and subjective experience are related to brain and body.[ "The problem with the dualistic concepts of consciousness and life in standard formulations of the hard problem is that they exclude each other by construction".][ Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or ]phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
as exemplified by Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
and Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
is to complement science and its objectification of the world. "The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression" (Merleau-Ponty, ''The phenomenology of perception'' as quoted by Thompson, p. 165). In this interpretation, enactivism asserts that science is formed or enacted as part of humankind's interactivity with its world, and by embracing phenomenology "science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing."[
Enaction has been seen as a move to conjoin ]representationalism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of conscious experience;Lehar, Steve. (2000)The Function of Consc ...
with phenomenalism
In metaphysics, phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in sp ...
, that is, as adopting a constructivist epistemology
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natura ...
, an epistemology centered upon the active participation of the subject in constructing reality.[ However, 'constructivism' focuses upon more than a simple 'interactivity' that could be described as a minor adjustment to 'assimilate' reality or 'accommodate' to it.][ Constructivism looks upon interactivity as a radical, creative, revisionist process in which the knower ''constructs'' a personal 'knowledge system' based upon their experience and tested by its viability in practical encounters with their environment. Learning is a result of perceived anomalies that produce dissatisfaction with existing conceptions.][
]Shaun Gallagher
Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the ...
also points out that pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
is a forerunner of enactive and extended approaches to cognition. According to him, enactive conceptions of cognition can be found in many pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. For example, Dewey says that "The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it" (1916, pp. 336–337). This view is fully consistent with enactivist arguments that cognition is not just a matter of brain processes and brain is one part of the body consisting of the dynamical regulation. Robert Brandom, a neo-pragmatist, comments that "A founding idea of pragmatism is that the most fundamental kind of intentionality (in the sense of directedness towards objects) is the practical involvement with objects exhibited by a sentient creature dealing skillfully with its world" (2008, p. 178).
How does constructivism relate to enactivism? From the above remarks it can be seen that Glasersfeld expresses an interactivity between the knower and the known quite acceptable to an enactivist, but does not emphasize the structured probing of the environment by the knower that leads to the "perturbation relative to some expected result" that then leads to a new understanding.[ It is this probing activity, especially where it is not accidental but deliberate, that characterizes enaction, and invokes ''affect'',][ that is, the motivation and planning that lead to doing and to fashioning the probing, both observing and modifying the environment, so that "perceptions and nature condition one another through generating one another."][ The questioning nature of this probing activity is not an emphasis of ]Piaget Piaget () may refer to:
People with the surname
* Édouard Piaget (18171910), a Swiss entomologist
* Jean Piaget (18961980), a Swiss developmental psychologist
* Paul Piaget (disambiguation), several people
* Solange Piaget Knowles (born 1986) ...
and Glasersfeld.
Sharing enactivism's stress upon both action and embodiment in the incorporation of knowledge, but giving Glasersfeld's mechanism of viability an evolutionary
Evolution is change in the heredity, heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the Gene expression, expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to ...
emphasis,[ is ]evolutionary epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery ...
. Inasmuch as an organism must reflect its environment well enough for the organism to be able to survive in it, and to be competitive enough to be able to reproduce at sustainable rate, the structure and reflexes of the organism itself embody knowledge of its environment. This biology-inspired theory of the growth of knowledge is closely tied to universal Darwinism
Universal Darwinism, also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics, is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal ...
, and is associated with evolutionary epistemologists such as Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
, Donald T. Campbell, Peter Munz
Peter Munz (12 May 1921 – 14 October 2006) was a philosopher and historian, Professor of the Victoria University of Wellington; among the major influences on his work were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Munz is one of two students who stu ...
, and Gary Cziko.[ According to Munz, "an organism is an ''embodied theory'' about its environment... Embodied theories are also no longer expressed in language, but in anatomical structures or reflex responses, etc."][
One objection to enactive approaches to cognition is the so-called "scale-up objection". According to this objection, enactive theories only have limited value because they cannot "scale up" to explain more complex cognitive capacities like human thoughts. Those phenomena are extremely difficult to explain without positing representation. But recently, some philosophers are trying to respond to such objection. For example, Adrian Downey (2020) provides a non-representational account of Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then argues that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the "scaling up" objection.
]
Psychological aspects
McGann & others[
] argue that enactivism attempts to mediate between the explanatory role of the coupling between cognitive agent and environment and the traditional emphasis on brain mechanisms found in neuroscience and psychology. In the interactive approach to social cognition developed by De Jaegher & others,[
][
][
] the dynamics of interactive processes are seen to play significant roles in coordinating interpersonal understanding, processes that in part include what they call ''participatory sense-making''.[
][
] Recent developments of enactivism in the area of social neuroscience involve the proposal of ''The Interactive Brain Hypothesis''[
] where social cognition brain mechanisms, even those used in non-interactive situations, are proposed to have interactive origins.
Enactive views of perception
In the enactive view, perception "is not conceived as the transmission of information but more as an exploration of the world by various means. Cognition is not tied into the workings of an 'inner mind', some cognitive core, but occurs in directed interaction between the body and the world it inhabits."[
]
Alva Noë
Alva Noë (born 1964) is an American philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science a ...
in advocating an enactive view of perception[
] sought to resolve how we perceive three-dimensional objects, on the basis of two-dimensional input. He argues that we perceive this solidity (or 'volumetricity') by appealing to patterns of sensorimotor expectations. These arise from our agent-active 'movements and interaction' with objects, or 'object-active' changes in the object itself. The solidity is perceived through our expectations and skills in knowing how the object's appearance would change with changes in how we relate to it. He saw all perception as an active exploration of the world, rather than being a passive process, something which happens to us.
Noë's idea of the role of 'expectations' in three-dimensional perception has been opposed by several philosophers, notably by Andy Clark
Andy Clark, (born 1957) is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prior to this, he was at professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotl ...
.[ Clark points to difficulties of the enactive approach. He points to internal processing of visual signals, for example, in the ventral and dorsal pathways, the two-streams hypothesis. This results in an integrated perception of objects (their recognition and location, respectively) yet this processing cannot be described as an action or actions. In a more general criticism, Clark suggests that perception is not a matter of expectations about sensorimotor mechanisms guiding perception. Rather, although the limitations of sensorimotor mechanisms constrain perception, this sensorimotor activity is drastically filtered to fit current needs and purposes of the organism, and it is these imposed 'expectations' that govern perception, filtering for the 'relevant' details of sensorimotor input (called "sensorimotor summarizing").][
These sensorimotor-centered and purpose-centered views appear to agree on the general scheme but disagree on the dominance issue – is the dominant component peripheral or central. Another view, the closed-loop perception one, assigns equal a-priori dominance to the peripheral and central components. In closed-loop perception, perception emerges through the process of inclusion of an item in a motor-sensory-motor loop, i.e., a loop (or loops) connecting the peripheral and central components that are relevant to that item.][Ahissar, E. and E. Assa (2016) Perception as a closed-loop convergence process. eLife 5:e12830.DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12830] The item can be a body part (in which case the loops are in steady-state) or an external object (in which case the loops are perturbed and gradually converge to a steady state). These enactive loops are always active, switching dominance by the need.
Another application of enaction to perception is analysis of the human hand. The many remarkably demanding uses of the hand are not learned by instruction, but through a history of engagements that lead to the acquisition of skills. According to one interpretation, it is suggested that "the hand s..an organ of cognition", not a faithful subordinate working under top-down instruction, but a partner in a "bi-directional interplay between manual and brain activity."[
] According to Daniel Hutto: "Enactivists are concerned to defend the view that our most elementary ways of engaging with the world and others - including our basic forms of perception and perceptual experience - are mindful in the sense of being phenomenally charged and intentionally directed, despite being non-representational and content-free."[
] Hutto calls this position 'REC' (Radical Enactive Cognition): "According to REC, there is no way to distinguish neural activity that is imagined to be genuinely content involving (and thus truly mental, truly cognitive) from other non-neural activity that merely plays a supporting or enabling role in making mind and cognition possible."
Participatory sense-making
Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007) have extended the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. The idea takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter.[
] De Jaegher and Di Paolo argue that the interaction process itself can take on a form of autonomy (operationally defined). This allows them to define social cognition as the generation of meaning and its transformation through interacting individuals.
The notion of participatory sense-making has led to the proposal that interaction processes can sometimes play constitutive roles in social cognition (De Jaegher, Di Paolo, Gallagher, 2010). It has been applied to research in social neuroscience
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the relationship between social experiences and biological systems. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather than solitary. As such, ''Homo sapiens'' create emerg ...
''[
]'' and autism
The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...
.''[
]''
In a similar vein, "an inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behavior of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself".[
] According to Torrance, enactivism involves five interlocking themes related to the question "What is it to be a (cognizing, conscious) agent?" It is:[
:1. to be a biologically autonomous (]autopoietic
The term autopoiesis () refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
The term was introduced in the 1972 publication '' Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living'' by Chilean biologists ...
) organism
:2. to generate ''significance'' or ''meaning'', rather than to act via...updated internal representations of the external world
:3. to engage in sense-making via dynamic coupling with the environment
:4. to 'enact' or 'bring forth' a world of significances by mutual co-determination of the organism with its enacted world
:5. to arrive at an experiential awareness via lived embodiment in the world.
Torrance adds that "many kinds of agency, in particular the agency of human beings, cannot be understood separately from understanding the nature of the interaction that occurs between agents." That view introduces the social applications of enactivism. "Social cognition is regarded as the result of a special form of action, namely ''social interaction''...the enactive approach looks at the circular dynamic within a dyad of embodied agents."[
]
In cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.Heine, S. J. (2011). ''Cultural Psychology. ''New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
It is based on the premise that mind and culture are i ...
, enactivism is seen as a way to uncover cultural influences upon feeling, thinking and acting. Baerveldt and Verheggen argue that "It appears that seemingly natural experience is thoroughly intertwined with sociocultural realities." They suggest that the social patterning of experience is to be understood through enactivism, "the idea that the reality we have in common, and in which we find ourselves, is neither a world that exists independently from us, nor a socially shared way of representing such a pregiven world, but a world itself brought forth by our ways of communicating and our joint action....The world we inhabit is manufactured of 'meaning' rather than 'information'.[
]
Luhmann attempted to apply Maturana and Varela's notion of autopoiesis to social systems.[
] "A core concept of social systems theory is derived from biological systems theory: the concept of ''autopoiesis''. Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana come up with the concept to explain how biological systems such as cells are a product of their own production." "Systems exist by way of operational closure and this means that they each construct themselves and their own realities."[
]
Educational aspects
The first definition of enaction was introduced by psychologist Jerome Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow ...
,[
][
] who introduced enaction as 'learning by doing' in his discussion of how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn. He associated enaction with two other ways of knowledge organization: Iconic and Symbol
A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...
ic.[Quote from
as quoted from ]
:"Any domain of knowledge (or any problem within that domain of knowledge) can be represented in three ways: by a set of actions appropriate for achieving a certain result (enactive representation); by a set of summary images or graphics that stand for a concept without defining it fully (iconic representation); and by a set of symbolic or logical propositions drawn from a symbolic system that is governed by rules or laws for forming and transforming propositions (symbolic representation)"
The term 'enactive framework' was elaborated upon by Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesi ...
and Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün a ...
.[
]
Sriramen argues that enactivism provides "a rich and powerful explanatory theory for learning and being."[
] and that it is closely related to both the ideas of cognitive development of Piaget Piaget () may refer to:
People with the surname
* Édouard Piaget (18171910), a Swiss entomologist
* Jean Piaget (18961980), a Swiss developmental psychologist
* Paul Piaget (disambiguation), several people
* Solange Piaget Knowles (born 1986) ...
, and also the social constructivism
Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others.
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states th ...
of Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on psy ...
.[ Piaget focused on the child's immediate environment, and suggested cognitive structures like spatial perception emerge as a result of the child's interaction with the world.][
] According to Piaget, children ''construct'' knowledge, using what they know in new ways and testing it, and the environment provides feedback concerning the adequacy of their construction.[
] In a cultural context, Vygotsky suggested that the kind of cognition that can take place is not dictated by the engagement of the isolated child, but is also a function of social interaction and dialogue that is contingent upon a sociohistorical context.[
] Enactivism in educational theory "looks at each learning situation as a complex system consisting of teacher, learner, and context, all of which frame and co-create the learning situation."[
] Enactivism in education is very closely related to situated cognition Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift ...
,[
] which holds that "knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used."[
] This approach challenges the "separating of what is learned from how it is learned and used."[
]
Artificial intelligence aspects
The ideas of enactivism regarding how organisms engage with their environment have interested those involved in robotics
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...
and man-machine interfaces. The analogy is drawn that a robot can be designed to interact and learn from its environment in a manner similar to the way an organism does,[
] and a human can interact with a computer-aided design tool or data base using an interface that creates an enactive environment for the user, that is, all the user's tactile, auditory, and visual capabilities are enlisted in a mutually explorative engagement, capitalizing upon all the user's abilities, and not at all limited to cerebral engagement.[
] In these areas it is common to refer to affordance
Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, ''The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems'', and it occurs in many of his earlier essays. However, his best-know ...
s as a design concept, the idea that an environment or an interface affords opportunities for enaction, and good design involves optimizing the role of such affordances.[
][
][
][
][
]
The activity in the AI community has influenced enactivism as a whole. Referring extensively to modeling techniques for evolutionary robotics Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which robots are automatically designed using Darwinian principles of natural selection. The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a neural controller, ...
by Beer,[
] the modeling of learning behavior by Kelso,[
] and to modeling of sensorimotor activity by Saltzman,[
] McGann, De Jaegher, and Di Paolo discuss how this work makes the dynamics of coupling between an agent and its environment, the foundation of enactivism, "an operational, empirically observable phenomenon."[
] That is, the AI environment invents examples of enactivism using concrete examples that, although not as complex as living organisms, isolate and illuminate basic principles.
Mathematical formalisms
Enactive cognition has been formalised in order to address subjectivity in artificial general intelligence
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.
It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fictio ...
.
A mathematical formalism of AGI is an agent proven to maximise a measure of intelligence. Prior to 2022, the only such formalism was AIXI
AIXI is a theoretical mathematical formalism for artificial general intelligence.
It combines Solomonoff induction with sequential decision theory.
AIXI was first proposed by Marcus Hutter in 2000 and several results regarding AIXI are proved ...
, which maximised “the ability to satisfy goals in a wide range of environments”. In 2015 Jan Lieke and Marcus Hutter
Marcus Hutter (born April 14, 1967 in Munich) is DeepMind Senior Scientist researching the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence. He is on leave from his professorship at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Scie ...
showed that "Legg-Hutter intelligence is measured with respect to a fixed UTM. AIXI is the most intelligent policy if it uses the same UTM", a result which "undermines all existing optimality properties for AIXI", rendering them subjective.
This problem stems from AIXI's use of compression as a proxy for intelligence, which requires that cognition take place in isolation from the environment in which goals are pursued. AIXI runs on one universal turing machine
In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simu ...
(UTM), while the measure of intelligence (the environment) runs on another. Michael Timothy Bennett argued this formalises Mind–body dualism
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, Hart, W. D. 1996. "Dualism." pp. 265–267 in ''A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind'', edited by S. Guttenplan. Oxford: Blackwell. ...
, which is what renders claims regarding AIXI’s behaviour moot without knowing the UTM the environment runs on as well. Bennett’s argument was that if cognition is a function A, the UTM is a function B and reality is a function C, then AIXI is the best choice of A to maximise the performance of the composed function C(B(A)). Unfortunately, C(B(A)) depends upon B(A), not upon A alone. To formalise enactive cognition, the formalisation of agent and environment as separate mathematical objects had to be abandoned. Instead, Bennett formalised an arbitrary task , integrating agency with the environment as a single object D. Subsequently both cognition and the reality within which it takes place were characterised as software, meaning instead of C(B(A)), cognition was formalised in terms of B(D) (or B(C(A)) as the original formulation had it). This classified all sensorimotor activity as software, and the universe as the interpreter, relying on pancomputationalism
Digital physics is a speculative idea that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program. The hypothesis that the universe is a digital computer was ...
.
As a result, an alternative proxy for intelligence called weakness was identified and shown to outperform compression in terms of the "ability to complete a wide range of tasks" and equivalently "ability to generalise", meaning that if enactivism holds and Mind–body dualism
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, Hart, W. D. 1996. "Dualism." pp. 265–267 in ''A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind'', edited by S. Guttenplan. Oxford: Blackwell. ...
does not, then compression is not necessary or sufficient for intelligence, calling into question widely held views on intelligence (see also Hutter Prize
The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 1 Gigabyte, GB English text file, with the goal of encouraging research in artificial intelligence (AI).
Launched in 2006, the priz ...
). This formalisation of enactive cognition has also been used to provide a mechanistic explanation of symbol emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
Emergence ...
in terms of modelling the intent of other agents. This is built upon the Mirror Symbol Hypothesis , which posits that sets of sensorimotor activities form symbols in the manner of perceptual symbol systems (see Lawrence W. Barsalou), though the characterisation of symbols as perceptual was abandoned . As these symbols must be present both in the act of undertaking an action and of observing it, they arguably explain the ability to empathise (conditional upon the ability to model other-directed intentionality
''Intentionality'' is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it ha ...
).
See also
*Action-specific perception Action-specific perception, or perception-action, is a psychological theory that people perceive their environment and events within it in terms of their ability to act.Witt, J. K. (2011). Action's effect on perception. ''Current Directions in Psyc ...
*Autopoesis
The term autopoiesis () refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
The term was introduced in the 1972 publication ''Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living'' by Chilean biologists ...
*Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (from the Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, p ...
* Cognitive science
*Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
*Computational theory of mind
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of comp ...
*Connectivism
Connectivism is a theoretical framework for understanding learning in a digital age. It emphasizes how internet technologies such as web browsers, search engines, wikis, online discussion forums, and social networks contributed to new avenues of le ...
*Cultural psychology
Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.Heine, S. J. (2011). ''Cultural Psychology. ''New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
It is based on the premise that mind and culture are i ...
*Distributed cognition Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.
From cognitive ethnography, Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive s ...
*Embodied cognition
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognit ...
*Embodied embedded cognition
Embodied embedded cognition (EEC) is a philosophical theoretical position in cognitive science, closely related to situated cognition, embodied cognition, embodied cognitive science and dynamical systems theory. The theory states that intellige ...
* Enactive interfaces
*Extended cognition
In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of ...
*Extended mind
In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a ...
* Externalism#Enactivism and embodied cognition
*Mind–body problem
The mind–body problem is a philosophical debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the brain as part of the physical body. The debate goes beyond addressing the mere question of how mind and bo ...
*Phenomenology (philosophy)
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, ''phainómenon'' "that which appears" and λόγος, ''lógos'' "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded i ...
*Practopoiesis
An adaptive system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole that together are able to respond to environmental changes or changes in the interacting parts, in a way analogous to either conti ...
*Representationalism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of conscious experience;Lehar, Steve. (2000)The Function of Consc ...
*Situated cognition Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift ...
*Social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactio ...
References
Further reading
*
*
* Di Paolo, E. A., Rohde, M. and De Jaegher, H., (2010). ''Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play.'' In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne and E. A. Di Paolo (eds), Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 33 – 87.
* Gallagher, Shaun (2017). ''Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind.'' Oxford University Press.
* Hutto, D. D. (Ed.) (2006). ''Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, phenomenology, and narrative.'' In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton (Series Eds.), ''Consciousness & Emotion, vol. 2.''
* McGann, M. & Torrance, S. (2005). Doing it and meaning it (and the relationship between the two). In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton, ''Consciousness & Emotion, vol. 1: Agency, conscious choice, and selective perception''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
* Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2005). ''Phenomenology of Perception.'' Routledge. (Originally published 1945)
* Noë, Alva (2010). ''Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.'' Hill and Wang.
*
*
Notes
External links
* Slides related to a chapter on haptic perception
Haptic perception ( gr, haptόs, script=latn, italics=yes "palpable", ''haptikόs'' "suitable for touch") means literally the ability "to grasp something". Perception in this case is achieved through the active exploration of surfaces and objects b ...
(recognition through touch):
*
* An overview of the rationale and means and methods for the study of representations that the learner constructs in his/her attempt to understand knowledge in a given field. See in particular §1.2.1.4 ''Toward social representations'' (p. 24)
* An extensive but uncritical introduction to the work of Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesi ...
and Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün a ...
* Entire journal issue on enactivism's status and current debates.
{{Authority control
Behavioral neuroscience
Cognitive science
Consciousness
Educational psychology
Enactive cognition
Epistemology of science
Knowledge representation
Metaphysics of mind
Motor cognition
Neuropsychology
Perception
Philosophical theories
Philosophy of psychology
Psychological concepts
Psychological theories
Sociology of knowledge
Action (philosophy)
Emergence