•  301
    Can social interaction constitute social cognition?
    with Hanne De Jaegher and Shaun Gallagher
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (10): 441-447. 2010.
    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 …Read more
  •  188
    Spatial embedding and the structure of complex networks
    with S. Bullock and L. Barnett
    Complexity 16 (2): 20-28. 2010.
  •  30
    F/acts Ways of Enactive Worldmaking
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (11): 159-189. 2023.
    Knowing is an activity through which agents and world produce themselves. This is often expressed by the enactive claim that agents bring forth a world. I analyse this idea for different modes of agent–environment engagement: interactional, transactional, and constitutional. Something is produced in each case. Bringing forth a world is not only an epistemic but an ontological claim. Acts in their fine structure result from a process of fact production, or f/acts. F/acts co-emerge with their 'pre…Read more
  •  116
    Spatial, temporal, and modulatory factors affecting GasNet evolvability in a visually guided robotics task
    with Philip Husbands, Andrew Philippides, Patricia Vargas, Christopher L. Buckley, Peter Fine, and Michael O'Shea
    Complexity 16 (2): 35-44. 2010.
  •  4
    What Needs to Change for Us to Love a Place?
    Constructivist Foundations 17 (3): 211-214. 2022.
    Open peer commentary on the article “Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature” by Laura Candiotto. Abstract: Candiotto elaborates a down-to-earth enactive epistemology and applies it to environmental ethics. I comment on the timeliness of her intervention and the challenges for an enactive account of place. I concur with her exhortation to a participatory loving of place by becoming native, but notice that the conditions for enacting it are inaccessible for m…Read more
  •  56
    The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society
    with Tom Froese
    Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (1): 1-36. 2011.
    There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of theenactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. T…Read more
  •  124
    Sociality and the life–mind continuity thesis
    with Tom Froese
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (4): 439-463. 2009.
    The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological processes can be systematically extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition. We suggest that this apparent ‘cognitive gap’ between minimal and human forms of life appears insurmountable largely because of the methodological individualism that is pr…Read more
  •  261
    Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4): 485-507. 2007.
    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…Read more
  •  777
    From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4): 1089-1125. 2015.
    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. …Read more
  •  13
    We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are not. We propose an operational criterion to effect such a distinction. We claim this criterion is organizational, i.e., systemic, and not causal. In …Read more
  •  7
    An important amount of research effort in psychology and neuroscience over the past decades has focused on the problem of social cognition. This problem is understood as how we figure out other minds, relying only on indirect manifestations of other people's intentional states, which are assumed to be hidden, private and internal. Research on this question has mostly investigated how individual cognitive mechanisms achieve this task. A shift in the internalist assumptions regarding intentional s…Read more
  •  8
    Effects of guided exploration on reaching measures of auditory peripersonal space
    with Mercedes X. Hüg, Fernando Bermejo, and Fabián C. Tommasini
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    Despite the recognized importance of bodily movements in spatial audition, few studies have integrated action-based protocols with spatial hearing in the peripersonal space. Recent work shows that tactile feedback and active exploration allow participants to improve performance in auditory distance perception tasks. However, the role of the different aspects involved in the learning phase, such as voluntary control of movement, proprioceptive cues, and the possibility of self-correcting errors, …Read more
  •  51
    Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts. In particular, we notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction betwe…Read more
  •  42
    Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions…Read more
  •  18
    Letting language be: reflections on enactive method
    Filosofia Unisinos 22 (1): 117-124. 2021.
    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 langu…Read more
  •  13
    Comment: How Your Own Becoming Feels
    Emotion Review 12 (4): 229-230. 2020.
    Mascolo successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participa...
  •  86
    A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continui…Read more
  •  9
    Rediscovering Richard Held: Activity and Passivity in Perceptual Learning
    with Fernando Bermejo and Mercedes X. Hüg
    Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
  •  31
    Enactive becoming
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (5): 783-809. 2020.
    The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss…Read more
  •  15
    Sensorimotor Life: An enactive proposal
    with Thomas Bhurman and Xabier Barandiaran
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while dev…Read more
  •  9
    Paticipatory Object Perception
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (5-6): 228-258. 2016.
    Social factors have so far been neglected in embodied theories of perception despite the wealth of phenomenological insights and empirical evidence indicating their importance. I examine evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience and attempt an initial classification according to whether social factors play a contextual, enabling, or constitutive role in the ability to perceive objects in a detached manner, i.e. beyond their immediate instrumental use. While evidence of cross-cultur…Read more
  •  13
    Interactive Time-Travel: On the intersubjective Retro-modulation of Intentions
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (1-2): 49-74. 2015.
    The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of social interaction can sometimes be paradoxical. I argue that in these situations it may sometimes be possible to conceive of individual acts that can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively. This could happen when the relational patterns in social interaction literally alter the virtual structure of a participant's past corporeal intentions resulting in an odd experience of having intended something all along without knowing it. I…Read more
  •  17
    Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 429-452. 2005.
    A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic lan- guage 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 via- bility. Adaptivity leads to more ar…Read more
  •  7
    Editorial: The social and enactive mind
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (4): 409-415. 2009.
  •  39
    Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: I contrast enactivist and ecological perspectives on some of the themes raised by the authors. I discuss some of their worries about the notion of sense-making and other epistemological aspects of enactivism.