Garri Hovhannisyan

The distinguishing feature of enactivist cognitive science is arguably its commitment to non-reductionism and its philosophical allegiance to first-person approaches, like phenomenology. The guiding theme of this article is that a theoretically mature enactivism is bound to be humanistic in its articulation, and only by becoming more humanistic can enactivism more fully embody the non-reductionist spirit that lay at its foundation. Our explanatory task is thus to bring forth such an articulation by advancing an enactivist theory of human personality. To this end, we synthesize core concepts from cognitive science, personality theory, and phenomenological philosophy in order to develop an Enactivist Big-5 Theory of personality. According to EB5T, personality traits are dispositional tendencies for how we come to optimally grip our distinctly human worlds. Individual differences in personality are therefore reflective of stylistic differences in optimal gripping tendencies between human beings. EB5T affords a non-reductionist understanding of the immanent teleology of the autopoietically embodied human mind as a kind of full-scale optimal gripping process that is achieved along five major dimensions of personality. To the degree that these dimensions are universal, therefore, we argue that our theory offers a viable path forward in advancing enactivist cognitive science beyond the life of a cell and into the mind of a person, a longstanding hope and ambition held by proponents of the enactive approach.

Cognitive science has been dealt with the unique task of straddling and bridging the gaps between the mind and the body. One such gap that has not received as much attention within the literature is the gap between the natural and the normative. We propose that the theory of autopoiesis can be used for bridging this gap, and, so, we incorporate autopoiesis into the framework of dynamical systems theory in order to ground a physicalist theory of normativity. Within this framework, the dynamical coupling between an autopoietic system and its environment can be either natural or normative. We then construct a full-fledged theory of how cognition achieves nor- mativity and find that we are confronted by the frame problem. We review Vervaeke, Lillicrap and Richards’ (2012) theory of the mech- anisms by which cognitive agents realize relevance and find that it promises to circumvent the frame problem. After augmenting their theory with our own theory of learning, we find that the frame problem has been circumvented in a way that meets the necessary con- ditions for normativity. We finally represent our theoretical findings in a dynamical systems framework and discuss some broad appli- cations for social and psychological science.