Abstract
According to enactivism all living systems, from single cell organisms to human beings, are ontologically endowed with some form of teleological and sense-making agency. Furthermore, enactivists maintain that: (i) there is no fixed pregiven world and as a consequence (ii) all organisms “bring forth” their own unique “worlds” through processes of sense-making. The first half of the paper takes these two ontological claims as its central focus and aims to clarify and make explicit the arguments and motivations underlying them. Our analysis here highlights three distinct but connected problems for enactivism: (i) these arguments do not and cannot guarantee that there is no pregiven world, instead, they (ii) end up generating a contradiction whereby a pregiven world seems to in fact be tacitly presupposed by virtue of (iii) a reliance on a tacit epistemic perspectivalism which is also inherently representationalist and as a consequence makes it difficult to satisfactorily account for the ontological plurality of worlds. Taking these considerations on board, the second half of the paper then aims to develop a more robust ontologically grounded enactivism. Drawing from biosemiotic enactivism, science and technology studies and anthropology, the paper aims to present an account which both rejects a pregiven world and coherently accounts for how organisms bring forth ontologically multiple worlds.
Highlights
Traditional conceptions of agency both within cognitive science (Pylyshyn 1988) and analytic philosophy (Davidson 1963; Fodor 1975) have tended to take a distinctivelyP
Enactivism (Colombetti 2014; Di Paolo 2009; Stewart et al 2010; Thompson 2007)1 has over the last decade developed an account of agency which it argues can serve as the foundation for a non-cognitivist, nonrepresentationalist embodied cognitive science
How else could we avoid these tensions and account for the ontological multiplicity or organismic worlds? In what remains of this paper I will aim to answer this question by sketching an account that both consistently rejects the notion of a pregiven world and coherently endorses, without falling into the trap of perspectivalism, the strong metaphysical thesis that organisms bring forth worlds
Summary
Traditional conceptions of agency both within cognitive science (Pylyshyn 1988) and analytic philosophy (Davidson 1963; Fodor 1975) have tended to take a distinctively. Section two presents the arguments for the ontological conception of agency while section three explores what it means to bring forth a world rather than find it pregiven These sections aim to clarify in what sense the enactive account of agency should be understood as an ontological rather than an epistemological account. Section four concludes the first half of the paper by showing how the various arguments deployed to argue for these claims lead enactivism into an internal contradiction and renders it unable to adequately account for the ontological multiplicity of organismic worlds. The second half of the paper presents a biosemiotic enactivist inspired account which aims to avoid the highlighted difficulties and attempts to coherently account for the ontological multiplicity of organismic worlds
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