What made me want the cheese? A reply to Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto

Abstract

I would like to thank Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto for taking the time to write these insightful responses. I will try to address three of their points. First, what should the precise status of the interaction process in studying social cognition be? Do I really mean that the interaction is the only important thing to study about social cognition? Second, and intimately related to this is the question of the individual: doesn’t what happens in the individual play a crucial role in social understanding? The third is a point about methodology: how to make an enactive/embodied point about social cognition in a landscape dominated by individualist and cognitivist approaches? Concerning the status of the interaction process, I stand by the assertion that studying it is the starting point for understanding social cognition. The point of this is not that the interaction details are something to fit into an existing picture. It is that centering on the interaction changes the research landscape and turns the endeavour of understanding social cognition on its head. The interaction process indeed is not the be all and end all of social cognition. However, putting it at the centre of the map opens up a new vantage point, a different way of studying social cognition, aspects of which are the history, needs, state, emotions, goals and capacities of the individual, neurology, the influence of context, society and culture, and so on. There is also the question ‘what makes social cognition precisely social?’ In traditional research, this was defined simply by the object of cognition being someone else. But isn’t social about a certain kind of interaction? In taking the social interaction process seriously, we found that it can become autonomous – in a strict formal sense (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). If this is the case, the idea that meaning and intentionality are situated with individuals changes from a given into a question. In traditional approaches, the individual represents the ‘reality out there’ and this is where meaning comes from. One big problem with this is that it does not ground meaning. Taking instead the hypothesis that the interaction process can become autonomous to mean that it itself has intentions would of course be silly. What does become possible on such a view is to spell out in detail how intentions can form and transform in social interaction. It allows us to envisage meanings not needing to be exclusively individually mediated, but that maybe they come into existence in a way more closely related to how waves form in the ocean. For instance, a couple of days ago I was having dinner with my partner and a friend. At some point, I was cutting some cheese for myself. I noticed my partner looking at the cheese and thought I would offer him some, because it looked like he might want some. When I did so, he accepted it. I asked him whether he had wanted it while looking at the cheese before (i.e. while I had noticed him looking at it and he had noticed me looking at him and it), and he said that he had not really. The desire for cheese in this case only crystallised at the point of accepting the slice from me. This indicates that fresh intentions can sprout from interactions and that what may often happen is that we back-track, newly emerged meaning in hand, and ‘stick’ this meaning onto our previous actions. It may have looked like he wanted the cheese, since I noticed him looking at it before, but in fact, the desire only took shape at the point of receiving it. Noticing him looking at the cheese and thinking that he might want some may have been a kind of direct perception. On the other hand, it was not just that he looked at the cheese, we also looked at each other and back and forth to the cheese, and he also to our friend. If anything in that coordination of gazes and actions had been different, I would probably not have developed the inclination to give him some. Hence illustrating that the precise coordination in an instance of interaction makes a difference to its significance for the participants.