Enactive Approach Research Articles

Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle (FEP) 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 between a system’s structure and its organization. Other misreadings concern the conflation of processes of self-distinction in operationally closed systems and Markov blankets. Deeper theoretical tensions underlie some of these misinterpretations. FEP assumes systems that reach a non-equilibrium steady state and are enveloped by a Markov blanket. We argue that these assumptions contradict the historicity of sense-making that is explicit in the enactive approach. Enactive concepts such as adaptivity and agency are defined in terms of the modulation of parameters and constraints of the agent-environment coupling, which entail the possibility of changes in variable and parameter sets, constraints, and in the dynamical laws affecting the system. This allows enaction to address the path-dependent diversity of human bodies and minds. We argue that these ideas are incompatible with the time invariance of non-equilibrium steady states assumed by the FEP. In addition, the enactive perspective foregrounds the enabling and constitutive roles played by the world in sense-making, agency, development. We argue that this view of transactional and constitutive relations between organisms and environments is a challenge to the FEP. Once we move beyond superficial similarities, identify misreadings, and examine the theoretical commitments of the two approaches, we reach the conclusion that far from being easily integrated, the FEP, as it stands formulated today, is in tension with the theories of autopoiesis and enaction.

Enactive Approach to Normativity in Oncoradiology Diagnostics: Communication, Affection by, and Enaction of Modified Experiences

This article examines the enactive approach to oncoradiology imaging and the diagnostic process involved. It investigates how diagnostically relevant knowledge is related to the radiologist's (embodied) subjectivity and (professional) intersubjectivity. The supporting data was gathered by way of ethnographic observations, which in turn were informed by front-loaded phenomenology.

Enacting Ought: Ethics, Anti-Racism, and Interactional Possibilities

Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and language is not an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that the enactive approach presents open-ended cultivation of virtue as embodied, contextualized, and dynamic know-how and destabilizes an individualist metaphysics. Putting this framework to work, we turn to the interactional challenges of conversations that concern differences and that involve potentially oppositional parties, offering a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. Finally, we make explicit Rankine’s normative project of mindful navigation of multiple perspectives in an interaction. We abstract three interrelated spheres of participatory intervention: location, language, and labor. These also indicate routes for empirical investigation into complex perspective-taking in dynamic interactions.

Enaktivizam kao okvir za psihijatrijske poremećaje

The paper shows how enactivism can be used as a theoretical framework in psychiatry. An enactive approach can help solve the problem of integration in psychiatry and how to meaningfully connect the different perspectives with which we explain the causes and nature of psychiatric disorders. Enactivism allows us to comprehensively connect the phenomenological, neurophysiological, sociocultural, and existential aspects of psychiatric disorders and holistically approach their understanding and treatment. I will explain what the tenets of enactivism are, what the problem of integration in psychiatry is, and how, according to Saneke de Haan, we can provide a solution to this problem through the enactivist approach. Finally, I will suggest how enactivism can be enriched by adding an ecological perspective.

Spatialization as a perceptual basis for information: How perception becomes a narrative

According to enaction theory, information perception results from a coupling between the individual and data in the perceptual space. Consequently, the minimal condition of achieving perception is that there be something to act upon, i.e., a salience or a hook. Data emerge in the background and become preponderant. But, being at first only a sensation, these data can only be constituted as information if they persist in the perceptive field. One should be able to leave them and return to them in the logic of topological continuity, for example, association, similarity/dissimilarity, divergence, etc. Our hypothesis is that there are logics that transform these data into information. We posit that, in addition to being spatializing, they embody above all the perceptual gestures that make these data legible. Such is, for example, the status of the various supports that serve as structures of data inscription available on the digital applications: lists, tables, diagrams, and cartographies. Starting from sensorimotor theories, in connection with the enactive approach, we intend to establish the semiotic conditions of these supports as a perceptive basis of information.

Экзофикшн и энактивистские нарративы в современной французской литературе

The proliferation of hybrid genres is a notable trend in contemporary French literature. Alongside autofiction, new hybrids are emerging in French literature, modelled on a mixture of fiction and factual genre. One of them is exofiction (“ex” + “fiction”), which implies a narrative about fictitious events from the life of a historical character or an attempt to introduce fiction into someone else’s biography. The neologism, belonging to the writer Philippe Vasset, is rapidly entering scholarly and critical discourse, but no systematic attempt to describe the phenomenon has been made. According to Vasset, exofiction can be defined as any narrative that “blends the reality with the phantasms that accompany its representations” (Ph. Vasset); in other words, exofictitious writing practices form the space of “enactivist literature” in the cognitive sense. Exofiction reveals itself in the search for a connection between inner narrator’s experience and the other subject’s experience — including traumatic — through the language. This article attempts to identify the main features of exofiction, according to the enactivist approach in cognitive science and narratology, and to propose an analysis of the genre characteristics of exofiction by the exаmple of the novels by Pascal Quignard, Jean Echenoz and David Foenkinos.

The feel of a recurrent gesture

Abstract The inner workings of recurrent gestures can now be distilled from almost three decades’ worth of fine-grained studies into gesture form variants, kinesic organization with speech, core semantic themes, and discourse-interactive functions. Yet several questions about this gesture category have remained in the background. How do such gestures relate to the behavioral activities within which they occur, their wider embodied and intercorporeal context, and the relations between the people performing them? These questions are addressed by adopting an enactive approach to human relating and by analysing how the Vertical Palm gesture form materializes during an episode of gift-giving between two friends in China, where the practice involves elaborate embodied maneuvers resulting in a visibly affective ‘seesaw battle’. Treating gift-giving as a situation for participatory sense-making spun from a complex web of sensorimotor schemes, this seesaw battle provides a natural ecology for exploring understudied dimensions of the Vertical Palm recurrent gesture as embodied, embedded, and enacted during a practice with culturally-specific dimensions.

An enactive approach to fictive motion

Le chemin linguistique a fait l’objet de nombreuses études (Talmy, 2000a ; Dan I. Slobin, 2003). La présente analyse explore un chemin sous-tendu par le phénomène du mouvement fictif (MF) : The plateau goes east along the river. Cette trajectoire, que l’on désigne ‘chemin de localisation’ décrit le MF d’une entité le long d’un chemin pour révéler son immobilité dans l’espace. Cet itinéraire linguistique est ici étudié à partir d’un corpus composé des verbes come et go. Si l’expérience langagière est en premier lieu vocale, elle implique aussi des procédés cinétiques non verbaux. L’expérience langagière sera alors explorée à partir des interactions qui existent entre le langage, le domaine de l’espace et le corps du sujet parlant, situant notre analyse dans une approche enactive. On définira le modèle syntaxique prototypique qui transcrit la grille d’interprétation du MF. Les structures syntaxiques récurrentes qui dévoilent la manière du locuteur de projeter son propre monde au travers de modèles simplexes seront explorées, dans le cadre de la transcription d’une réalité visuelle complexe en séquences linguistiques.

Brain, Lagree Method, Manual Therapy; Physical Exercise, Microformer, Massage in Psycho-Body, Emotional-Affective and Socio-Relational Recovery

Exercise as a moment of socializing, fun and well-being. Titanic Enterprise? Just want to do. For me, I have brought together the greatest, the best, my closest friends, for one great passion: movement, physical exercise, as a source of well-being, especially in this critical moment for those who have suffered damage even from the point of view. economically. But the topic is another. I was in Sicily, a friend of mine is training with others but ... he has a herniated disc ... prevents him from moving ... yet, thanks also to the encouragement, the sociability, the fun of the group itself, he does not he feels pain and is able to perform all exercises perfectly. Hence the idea: can conviviality, sociality in the world of sport have and be a natural opioid? Can we modulate our perception of pain thanks to a “disembodied attitude and an enactive approach? We are embodied beings” , in which minds, bodies, environment and culture are connected to each other on different levels. “The answer is yes and the purpose of the post is to leave you breathless to admire the infinite beauty of my friends who train and have fun, live the sport , the Movement and long live true friendship. Obviously I emphasize my world, my fitness lagree method, Lagreefitness which also improves self-esteem, good mood through the generation of wellness molecules and hormones. heart health, brain health, muscle and joint health. Neuroscience and lagree method; induction of the pituitary hypothalamic axis of growth hormone, its possible implications in longevity

Integrating Enactive and Intercorporeal Approaches to Interaction and Interaction Analysis: d/Deaf Persons and Animals. In Search of the ‘In-Between’ and Adequate Methodologies

"How does understanding occur in encounters of living beings? What is experienced by the interaction partners and what happens in the ‘In-Between’? And how can this be captured? In this paper an enactive approach to interaction is proposed with the focus on reciprocal intercorporeal attunement and co-creation of meaning in a specific environment. As alternative framework this approach is applied to the interaction of d/Deaf persons and animals. In the interaction with an animal, verbal communication - which is challenging for d/Deaf persons - is of secondary importance, so this frame is well suited to focus on intercorporeal attunement. In the interaction discourse regarding d/Deaf persons as well as Human-Animal-Interaction the assessment of the interaction process as such and embodied research methodologies are scarcely to be found. With the enactive approach new perspectives on the mechanisms of interaction and the influencing conditions can be opened as well as new approaches to respective research options. Keywords: d/Deaf, Human-Animal-Interaction, Intercorporeality, Embodied Cognition, Embodied methodologies, Enactive approach, resonance "

Enactivism and Performance Art: Putting on Display Our Perception

"Seeing, according to the enactive approach, is not something that happens inside our brain, rather it is something we do, but, as I will argue thanks to the performance art, it is something we do together. The performing arts, with their characteristics – autopoietic feedback loop, spectator/performer exchange, oscillation of the dichotomous subject-object pair - constitute a model through which to in-vestigate the nature of our perception, which is constitutively relational, participative, and transformative. Keywords: Enactivis, performing arts, percep-tion, enactive loniness, transformation. "

Enacting a Jazz Beat: Temporality in Sonic Environment and Symbolic Communication

Abstract What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference.

Imagery in action. G. H. Mead\u2019s contribution to sensorimotor enactivism

The aim of the article is to outline several valuable elements of Mead’s pragmatist theory of perception in action developed in his The Philosophy of the Act (1938), in order to strengthen the pragmatist legacy of the enactivist approach. In particular, Mead’s theory of perception in action turns out to be a forerunner of sensorimotor enactivist theory. Unlike the latter, however, Mead explicitly refers to imagery as an essential capacity for agency. Nonetheless, the article argues that the ways in which Mead refers to this capacity do not necessarily place it in opposition to enactivist non-representationalism. On the contrary, as a synthetic process of re-presenting of present and past sensorimotor elements, imagery can be seen as the hallmark of a pragmatically inspired sensorimotor enactivist approach that bypasses the opposition between representationalists and non-representationalists.

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

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 of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

Enactive manufacturing through cyber-physical systems: a step beyond cognitive manufacturing

Cognitive manufacturing, as a paradigm for providing intelligence to manufacturing systems and enabling interaction with operators presents limitations. Manufacturing system requires to be adaptive to machine tools, manufacturing environments and operators. In this line, the enactive approach to cognitive science provides a paradigm for the design of new biologically inspired cognitive architectures. Likewise, the advantages of Key Enabling Technologies and the concept of Industry 4.0 reveal new opportunities for increasing industrial innovation and developing sustainable industrial environments. These technologies are appropriated to overcome the limitations of cognitive manufacturing, because they can achieve the integration of physical and digital systems focused on cyber-physical systems. In this work, an architecture for the sustainable development of enactive manufacturing systems based on holonic paradigm is proposed and its main associated informational model is described.

Grocery Shopping Has Become Complicated. Managing Dual-tasks in a Supermarket for Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease

The executive functions neuropsychological assessment with paper and pencil tests is particularly sensitive to the lack of ecological validity. If the purpose of the clinician is not to get a merely theoretical measure, but to assess the deficit impact on patient’s life, the classical tests for executive functions are not very informative. A more ecological measure could be provided by the direct observation of the patient in his daily life, but this practice is largely cost-demanding and difficult to implement. Moreover by assuming an enactive cognition approach, the role of interaction between the embodied behaviors and the affordances provided in the coupling with the environment in which the agent’s activity is placed remains unrevealed from classical neuropsychological tests. Recently, the introduction of virtual reality simulations in clinical neuropsychology seems to provide peculiar opportunities for the evaluation of the ecological impact of disease in neurological patients, while introducing new inputs for the research on embodied cognition and enactive knowledge acquisition. This contribution aims in analyzing how a virtual reality dual-task test, set in the scene of a supermarket, can be used to assess executive functions in adult/elderly population and in patients with Alzheimer disease. The results show that the test has convergent validity, compared to the Mini Mental State Evaluation and Tower of London tests and discriminant validity in identifying the degenerative disease, compared to healthy subjects matched for age, sex and education.

Autonomy and Openness in Human and Machine Systems: Participatory Sense-Making and Artificial Minds

Within artificial intelligence (AI) and machine consciousness research, social cognition as a whole is often ignored. When it is addressed, it is often thought of as one application of more traditional forms of cognition. However, while theoretical approaches to AI have been fairly stagnant in recent years, social cognition research has progressed in productive new ways, specifically through enactive approaches. Using participatory sense-making (PSM) as an approach, we rethink conceptions of autonomy and openness in AI and enactivism, shifting the focus away from living systems to allow incorporation of artificial systems into social forms of sense-making. PSM provides an entire level of analysis through an overlooked autonomous system produced via social interaction that can be both measured and modeled in order to instantiate and examine more robust artificial cognitive systems.

Knowing Groundlessness: An Enactive Approach to a Shift From Cognition to Non-Dual Awareness.

The enactive approach has become an influential paradigm in cognitive science. One of its most important claims is that cognition is sense-making: to cognize is to enact a world of meaning. Thus, a world is not pregiven but enacted through sense-making. Most importantly, sense-making is not a fixed process or thing. It does not have substantial existence. Instead, it is groundless: it springs from a dynamic of relations, without substantial ground. Thereby, as all cognition is groundless, this groundlessness is considered the central underlying principle of cognition. This article takes that key concept of the enactive approach and argues that it is not only a theoretical statement. Rather, groundlessness is directly accessible in lived experience. The two guiding questions of this article concern that lived experience of groundlessness: (1) What is it to know groundlessness? (2) How can one know groundlessness? Accordingly, it elaborates (1) how this knowing of groundlessness fits into the theoretical framework of the enactive approach. Also, it describes (2) how it can be directly experienced when certain requirements are met. In an additional reflexive analysis, the context-dependency and observer-relativity of those statements themselves is highlighted. Through those steps, this article exhibits the importance of knowing groundlessness for a cognitive science discourse: this underlying groundlessness is not only the “ground” of cognition, but it also can be investigated empirically through lived experience. However, it requires a methodology that is radically different from classical cognitive science. This article ends with envisioning a future praxis of cognitive science which enables researchers to investigate not only theoretically but empirically the “foundationless foundation” of cognition: groundlessness.

An enactivist reconceptualization of the medical model

ABSTRACT According to the medical model that prevails in the Western world, mental disorder is a form of illness, parallel to bodily illness, which can be diagnosed by a doctor on the basis of symptoms and administered treatments designed to “cure” it. However, it seems clear that how we understand “disorder” is influenced by cultural norms and values. Theorists associated with the so-called anti-psychiatry movement have gone so far as to claim that ‘mental illness’ simply is the accepted term for behaviors and experiences that are problematic or do not fit the cultural norm. In my view, however, this social-constructionist view downplays and obscures the very real difficulties encountered by subjects with mental disorder. I argue that rather than rejecting the medical model altogether, we should revise the model by utilizing insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind. An appeal to the enactivist notions of autonomy, sense-making, and adaptivity, I propose, can help us to (a) account for mental disorder’s normative aspect, so that we can navigate a middle way between the medical model and an anti-psychiatry stance; and (b) understand the way in which the neurobiological, social, and existential dimensions of mental disorder are integrated.

Perceiving at a distance: enaction, exteriority and possibility – a tribute to John Stewart

The aim of this article is to offer a new approach of perception regarding the position of a distant object. It is also a tribute to John Stewart who accompanied the first stages of this research. Having already examined the difficulties surrounding questions of the perception of exteriority within the framework of enactive approaches, we will proceed in two stages. The first stage will consist of an attempt to explain distal perception in terms of individual sensorimotor invariants. This poses the problem but fails to solve it. The second stage will propose a new pathway to account for spatial perception; a pathway that does not deny the initial intuitions of the autopoietic enactive approaches, but one which radically changes the conception of cognition by considering, from the perceptual stage, the need to take into account interindividual interactions. The protocol of an original experimental study will characterize this new approach considering the perceptual experience of objects at a distance, in exteriority, in a space of possibilities without parting from the domain of interaction. To do this, we have to work at the limits of the perceptual crossing, that is, at the moment when the perceptual reciprocity between different subjects begins to disappear.