Enactivism

The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation".^[5] The introduction of the term enaction in this context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991),^[5][6] who proposed the name to "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs".^[2] This was further developed by Thompson and others,^[1] to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment.^[6] However, some writers maintain that there remains a need for some degree of the mediating function of representation in this new approach to the science of the mind.^[7]


The initial emphasis of enactivism upon sensorimotor skills has been criticized as "cognitively marginal",^[8] but it has been extended to apply to higher level cognitive activities, such as social interactions.^[3] "In the enactive view,... knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with its environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction...[that] allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."^[9]


Enactivism is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism.

Enactivism is one of a cluster of related theories sometimes known as the 4Es.^[10] As described by Mark Rowlands, mental processes are:


Enactivism proposes an alternative to dualism as a philosophy of mind, in that it emphasises the interactions between mind, body and the environment, seeing them all as inseparably intertwined in mental processes.^[11] The self arises as part of the process of an embodied entity interacting with the environment in precise ways determined by its physiology. In this sense, individuals can be seen to "grow into" or arise from their interactive role with the world.^[12]


In The Tree of Knowledge Maturana & Varela proposed the term enactive^[14] "to evoke the view of knowledge that what is known is brought forth, in contraposition to the more classical views of either cognitivism^{[Note 1]} or connectionism.^{[Note 2]} They see enactivism as providing a middle ground between the two extremes of representationalism and solipsism. They seek to "confront the problem of understanding how our existence-the praxis of our living- is coupled to a surrounding world which appears filled with regularities that are at every instant the result of our biological and social histories.... to find a via media: to understand the regularity of the world we are experiencing at every moment, but without any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions. Indeed the whole mechanism of generating ourselves, as describers and observers tells us that our world, as the world which we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close."[Tree of Knowledge, p. 241] Another important notion relating to enactivism is autopoiesis. The word refers to a system that is able to reproduce and maintain itself. Maturana & Varela describe that "This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems"^[15] Using the term autopoiesis, they argue that any closed system that has autonomy, self-reference and self-construction (or, that has autopoietic activities) has cognitive capacities. Therefore, cognition is present in all living systems.^[15] This view is also called autopoietic enactivism.


Radical enactivism is another form of enactivist view of cognition. Radical enactivists often adopt a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of basic cognition. Basic cognitive capacities mentioned by Hutto and Myin include perceiving, imagining and remembering.^[16][17] They argue that those forms of basic cognition can be explained without positing mental representations. With regard to complex forms of cognition such as language, they think mental representations are needed, because there needs explanations of content. In human being's public practices, they claim that "such intersubjective practices and sensitivity to the relevant norms comes with the mastery of the use of public symbol systems" (2017, p. 120), and so "as it happens, this appears only to have occurred in full form with construction of sociocultural cognitive niches in the human lineage" (2017, p. 134).^[16] They conclude that basic cognition as well as cognition in simple organisms such as bacteria are best characterized as non-representational.^[18][16][17]


Enactivism also addresses the hard problem of consciousness, referred to by Thompson as part of the explanatory gap in explaining how consciousness and subjective experience are related to brain and body.^[19] "The problem with the dualistic concepts of consciousness and life in standard formulations of the hard problem is that they exclude each other by construction".^[20] Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or phenomenology as exemplified by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is to complement science and its objectification of the world. "The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression" (Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception as quoted by Thompson, p. 165). In this interpretation, enactivism asserts that science is formed or enacted as part of humankind's interactivity with its world, and by embracing phenomenology "science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing."^[21][22]


Enaction has been seen as a move to conjoin representationalism with phenomenalism, that is, as adopting a constructivist epistemology, an epistemology centered upon the active participation of the subject in constructing reality.^[23][24] However, 'constructivism' focuses upon more than a simple 'interactivity' that could be described as a minor adjustment to 'assimilate' reality or 'accommodate' to it.^[25] Constructivism looks upon interactivity as a radical, creative, revisionist process in which the knower constructs a personal 'knowledge system' based upon their experience and tested by its viability in practical encounters with their environment. Learning is a result of perceived anomalies that produce dissatisfaction with existing conceptions.^[26]


Shaun Gallagher also points out that pragmatism is a forerunner of enactive and extended approaches to cognition.^[27] According to him, enactive conceptions of cognition can be found in many pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. For example, Dewey says that "The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it" (1916, pp. 336–337).^[28] This view is fully consistent with enactivist arguments that cognition is not just a matter of brain processes and brain is one part of the body consisting of the dynamical regulation.^[27][29] Robert Brandom, a neo-pragmatist, comments that "A founding idea of pragmatism is that the most fundamental kind of intentionality (in the sense of directedness towards objects) is the practical involvement with objects exhibited by a sentient creature dealing skillfully with its world" (2008, p. 178).^[30]


How does constructivism relate to enactivism? From the above remarks it can be seen that Glasersfeld expresses an interactivity between the knower and the known quite acceptable to an enactivist, but does not emphasize the structured probing of the environment by the knower that leads to the "perturbation relative to some expected result" that then leads to a new understanding.^[26] It is this probing activity, especially where it is not accidental but deliberate, that characterizes enaction, and invokes affect,^[31] that is, the motivation and planning that lead to doing and to fashioning the probing, both observing and modifying the environment, so that "perceptions and nature condition one another through generating one another."^[32] The questioning nature of this probing activity is not an emphasis of Piaget and Glasersfeld.


Sharing enactivism's stress upon both action and embodiment in the incorporation of knowledge, but giving Glasersfeld's mechanism of viability an evolutionary emphasis,^[33] is evolutionary epistemology. Inasmuch as an organism must reflect its environment well enough for the organism to be able to survive in it, and to be competitive enough to be able to reproduce at sustainable rate, the structure and reflexes of the organism itself embody knowledge of its environment. This biology-inspired theory of the growth of knowledge is closely tied to universal Darwinism, and is associated with evolutionary epistemologists such as Karl Popper, Donald T. Campbell, Peter Munz, and Gary Cziko.^[34] According to Munz, "an organism is an embodied theory about its environment... Embodied theories are also no longer expressed in language, but in anatomical structures or reflex responses, etc."^[34][35]


One objection to enactive approaches to cognition is the so-called "scale-up objection". According to this objection, enactive theories only have limited value because they cannot "scale up" to explain more complex cognitive capacities like human thoughts. Those phenomena are extremely difficult to explain without positing representation.^[36] But recently, some philosophers are trying to respond to such objection. For example, Adrian Downey (2020) provides a non-representational account of Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and then argues that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the "scaling up" objection.^[37]