Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play

By E. D. Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde, Hanne De Jaegher. 2010

475 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What is the enactive approach to cognition? Over the last 15 years this banner has grown to become a respectable alternative to traditional frameworks in cognitive science. It is at the same time a label with different interpretations and upon which different doubts have been cast. This paper elaborates on the core ideas that define the enactive approach and their implications: autonomy, sensemaking, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These are coherent, radical and very powerful concepts that establish clear methodological guidelines for research. The paper also looks at the problems that arise from taking these ideas seriously. The enactive approach has plenty of room for elaboration in many different areas and many challenges to respond to. In particular, we concentrate on the problems surrounding several theories of value-appraisal and valuegeneration. The enactive view takes the task of understanding meaning and value very seriously and elaborates a proper scientific alternative to reductionist attempts to tackle these issues by functional localization. Another area where the enactive framework can make a significant contribution is social interaction and social undertanding. The legacy of computationalism and methodological individualism is very strong in this field. Enactivism allows us to see embodied social interaction and coordination at many different levels in an integrated manner, from the emergence of autonomous temporal structures that regulate interaction to the generation of socially mediated meaning. Finally, we also present some speculations about how the enactive approach may be the right tool to help us bridge knowledge of concrete embodied and situated practices and higher-level human cognition, thus becoming a serious contender to computationalism in all areas of cognitive science (and not just on low-level sensorimotor cognition). The language offered by the enactive perspective already proves very useful in formulating the problem of human cognition in a tractable manner. These speculations will centre on the role of play as an activity that allows the development of meaning-manipulation skills as well as a further level of autonomous cognitive self, one that is characteristic of human beings. For the enactive view play is seen as re-creation whereas for computationalism fun is a mystery. These discussions will be supported and illustrated with examples from work in evolutionary robotics. The need for synthetic minimal models and their scientific role is a running theme of this paper.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d5ed5e036ca2ef4ded7b492843d710e03b4d4cd

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Citations in the corpus

Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception (2009, methodology): “Enactivists call this process “sense-making” (see Di Paolo et al. 2009; also Thompson and Stapleton 2009; De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007).”
The interactive brain hypothesis (2012, background): “The main focus in this approach is the living body, its autonomy as a self-organizing system, its precarious identity and its sense-making relation to the world (Di Paolo et al., 2010).”
The anticipating brain is not a scientist: the free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective (2016, background): “The free-energy principle then reveals the deep continuity between mind and life that Clark (2013) has hinted at as being reminiscent of enactive approaches towards life and mind20 (Varela et al. 1991; Thompson 2007; Stewart et al. 2010; Colombetti 2013; Di Paolo et al. 2010).”
The extended body: a case study in the neurophenomenology of social interaction (2012, unknown): “6 For a more detailed discussion of this methodology: Varela et al. (1991); Gallagher (1997); Varela (1997); Roy et al. (1999); Lutz and Thompson (2003); Di Paolo et al. (2010); and Froese et al. (2011).”
The iCub humanoid robot: An open-systems platform for research in cognitive development (2010, background): “The iCub project takes an enactive approach to the study of cognition whereby a cognitive system develops it own understanding of the world around it through its interactions with the environment [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20] and for which ontogenetic development is the only possible solution to ”