Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories

By Evan Thompson, Mog Stapleton. 2009

439 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making. We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7cf658031f579681621681b4eae48d5eaffd21e

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Citations in the corpus

Emotions beyond brain and body (2014, background): “…or in any combination of these, given that cognition is supposed to be an essentially relational and temporally extended process of “sense-making” (Thompson & Stapleton, 2009) by an autonomous and adaptive system in interaction with its environment, so that to ask where a particular cognitive…”
Musical creativity and the embodied mind (2018, background): “Such sets of meaningful activities constitute what enactivists refer to as “sense-making,” which is ultimately equated with “cognition” (see Thompson & Stapleton, 2009).”
The Brain — A Mediating Organ (2011, background): “Thomas Fuchs (to appear in Journal of Consciousness Studies)”
Introduction to the special issue on 4E cognition (2010, background): “Enactivism, as understood by the likes of Thompson (2007, Thompson and Stapelton 2009 ) and DiPaulo (2009), is a thesis about the continuity between life and mind.”
Emotion and ethics: An inter-(en)active approach (2009, background): “What is meant by ‘sense-making’ in the enactive approach? The term appears in later discussions of the theory of autopoiesis (Weber and Varela 2002), and has recently been refined and clarified (Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Stapleton 2009 ).”
Playing together without communicating? A pre-reflective and enactive account of joint musical performance (2015, background): “This conversation-like style requires the interviewer to be flexible, responsive, and actively engaged in listening (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Varela & Shear, 1999, p. 10).”
Making enactivism even more embodied (2014, background): “Affective phenomena are pervasively integrated into our perceptual and cognitive experiences (Pessoa 2013; Barrett and Bliss-Moreau 2009), as noted by many enactivists (Colombetti 2007; Ellis 2005; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Stapleton 2009).”
Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception (2009, background): “…processes of the system must: (1) recursively depend on each other for their generation and realization as a network, (2) constitute the system as a unity in whatever domain they exist, and (3) determine the domain of possible interactions with the environment (Thompson and Stapleton 2009, p. 24).”