Bodies in place : enactive cognition as development of ecological norms

Supporters of autonomist enactivism or the enactive approach claim that cognition is a phenomenon constituted by the historical development of different forms of interaction (biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic) between living bodies and their environments. For autonomist enactivists, the nature of these interactions is not entirely predetermined by general laws of causation but by norms enacted in the historical path of the agent-environment system, and thanks to processes of sense-making. Cognition is, from the enactivist standpoint, a form of sense-making. While there are multiple advantages in holding such perspective to study mind and cognition, this thesis develops a critical point of view and argues that it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the ecological dimension of sense-making. Specifically, the thesis aims to show that the environment plays a more critical role than autonomist enactivism usually attributes to it. By drawing on and critically engaging with the conceptual repertoire of enactive cognition, phenomenology, and ecological approaches to cognition, my objective is to set the conceptual foundations for an enactive-ecological approach to cognition. For this task, I propose three interrelated ideas. The first redefines sense-making as a phenomenon of norm development. The most common descriptions of sense-making involve the emergence of meaning from raw physical matter thanks to the activity of living organisms. As norm development, by contrast, sense-making refers to a constant enactment and re-enactment of norms of interaction from other pregiven norms, previously enacted in the past of the agent-environment system. I argue that the encounter of the body and the world is permanently embedded in a pregiven normative field and never in an abstract void where raw physical interactions occur. From this standpoint, we need, however, to re-evaluate the role that the environment plays in sense-making processes. If agents find themselves immersed in normative fields and not in raw physical landscapes, then the environment has a more active role for the constitution and self-transformation of sense-making norms than autonomist enactivists have acknowledged. In this vein, the second main idea of this thesis concerns the environment as an active normative field that incarnates a tension between the habitual past of the agent-environment system and the ongoing contingencies of worldly events that push the system to their self-transformation and development. The third main idea of this thesis consists of a holistic description of the field of action of agents (enactive place) and the norms enacted by processes of sense-making in the field (place-norms). A general sketch of enactive place shows that sense-making is tied to processes that entangle multiple agents and material localities into a local ecological web. An enactive place constitutes a systemic and resilient unity that unfolds in time altogether with its inhabitants, working as a normative field that constrains and motivates the self-transformation of each agent-environment system. Bodies are therefore part of wider unities of historical development: places.

Keyphrases: Enactive approach, Phenomenology, Ecological psychology, Enaction, Sense-making, Autonomy, Spatial levels, Affordances, Place, Embodied Cognition, Enactivism, Chinampas