This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the ‘problem of the veil,’ a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of ‘living together.’ For some time—and it is not possible to foresee how much—in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing (...) a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the ‘local’ perception of the Islamic veil and—as a matter of equality—the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the ‘fact’ of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than ‘objective facts,’ as such allegedly independent from the observer’s point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one’s own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of ‘facts’ into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged ‘facts.’ The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law. (shrink)

Pregnancy presents some interesting challenges for the philosophy of embodied cognition. Mother and fetus are generally considered to be passive during pregnancy, both individually and in their relation. In this paper, we use the enactive operational concepts of autonomy, agency, individuation, and participation to examine the relation between mother and fetus in utero. Based on biological, physiological, and phenomenological research, we explore the emergence of agentive capacities in embryo and fetus, as well as how maternal agency changes as pregnancy advances. (...) We show that qualitatively different kinds of agency have their beginnings already in utero, and to what extent fetal and maternal movement modulate affectivity and individuation in pregnancy. We thus propose that mother and fetus are both agents who participate in pregnancy. Pregnancy then emerges as a relational developmental organization that anchors and holds its developing participants. We end the paper with reflections on ethical implications of this proposal, and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The complexity of the human mind and its interaction with the environment is one of the main epistemological debates throughout history. Recent ideas, framed as the 4E perspective to cognition, highlight that human experience depends causally on both cerebral and extracranial processes, but also is embedded in a particular sociomaterial context and is a product of historical accumulation of trajectory changes throughout life. Accordingly, the human microbiome is one of the most intriguing actors modulating brain function and physiology. Here, we (...) present the 4E approach to the Human Microbiome for understanding mental processes from a broader perspective, encompassing one's body physiology and environment throughout their lifespan, interconnected by microbiome community structure and dynamics. We review evidence supporting the approach theoretically and motivates the study of the global set of microbial ecosystem networks encountered by a person across their lifetime (from skin to gut to natural and built environments). We furthermore trace future empirical implementation of the approach. We finally discuss novel research opportunities and clinical interventions aimed toward developing low‐cost/high‐benefit integrative and personalized bio‐psycho‐socio‐environmental treatments for mental health and including the brain‐gut‐microbiome axis. (shrink)

Descriptions of bodies within the literature of the enactive approach to cognitive science exhibit an interesting dialectical tension. On the one hand, a body is considered to be a unity which instantiates an identity, forming an intrinsic basis for value. On the other, a living body is in a reciprocally defining relationship with the environment, and is therefore immersed and entangled with, rather than distinct from, its environment. In this paper I examine this tension, and its implications for the enactive (...) approach, particularly the enactive conceptions of life and bodies. Following the lead of others, I argue that enactive cognitive science can benefit from a deeper reading and integration with extant work on the complexity and multiplicity of the living body within feminist philosophy and feminist science studies. (shrink)

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the “environment.” In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the “meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual.” The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat “the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species.” By making this (...) distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit). (shrink)

As an alternative to linear and unidimensional perspectives focused mainly on either organic or psychological processes, the enactive approach to life and mind—a branch of 4-E cognitive theories—offers an integrative framework to study mental disorders that encompasses and articulates organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective dimensions of embodiment. These three domains are deeply entangled in a non-trivial manner. A question remains on how this systemic and multi-dimensional approach may be applied to our understanding of mental disorders and symptomatic behavior. Drawing on Gilbert (...) Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, we provide some enactive conceptual tools to better understand the dynamic, interactive, and multi-dimensional nature of human bodies in mental disorders and psychopathological symptoms. One of such tools cursiva is sense-making, a key notion that captures the relational process of generating meaning by interacting with the sociomaterial environment. The article analyzes five aspects related to sense-making: temporality, adaptivity, the multiplicity of normativities it involves, the fundamental role of tension, and its participatory character. On this basis, we draw certain implications for our understanding of mental disorders and diverse symptoms, and suggest their interpretation in terms of difficulties to transform tensions and perform individuation processes, which result in a reduction of the field of potentialities for self-individuation and sense-making. (shrink)

Several enactive-phenomenological perspectives have pointed to affectivity as a central aspect of mental disorders. Indeed, from an enactive perspective, sense-making is an inherently affective process. A question remains on the role of different forms of affective experiences (i.e., existential feelings, atmospheres, moods, and emotions) in sense-making and, consequently, in mental disorders. This work elaborates on the enactive perspective on mental disorders by attending to the primordial role of affectivity in the self-individuation process. Inspired by Husserl’s genetic methodology and Simondonian philosophy (...) of individuation, sense-making is described as the process of progressive concretization and structuration of the self-world structures that support the intentionality of conscious experiences. Accordingly, affectivity is described as the force that anticipates a partial self-world coherence in sense-making. Structurally different types of affective experiences are integrated into the genetic picture and, on this basis, a reinterpretation and classification of certain mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, and the anxiety spectrum, is provided. In this way, this work contributes to a phenomenologically informed enactive account of mental disorders as disorders of affectivity. (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological (...) perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

We examine the question of material agency as raised in material engagement theory (MET). Insofar as MET tends to highlight the causal roles played by extra-bodily material flows in human practices, the term “material agency” does not sufficiently distinguish cases in which these flows are part of an agentive engagement from cases in which they are not. We propose an operational criterion to effect such a distinction. We claim this criterion is organizational, i.e., systemic, and not causal. In the enactive (...) account, agency requires three organizational conditions: self-individuation, interactional asymmetry, and normativity. These conditions can have organic, sensorimotor, and sociomaterial realizations. The dance of human productive practices is indeed spread between brains, bodies, and the world, as MET claims, but it is distributed in an organized manner that involves constraints and norms at various scales. We put forward a relational and non-anthropocentric perspective toward an enactive approach to productive practices. We discuss some aspects of agentive ensembles rendered more intelligible by our proposal, including incorporation, soft assembly and non-decomposability, and the grounding of teleology normative processes at multiple scales. In this manner, we seek to continue the dialog between MET and enactive theory, beginning with the view that a situated system must realize certain minimal organizational conditions to be called an _agent_. (shrink)

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle 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. (shrink)

Mascolo successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participa...

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. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to psychiatry have recently argued for an understanding of psychiatric conditions based within relational interactions between individuals and their environments. A central motivation for these enactive approaches is the goal of social integration: the integration of a naturalistic approach to psychiatric conditions with their broader sociocultural dimensions. One possible issue, however, is whether appeals to the autonomy and authenticity of relationally constituted enactive individuals can provide a means of adjudicating between harmful and beneficial social constraints upon individual behaviour. (...) This paper seeks to provide enactive approaches to psychiatry with a possible means of evaluating normative influences of social contexts beyond direct interactions with relationally constituted individuals. Some of the most significant influences of the sociocultural dimension of psychiatric conditions consist not in direct interaction with individuals, but in setting the terms for interactions and interactants alike. Insofar as some social influences precede and predefine dyadic relations between individuals and their social context, these cannot be accounted for as features of interactions, but must be assessed as independent structures of the sociocultural dimension. I will provide one potential means for enactive models to assess social norms using Canguilhem’s distinction between health and pathology. I will argue that Canguilhem’s conceptualization of health in terms of adaptive normative structure provides a potential tool for social integration which strongly complements enactive approaches to psychiatry. (shrink)

In a paper from the late 1990s, Francisco Varela indicates that a science of inter-being is on the horizon. But how to envisage such a science? Here I propose that an enactive science of inter-being will benefit from engaging with recent innovative autism research that starts from autistic experience and intersubjectivity. Properly intersubjective autism research is both more ethically just and scientifically richer than cognitivist explanations that have dominated research, discourse, and practice for a long time, and which have tended (...) to set people apart more than connect them. I discuss the work of Bervoets and Hens (2020), who show how autism research is unavoidably theorethical, and must be in order to move past the catch-22 they identify between autism and dysfunction. This kind of research exemplifies a participatory sense-making between subjects and scientists, and it is here that 'steps to a science of inter-being' (Varela, 1999a) are being taken. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the affective experience that permeates the employment of Assistive Technology (AT) in special needs education is crucial for the integration of AT. “AT integration” generally means the fluid and automatic employment of AT for fulfilling certain tasks. Pritchard et al. ( 2021 ) have proposed a more specific conceptualisation of AT integration by saying that AT is integrated when it is part of the user’s cognitive character. By discussing their proposal, we argue that the (...) user’s affective experience is crucial for AT integration. To better appreciate the relevance of the affective experience in AT integration, we suggest shifting the perspective from the functionalist extended cognition framework, as Pritchard et al. ( 2021 ) propose, to affective scaffoldings. In doing so we focus on the feeling of agency as the key experience to consider for understanding what AT does to the agent. We will put forth the hermeneutical tool of “phenomenal transformation” to explain how and why AT as an affective scaffolding can support the fundamental “I can” of the experience. (shrink)

What does it take to see how autistic people participate in social interactions? And what does it take to support and invite more participation? Western medicine and cognitive science tend to think of autism mainly in terms of social and communicative deficits. But research shows that autistic people can interact with a skill and sophistication that are hard to see when starting from a deficit idea. Research also shows that not only autistic people, but also their non-autistic interaction partners can (...) have difficulties interacting with each other. To do justice to these findings, we need a different approach to autistic interactions—one that helps everyone see, invite, and support better participation. I introduce such an approach, based on the enactive theory of participatory sense-making and supported by insights from indigenous epistemologies. This approach helps counteract the homogenising tendencies of the “global mental health” movement, which attempts to erase rather than recognise difference, and often precludes respectful engagements. Based in the lived experiences of people in their socio-cultural-material and interactive contexts, I put forward an engaged—even engaging—epistemology for understanding how we interact across difference. From this perspective, we see participatory sense-making at work across the scientific, diagnostic, therapeutic, and everyday interactions of autistic and non-autistic people, and how everyone can invite and support more of it. (shrink)