Over the last twenty years, archaeologists have used various process-oriented modes of enquiry to undermine the belief that humans are special. Barad (2007) developed Bohr’s indeterminist interpretation of quantum mechanics into agential realism which offers an ontological basis for distributing agency away from humans and plays a crucial role in underwriting some posthumanist archaeological agendas. But its origins in quantum physics make agential realism difficult to understand and evaluate. Despite the challenge, the first two parts of this paper are devoted (...) to each task in turn, with limited success. Part three turns to the archaeological literature, where the evaluation of agential realism turns out to be even more inadequate and so I advise against its use in support of process-oriented approaches in archaeology. The final section turns to the activity of an art workshop and introduces a playful approach to working with clay. Clayful phenomenology is a way of investigating the relationship between gesture, material and ideation. During sculpting, phenomenological experience is not subjective, stable and external but is generated within a transient creative system where entities, ideas and agency reciprocally, emerge as ephemeral manifestations. Clayful phenomenology and agential realism are ontologically similar and both are controversial but agential realism has a wall of quantum conceptual complexity standing between it and a judgement about credibility whereas playing with clay can be assessed directly, through experience. (shrink)

Marta Caravà synthétise de manière très juste et claire les ambitions de la lecture que je propose de Wittgenstein dans le troisième chapitre de l’ouvrage: il s’agit de penser d’une manière critique renouvelée le projet des sciences cognitives, en particulier dans leurs versions énactives ou énactivistes. Avant de répondre aux questions légitimes qu’elle m’adresse, je voudrais dissiper un malentendu concernant le statut de ce que j’appelle, à la suite de Wittgenstein, les “concepts psychologi...

This investigation provides an in-depth exploration of the dialectics of action and technology in the works of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, both in terms of the concrete use contexts of technological artifacts and the entanglement between individual agents and their sociotechnical surroundings. Furthermore, it briefly outlines some potentials of Sartre’s thoughts for debates in contemporary philosophy of technology. Throughout his works, Sartre approaches human action from different yet dialectically interrelated perspectives that are always accompanied by and developed in relation to (...) reflections about technology. Against the background of a complementary conception of human action that is derived from Sartre’s major works, the implementation of matter in the course of action primarily represents an instrumentalization. Things are thus always disclosed as implement things due to the practical character of human existence. Although things do not prescribe action, the material characteristics and properties of these things render them more useful for attaining some and more adverse for attaining other ends. Despite the ontological freedom of human beings, their position in societal forms of organization, to which Sartre refers to as practical ensembles, delimits their choice of means and necessitates them to satisfy their needs and desires with the limited means available. In this way, la force des choses arises, not as a result of the characteristics of technology but as an outcome of sociality and politics. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment (which is sometimes labeled “basic” cognition) depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between (...) basic and higher cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between basic and higher cognition. In this (...) paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive (...) access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point. (shrink)

Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris (Philosophy and Technology 32:195–214, 2019) have argued that “we are homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.” The emphasis falls on the idea that the things that we create, use, rely on—that is, those things with which we engage—have a recursive effect on human existence. We make things, but we also make arrangements, many of which are long-standing, material, social, normative, economic, institutional, and/or political, and many (...) of which are supported by various technologies, including AI, more and more. Critical theorists, such as Habermas, have argued that we need a “depth” or critical hermeneutics (one that combines hermeneutical understanding with scientific explanation) to provide a full account of this kind of recursivity. For Habermas, the explanatory aspect of critical hermeneutics has been modeled on neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian theories. We propose a new critical hermeneutical approach that uses the tools of embodied cognitive science, affordance theory, material engagement theory, and the concept of the socially extended mind. (shrink)

Many digital technologies, designed and controlled by intensive data-driven corporate platforms, have become ubiquitous for many of our daily activities. This has raised political and ethical concerns over how they might be threatening our personal autonomy. However, not much philosophical attention has been paid to the specific role that their hyper-designed (sensorimotor) interfaces play in this regard. In this paper, we aim to offer a novel framework that can ground personal autonomy on sensorimotor interaction and, from there, directly address how (...) technological design affects personal autonomy. To do this, we will draw from enactive sensorimotor approaches to cognition, focusing on the central notion of habits, understood as sensorimotor schemes that, in networked relations, give rise to sensorimotor agency. Starting from sensorimotor agency as a basis for more complex forms of personal autonomy, our approach gives us grounds to analyse our relationship with technology (in general) and to distinguish between autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-diminishing technologies. We argue that, by favouring/obstructing the enactment of certain (networks of) habits over others, technologies can directly act upon our personal autonomy, locally and globally. With this in mind, we then discuss how current digital technologies are often being designed to be autonomy-diminishing (as is the case of “dark patterns” in design), and sketch some ideas on how to build more autonomy-enhancing digital technologies. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of creative material engagement actualised (...) in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. (shrink)

Culture has traditionally been considered as a set of knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, norms, and morals, acquired by a human being as a member of a group. Some anthropologists interpret this as a set of abstract representations, such as information or knowledge, while others interpret it as behavioral control mechanisms. These views assume that the contents of a particular culture must be processed by the minds of individuals, either in a direct way or by resorting to learned mental structures in (...) processes of symbolic socialization. Some critics suggest a problem with these perspectives since they do not provide a convincing explanation of the enculturation process beyond metaphorical images of transfer or internalization of symbolic cultural contents through linguistic transmission. The new embodied theories of cognition, especially enactivism, could give new ideas about what enculturation processes are like, through the concept of participatory sense-making in material culture environments. In this essay, we discuss how an enactive vision of culture could be, and what advantages it would have, as well as the challenges and weaknesses in explaining the culture and its learning processes. (shrink)

The health benefits of practising mindfulness are well documented, yet the phenomenological mechanisms of such practice remain under-theorised from both ontogenetic and social perspectives. By leveraging an enactive perspective on selfhood, these lacunae can be addressed: firstly, it is argued that proper understanding of mindfulness – and the health benefits that mindfulness practices seek – relies on recognising the socio-embodied nature of the self; consequently, occasions in which the therapeutic need for mindfulness are most pressing will be shown to be (...) inextricably tied to socio-embodied fluctuations across different stages of life. What emerges is a phenomenological understanding of mindfulness as allowing one to dwell in the sensuous density of the present and, through this, remain connected to the social world of open possibilities. (shrink)

Why does one need creativity? On a personal level, improvisation with available resources is needed for online coping with unforeseen environmental stimuli when existing knowledge and apparent action strategies do not work. On a cultural level, the exploitation of existing cultural means and norms for the deliberate production of novel and valuable artifacts is a basis for cultural and technological development and extension of human action possibilities across various domains. It is less clear, however, how creativity develops and how exactly (...) one arrives at generating new action possibilities and producing multiple alternative action strategies using familiar objects. In this theoretical paper, we first consider existing accounts of the creative process in the Alternative Uses Task and then present an alternative interpretation, drawing on sociocultural views and an embodied cognition approach. We explore similarities between the psychological processes underlying the generation of new uses in the Alternative Uses Task and children’s pretend play. We discuss possible cognitive mechanisms and speculate how the generation of new action possibilities for common objects in pretend play can be related to adults’ ability to generate new action strategies associated with object use. Implications for creativity development in humans and embodied artificial agents are discussed. (shrink)

Advanced technologies such as drones, intelligent algorithms and androids have grave implications for human existence. With the purpose of exploring their basis for doing so, the paper proposes a framework for investigating the complex relationship between such devices and human practices and language-mediated cognition. Specifically, it centers on the importance of the typically neglected intermediate layer of culture which not only drives both technophobia and philia but also, more fundamentally, connects pre-reflective experience and socio-material practices by placing advanced technologies in (...) the loop. Theoretically, the paper draws on contributions from performativist Science and Technology Studies and Radically Embodied Cognitive Science and pushes new grounds by stressing their compatibility. Yet, it also emphasizes the importance of the enlanguaged side of cognition which is a requirement for human-style socio-material practices and, hence, the emergence of cultures that fetishizes certain technologies. (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)

In this paper we suggest that Duffley’s sign-based semantics rests on two main claims: a methodological one and an ontological one. The methodological one is the analysis of corpora and the ontological one is the postulate of mental content. By adopting a linguistic enactivist perspective with a Wittgensteinian twist, we endorse Duffley’s methodological claim and suggest that a sign-based semantics doesn’t have to rely on mental content if it takes into account the conception of meaningful material engagement in cognitive archeology (...) and its development into sign-using as an enactive capacity. (shrink)

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan’s experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory shows that (...) while these theories explain complementary aspects of skillful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan’s emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an open-ended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate. (shrink)

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This (...) paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)

Concept formation is a crucial milestone for cognitive development. In the last 40 years, empirical evidence obtained in laboratory settings suggested that babies have a rich conceptual system that expresses in responses to stimuli. However, very little is still known about how concepts develop in every day, ecological contexts. This is due to a lack of studies addressing (i) the intersubjective contexts of activity in which concepts develop and (ii) the meanings that objects that are part of those contexts acquire (...) through material engagement. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of six observations from a longitudinal pilot study carried out at an infant school in Madrid (Spain), with children from ages 5 to 17 months. Children’s interactions with each other, with their teacher, and with objects were recorded every 21 days for 6 months. Results show that when children, in their first year of life, grasp the canonical uses of objects they stop interacting with isolated things and start to interact with members of functional classes. Knowledge about the canonical function of objects grants children access to new forms of interaction with the material world, with others, and with themselves. I, therefore, propose that, in early childhood, general forms of material engagement that take place within culturally organised activities are central to conceptual development. Specifically, I hold that canonical uses of objects are conceptual in nature. Results are discussed in relation to the need for more studies addressing the active role of material culture for cognition in early childhood. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past fifty years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological record can only be an “external” product or the behavioral trace of “internal” representational and computational processes. In comparison, the 4E approach (...) helps us to overcome this dualist representational logic, allowing us to engage directly with the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process, and thus ground a more parsimonious cognitive archaeology. It also treats stone tools, the primary vestiges of hominin thinking, as active participants in mental life. The 4E approach offers a better grounding for understanding hominin technical expertise, a crucially important component of hominin cognitive evolution. (shrink)