Embodiment, enaction, and culture: Investigating the constitution of the shared world
Abstract
Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives that range from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. The book brings together new contributions by some of the most renowned scholars in the field and the latest results from up-and-coming researchers. The contributors explore conceptual foundations, drawing on work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and respond to recent critiques. They consider whether there is something in the self that precedes intersubjectivity and inquire into the relation between culture and consciousness, the nature of shared meaning and social understanding, the social dimension of shame, and the nature of joint affordances. They apply the notion of radical enactive cognition to evolutionary anthropology, and examine the concept of the body in relation to culture in light of studies in such fields as phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and psychopathology. Through such investigations, the book breaks ground for the study of the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture.
... From a broader perspective, the sense-making process through sensory-motor coupling doesn't only form individual experience but also constitutes an intersubjective shared world. For Durt et al., 'participatory and broader collective sense-making processes manifested in dynamic forms of intercorporeality, collective body memory, artefacts, affordances, scaffolding, use of symbols, and so on' ( [8], p.2). It means that while cultural artefacts (including technologies), shared beliefs, ideologies, and patterned behaviour become integral to the sense-making process, emerging meanings enter the shared world and constitute the cultural realm [8]. ...
... For Durt et al., 'participatory and broader collective sense-making processes manifested in dynamic forms of intercorporeality, collective body memory, artefacts, affordances, scaffolding, use of symbols, and so on' ( [8], p.2). It means that while cultural artefacts (including technologies), shared beliefs, ideologies, and patterned behaviour become integral to the sense-making process, emerging meanings enter the shared world and constitute the cultural realm [8]. It suggests that while each online and studio participant's individual experiences varied because of the differences in their learning context and medium, this might have shaped their shared sense-making process. ...
... From the enactivist perspective, 'sense-making is largely a collective activity through which our environment becomes a world of shared significance' . ( [8], p.2). 'Mutual interaction' , which has been defined as a 'coordination between intentional and embodied agents' ( [23], p.467) is the key component of constructing a shared world. In the training, during the remote interactions, each item for technological mediation (camera, screen, cables, etc.) impacted participants' attention span and direction of their attention. ...
This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in one of the physical training institutions that offer the Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (LBMS) certification program in 2021. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the training was held in a hybrid format in which some participants were in the studio while others were attending remotely via Zoom. Zoom-mediated movement training for long hours revealed how the intervention of telematic technologies challenged practitioners’ sensorial experience and sense-making process. Moreover, bringing co-located and remote participants’ experiences together in the hybrid setting disclosed different modes of interaction dynamics in the studio and online. Overall, participants described their hybrid experience as a clash. In the article, starting from unfolding those clashes from the enactive perspective, I discuss how remote intercorporeality through an audio–video streaming system, Zoom, challenges participants’ sensorial experience and how remote interaction affects the shared sense-making process in the hybrid format setting.
... Consequently, in order to understand cognition, recognition of the role of context is vital. When considering human functioning, the environment is also regarded not simply to be a physical one, but a social-cultural one, constituted by others, alongside their artifacts and shared structures of meaning 213 . Embedment highlights that, across the timescales of evolutionary change, sociocultural development, life-span learning, and moment-to-moment cognition, human beings are both deeply influenced by, and in turn influence, their surrounding environments. ...
... Extension is an idea in many ways similar to embedment, but which makes a more radical claim. Specifically, it is the idea that cognitive processes are often best understood as extending out beyond the body and looping through the world 213 . To continue the mathematics example, rather than merely understanding a calculator as supporting the cognitive processes of an individual, an extended view of mind would hold that the calculator becomes part of the cognitive process. ...
Work at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry has an extensive and influential history, and has received increased attention recently, with the emergence of professional associations and a growing literature. In this paper, we review key advances in work on philosophy and psychiatry, and their related clinical implications. First, in understanding and categorizing mental disorder, both naturalist and normativist considerations are now viewed as important – psychiatric constructs necessitate a consideration of both facts and values. At a conceptual level, this integrative view encourages moving away from strict scientism to soft naturalism, while in clinical practice this facilitates both evidence‐based and values‐based mental health care. Second, in considering the nature of psychiatric science, there is now increasing emphasis on a pluralist approach, including ontological, explanatory and value pluralism. Conceptually, a pluralist approach acknowledges the multi‐level causal interactions that give rise to psychopathology, while clinically it emphasizes the importance of a broad range of “difference‐makers”, as well as a consideration of “lived experience” in both research and practice. Third, in considering a range of questions about the brain‐mind, and how both somatic and psychic factors contribute to the development and maintenance of mental disorders, conceptual and empirical work on embodied cognition provides an increasingly valuable approach. Viewing the brain‐mind as embodied, embedded and enactive offers a conceptual approach to the mind‐body problem that facilitates the clinical integration of advances in both cognitive‐affective neuroscience and phenomenological psychopathology.
... Using technology to predict one's death may sound extreme. Yet, we should never forget that the symbol itself of the relationship between humans and technology in Western culture literally identifies a predictor (see at least Kahn 1970 andDougherty 2006): Prometheus, as the symbol itself of the relationship between humans and technology, literally identifies who can "know" (μανθάνω) "before" (πρό), which means both the general capability to be far-sighted (as shown by Prometheus, for instance, when he gives humans Hephaestus' fire and Athena's wisdom in the arts) and the particular capability to predict (as shown by Prometheus, for instance, when he predicts Zeus' future). Moreover, Prometheus gives humans the capability to predict. ...
... 17 As far as sensemaking is concerned, I mean what is generally described as what starts with a rationalisation of one's actions (see, for instance, Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld 2005). Other references may be considered to further reflect on the contemporary notion of sensemaking (even though the length of the article necessarily limits my possibility to develop them in what follows), especially at the intersection between phenomenology and cognitive sciences, starting with enactivism's contributions (see, for instance, Durt et al. 2017, Vörös 2017, Di Paolo 2021and Marin 2022. Also, contributions that may be complementary to the rationalisation on one's actions proposed by Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld 2005 can be found in Solomon 1993, as far as the relationship between sensemaking and emotions is concerned, and in Andersen et al. 2020, as far as the relationship between sensemaking and social sciences is concerned. ...
In the following article, I shall focus on emerging technologies that increasingly try to predict our death, i.e. when we will die and from what cause. More precisely, I shall focus on the possible answer to the following philosophical question: why are we taking predictive technologies to the extreme? First, I shall reflect upon the results of recent empirical research. Second, I shall address the issue of taking predictive technologies to the extreme, i.e. predicting one’s death, through philosophical tools, from thought experiments to a philosophical perspective on the possible key reason why we are using emerging technologies’ unprecedented power of prediction to improve more and more our knowledge of when we will die and from what cause. The philosophical answer I propose is the following: even death clocks, together with other kinds of emerging technologies that gain an unprecedented power of prediction, may somehow save us by reactivating our sensemaking whenever our life is uncertain and demanding to the point that we cannot face our open future by planning and acting by ourselves. If it is true that the price we pay, i.e. a kind of automation of our own future, is extremely high, it is also true that, in our unprecedentedly uncertain and demanding time, autonomous sensemaking seems to scare us even more.
... The school, understood from a material perspective, is part of the hidden curriculum that students learn through the implicit practices that the architecture and the space-time distribution generate -through performative and embodied acts -between the student and teacher. Recently, new proposals have emerged for understanding objects, social structures and human practices as "agents", that is, as actors-even if they are inorganic and inert materials-that actively construct and configure the sociocultural practices of human beings (Monforte, 2018), facilitating the construction of not only the environment in which human beings find themselves but also their own organic, cognitive and cultural existence (Durt, Fuchs and Tewes, 2018). ...
... In this sense, the major limits of this space-time cause our corporeality and its meanings to no longer reside in our own embodiment or the position it adopts. Its meanings should be understood within the relationship that is constructed within the limits of the space-time occupied by both the individual and the group, that is, in the relationship that is established with the rest of the corporealities that cohabit a space, in the binding relationship of the intercorporealities (Durt, Fuchs and Tewes, 2018). Three elements of the meaning of the body in public space are defined: 1) my corporeality, with a self-constructed meaning and symbolism; 2) my corporeality and the meaning and symbolism granted to it by other corporealities in the group relationship; and 3) my position within space-time with respect to the group and, at the same time, the position that the group itself occupies with respect to the space-time limit, which in turn constructs a meaning and symbolism about my body. ...
This paper presents a theoretical discussion about space-time as a curricular element which the student learns certain dynamics and positions to knowledge. The interactions to student's whit curriculars elements are necessary to build knowledge, like other curricular elements, the perspective of use of this element is important to type of learning that is built. Both the organization the space-time and the position and orientation of the bodies in classroom can favours different types of social interactions and learnings in students. Traditionally, the disposition of classroom has followed a technical paradigm and has developed an organizational structures and space-times focused on effectiveness. This perspective propose activities and learnings hierarchical which teachers is the centre of knowledge and they expertise and experience are important to learn. In this sense, students have a secondary plan of action based to assimilation and repetition learning. However, other perspectives focus to the distribution of the classroom for build a space-time and bodies focused on construction of horizontal relationships between peer through activities that ʺuseʺ the space-time to suggest common interaction and learnings. This work is focussed to analyses these organizations to classroom and explain the embodied symbology, the communicative relationships, and the possibilities of knowledge construction that we build through the use of the space-time in classroom.
... Embodied intersubjectivity emphasizes the sense of bodies mutually communicating, which in some ways is close to the concept of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001;Trevarthen & Hubley, 1978) and explorations on inter-corporealities (Durt et al., 2017). Brandt (2004) proposes that human-horse interactions are intersubjective particularly through bodily communication, developing through mutually and cyclically repeated common language between a horse and a rider. ...
... Deste modo, a narrativa incorpora outros meios e suportes para refletir a própria pesquisa, aqui configurada em uma narrativa textual tecida em fluxos de imersão corpo-obra-ambiente. (NAGATOMO, 1992, p. 198), mantêm-se atentos ao pássaro, que, por sua vez, se mantém atento aos performers atentos. Trata-se de um modo de atenção visto como estado celular integrado de conexão; a atenção não apenas como estado mental, desconectado do corpo, mas como estado de percepção, somático, entendido na perspectiva da cognição incorporada (DURT et al., 2017). Distinto, portanto, de uma visão solipsista e desencarnada de intersubjetivi- importância ou superioridade de algo ou alguém. ...
Este artigo traz reflexões acerca da corporeidade ecocêntrica na prática dramatúrgica em campo expandido, articuladas a vídeo-ecoperformance, tendo em perspectiva o corpo em experiência e interação com a natureza nos ambientes natural e urbano. A Prática como Pesquisa (PaR) e a abordagem somático-performativa corroboram o centramento corpo-natureza, no qual as dimensões cognitiva, artística, ecológica e humana se fundem com potência para gerar desdobramentos concretos para além de obra videográfica. As dramaturgias do corpo e da obra são discutidas à luz da abordagem ecológico-enativa da cognição humana. Engajamento sensoriomotor, busca ativa e sensibilidade são condições cognitivas chaves sugestivas para ignição de processos cognitivos mais elaborados no espectador diante da vídeo-ecoperformance para práticas ambientais colaborativas nas esferas global e local.
... In particular, third-person modellings 24 ignore the primordial pre-reflective self-awareness related to the lived body [Leib] (Fuchs, 2012: 154). The most recent enactivist approaches, focussing on the affective dimension (Durt et al., 2017;Colombetti, 2014) endorse an integrated approach to the organic ground of 'aliveness' and the phenomenal level of 'experience' right from the start (Thompson, 2007;Gallagher, 2003a). In particular, I concur with Gallagher's suggestion of a «mutual enlightenment» and constraint between neuroscientific descriptions and phenomenological conceptualizations (1997) as an effective and promising strategy 25 . ...
The feeling of being alive still constitutes a major blind spot of contemporary
affective sciences research. The mainstream view accepts it as an ‘umbrella notion’
comprising different states, such as M. Ratcliffe’s «feelings of being», T. Fuchs’s
«feeling of being alive», E.M. Engelen’s «Gefühl des Lebendigseins», etc. In contrast, I
argue for an account of the feeling of being alive as a unique feeling that can be
described in several ways. Empirical support for this view comes mainly from Carvalho
and Damasio’s hypothesis of the distinctness of the interoceptive system as the
physiological underpinning of this feeling. This account is also in line with many other
approaches recognizing the role of interoception proper in mind and subjectivity
grounding, collected by Tsakiris & De Preester. Over recent decades, Damasio’s
organic descriptions have been widely acknowledged as neurophysiological
counterparts of philosophical/psychological concepts. However, in my view they have
been often misinterpreted, especially due to the mainstream Ratcliffian interpretation
mediating his ideas amongst philosophers. Throughout the paper, a critical inquiry into
Damasio’s conceptualization is provided, by means of conceptual analysis and an
overall taxonomy of the several affective states he has proposed over the past few
decades. Ultimately, a critical discussion of his own account of the feeling of being
alive is offered from a philosophical viewpoint.
Este artigo enfoca as dimensões cognitivas envolvidas no processo de criação de [título de obra removido para avaliação]. Esta obra multimídia foi composta pelos autores a partir do conceito de Equilíbrio dinâmico, inferido por [nome do autor removido para avaliação] na sua pesquisa de doutorado no contexto da Capoeira Regional, a partir de um horizonte metodológico performativo. Inicialmente, abordamos as noções de memória e consciência em uma perspectiva incorporada da experiência neste contexto. Então, discutimos as relações música/movimento, as perspectivas musicais do arcabouço cognitivo e seus desdobramentos na noção de equilíbrio. Finalmente, apresentamos brevemente o conceito de Equilíbrio Dinâmico e discutimos o processo de criação de [título de obra removido para avaliação].
Partindo da descrição de uma experiência de imersão, vivida por uma das autoras, numa videoconferência, via plataforma Zoom - em que, por graus de envolvimento, os espaços das telas foram confundidos e misturaram-se na sua percepção - o artigo pretende provocar reflexões a respeito do papel dos hábitos perceptivos e motores, na constituição das relações com o ambiente e com os outros, tanto em contextos da vida cotidiana, como na arte. Toma-se como hipótese que habilidades sensório motoras específicas, solicitadas nas interações virtuais correntes, e, mediadas pelas plataformas em uso, ainda estão em processo de desenvolvimento e integração. Adaptação e habituação estão, portanto, em curso. À luz de contribuições da abordagem da cognição corporalizada, das ciências cognitivas, assim como da empatia estética, essa hipótese conduzirá à construção de uma argumentação que coloca em foco a centralidade da percepção cinestésica nas nossas imersões na vida, na criação e na fruição artísticas.
Book Review
in 'Phenomenological Reviews'
https://reviews.ophen.org/2022/12/20/tewes-stanghellini-time-body-review/
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