Sense-Making in the Wild: The Historical and Ecological Depth of Enactive Processes of Life and Cognition

Abstract

The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description of sense-making entails the co-emergence of an agent’s self and a meaningful world, as well as the emergence of a normativity that guides the behaviour of the coupled agent-environment system. This emergent process happens at different levels of interactions: biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal and linguistic. Sense-making therefore accounts for the natural origins of intentionality and meaning and gives continuity to the emergent enactive processes of life and mind. The standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and neglects many historical and ecological aspects relevant to the scientific study of life and mind processes as they happen in concrete fields of action. To address this issue, I propose the enlarged description of sense-making in the wild, which is based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development defines sense-making as a historically situated process that transforms the previously given dynamical configuration of the agent-environment system into a new one. Enactive-situated normativity asserts that in addition to the agent’s self-maintenance and the material constraints of the agent-environment system, many dynamical constraints, ecologically situated, shape the origin, maintenance and development of sense-making processes. Finally, transverse emergence describes the transformational process of the whole agent-environment system dynamically, as a reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors that exhibit the typical behaviour of the system. Sense-making in the wild thus aims to facilitate conceptual tools to study enactive cognition, as it happens in concrete fields of action.