AHT: 4.3., p.55
Enaction suggests that meaning is derived from action and action is constrained by the meanings the organism derives from experience, including its experience of the environment. In other words, there can be no experience without action, action and experience are not categorically distinct, they co-arise. In effect, to have an experience is an action. What this requires is a process of viable structural coupling between the organism and its environment and an understanding of how the objects of ‘common sense’ ‘know-how’ are formed. The objects of ‘common sense’ ‘know-how’ do not have clearly independent boundaries from the subject, rather, they are formed in relation to the subject’s past experiences and actions. These points and the role of intentionality and proprioception or sensorimotor capacities are discussed in section 4.14, Enaction. The model of action discussed in chapter 12 draws directly on Enaction.
AHT: Section 4.14. pp.81-84
Common sense knowledge is not well understood through the framework of propositional knowledge. Rather than being “knowledge that”, common sense is better understood as “knowledge how” because common sense is formed through the accumulation of past experiences and actions. The objects of the life world that stem from ‘knowledge how’ do not have clearly independent boundaries. Their boundaries are context dependent and depend on the action being performed. Such a life world becomes very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to conceptualise within the strong sense of representation.
Indeed, if we wish to recover common sense, then we must invert the representationist attitude by treating context-dependent know-how not as a residual artefact that can be progressively eliminated by the discovery of more sophisticated rules but as, in fact, the very essence of creative cognition. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.148)
Understanding how an individual enacts meaning by bringing it forth from a background has been the project of philosophical hermeneutics as it was pioneered by Martin Heidegger.
Since Heidegger, continental philosophers have continued to consider the ways in which our experience of being in the world is intimately connected to our bodies, language and social history.
The central insight of this nonobjectivist orientation is the view that knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history. They enable us to make sense of our world; or in more phenomenological language, they are the structures by which we exist in the manner of “having a world” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.149-150)
This project has begun to influence cognitive science. The principal challenge that this continental non-objectivist philosophical tradition presents to cognitive science is the need to relinquish the assumption that the world can be independent of the knower. Cognitive science, on the other hand, challenges continental philosophy with the task of linking the study of culturally embodied experience with the observations of cognitive science. Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) come to two crucial conclusions:
If we are forced to admit that cognition cannot be properly understood without common sense, and that common sense is none other than our bodily and social history, then the inevitable conclusion is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination. If this critique is valid, then scientific progress in understanding cognition will not be forthcoming unless we start from a different basis from the idea of a pregiven world that exists “out there” and is internally recovered in a representation. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.150)
What does it mean to say that the mind and the world “stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent co-origination” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.150)? Varela states in Steps to a Science of Inter-being that: “the mind is not in the head” (Varela 1999a, p.72). Mind arises from the completely embodied process of actively coping with the world. It is the organism’s active handling of the objects of the world that forms the basis of the subject. Equally, the arising of the objects of the world is dependent on the subject actively engaging with them. In other words, you “cannot see the object as independently being ‘out-there’. The object arises because of your activity, so, in fact, you and the object are co-emerging, co-arising” (Varela 1999a, p.73).
To emphasise the importance of the active aspect of mind, Varela discusses the well known experiment involving two kittens. The first explores the world whilst pulling the other in a cart behind it. The first kitten acted normally when released from its load. The kitten that had been restrained, however, was unable to navigate space. The experiment shows how the very concept of space arises from an active engagement in movement.
Cognition is something that you bring forth by the act of handling, by the fact of doing it actively. It is the very foundational principle of what mind is all about. That entails, as I tried to show above, that it is a deep co-implication, a co-determination of what seems to be outside and what seems to be inside. In other words, the world out there and what I do to find myself in that world, cannot be separated. The process itself makes them completely interdependent, quite literally so, as seen with the example of the kittens. (Varela 1999a, p.73)
Mind arises not in some imaginary inner space, nor purely as a reaction to an outer reality, but in the “non-place of the co-determination of inner and outer” (Varela 1999a, p.73). Mind is also a product of the entire organism. Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, p.173) bring these elements to fruition in the concept of embodied action or enaction. The term “embodied” here acknowledges that experiences arise within the context of having a body with sensorimotor capacities and these sensorimotor capacities are “embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.173). The term “action” emphasises the fact that the actions of these sensory motor processes are fundamental to cognition. In effect, cognition is action.
In a nutshell, the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.173)
Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, p.176) discuss numerous examples of perceptually guided action. They show how Jean Piaget’s “genetic epistemology” can be considered demonstrative of how cognitive structures emerge from recurrent patterns of sensorimotor activity. Their discussion of colour perception is particularly informative.
According to the enactive approach, cognition is the enactment of the world based on a history of viable structural coupling. Viable (rather than optimal) couplings retain the ontogenal and phylogenal integrity of the system. This viability requires only a proscriptive, rather than prescriptive logic. “Thus cognition as embodied action both poses the problems and specifies those paths that must be tread or laid down for their solution” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.205). This model provides an understanding of the “aboutness or intentionality of cognition as embodied action” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p,205). Intentionality is expressed through the directedness of action. Intentionality is what the system assumes the possibilities for action to be given how the system understands the world to be. In terms of how the world satisfies, or fails to satisfy, the system’s understanding of these possibilities for action, intentionality becomes how the resulting actions fulfil, or fail to fulfil, the assumed possibilities. Enaction understands a cognitive system either by describing the structure of the system and its subsystems or by describing the behaviour of the system in terms of the forms of coupling it is capable of. In employing these two perspectives, cognitive scientists can understand how a particular environment constrains a cognitive system and how this cognitive system represents these constraints.
In so doing, we are able to explain how regularities – sensorimotor and environmental – emerge from structural coupling. The research task in cognitive science is to make transparent the mechanisms by which such coupling actually unfolds and thereby how specific regularities arise. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.206)
In the enactive approach, the environment tends to recede into the background in comparison to cognitivism or emergence” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.207). The environment “now enters in explanations only on those occasions where systems undergo breakdowns or suffer events that cannot be satisfied by their structures” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.207). This leads to a shift in our concept of intelligence. Rather than being the capacity to solve problems, it becomes the capacity to “enter into a shared world of significance” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.207).