Reconceiving representation-hungry cognition: an ecological-enactive proposal

“Every science operates with theoretical assumptions that guide scientific research, shaping how scientists think about the phenomena they investigate, framing the research questions scientists ask (Fleck, 1979; Kuhn, 1962).”

“Recursive dependence of this kind between processes yields an organisational property often referred to as ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela, 1979).”

“Enactive theories might then be argued to be restricted in their scope to cases of cognition in which ‘the world can serve as its own best model’ (Brooks, 1991).”

“This is where the enactive approach to cognitive science enters the story (Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2010; Thompson, 2007; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).”

“yields an organisational property often referred to as ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela, 1979).”

“See also Di Paolo (2005).”

“Varela (1991, 1997, 1999) proposed thinking of agents as bundles of ‘micro-identities’.”

“Indeed, we would argue that the ambient array does not contain information about affordances independently of how the structure in the ambient array can be used to do things by the animals in the form of life (Hutto & Myin, 2017; Van Dijk, Withagen, & Bongers, 2015).”

“We can, for instance, think about all of the objects that belong to the Pope (to offer an example discussed by Clark and Toribio (1994)).”

“In the biological world, we find networks of processes that produce and sustain an identity at multiple levels of organisation from ‘microbial communities, nervous systems, immune systems, multicellular organisms, ecosystems, and so on’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 46; c.f. Varela, 1991, 1997).”

“An example is the tension one experiences when someone stands too close to us in conversation (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2007; Rietveld, 2008).”

“…is not best understood at the basic level of biological autonomy associated with metabolism (though metabolism will certainly play a central role in cognition through the dense reciprocal interactions between bodily affective processes and cognitive processes (Colombetti, 2014; Pessoa, 2013)).”

“In the biological world, we find networks of processes that produce and sustain an identity at multiple levels of organisation from ‘microbial communities, nervous systems, immune systems, multicellular organisms, ecosystems, and so on’ (Thompson, 2007, p. 46; c.f. Varela, 1991, 1997).”

“Online control is typically distinguished from offline cognition on the basis of decoupling (Clark & Grush, 1999).”

“…of so-called representation-hungry cognition in terms of temporally extended activities in which the agent skilfully coordinates to a richly structured landscape of affordances (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2016; c.f. Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016).”

“The notion of affective significance we have appealed to in explaining the enactive notion of sense-making presupposes the meaning that is already present in the environment because of the affordances it offers (Hodges & Baron, 1992).”

“See Barandiaran and Moreno (2006) for more discussion of this last point.”

“An example is the tension one experiences when someone stands too close to us in conversation (Dreyfus & Kelly, 2007; Rietveld, 2008).”

“See Barandiaran and Moreno (2006) for more discussion of this last point.”

“Situated in a concrete situation, creative imagination opens one up to hitherto neglected affordances (Van Dijk & Rietveld, under review; Hutchins, 2010).”

“For further discussion of the sense in which bacteria qualify as minimal agents, see Fulda (2017).”

“She is responsive to the multiplicity of affordances as a whole, ready to make a move that will put her on the right track for the whole route ahead (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Seifert et al., 2014).”

“In what follows, we will use the term ‘representation’ to denote states of a system that stand in and function as surrogates for things in their absence (Clark & Grush, 1999; Haugeland, 1991; Orlandi, 2014; Ramsey, 2007).”

“Degenaar and O’Regan (2017) distinguish sensorimotor enactivism from AE enactivism.”

“However, in creatures with more complex biological organisations, patterns of sensorimotor behaviour can quite literally take on a life of their own (Di Paolo et al., 2017; Egbert & Barandiaran, 2014).”

“22 In EM-imagining, the perceiver relies on the very same attunement to external dynamics that is used in action to coordinate to affordances.”

“…of this type with frequently encountered passages in the more recent writings of enactivists in which organism and environment are described in terms of ‘co-determination’ and ‘mutual interdependence’ (Varela et al., 1991, p. 177; also see Di Paolo, 2018; McGann, 2014; Thompson, 2007, pp. 152–154).”

“McGann (2014) is an important exception, and more recently Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran (2017).”

“…of so-called representation-hungry cognition in terms of temporally extended activities in which the agent skilfully coordinates to a richly structured landscape of affordances (Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Van Dijk & Rietveld, 2016; c.f. Van Dijk & Withagen, 2016).”

“Also see Rucińska (2016) for a helpful treatment of play in terms of skilled engagement with affordances in an intersubjective context.”

“Consider the following case from Shapiro (2013).”

“Moreover, this is clearly not all that one can do with chairs: they can, for instance, be used for firewood, in a children’s party game, and even play the role of an example in a philosophical argument. Affordances occupy a place in historically developed constellations of regular, more or less stable patterns of acti…”

“Current machines exhibit some intelligence but no sense-making, defined as an agent’s “meaningful relation to the environment” 4 .”

“Merleau-Ponty understands life as a process always delicately balanced between relatively stable equilibrium with the environment, and disequilibrium, or instability (MerleauPonty, 2003, p. 149; Rietveld, 2008b; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2018).”