Abstract
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.
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Notes
Because the extended evolutionary synthesis is essentially pluralistic in its approach, and because it challenges central assumptions of traditional or modern evolutionary synthesis, one can argue that it is neither a synthesis nor an extension of the traditional view (dos Reis & Araújo, 2020). We, however, do not take a stance on that issue.
A similar view has been put forth by Konrad Werner (2020). Werner’s idea of construction of a cognitive niche is based on the distinction between metabolism and meta-metabolism (Moreno et al., 1997), where metabolic processes enable organisms to survive, and meta-metabolic ones guide organisms towards attractors and away from repellents, therefore aiding and enhancing metabolic processes. Werner argues that organism and niche are codetermined in two ways. First, the construction of a metabolic niche produces a stable, operationally closed, tenant. As organisms develop the capacities to act in their metabolic niches, they construct cognitive niches, which marks a second step of codetermination. Given Werner’s reliance on a distinction between metabolic and meta-metabolic processes, and given that cognition is understood as a process of the latter type, it follows that the conditions for the emergence of life are not the same as the conditions for the emergence of cognition. This seems to be incompatible with a strong construal of the life-mind continuity thesis, as it is defended in TEM and perhaps more notoriously by Thompson (2007) and more recently by Di Paolo et al (2018).
Whether or not this is a difference of kind or degree depends on whether other animals have a “theory of mind” like we do, that is, whether they are capable of ascribing intentional states to other animals. Research on the subject of animal cognition has been live yet controversial (see Heyes, 2015, for a historical overview and a methodological critique). In this argument, we do not rely on whether non-human animals have a theory of mind. We do rely, however, on the less controversial claim that there is something about human social behavior that sets us significantly apart from other animals.
We use ‘highly normative’ to distinguish it from the normativity present in non-human animals (see van de Waal, Borgeaud, & Whiten, 2013 for an example of socially inherited norms in apes).
Naturally, satisfactory explanation of how behaviorally modern humans came to existence is much more intricate than what we explore here.
Consider again the example above: at the neural level, Malafouris hypothesizes that manipulating clay tokens lead to a reorganization in the neural connectivity of the intraparietal area, specifically linking the anterior intraparietal area, which is responsible for manual tasks, with the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus and the angular gyrus, which are areas associated, respectively, with semantic associations and metaphorical thinking (see Malafouris, 2013, p. 115).
Of course, a skeptic about the external world could insist that we cannot know whether our actions are in fact real—maybe, their argument goes, we can only be sure about the content of some of our present-tense experiences. But that would imply a conception of mind as a disembodied entity, something that enactivists fundamentally reject.
We acknowledge that our proposal may not satisfy anti-realists who hold that entities postulated by physical theories are merely culturally enabled abstractions, so they are not objective or real in a sufficiently robust sense. As we have argued in Sect. 3.3, however, symbolic numerical counting, which is presumably a paradigmatic case of culturally enabled abstraction, is historically dependent upon material engagements. Therefore, it is not separable from our actions in the world. This, we believe, offers good initial grounds to resist the idea that theoretical entities are not real.
Similarly to enactivism, ecological psychology, which was originally developed by Gibson (1979/2015) has its roots on pragmatism. Ecological psychologists emphasize the role of agency in perceptual cognition and reject that organisms have to enrich information about distal physical structures through computations over mental representations. Despite these initial similarities, the authors of TEM took Gibson’s ideas to overemphasize the environmental side of the agent-environment relations, supposedly downplaying the organism’s role in cognition (Cf. Varela et al., 2016, pp. 203–204). Recently, Harry Heft (2020) argued for a divergence between the two approaches by reading enactivism under an idealist light, in contrast with Gibson’s professed realism. Despite their complicated past, recent developments indicate that ecological psychology and enactivism can be put to work together (Baggs & Chemero, 2021; Carvalho & Rolla, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2019; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2018; Rolla & Novaes, 2020).
Natural drift should not be confused with genetic drift, which is the change in frequency of gene variants in the genetic compositions of populations due to the randomness of sampling, as opposed to genetic variation by adaptation.
These points can be summarized as (1) specific genes rarely determine the manifestation of isolated traits (linkage and pleiotropy), (2) development is determined by epigenetic factors, (3) genetic frequency is random in maintained population size (genetic drift), (4) some groups undergo very little changes over large timescales despite significant changes in the environment and high genetic diversity (stasis), and (5) there is a need for reconceiving the individual as a unit of selection.
Note that their criticism is directed towards what has been called empirical adaptationism, the view that natural selection is the main mechanism responsible for evolutionary changes. They do not affect (at least prima facie) explanatory and methodological varieties of adaptationism (see Godfrey-Smith, 2001; Orzack & Forber, 2017).
The extreme version of this tendency of isolating individual levels of analysis for explaining evolution and natural selection is the selfish gene hypothesis (Dawkins, 1976). Opposing views, such as evolution as natural drift (see also the notion of group selection in Wynne-Edwards, 1982), suggest that the understanding of the evolutionary process will involve ‘a clear articulation of various units of selection and their relations’ (Varela et al., 2016, p. 193).
As one anonymous reviewer brought to our attention, this definition of agency has a flair of circularity. Regarding this alleged circularity, we may follow Di Paolo et al., (2017, p. 127) in their definition of an agent as an autonomous system capable of modulating its environmental couplings in an adaptive manner. Because the elements of this definition are themselves defined in dynamical terms, not presupposing agency, this definition mitigates the charge of circularity.
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Acknowledgements
We dedicate this paper to the memory of Humberto Maturana. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their positive remarks, suggestions and criticisms that have greatly improved the quality of this work. We would also like to thank the members of the Cognition, Language, Enaction and Affectivity group (CLEA) for commenting on previous versions of this paper.
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Rolla, G., Figueiredo, N. Bringing forth a world, literally. Phenom Cogn Sci 22, 931–953 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09760-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09760-z