Abstract
As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.
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We must acknowledge here that by autonomy of the interactors we should understand a possibly multi-dimensional complex of identities that co-exist in what we call a subject, from his physical body, his sensorimotor integration, his function in the interaction, to his broader contextual, relational and historical roles. Complex interactions may result in the loss of the autonomy associated with a specific identity but they are still social as long as other autonomous identities remain in interaction (e.g., a conversation where an employee loses his job is a definitive blow to the sustained identity of the employee as such, but not to the social agent that still enjoys his autonomy to express his reaction to the situation). We expect that even though the proposed distinction holds in general (encounters are not social if an interactor’s autonomy is lost), specific instances must be unpacked carefully in terms of what identities are at play in what we have loosely termed an interactor.
Participatory sense-making is not restricted to human social interactions. Many social animals build up coherences of significance by engaging in coordinated displays, such as circle-walking in wolves where potential contenders size each other up by making turns around each other (Moran et al. 1981), their intention to fight or not being affected by the emergent coordination. Even in simple models in evolutionary robotics the discrimination between different significant contexts can be performed through appropriate coordination between individuals (Di Paolo, Rohde and De Jaegher 2007; Quinn 2001). Recent work modelling the detection of social contingency in minimal agents shows in explicit terms how individual perception alters its meaning as a result of social coordination (Di Paolo, Rohde and Iizuka 2007).
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We would like to thank Stephen Cowley, Marek McGann and Steve Torrance for their very helpful comments on this paper.
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De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E. Participatory sense-making. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 485–507 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9