Enactivist Interventions

Shaun Gallagher's 2005 book, How the Body Shapes the Mind (OUP), had a huge impact on the philosophy of mind, making the embodied and phenomenological approach to the mind part of the mainstream. In his new, 2017 book, Gallagher offers, among other things, both an accurate overview of the embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded (4E) approaches of the last two decades or so, and a new focus on its neglected origins and potential source of future creativity in this field, namely, pragmatism, Gallagher claims.In the first two chapters of the book, Gallagher looks at the big picture and the most general trends in nonclassical cognitive science and philosophy of mind. There is a lot of diversity in the approaches that are usually labelled as 4E, and it is important to structure this diversity in some intelligible way. Gallagher does this by considering the issue of how radical each proposal is. By “how radical” he means how far an approach is from classical, computational, and representational cognitive science. The best measures to consider here are: commitment to the existence of representations, in some form or other, and individualism, in one form or other, that is, whether the organism or some subunit of it is taken as more or less sufficient for mentality.On this scale of radicalness, Gallagher puts forward a scheme of four general categories of theories, from the least to the most radical ones: weak Embodied Cognition (EC), Functionalist EC, Biological EC, and Enactivist EC. The first two are consistent with classical cognitivism in that their main proposal is the existence and importance of body-formatted representations (B-formats) and action-oriented representations (AORs). The biological and the enactive approaches, however, are true alternatives to classical cognitivism in that they consider the body as such (rather than body-representations) as constitutive to cognition, perception, emotion, and so on, and as inextricably interconnected with the brain and the environment. This interconnection is not merely causal, but it is, as we learn from chapters 3 and 4, what constitutes a minded subject.I found chapters 3 and 4 very interesting, because Gallagher offers a credible case for classical pragmatism (Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead) as a precursor of 4E, and for neopragmatism (Robert Brandom) to integrate certain aspects of 4E that otherwise appear to be in conflict. Gallagher points out that pragmatism has been hardly mentioned by enactivists, although their work clearly contains elements that are central to the ideas of embodied cognition and extended mind. Indeed, Dewey and Mead anticipate the essential brain-body-environment interaction, whereas Pierce the idea of the extended mind. Gallagher offers plenty of textual evidence for this claim. Moreover, pragmatism can also be interpreted as a resource for replying to one of the most popular objections to the extended mind thesis, the “coupling-constitution fallacy” (Adams and Aizawa). This alleged fallacy consists in mistakenly inferring a constitutive relation between two individuals from the existence of a systematic and tight causal interdependence between them. Applied to the case of a cognitive system, the fallacy would be to infer that some parts of the external, extraneural reality are constitutive parts of the cognitive system just because there is a tight and systematic causal interplay between them.The basic answer is to point out that the supposed fallacy assumes that the agent's cognitive system is already self-sufficient, autonomous, and that the question of mind extension is a question of when it is justified to take parts of the environment (understood, therefore, as separate and independent of the agent's cognitive system) as parts of the cognitive system. The pragmatist would rather deny this assumption and highlight that the organism-environment interconnectedness is the default, and hence the very idea of the “internal-external” divide is flawed. Similarly, underived intentionality, which is taken as the mark of the mental (Brentano) or, lately, of the cognitive (Adams and Aizawa) can be analyzed based on neopragmatist resources. Thus, Brandom's point that the most fundamental form of intentionality (aboutness) is practical rather than symbolic-representational-semantic can be used to defend both the embodied and the extended mind theses against the objection that intentionality, intuitively, appears to be tied to the agent's brain. If all forms of intentionality were tied to the agent's brain, then, of course, the coupling-constitution fallacy would have a bite, assuming it is intentionality which is really the mark of the mental. If neopragmatists are right, however, there is a fundamental form of intentionality which transcends the brain-world boundary. Intentionality is further discussed in detail in chapter 4, where Gallagher puts forward an embodied approach to it, quite different from the mainstream approach we are used to from the armchair philosophy of mind literature. Here the focus is on practical and social aspects of aboutness, such as Merleau-Ponty's idea of intercorporeity, that constitute the most fundamental level of mentality, as evidenced, for instance, in empirical research on infant-caregiver interactions.Pragmatism and neopragmatism appear, for Gallagher, to unify or integrate the extended and the embodied aspects of the mind, which, on the face of it have been treated separately and sometimes in conflict, given that extended mind defenders are typically functionalist about mental states, which does not square well with embodied phenomenologists’ idea of holistic autopoietic systems. Gallagher believes that it is some form of pragmatism that will be able to offer a more embodied coherent notion of extended mind.The second half of the book deals with a number of particular 4E-related topics rather than with the big picture. In chapter 5 we are offered a view on how to understand the notion of representation in weak EC, which ultimately leads to building a representationless, radical enactivist theory of action. Here Gallagher takes issue with two notions of minimal representation, Pre-Intentional Acts (Rowlands) and AORs (Wheeler), and argues, quite convincingly in my view, that at the end of the day there is not much left of the idea of representation, that is, of anything like a full-fledged notion satisfying all the criteria for something to count as so in the classical sense. In the end, Gallagher argues, if the effort invested into trying to justify the existence and alleged explanatory work of representations is much greater than the effort put into a nonrepresentationalist view, then the very notion of representation is at best redundant.The sixth chapter focuses on the issue of whether there is inference in perception, and argues for an enactive, noninferential view. Gallagher discusses several inferentialist views, including the predictive coding theory, recently embraced and popularized by Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, and argues that it is based on quite implausible assumptions, such as the brain being isolated from the world and having access only to effects of stimuli. On the contrary, an enactive and ecological view has it that the brain is attuned to information in the world, meaning it is directly involved with the world.Chapter 7 discusses the problem of action and free will. The central topic here is how Benjamin Libet's famous experiments can be dealt with in an enactive paradigm. Gallagher claims that there has been a lot of confused interpretation of Libet's results, and once we opt for some basic principles of enactivism, the impressionistic claims to the effect that Libet's experiments endanger the existence of free will come out as quite unjustified. The main point of such an enactive approach to the experiments is that to focus on the subsecond, subpersonal level is to look in the wrong place for freedom of the will. Free will “cannot be squeezed into the elementary timescale of 150–350 milliseconds; free will is a longer-term phenomenon. . . . Second, the notion of free will does not apply primarily to abstract motor processes or even to bodily movements that make up intentional actions—rather it applies to intentional actions themselves, described at the most appropriate pragmatic level of description” (143).The shorter chapter 8 is dedicated to an enrichment of Alva Noë's sensorimotor enactivism by the addition of two important elements of embodiment: affect and intersubjectivity.The last two chapters of the book put forward the idea that even higher-level mental phenomena such as reflection, thought, and mathematical reasoning are to be treated in an enactivist paradigm. Here Gallagher introduces the notion of an affordance space, derived from Gibson's notion of an affordance. “An affordance space is the (abstract) range of possibilities provided by any change in body or environment. An individual's occurrent affordance space is defined by evolution (the fact that she has hands), development (her life-stage—infant, adult, aged), and by social and cultural practices (normative constraints)” (174). These notions are then deployed in an empirically supported analysis and speculation about how the human hands and other bodily features modulate sophisticated cognitive processes, like reasoning and imagination.To summarize, Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work, extremely rich in content; it offers a genuinely enactive and embodied view of a wide range of mental phenomena, and, methodologically, it spans across the programmatic-metatheoretical, the empirical, the analytic, the phenomenological, and the speculative dimensions of the mind sciences

Autopoiesis · Cognition · Cognitive science · Cognitivism (psychology) · Embodied cognition · Enactivism · Epistemology · Internalism and externalism · Mainstream · Metaphysics · Mind–body problem · Philosophy of mind · Pragmatism · Sociology · Action Observation and Synchronization · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology

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