Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro | UNAM Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (original) (raw)
Thesis Chapters by Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro
En esta tesis se busca dar ciertos lineamientos básicos para un nuevo modelo de la percepción que... more En esta tesis se busca dar ciertos lineamientos básicos para un nuevo modelo de la percepción que esté basado en teorías de la cognición corporeizada y la fenomenología. El modelo de percepción aquí propuesto busca, principalmente, dar una respuesta a los problemas surgidos por los modelos de percepción de la ciencia cognitiva tradicional, en especial al problema del anclaje y el problema del marco, que reflejan la incapacidad de un sistema computacional para, por sí mismo, dar una significación y categorización a su entorno cognitivo. Estos problemas, se argumenta aquí, surgen del supuesto de que la cognición se basa en el procesamiento de información extraída del mundo externo, ajeno al agente cognitivo, a través de representaciones internas y su manipulación simbólica. Desde el modelo aquí propuesto, en cambio, la percepción se funda en el ejercicio práctico de patrones de interacción continua con el entorno que por medio del hábito permiten formar estructuras estables de acción (esquema corporal), y que permiten al observador interpretar las características del entorno como posibilidades de acción o affordances. Así, la significación de un sistema cognitivo nace como resultado de la interacción entre el agente y su entorno, y no por la adquisición de un contenido semántico por parte de agentes provistos con funciones computacionales.
El filósofo mexicano Emilio Uranga propuso interpretar ciertos rasgos característicos de la cultu... more El filósofo mexicano Emilio Uranga propuso interpretar ciertos rasgos característicos de la cultura mexicana y de sus representantes como una categoría ontológica particular que llamo "el ser del mexicano". De acuerdo con Uranga, este "ser del mexicano" correspondería a las descripciones hechas por Heidegger como el ser autentico de la existencia (Dasein), y por lo tanto el "ser del mexicano" debía ser aquilatado con un valor mayor al ser de otras culturas, especialmente la europea. Sin embargo, desde mi análisis, considero que atribuir la autenticidad del Dasein al carácter especifico de una cultura que es el resultado de una herencia histórica y meramente circunstancial, presenta una contradicción con la propuesta de Heidegger. En cambio, en esta tesis argumento que la interpretación del historiador Edmundo O'Gorman que ofrece un análisis desde una perspectiva que guarda mucha mayor concordancia con las ideas de Heidegger, muestra como en México ha habido una tradición de tipo esencialista, de la cual el mismo Uranga formaría parte, y que se opondría radicalmente a una visión de tipo existencialista como la de Heidegger.
Conference Presentations by Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro
We commonly think that our minds are spatially localized in the boundaries of our heads, or at le... more We commonly think that our minds are spatially localized in the boundaries of our heads, or at least surrounded by the limits of the flesh. Traditionally, in western philosophy, we find similar beliefs. For instance, Descartes, who thought that mental activity occurs in a realm different of the spatiotemporal world, considered that minds, even without spatial extension, find their anchor to the material world in the pineal gland, an organ part of the brain, thus inside the spatial limits of our bodies. Contemporary neuroscience does not belief that mental activity is separated from material reality, yet it is still common to think that mind processes happen inside the boundaries of the skull, because they are the product of the electrochemical activity of the brain. However, in 1998, the philosophers of cognitive science, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, made the provocative claim that our cognitive activities are so crucially determined by the role of natural and cultural resources of the environment, that such resources also constitute our minds. This could turn our conception of the mind, supposedly internal and individual, into spatially extended entities, inhabiting regions outside the boundaries of the body. So landmarks in the meadow would constitute part of our orientation sense, writing notes could be replacing our biological memories, or numerical systems would be indispensable to enable our mathematical thinking. Nevertheless, despite the importance of external resources for our cognition, it is controversial to affirm that environmental resources are really constitutive parts of our minds, and not only auxiliary additions that causally contribute to what is truly mental (e.g. neuronal activity and intentional content). Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, among others, has challenged the hypothesis of the extended mind, arguing that we need to preserve clear boundaries to define what is mental. Otherwise, we risk to incorporate almost everything existing in the world to the realm of cognitive systems. In my presentation, I shall expose the main arguments in favor and against the hypothesis of the extended mind. Later, I will consider that though it is desirable to expand our conception of the mind, beyond its traditional boundaries, we need to do it carefully. Although we require some parameters to avoid superficial definitions of the mental, they need to remain open and ambiguous at some level, since any clear demarcation between the mental realm and external reality, at the end, assumes, explicitly or implicitly, a dualist metaphysics.
For the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, empirical sciences cannot provi... more For the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, empirical sciences cannot provide us the enough rigorous analysis of subjective experience and consciousness, since natural-scientific explanations commonly rest on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the mind and the experienced objects, instead of considering how experiences are given in themselves. In contrast, Husserl offers careful methodological steps (the phenomenological method) to describe subjective experience and to uncover the essential structures of consciousness. In the last decades, however, philosophers of cognitive science, who have seen new threads centered on the embodied nature of cognition and consciousness coming up in the field, have realized that an account of subjective experience is needed to complement causal explanations. Thus some suggested that phenomenology was able to provide useful tools for such account. This situation has motivated the idea that phenomenology can be naturalized, namely, that phenomenological data can be made continuous with those accepted by natural sciences. However, the coexistence of phenomenological analysis and causal explanations into one single frame is problematic at two levels at least. At the first level, it is needed to set up how the phenomenological method can contribute to the empirical accounts. Nevertheless, it is also needed to face the problem of how it is possible to overcome that phenomenology was born as an attempt to avoid the assumptions of empirical sciences, leading the phenomenological research to the transcendental realm. At this level we would need to construct an epistemological and ontological frame where phenomenology and science do not only cooperate with each other, but where they become part of one single comprehension of the empirical reality. In our presentation, we shall introduce these two problematic levels, considering the most relevant contemporary proposals, and the remaining challenges still needed to achieve.
Traditionally, visual perception has been conceived as a process starting on the information acqu... more Traditionally, visual perception has been conceived as a process starting on the information acquired by the retinal sensory receptors. Since this information is very poor in contrast to our rich visual experience, it has been needed to posit the existence of high order cognitive processes to complete the raw visual data. Recently, this conception has been changing in the new approaches of cognitive sciences generically known as embodied cognition. In contrasts to the traditional accounts, these new waves are focused on how the body and its actions play a fundamental role in shaping our perceptual experiences. However, at least two different theoretical frameworks before the embodied conceptions of the mind: Phenomenology and Ecological Psychology. These two movements evidently share a common ground: its opposition to traditional theories of perception, but what else they share?
If we look into the “embodied” theories of perception like Gibson’s ecological approach and Husserl’s phenomenological analysis, we could find surprising similarities. This is surprising because they depart from very different traditions, what means a different corpus of conceptual frames and presuppositions. In spite of these differences, they arrived to very close conclusions. Mainly, those conclusions involve the fact that movement and the embodied-self are fundamental prerequisites for our perceptual experiences. However, if we look carefully, we shall find important divergences that imply different ways to conceive how perception is an embodied and situated act. My purpose in this presentation is to describe the opposition between notions of visual kinaesthesis and the body as passive explorer in Gibson’s work, and kinaesthetic sensations and the body as enactive constitutor of the perceptual field in Husserl’s. At the end, this differentiation, I shall argue, triggers different conceptions about the nature of the embodiment that we need to reflect on, to go deeper into our enquiries on this subject.
Book Reviews by Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro
Phenomenological Reviews, 2018
Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (henceforth Perception and its De... more Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (henceforth Perception and its Development) is a volume of fifteen papers from different authors, each addressing the most significant (or at least the most explicitly addressed) topic of the philosophical path of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that is perception. Each chapter focuses on a specific subset of philosophical issues related to perception, all of them initially addressed by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (henceforth the Phenomenology).
Papers by Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro
Adaptive Behavior, 2023
The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description ... more The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description of sense-making entails the co-emergence of an agent's self and a meaningful world, as well as the emergence of a normativity that guides the behaviour of the coupled agent-environment system. This emergent process happens at different levels of interactions: biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal and linguistic. Sense-making therefore accounts for the natural origins of intentionality and meaning and gives continuity to the emergent enactive processes of life and mind. The standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and neglects many historical and ecological aspects relevant to the scientific study of life and mind processes as they happen in concrete fields of action. To address this issue, I propose the enlarged description of sense-making in the wild, which is based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactivesituated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development defines sense-making as a historically situated process that transforms the previously given dynamical configuration of the agent-environment system into a new one. Enactivesituated normativity asserts that in addition to the agent's self-maintenance and the material constraints of the agentenvironment system, many dynamical constraints, ecologically situated, shape the origin, maintenance and development of sense-making processes. Finally, transverse emergence describes the transformational process of the whole agentenvironment system dynamically, as a reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors that exhibit the typical behaviour of the system. Sense-making in the wild thus aims to facilitate conceptual tools to study enactive cognition, as it happens in concrete fields of action.
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2021
In The Philosophy of Affordances, Manuel Heras–Escribano immerses us into an exciting and origina... more In The Philosophy of Affordances, Manuel Heras–Escribano immerses us into an exciting and original philosophical analysis of two fundamental concepts of Gibson’s ecological approach to perception: affordances and ecological information. Heras–Escribano’s inquiry is founded on pragmatist and naturalist philosophers. From this perspective, the author looks forward to setting more solid theoretical foundations for ecological psychology, considering the current challenges of post-cognitivist cognitive science. Despite the exciting proposals of Heras–Escribano, I am concerned about two problematic aspects of his work. First, the author mistakenly concluded that his naturalist account of affordances truly overcomes the subject–object dichotomy of mind and cognition. Indeed, I think Heras–Escribano leans in favour of an objectivist account of affordances that implicitly assumes the dichotomy. Second, his overfocus on natural selection as the causal origin of the link between organisms and the environment, and his narrow conception of biological agency, neglect the importance of the enactive approach claim that each living organism enacts its own norms of interaction with the environment. The enactivist perspective recognizes the crucial role of development in the emergence of affordances. It also offers a better account than Heras–Escribano’s of the flexibility and plasticity of behaviour. The first part of the critical notice briefly reviews the main contributions of Heras–Escribano to Gibson’s ecological approach. The second part focuses on the problematic issues of his view and recommends a more substantial connection between ecological psychology, phenomenology, and the enactive approach than Heras–Escribano suggests.
Enaction and Ecological Psychology: Convergences and Complementarities, 2020
The enactive approach and the skilled intentionality framework are two closely related forms of r... more The enactive approach and the skilled intentionality framework are two closely related forms of radical embodied cognition that nonetheless exhibit important differences. In this paper, I focus on a conceptual disparity regarding the normative character of action and perception. Whereas the skilled intentionality framework describes the norms of action and perception as the capacity of embodied agents to become attuned (i.e., skilled intentionality) to preestablished normative frameworks (i.e., situated normativity), the enactive approach describes the same phenomenon as the enactment of norms (i.e., as sense-making) at different levels of organization that go from individual biological agents to linguistic encounters. I will argue that although both accounts accurately recognize important features of the norms of action and perception, they also have significant shortcomings. Norm-attunement accurately sees normative, ecological frameworks as the necessary set of constraints for the existence of norms at play in sociocultural bodily practices, but it fails to acknowledge the temporal and open-ended character of these norms and frameworks. Norm-enactment, by contrast, acknowledges that norms of action and perception are temporally open-ended, but fails to explicitly recognize that environmental normative frameworks are necessary for the enactment and development of all sort of norms in the interactional domain of an agent-environment system. To overcome these problems, I propose an enactive-ecological approach to norms of action and perception. This approach consists in describing norm-enactment as a result of a developmental process I call norm-development. This process describes the enactment of norms from the background of ecological, normative frameworks. These frameworks are norms enacted in the past of the interactional history of the agent-environment system that remain open to new configurations (new norms) in the present. To clarify conceptually norm-development, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of norms of perception, and more particularly to his concept of spatial levels. Like the enactive approach, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that perceptual norms emerge in the interactional history of the agent-environment system, but, like the skilled intentionality framework, he also posits that normative frameworks, that he calls levels, enable and constrain the emergence of perceptual norms and its development. Levels are therefore a phenomenological description of ecological normative frameworks that has been temporally constituted and that stay temporally open-ended as a fundamental requisite for the enactment and development of norms of action and perception.
Books by Miguel A . Sepúlveda-Pedro
New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 2023
This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life... more This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place.
En esta tesis se busca dar ciertos lineamientos básicos para un nuevo modelo de la percepción que... more En esta tesis se busca dar ciertos lineamientos básicos para un nuevo modelo de la percepción que esté basado en teorías de la cognición corporeizada y la fenomenología. El modelo de percepción aquí propuesto busca, principalmente, dar una respuesta a los problemas surgidos por los modelos de percepción de la ciencia cognitiva tradicional, en especial al problema del anclaje y el problema del marco, que reflejan la incapacidad de un sistema computacional para, por sí mismo, dar una significación y categorización a su entorno cognitivo. Estos problemas, se argumenta aquí, surgen del supuesto de que la cognición se basa en el procesamiento de información extraída del mundo externo, ajeno al agente cognitivo, a través de representaciones internas y su manipulación simbólica. Desde el modelo aquí propuesto, en cambio, la percepción se funda en el ejercicio práctico de patrones de interacción continua con el entorno que por medio del hábito permiten formar estructuras estables de acción (esquema corporal), y que permiten al observador interpretar las características del entorno como posibilidades de acción o affordances. Así, la significación de un sistema cognitivo nace como resultado de la interacción entre el agente y su entorno, y no por la adquisición de un contenido semántico por parte de agentes provistos con funciones computacionales.
El filósofo mexicano Emilio Uranga propuso interpretar ciertos rasgos característicos de la cultu... more El filósofo mexicano Emilio Uranga propuso interpretar ciertos rasgos característicos de la cultura mexicana y de sus representantes como una categoría ontológica particular que llamo "el ser del mexicano". De acuerdo con Uranga, este "ser del mexicano" correspondería a las descripciones hechas por Heidegger como el ser autentico de la existencia (Dasein), y por lo tanto el "ser del mexicano" debía ser aquilatado con un valor mayor al ser de otras culturas, especialmente la europea. Sin embargo, desde mi análisis, considero que atribuir la autenticidad del Dasein al carácter especifico de una cultura que es el resultado de una herencia histórica y meramente circunstancial, presenta una contradicción con la propuesta de Heidegger. En cambio, en esta tesis argumento que la interpretación del historiador Edmundo O'Gorman que ofrece un análisis desde una perspectiva que guarda mucha mayor concordancia con las ideas de Heidegger, muestra como en México ha habido una tradición de tipo esencialista, de la cual el mismo Uranga formaría parte, y que se opondría radicalmente a una visión de tipo existencialista como la de Heidegger.
We commonly think that our minds are spatially localized in the boundaries of our heads, or at le... more We commonly think that our minds are spatially localized in the boundaries of our heads, or at least surrounded by the limits of the flesh. Traditionally, in western philosophy, we find similar beliefs. For instance, Descartes, who thought that mental activity occurs in a realm different of the spatiotemporal world, considered that minds, even without spatial extension, find their anchor to the material world in the pineal gland, an organ part of the brain, thus inside the spatial limits of our bodies. Contemporary neuroscience does not belief that mental activity is separated from material reality, yet it is still common to think that mind processes happen inside the boundaries of the skull, because they are the product of the electrochemical activity of the brain. However, in 1998, the philosophers of cognitive science, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, made the provocative claim that our cognitive activities are so crucially determined by the role of natural and cultural resources of the environment, that such resources also constitute our minds. This could turn our conception of the mind, supposedly internal and individual, into spatially extended entities, inhabiting regions outside the boundaries of the body. So landmarks in the meadow would constitute part of our orientation sense, writing notes could be replacing our biological memories, or numerical systems would be indispensable to enable our mathematical thinking. Nevertheless, despite the importance of external resources for our cognition, it is controversial to affirm that environmental resources are really constitutive parts of our minds, and not only auxiliary additions that causally contribute to what is truly mental (e.g. neuronal activity and intentional content). Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, among others, has challenged the hypothesis of the extended mind, arguing that we need to preserve clear boundaries to define what is mental. Otherwise, we risk to incorporate almost everything existing in the world to the realm of cognitive systems. In my presentation, I shall expose the main arguments in favor and against the hypothesis of the extended mind. Later, I will consider that though it is desirable to expand our conception of the mind, beyond its traditional boundaries, we need to do it carefully. Although we require some parameters to avoid superficial definitions of the mental, they need to remain open and ambiguous at some level, since any clear demarcation between the mental realm and external reality, at the end, assumes, explicitly or implicitly, a dualist metaphysics.
For the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, empirical sciences cannot provi... more For the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, empirical sciences cannot provide us the enough rigorous analysis of subjective experience and consciousness, since natural-scientific explanations commonly rest on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the mind and the experienced objects, instead of considering how experiences are given in themselves. In contrast, Husserl offers careful methodological steps (the phenomenological method) to describe subjective experience and to uncover the essential structures of consciousness. In the last decades, however, philosophers of cognitive science, who have seen new threads centered on the embodied nature of cognition and consciousness coming up in the field, have realized that an account of subjective experience is needed to complement causal explanations. Thus some suggested that phenomenology was able to provide useful tools for such account. This situation has motivated the idea that phenomenology can be naturalized, namely, that phenomenological data can be made continuous with those accepted by natural sciences. However, the coexistence of phenomenological analysis and causal explanations into one single frame is problematic at two levels at least. At the first level, it is needed to set up how the phenomenological method can contribute to the empirical accounts. Nevertheless, it is also needed to face the problem of how it is possible to overcome that phenomenology was born as an attempt to avoid the assumptions of empirical sciences, leading the phenomenological research to the transcendental realm. At this level we would need to construct an epistemological and ontological frame where phenomenology and science do not only cooperate with each other, but where they become part of one single comprehension of the empirical reality. In our presentation, we shall introduce these two problematic levels, considering the most relevant contemporary proposals, and the remaining challenges still needed to achieve.
Traditionally, visual perception has been conceived as a process starting on the information acqu... more Traditionally, visual perception has been conceived as a process starting on the information acquired by the retinal sensory receptors. Since this information is very poor in contrast to our rich visual experience, it has been needed to posit the existence of high order cognitive processes to complete the raw visual data. Recently, this conception has been changing in the new approaches of cognitive sciences generically known as embodied cognition. In contrasts to the traditional accounts, these new waves are focused on how the body and its actions play a fundamental role in shaping our perceptual experiences. However, at least two different theoretical frameworks before the embodied conceptions of the mind: Phenomenology and Ecological Psychology. These two movements evidently share a common ground: its opposition to traditional theories of perception, but what else they share?
If we look into the “embodied” theories of perception like Gibson’s ecological approach and Husserl’s phenomenological analysis, we could find surprising similarities. This is surprising because they depart from very different traditions, what means a different corpus of conceptual frames and presuppositions. In spite of these differences, they arrived to very close conclusions. Mainly, those conclusions involve the fact that movement and the embodied-self are fundamental prerequisites for our perceptual experiences. However, if we look carefully, we shall find important divergences that imply different ways to conceive how perception is an embodied and situated act. My purpose in this presentation is to describe the opposition between notions of visual kinaesthesis and the body as passive explorer in Gibson’s work, and kinaesthetic sensations and the body as enactive constitutor of the perceptual field in Husserl’s. At the end, this differentiation, I shall argue, triggers different conceptions about the nature of the embodiment that we need to reflect on, to go deeper into our enquiries on this subject.
Phenomenological Reviews, 2018
Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (henceforth Perception and its De... more Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology (henceforth Perception and its Development) is a volume of fifteen papers from different authors, each addressing the most significant (or at least the most explicitly addressed) topic of the philosophical path of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that is perception. Each chapter focuses on a specific subset of philosophical issues related to perception, all of them initially addressed by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (henceforth the Phenomenology).
Adaptive Behavior, 2023
The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description ... more The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description of sense-making entails the co-emergence of an agent's self and a meaningful world, as well as the emergence of a normativity that guides the behaviour of the coupled agent-environment system. This emergent process happens at different levels of interactions: biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal and linguistic. Sense-making therefore accounts for the natural origins of intentionality and meaning and gives continuity to the emergent enactive processes of life and mind. The standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and neglects many historical and ecological aspects relevant to the scientific study of life and mind processes as they happen in concrete fields of action. To address this issue, I propose the enlarged description of sense-making in the wild, which is based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactivesituated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development defines sense-making as a historically situated process that transforms the previously given dynamical configuration of the agent-environment system into a new one. Enactivesituated normativity asserts that in addition to the agent's self-maintenance and the material constraints of the agentenvironment system, many dynamical constraints, ecologically situated, shape the origin, maintenance and development of sense-making processes. Finally, transverse emergence describes the transformational process of the whole agentenvironment system dynamically, as a reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors that exhibit the typical behaviour of the system. Sense-making in the wild thus aims to facilitate conceptual tools to study enactive cognition, as it happens in concrete fields of action.
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2021
In The Philosophy of Affordances, Manuel Heras–Escribano immerses us into an exciting and origina... more In The Philosophy of Affordances, Manuel Heras–Escribano immerses us into an exciting and original philosophical analysis of two fundamental concepts of Gibson’s ecological approach to perception: affordances and ecological information. Heras–Escribano’s inquiry is founded on pragmatist and naturalist philosophers. From this perspective, the author looks forward to setting more solid theoretical foundations for ecological psychology, considering the current challenges of post-cognitivist cognitive science. Despite the exciting proposals of Heras–Escribano, I am concerned about two problematic aspects of his work. First, the author mistakenly concluded that his naturalist account of affordances truly overcomes the subject–object dichotomy of mind and cognition. Indeed, I think Heras–Escribano leans in favour of an objectivist account of affordances that implicitly assumes the dichotomy. Second, his overfocus on natural selection as the causal origin of the link between organisms and the environment, and his narrow conception of biological agency, neglect the importance of the enactive approach claim that each living organism enacts its own norms of interaction with the environment. The enactivist perspective recognizes the crucial role of development in the emergence of affordances. It also offers a better account than Heras–Escribano’s of the flexibility and plasticity of behaviour. The first part of the critical notice briefly reviews the main contributions of Heras–Escribano to Gibson’s ecological approach. The second part focuses on the problematic issues of his view and recommends a more substantial connection between ecological psychology, phenomenology, and the enactive approach than Heras–Escribano suggests.
Enaction and Ecological Psychology: Convergences and Complementarities, 2020
The enactive approach and the skilled intentionality framework are two closely related forms of r... more The enactive approach and the skilled intentionality framework are two closely related forms of radical embodied cognition that nonetheless exhibit important differences. In this paper, I focus on a conceptual disparity regarding the normative character of action and perception. Whereas the skilled intentionality framework describes the norms of action and perception as the capacity of embodied agents to become attuned (i.e., skilled intentionality) to preestablished normative frameworks (i.e., situated normativity), the enactive approach describes the same phenomenon as the enactment of norms (i.e., as sense-making) at different levels of organization that go from individual biological agents to linguistic encounters. I will argue that although both accounts accurately recognize important features of the norms of action and perception, they also have significant shortcomings. Norm-attunement accurately sees normative, ecological frameworks as the necessary set of constraints for the existence of norms at play in sociocultural bodily practices, but it fails to acknowledge the temporal and open-ended character of these norms and frameworks. Norm-enactment, by contrast, acknowledges that norms of action and perception are temporally open-ended, but fails to explicitly recognize that environmental normative frameworks are necessary for the enactment and development of all sort of norms in the interactional domain of an agent-environment system. To overcome these problems, I propose an enactive-ecological approach to norms of action and perception. This approach consists in describing norm-enactment as a result of a developmental process I call norm-development. This process describes the enactment of norms from the background of ecological, normative frameworks. These frameworks are norms enacted in the past of the interactional history of the agent-environment system that remain open to new configurations (new norms) in the present. To clarify conceptually norm-development, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of norms of perception, and more particularly to his concept of spatial levels. Like the enactive approach, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that perceptual norms emerge in the interactional history of the agent-environment system, but, like the skilled intentionality framework, he also posits that normative frameworks, that he calls levels, enable and constrain the emergence of perceptual norms and its development. Levels are therefore a phenomenological description of ecological normative frameworks that has been temporally constituted and that stay temporally open-ended as a fundamental requisite for the enactment and development of norms of action and perception.
New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 2023
This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life... more This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepúlveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place.