Embodied Interaction Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, enactivist approaches view mind and cognition as arising from the dynamic interplay between the living organism and its environment, as it unfolds through the activities and experiences of situated lived bodies interacting with the world, alongside each other. Understood in this context, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) coined the term ‘enaction’ in their seminal work The Embodied Mind to “emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs”. Today, enactivism is a key player in a cluster of related theoretical paradigms known as the ‘4E’s’, for their commitment to study mind and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, enacted phenomena. The goal of this seminar is to understand the central ideas and tenets of enactivism, its main theoretical strands, how it differs from neighboring and rival accounts, and what it has to offer to specific areas of study in biology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, culture, linguistics, art, performance, and human-computer interaction.

Enactivism is a colorful tapestry of interwoven and mutually supporting ideas, methods, and perspectives drawn from a variety of fields, notably psychology and cognitive science, phenomenology, and systems biology and neuroscience. Historically, it traces its roots to phenomenological and existentialist traditions (esp. Merleau-Ponty, Jonas, Husserl, and Schütz), and has strong affinities with the pragmatism of James and Dewey, constructivist epistemologies, Gestalt psychology, ecological psychology, and the cybernetics movement. In our course, we shall discuss several themes that are central and distinctive to enactivism as a paradigm: (1) its attention to the fine details of (non-neurally) embodied cognition, such as bodily morphology and physiology, sensorimotor and homeodynamic organization, temporality and movement, habits and historicity, posture and expressivity; (2) its relational ontology of the mental, promoting the view that cognition, agency, experience, and the self are not ‘within’ but ‘between’ properties that emerge from complex entanglements between brains, bodies, material culture, and environmental scaffolds and affordances; (3) the centrality of lived experience for a scientific study of the mind, embracing a variety of first-person methods and techniques for the exploration of consciousness; (4) the mutual dependence and complementarity between third-person scientific accounts of the living body and first-person accounts of lived experience, an enterprise sometimes glossed as ‘naturalized phenomenology’; and (5) the deep continuity of life and mind, a thesis according to which mind shares the same basic organizational properties with life, which assures that living things, even in their most basic form, are already ‘mind-like’ and minds, even in their richest forms, always remain ‘life-like’.