Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making

Making Sense of Non-Sense

M. Cappucio, T. Froese, Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Cappucio, T. Froese, Massimiliano Cappuccio

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137363367
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Esprit et corps en philosophie

The enactive approach replaces the classical computer metaphor of mind with emphasis on embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Researchers from a range of disciplines unite to address the challenge of how to account for the more uniquely human aspects of cognition, including the abstract and the nonsensical.

1

Introduction

Massimiliano Cappuccio and Tom Froese

Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense!

Only don’t fail to pay attention to your nonsense.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1998, p. 64)

1.1 Wittgenstein’s philosophical challenge: speaking about non-sense, without speaking non-sense

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the attempt to take as far as possible a “naïve” correspondentialist and representationalist view on language (Hutto, 2004), had to face a resilient philosophical puzzle on the nature of nonsensical propositions (Wittgenstein, 1921/2001, 4.01): if our knowledge of the world is necessarily delimited by its representations, then what should we say about nonsensical expressions that represent nothing at all and that, nonetheless, allow us to relate to what is most valuable in our lives? If non-sense is situated outside the “limits of our language”, which bi-univocally correspond to the articulations of ontology (the “limits of our world”), then why is it the case that our words can capture the very notion of non-sense, allowing us to concur on its meaning? How is it possible that we know how to efficaciously respond to nonsensical expressions, and our beliefs seem affected by them in ways that are characteristic and significant?

Non-sense is imputable neither to the falsity or vagueness of representational content, as these flaws could well be compatible with the normativity of representationalism (inexact isomorphism does not undermine isomorphism as a criterion of truth), nor to mere absence of sense: according to Wittgenstein, our language is “senseless” (sinnlos) when it tries to represent the preconditions of its very semantic function, and this can be disconcerting for a representationalist view of language, but there is nothing nonsensical in such a limitation. The propositions of logic – such as tautologies and contradictions – or mathematics, or the pictorial form of our pictures, have no sense, because they do not stand for any state of affairs in the world (Wittgenstein, 1921/2001, 4.0312). Senseless but significant, endowed with truth-values and an identifiable declarative form, these propositions “scaffold” the very possibility of contentful representation and, even if they do not represent anything within the boundaries of the world, they are all we have to gesture at these boundaries. That is why the very possibility of representing (“the logic of the facts”, idem) seems nonrepresentable: not only the illogical structure of ungrammatical expressions, but also the well-formed structure of meaningful expressions, are beyond possibility of representation.

Compared with the senseless, proper non-sense gestures at a more specific kind of non-representability, which is not just confined to the borders of our language/world, but ranges beyond them, displaying an ulterior domain (ibid., 5.61). According to Wittgenstein, nonsensical propositions are a subcategory of the senseless ones; thus, his characterization of non-sense is narrower and even more puzzling. Truly nonsensical (unsinnig) propositions are not just devoid of clear denotational content, like the senseless ones: as they do not exhibit any recognizable logical form, they seem to transcend the very purpose of representation. Not only is their declarative content uncertain, but also the very fact that they have a declarative form, and that is why their truth conditions appear unknown and mysterious. “Pseudo-propositions” such as “Socrates is identical” (ibid., 5.473), but also formal concepts like “There is only one zero”, “there are objects”, and “2+2 at 3 o’clock equals 4” (ibid., 4.1272) are not just devoid of a clear denotational referent: their truth conditions – if they have any – are not even thinkable, as they gesture at “things that cannot be put into words”; but, adds Wittgenstein in a famous remark, “they make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (ibid., 6.522), that is, they suggest a domain of significance that transcends positivistic representation of the world while having a pervasive presence in our life.

Surprisingly, whether such propositions are well-formed or not, their communicative intent can be intuitively efficacious in affecting our beliefs and motivating our actions: all the philosophical propositions of ethics and aesthetics (ibid., 6.421) and traditional metaphysics belong to this group of utterances (ibid., 6.53). Puzzlingly, most of our knowledge (and most of the Tractatus itself!) is made of such nonsensical propositions (ibid., 4.0003). While the logic of their use is not rule-based, it compels us to regulate our life, and this idea will famously inspire the “language games” theme in Wittgenstein’s late production (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, § 2, 23, 65; see Hutto, 2004, pp. 137–138). However, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is still attempting to account for the paradox of non-sense (i.e., that which is meaningless, but effective in our practices of knowledge) by contrasting two incomparable modes of signification, referred to as “what can be said” and “what can be shown” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2009, 4.1212, p. XI), which we could reinterpret as a contentful and a directed form of cognition, respectively (this distinction solicits various questions on the possibility of direct perceptual experience before and below conceptual categorization. Even if recontextualized in a different debate, these are some of the philosophical questions challenged by Beaton’s chapter in this book). In fact, if a merely representational approach to meaning might not account for all the possibilities of cognition, then another – non-representational – form must be possible and necessary: an immediate presentation of the existent, one that does not require internal mental states to be matched with external states of affairs, and for which “truth” does not indicate a norm of adequate correspondence.

1.2 Enactive theory and non-sense as challenges to the non-representationalist approaches to cognition

Wittgenstein treats non-sense as a paradox situated at the core of his philosophy of language, but his reflections are significant for a broader consideration of non-sense as a crucial experiential event that, once understood in its typical form and prelinguistic preconditions, can reveal an underlying embodied cognitive architecture. Interestingly, the same puzzles that affected Wittgenstein’s representational theory seem to be challenging today the non-representational theories of cognition and knowledge formation. During the last 20 years, the cognitivist approaches to cognitive science have been gradually supplanted by embodied-embedded and enactive approaches (e.g., Dreyfus, 2002a, 2002b; Gallagher, 2005; Varela, 1995; Thompson, 2007; Noë, 2009; Di Paolo et al., 2010). The latter, in opposition to the former, consider representation neither as a primitive explanatory element of intelligence nor as a constitutive ontological building block of the mind. Not to minimalize this trend, but in recognition of its significance, this book wants to highlight that the problems concerning the nature of non-sense, unsolved by the representationalist cognitive science, need even more urgently a solution by the non-representationalist one: the latter – as opposed to the former – cannot account for non-sense in terms of failed or impossible representation, as it does not recognize the same normative efficacy to the distinction between representational (well-formed) and non-representational (anomalous) forms of intelligence.

In fact, the enactive-embodied theory assumes that what was considered an anomaly by the tradition is actually the norm, as mental functions prevalently emerge from a background of practical engagement in which meaning is pure know-how learned through unprincipled interaction with the world. On this view, cognition is primarily a relational form of meaningful engagement, or sense-making (Weber and Varela, 2002). But what kind of process does regulate sense-making, then, if nonsensical, senseless, and fully meaningful experience all equally depend on an undifferentiated background of situated engagement? Or, to put it differently, if all cognition is situated sense-making, then how shall we account for cognition of the absurd? How should the enactive theories characterize non-sense, and the fact that it plays a major role in our cognitive life through abstract and symbolic concepts? The problem is not only that enactivism cannot rely on wrong, missing, or “blank” representations to differentiate between meaningful and nonsensical events, but also that it often seems to implicitly assume that every directed form of practical engagement with the world not only can but – to some extent – must be inherently productive of sense (Froese, 2012). But is it correct to assume that the cognitive horizon described by enactivism is entirely saturated with sense?

To illustrate this problem, we must introduce the non-representational embedded-situated theories of sense-making, which interpret adaptive intelligence as an immediate organismic responsiveness to the relevance of contextual contingencies; in particular, according to the enactive approach to cognition, all organisms are structurally predisposed to make sense of their world-environment in terms of opportunities of perception and movement, whose reciprocal co-implication is established during interaction with real-life circumstances. These opportunities are disclosed either to individual agents or, importantly, in a participatory way, when their social interaction brings about coordinated forms of perception and joint awareness (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009; Torrance and Froese, 2011). Interestingly, not only is the world of the agents defined by their coordinated social interaction, but the identity of the agents themselves, with their specific features, including, importantly, gender and gender perception (see Merritt’s chapter in this book for a circumstantiated analysis). Intelligence (including social intelligence) does not find its foundation in explicit decisional processes mediated by internal models, supra-modal representations of an objective external world, stored heuristics, declarative contents, or formal inferences; on the contrary, it emerges from the unprincipled adaptation of a living system whose intrinsic pragmatic dispositions and narrative habits progressively adjust to reach a structural attunement with the environment, tending towards a dynamical balance with its contingent fluctuations (Gallagher, 2008a; Gallagher and Hutto, 2008). This notion of intelligence as direct know-how opposes the intellectualist biases of classical cognitivism (Hutto and Myin, 2013), modeled in the image and likeness of exquisitely human practices of knowledge, preferably based on literacy proficiency and culture-specific aptitude in formal thought. Enactivism challenges the anthropocentrism implied by this view (see in particular Leavens’ chapter in this book for a systematic argument against such an anthropocentric approach to cognition); it remarks that these forms of cognition constitute the explanandum in the scientific discourse on the evolution of intelligence, not the explanans, and claims that a better awareness of the biologically and historically situated foundations of cognition is needed. Paradigmatically, enactivism revolves around animal processes of meaning formation that at root are organism-centered, environment-specific, and goal-directed, that is, incarnated into dynamic relationships rather than stored informational contents, shaped by material contingencies rather than computational algorithms (Thompson, 2007, 2011).

1.3 Sense-making as adaptive coupling between living body and world-environment

Inspired by a well-established tradition in bio-semiotics (von Uexküll, 1934/1957; Barbieri, 2006) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962), the enactive approach to cognition (originally introduced to describe the role of embodied action in perception, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991) assumes that the distinctive characteristic of a cognitive system is its continuous engagement in the active constitution of a meaningful “world-environment” (Umwelt). The world-environment is essentially irreducible to the natural world described by the empirical sciences (the scientist himself, while running his experiments, is a cognitive system that enacts a peculiar world-environment, with its peculiar experimental truth, as Bitbol’s chapter in this book reminds us). The system intimately belongs to its world-environment and always has a situated, teleologically oriented perspective on it (Di Paolo, 2005); perspectivism, in turn, is an ineliminable, constitutive feature of the world-environment itself. Autonomously orienting itself towards what is relevant to its subsistence, the organism actively adjusts the anticipatory trajectories of its behavior to dynamically regulate its conduct in the fuzzy, risky scenarios of real-life. This regulation can legitimately be called intelligent because it does not mechanically react to limited sets of occurring stimuli on the basis of the statistical repetition of previous experiences, but also flexibly prioritizes between novel contingencies based on their contextual relevance for the survival of the organism, anticipating the incoming changes (various philosophers characterized this pre-reflective adaptation in terms of “motor-intentionality” guided by a situated normativity, rather than representations of rules and stored heuristics; see, e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962; Kelly, 2000, 2002; Dreyfus, 2002a; Rietveld, 2008, 2012). This rich coupling with the environment, at once compensatory and anticipatory, exploratory and balance-seeking, is structured in accord with a protentive/retentive temporal dynamic (Varela, 1999) and is essentially realized by the sedimentation of habitual responses that are progressively refined, either in ontogenesis or in phylogenesis, through a history of successful interactions.

Enactivism stresses also that perceptual engagement and motor expertise are pre-eminent defining factors for the consolidation of the cognitive self (Thompson, 2005), as the interactive exploration of the peripersonal space (through either manipulation or navigation) is the primal situated experience for learning how to map the transformative meaning of one’s own actions into the opportunities offered by the perceived environmental affordances; in turn, it also emphasizes that the perceptual sensitivity to relevance is embodied in the physical constitution of the organism, either as passive filters realized by its morphology, or as anticipatory mechanisms relying on the formation of sensorimotor feedback loops (O’Regan and Noë, 2001; Noë, 2004). Before and below explicit judgment, sense-making depends on the interactive habits matured by the system that establishes a dynamic coupling with its world: this reciprocal belonging of living body and world-environment is the defining, nonmetaphoric underpinning of cognition itself, so that living and cognizing are modes of the same sense-making capability and therefore are, in their essences, coextensive (Thompson, 2004). Materially extended over the dynamic interplay between nervous system, extra-cranial body, and extra-bodily environment (Virgo et al., 2011), the sense-making processes of an organism constitute its world as a significant context of action and experience, the bottomless backdrop of implicit and nonrepresentable practical meanings that at once are informed by and inform the patterns of preferred intervention, the living system’s intrinsic sensitivity to relevant stimuli, and the characteristic emotional tones that globally modulate the ongoing body–environment adjustments (Colombetti, 2014).

Unsurprisingly, the enactivist concept of sense-making builds on a general constructivist epistemology of the living organisms situated in their specific niche. Enaction theory represents the cognitive–psychological complement of the paradigm of autopoiesis in theoretical biology, a key descriptive and explanatory doctrine that understands the living being as a distinct type of homeostatic system whose peculiarity consists in counterbalancing environmental fluctuations to build and preserve its own internal functional organization (Varela et al., 1974; Maturana and Varela, 1980, 1987; Maturana, 2002). This compensatory process is an always-precarious negotiation that tends towards a relative stability through the constitution of self-organizing hierarchies of transient structures. The supervenience of self-organization over the component processes of the system defines the virtual boundaries between the internal and the external world of the organism, and endows the internal domain of the living being’s systemic processes with a distinctive identity (but territorial spatial concepts cannot account for the dialectic process that defines this identity: see Stewart, this book, for a deeper contextualization of this notion of identity). Autopoietic systems are defined as autonomous because, in spite of their precarious negotiation with the external fluctuations and the transitory nature of their constitutive processes, they actively preserve a stable organization that distinguishes them from the world in which they are situated. Their phenomenology is governed by the principle of operational closure, which asserts that the transitions occurring within the organism can find a functional characterization only in reason of the specific horizon of organism-centered meanings that it enacts: this is the holistic backdrop against which single processes and events make sense to a particular living being, the immanent hermeneutic precondition of its sense-making capability (Stewart, 2000).

The precariousness of the living condition is not merely a contingent aspect of its realization, but essential for the enaction of meaning: without the ever-present possibility of the cessation of life there could be no sense of concern for life. The potential end of all sense-making is at the same time a necessary condition of possibility of all sense-making (Jonas, 1992). The complexity and the variety of the meanings of an organism’s world-environment depend on the level of organization of the autonomous systems considered (single-celled and multicellular organisms, and large societies of ...