Situating sense-making: The historical and ecological dimensions of enactive cognition
Miguel Sepúlveda-Pedro
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
Nov. 10, 2022, 4 p.m. UTC // Nov. 10, 2022, 4 p.m. in UTC
The enactive approach characterizes living and cognizing as sense-making. The traditional conception of sense-making involves the co-emergence of an agent’s self and a meaningful world that interact normatively as a coupled agent-environment system. This conception of sense-making helps explain the natural origins of normativity, intentionality, and meaning. Still, it does not fully account for the ecological and historical dimensions of cognitive and biological phenomena. Hence, I argue that we can build an alternative definition of sense-making based on the concepts of norm development and transverse emergence. Norm development describes sense-making as the progressive transformation of the ever-present normative entanglement of an agent-environment system. The previous history of the system constitutes this normative entanglement, enabling and constraining, at the same time, the emergence of any new sense-making norm. Therefore, from this standpoint, sense-making is essentially the normative reconfiguration of the agent-environment system. If this transformation involves a process of emergence, then we need to describe it as a transverse emergence. This form of emergence diachronically reconfigures the synchronic dynamic structures of the agent-environment system. This new conception of sense-making could help us to situate more concretely our study of life and cognition in the fields where these phenomena occur and recognize the many environmental and historical contingencies that shape the developmental pathways of the living.
