La ricerca di una via di mezzo per la descrizione della coscienza nella prospettiva enazionista porta a riconsiderare la prospettiva della cognizione come azione incarnata:
Enaction: Embodied Cognition
Cognition as Embodied Action
Let us begin, once again, with visual perception. Consider the question, "Which came first, the world or the image?" The answer of most vision research-both cognitivist and connectionist-is unambiguously given by the names of the tasks investigated. Thus researchers speak of "recovering shape from shading," "depth from motion," or "color from varying illuminants." We call this stance the chicken position:
Chicken position: The world out there has pregiven properties. These exist prior to the image that is cast on the cognitive system, whose task is to recover them appropriately (whether through symbols or global subsymbolic states).Notice how very reasonable this position sounds and how difficult it is to imagine that things could be otherwise. We tend to think that the only alternative is the egg position:
Egg position: The cognitive system projects its own world, and the apparent reality of this world is merely a reflection of internal laws of the system.Our discussion of color suggests a middle way between these two chicken and egg extremes. We have seen that colors are not "out there" independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities. We have also seen that colors are not "in here" independent of our surrounding biological and cultural world. Contrary to the objectivist view, color categories are experiential; contrary to the subjectivist view, color categories belong to our shared biological and cultural world. Thus color as a study case enables us to appreciate the obvious point that· chicken and egg, world and perceiver, specify each other.
It is precisely this emphasis on mutual specification that enables us to negotiate a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a pregiven inner world (idealism). These two extremes both take representation as their central notion: in the first case representation is used to recover what is outer; in the second case it is used to project what is inner. Our intention is to bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action.
Let us explain what we mean by this phrase embodied action. By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. By using the term action we mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition. Indeed, the two are not merely contingently linked in individuals; they have also evolved together.
We can now give a preliminary formulation of what we mean by enaction. In a nutshell, the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided. These two statements will perhaps appear somewhat opaque, but their meaning will become more transparent as we proceed.
Let us begin with the notion of perceptually guided action. We have already seen that for the representationist the point of departure for understanding perception is the information-processing problem of recovering pregiven properties of the world. In contrast, the point of departure for the enactive approach is the study of how the perceiver can guide his actions in his local situation. Since these local situations constantly change as a result of the perceiver's activity, the reference point for understanding perception is no longer a pregiven, perceiver-independent world but rather the sensorimotor structure of the perceiver (the way in which the nervous system links sensory and motor surfaces). This structure-the manner in which the perceiver is embodied-rather than some pregiven world determines how the perceiver can act and be modulated by environmental events. Thus the overall concern of an enactive approach to perception is not to determine how some perceiver-independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather, to determine the common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems that explain how action can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-dependent world.
The organism cannot properly be compared to a keyboard on which the external stimuli would play and in which their proper form would be delineated for the simple reason that the organism contributes to the constitution of that form .... "The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject . . . are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole." When the eye and the ear follow an animal in flight, it is impossible to say "which started first" in the exchange of stimuli and responses. Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have in tum been possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to external influences, one could also say that behavior is the first cause of all the stimulations.In such an approach, then, perception is not simply embedded within and constrained by the surrounding world; it also contributes to the enactment of this surrounding world. Thus as Merleau-Ponty notes, the organism both initiates and is shaped by the environment. Merleau-Ponty clearly recognized, then, that we must see the organism and environment as bound together in reciprocal specification and selection.
Thus the form of the excitant is created by the organism itself, by its proper manner of offering itself to actions from the outside. Doubtless, in order to be able to subsist, it must encounter a certain number of physical and chemical agents in its surroundings. But it is the organism itself-according to the proper nature of its receptors, the thresholds of its nerve centers and the movements of the organs-which chooses the stimuli in the physical world to which it will be sensitive. "The environment (Umwelt) emerges from the world through the actualization or the being
of the organism-[granted that] an organism can exist only if it succeeds in finding in the world an adequate environment." This would be a keyboard which moves itself in such a way as to offer-and according to variable rhythms-such or such of its keys to the in itself monotonous action of an external hammer
[italics added].
Let us now provide a few illustrations of the perceptual guidance of action. In a classic study, Held and Hein raised kittens in the dark and exposed them to light only under controlled conditions. A first group of animals was allowed to move around normally, but each of them was harnessed to a simple carriage and basket that contained a member of the second group of animals. The two groups therefore shared the same visual experience, but the second group was entirely passive. When the animals were released after a few weeks of this treatment, the first group of kittens behaved normally, but those who had been carried around behaved as if they were blind: they bumped into objects and fell over edges. This beautiful study supports the enactive view that objects are not seen by the visual extraction of features but rather by the visual guidance of action.
Another sensory modality where the relation between perception and action can be seen is olfaction. Over many years of research, Walter Freeman has managed to insert an array of electrodes into the olfactory bulb of a rabbit so that a small portion of the global activity can be measured while the animal behaves freely. He found that there is no clear pattern of global activity in the bulb unless the animal is exposed to one specific odor several times. Furthermore, such emergent patterns of activity seem to be created out of a background of incoherent or chaotic activity into a coherent attractor.49 As in the case of color, smell is not a passive mapping of external features but a creative form of enacting significance on the basis of the animal's embodied history.
There is in fact growing evidence that this kind of fast dynamics can underlie the configuration of neuronal ensembles. It has been reported in the visual cortex in cats and monkeys linked to visual stimulation; it has been found in radically different neural structures such as the avian brain and even the ganglia of an invertebrate, Hermissenda. This universality is important, for it indicates the fundamental nature of this kind of mechanism of sensorimotor coupling and hence enaction. Had this kind of mechanism been a more species-specific process, typical of, say, only the mammalian cortex, it would have been be far less convincing as a working hypothesis.
Let us now tum to the idea that cognitive structures emerge from the kinds of recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided. The pioneer and giant in this area is Jean Piaget.
Piaget laid out a program that he called genetic epistemology: he set himself the task of explaining the development of the child from an immature biological organism at birth to a being with abstract reason in adulthood. The child begins with only her sensorimotor system, and Piaget wishes to understand how sensorimotor intelligence evolves into the child's conception of an external world with permanent objects located in space and time and into the child's conception of herself as both an object among other objects and as an internal mind. Within Piaget's system, the newborn infant is neither an objectivist nor an idealist; she has only her own activity, and even the simplest act of recognition of an object can be understood only in terms of her own activity. Out of this, she must construct the entire edifice of the phenomenal world with its laws and logic. This is a clear example in which cognitive structures are shown to emerge from recurrent patterns (in Piaget's language, "circular reactions") of sensorimotor activity.
Piaget, however, as a theorist, never seems to have doubted the existence of a pregiven world and an independent knower with a pregiven logical endpoint for cognitive development. The laws of cognitive gevelopment, even at the sensorimotor stage, are an assimilation of and an accommodation to that pregiven world. We thus have an interesting tension in Piaget's work: an objectivist theorist who postulates his subject matter, the child, as an enactive agent, but an enactive agent who evolves inexorably into an objectivist theorist. Piaget's work, already influential in some domains, would bear more attention from non-Piagetians.
One of the most fundamental cognitive activities that all organisms perform is categorization. By this means the uniqueness of each experience is transformed into the more limited set of learned, meaningful categories to which humans and other organisms respond. In the behaviorist era of psychology (which was also the heyday of cultural relativism in anthropology), categories were treated as arbitrary, and categorization tasks were used in psychology only to study the laws of learning. (The sense of arbitrariness also reflects the subjectivist trends in contemporary thought that emphasize the element of interpretation in all experience.) In the enactive view, although mind and world arise together in enaction, their manner of arising in any particular situation is not arbitrary. Consider the object on which you are sitting, and ask yourself what it is. What is its name? If you are sitting on a chair, the chances are that you will have thought chair rather than furniture or armchair. Why? Rosch proposed that there was a basic level of categorization in taxonomies of concrete objects at which biology, culture, and cognitive needs for informativeness and economy all met. In a series of experiments, Rosch et al. found the basic level of categorization to be the most inclusive level at which category members (1) are used, or interacted with, by similar motor actions, (2) have similar perceived shapes and can be imaged, (3) have identifiable humanly meaningful attributes, (4) are categorized by young children, and (5) have linguistic primacy (in several senses).
The basic level of categorization, thus, appears to be the point at which cognition and environment become simultaneously enacted. The object appears to the perceiver as affording certain kinds of interactions, and the perceiver uses the objects with his body and mind in the afforded manner. Form and function, normally investigated as opposing properties, are aspects of the same process, and organisms are highly sensitive to their coordination. And the activities performed by the perceiver/actor with basic-level objects are part of the cultural, consensually validated forms of the life of the community in which the human and the object are situated-they are basic-level activities.
Mark Johnson proposed another very intriguing basic categorization process. Humans, he argues, have very general cognitive structures called kinesthetic image schemas: for example, the container schema, the part-whole schema, and the source-path-goal schema. These schemas originate in bodily experience, can be defined in terms of certain structural elements, have a basic logic, and can be metaphorically projected to give structure to a wide variety of cognitive domains. Thus, the container schema's structural elements are "interior, boundary, exterior," its basic logic is "inside or outside," and its metaphorical projection gives structure to our conceptualizations of the visual field (things go in and out of sight), personal relationships (one gets in or out of a relationship), the logic of sets (sets contain their members), and so on.
On the basis of a detailed study of these kinds of examples, Johnson argues that image schemas emerge from certain basic forms of sensorimotor activities and interactions and so provide a preconceptual structure to our experience. He argues that since our conceptual understanding is shaped by experience, we also have image-schematic concepts. These concepts have a basic logic, which imparts structure to the cognitive domains into which they are imaginatively projected. Finally, these projections are not arbitrary but are accomplished through metaphorical and metonymical mapping procedures that are themselves motivated by the structures of bodily experience.
Sweetzer provides specific case studies of this process in linguistics. She argues that historical changes of meaning of words in languages can be explained as metaphorical extensions from the concrete and bodily relevant senses of basic-level categories and image schemas to more abstract meanings--for example, "to see" comes to mean "to understand."
Focusing on categorization, Lakoff has written a compendium of the work that various people have done that can be interpreted to challenge an objectivist viewpoint.
Recently Lakoff and Johnson have produced a manifesto of what they call an experientialist approach to cognition. This is the central theme of their approach:
Heideggerian Psychoanalysis
A view of psychopathology fundamentally different from either the Freudian approach or object relations theory was offered by Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Binswagner, and Merleau-Ponty based on the philosophy of Heidegger.
There is in fact growing evidence that this kind of fast dynamics can underlie the configuration of neuronal ensembles. It has been reported in the visual cortex in cats and monkeys linked to visual stimulation; it has been found in radically different neural structures such as the avian brain and even the ganglia of an invertebrate, Hermissenda. This universality is important, for it indicates the fundamental nature of this kind of mechanism of sensorimotor coupling and hence enaction. Had this kind of mechanism been a more species-specific process, typical of, say, only the mammalian cortex, it would have been be far less convincing as a working hypothesis.
Let us now tum to the idea that cognitive structures emerge from the kinds of recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided. The pioneer and giant in this area is Jean Piaget.
Piaget, however, as a theorist, never seems to have doubted the existence of a pregiven world and an independent knower with a pregiven logical endpoint for cognitive development. The laws of cognitive gevelopment, even at the sensorimotor stage, are an assimilation of and an accommodation to that pregiven world. We thus have an interesting tension in Piaget's work: an objectivist theorist who postulates his subject matter, the child, as an enactive agent, but an enactive agent who evolves inexorably into an objectivist theorist. Piaget's work, already influential in some domains, would bear more attention from non-Piagetians.
One of the most fundamental cognitive activities that all organisms perform is categorization. By this means the uniqueness of each experience is transformed into the more limited set of learned, meaningful categories to which humans and other organisms respond. In the behaviorist era of psychology (which was also the heyday of cultural relativism in anthropology), categories were treated as arbitrary, and categorization tasks were used in psychology only to study the laws of learning. (The sense of arbitrariness also reflects the subjectivist trends in contemporary thought that emphasize the element of interpretation in all experience.) In the enactive view, although mind and world arise together in enaction, their manner of arising in any particular situation is not arbitrary. Consider the object on which you are sitting, and ask yourself what it is. What is its name? If you are sitting on a chair, the chances are that you will have thought chair rather than furniture or armchair. Why? Rosch proposed that there was a basic level of categorization in taxonomies of concrete objects at which biology, culture, and cognitive needs for informativeness and economy all met. In a series of experiments, Rosch et al. found the basic level of categorization to be the most inclusive level at which category members (1) are used, or interacted with, by similar motor actions, (2) have similar perceived shapes and can be imaged, (3) have identifiable humanly meaningful attributes, (4) are categorized by young children, and (5) have linguistic primacy (in several senses).
The basic level of categorization, thus, appears to be the point at which cognition and environment become simultaneously enacted. The object appears to the perceiver as affording certain kinds of interactions, and the perceiver uses the objects with his body and mind in the afforded manner. Form and function, normally investigated as opposing properties, are aspects of the same process, and organisms are highly sensitive to their coordination. And the activities performed by the perceiver/actor with basic-level objects are part of the cultural, consensually validated forms of the life of the community in which the human and the object are situated-they are basic-level activities.
On the basis of a detailed study of these kinds of examples, Johnson argues that image schemas emerge from certain basic forms of sensorimotor activities and interactions and so provide a preconceptual structure to our experience. He argues that since our conceptual understanding is shaped by experience, we also have image-schematic concepts. These concepts have a basic logic, which imparts structure to the cognitive domains into which they are imaginatively projected. Finally, these projections are not arbitrary but are accomplished through metaphorical and metonymical mapping procedures that are themselves motivated by the structures of bodily experience.
Focusing on categorization, Lakoff has written a compendium of the work that various people have done that can be interpreted to challenge an objectivist viewpoint.
Meaningful conceptual structures arise from two sources: (1) from the structured nature of bodily and social experience and (2) from our innate capacity to imaginatively project from certain well-structured aspects of bodily and interactional experience to abstract conceptual structures. Rational thought is the application of very general cognitive processes-focusing, scanning, superimposition, figure-ground reversal, etc.-to such structures.
This statement would seem consonant with the view of cognition as enaction for which we are arguing.
One provocative possible extension of the view of cognition as enaction is to the domain of cultural knowledge in anthropology. Where is the locus of cultural knowledge such as folktales, names for fishes, jokes-is it in the mind of the individual? In the rules of society? In cultural artifacts? How can we account for the variation found across time and across informants? Great leverage for anthropological theory might be obtained by considering the knowledge to be found in the interface between mind, society, and culture rather than in one or even in all of them. The knowledge does not preexist in anyone place or form but is enacted in particular situations-when a folktale is told or a fish named. We leave it to anthropology to explore this possibility.
A view of psychopathology fundamentally different from either the Freudian approach or object relations theory was offered by Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Binswagner, and Merleau-Ponty based on the philosophy of Heidegger.
Intended to account for psychological disorders more general, more characterological, than the hysterical and compulsive symptomatology in which Freudian analysis specializes, this account can be dubbed the ontological view to contrast with Freud's representational, cognitivist, epistemological view. In the ontological view, a character disorder can be understood only in terms of a person's entire mode of being in the world. A theme, such as inferiority and dominance, which is usually only one dimension among many used by an individual in defining his world, becomes fixated, through an early experience, such that it becomes the only mode through which the person can experience himself in the world. It becomes like the light by which objects are seen-the light itself cannot be seen as an object-and thus there is no comparison possible with other modes of being in the world. Existential psychoanalysis has extended this type of analysis to pathologies other than character disorders at the same time that it has recharacterized so-called pathologies as existential choices.
The extent to which this phenomenological portrait of pathology lacks any specific methods of its own for treatment is well known, however. The patient might attempt to recall the initial incidents that produced the totalizing of one theme, enact and work through this theme through transference with the therapist, or undergo body work to discover and alleviate the embodied stance of the theme-all, however, are equally characteristic of therapies in which the disorder is conceived in a Freudian, object relations, or other theoretical fashion.
The possibilities for total personal reembodiment inherent in the mindful, open-ended approach to experience that we have been describing may provide the needed framework and tools for implementation of an existential, embodied psychoanalysis. In fact, the relationship between meditation practice, Buddhist teachings, and therapy is a topic of great interest and great controversy among Western mind fullness/awareness practitioners.
The extent to which this phenomenological portrait of pathology lacks any specific methods of its own for treatment is well known, however. The patient might attempt to recall the initial incidents that produced the totalizing of one theme, enact and work through this theme through transference with the therapist, or undergo body work to discover and alleviate the embodied stance of the theme-all, however, are equally characteristic of therapies in which the disorder is conceived in a Freudian, object relations, or other theoretical fashion.
The possibilities for total personal reembodiment inherent in the mindful, open-ended approach to experience that we have been describing may provide the needed framework and tools for implementation of an existential, embodied psychoanalysis. In fact, the relationship between meditation practice, Buddhist teachings, and therapy is a topic of great interest and great controversy among Western mind fullness/awareness practitioners.
Psychological therapy in the Western sense is a historically and culturally unique phenomenon ; there is no specific counterpart within traditional Buddhism. Many Western meditators (whether they consider themselves students of Buddhism or not) either are therapists or are considering becoming therapists, and many more have the experience of undergoing therapy. But again, we must remind the reader of our disclaimer concerning what is said in this book about psychoanalysis. An adequate discussion of this ferment would lead us too far afield at this point , but we invite the reader to consider what form a reembodying psychoanalysis might take.
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