Mixed up perspectives: Reply to Chryssides et al. and Daanen and their critique of enactive cultural psychology

We need two perspectives to describe a living system

For some proponents of an inherently social psychology, a main source of discontent with the enactive framework seems to lie in the explicitly biological language that is used. Indeed, even though enactive cultural psychology is centrally concerned with the consensual ¹ coordination of actions and the normativity of cultural practice, it finds its epistemological basis in Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s efforts to describe the defining properties of living systems. Yet, far from offering a reductionist account of meaningful action, these biologists are precisely interested in the systemic and irreducible qualities of both cognitive and social phenomena that follow from the characteristic organization of living systems.

Maturana and Varela (1980) recognized that a living system can in principle not be fully described in terms of the features, components, and behaviors that an observer can distinguish with respect to that living system. Such a type of description suffices to fully describe objects, but not living systems; it suffices to describe a dead body, but not a living one. In order to describe a living system as a living system, one needs to acknowledge that such a system constantly produces its own components and organization—e.g., its molecules and cells, and the relations between them. It is necessary for living systems that they have a self-referential, recursive organization, which sets them apart from other systems. In the words of Maturana (in Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 48): “The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them.”

Living systems, then, are self-creating or auto-poietic systems whose circular organization is a key characteristic that must be included in an explanation of the system’s operations. The circular organization is such that the relations between their components are maintained and disintegration is precluded, which is another way of saying that in the eyes of an observer living systems maintain their identity as a composite unit. Therefore, in order to fully describe a living system as an autonomous living system, a description of its internal circular dynamics is needed, in addition to a description of its features and (inter)actions in an environment.

Countering the critique

Recognizing that the two phenomenal domains are irreducible to each other implies an absolute prohibition on explaining behavioral and by extension social phenomena in terms of the internal dynamics of individual biological systems. It should be noticed that the dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is precisely that there are causal relations between events in the operational and the behavioral domain. Embodiment is often understood in terms of neuron formations that represent abstract meanings and concepts. Enactivist cultural psychology is radically at odds with that view for it holds that such observations would constitute the epistemological mistake of mixing up phenomena that belong to different a priori perspectives on the functioning of embodied living systems.

We can now also readdress the criticism that in earlier papers (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999; Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007) we have presented a solipsistic and reductionist epistemology in which self-contained individuals act like isolated monads. As stated in the foregoing, the notion of “operational closure” as put forward by enactivism only pertains to formal descriptions in the operational perspective. It by no means implies that interactions with an environment or even metabolism are altogether impossible for a living system. Quite on the contrary, such interactions are indeed necessary to live at all. However, the descriptions of interactions between a unit and its environment belong to the behavioral perspective, which is part of the enactive account in addition to the operational perspective.

Kreppner’s (1999) and Chryssides et al.’s (2009, p. 86) critique of solipsism is directly derived from mixing up the two perspectives. The authors drag the notion of operational closure into the behavioral viewpoint, which is principally illegitimate. Subsequently, they argue that enactivism precludes people from having any interaction with an environment. Of course, neither we nor any enactivist would be that naive.

Arguing that the enactivist framework is essentially materialistic and reductionistic (Chryssides et al., 2009, pp. 86, 92) stems from the very same confusion. We have seen above that phenomena which can only be observed in the behavioral perspective are irreducible to operations in the physiology of single organisms. That is precisely the key point in the enactive epistemology.

Our critics do not seem to have made great efforts to understand “closure” as we used it (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, pp. 192–193, 202-203; Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007, pp. 15–17, 19, 22–23), or as it is generally used within the enactive framework. Instead of looking into it, is seems that both Kreppner (1999) and Chryssides et al. (2009) have merely associated about what they thought operational closure would be about, thereby presenting a crippled caricature of the enactivist epistemology.

Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that the notion of “experiential closure” was misinterpreted as well. We introduced the notion in 1999 (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999) to convey that the same closed organization that makes it possible for a system to have experiences makes it impossible for those experiences to be accessed or instructed from the outside, so to speak. Our focus in this article was epistemological in nature and our claim was simply that “experience” cannot be made into an object of knowledge and by the same token cannot be “shared” in an epistemological sense of that word.

In our 2007 article (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007), we elaborated the idea that to have a world in common is indeed not a matter of sharing knowledge or representations about the world. Although little contested in phenomenological circles, representational thinkers may see in this an argument for solipsism or self-contained individualism. However, phenomenologically speaking experience is never self-contained but always “opens up unto a world.” Enactive cultural psychology is an attempt to understand how we can have such a world in common if not by way of “shared” knowledge and our own answer has been one in terms of a particular consensual coordination of actions that generates a common normative “style” of expression and practice, against the background of which experiences can come to be articulated as meaningful. As we will argue below, this puts enactive cultural psychology much closer to Heidegger’s existential phenomenology than to the representational thought of those who confuse “being-in-the-world” with possessing knowledge about the world.

Having said that, perhaps it is also true that “experiential closure” suggests too easily that the articulation of experiences is impossible, rather than mandatory. We will therefore drop this notion from our conceptual toolkit. ³

Can enactivism solve problems for cultural psychology?

Enactivist epistemology denies that there is a deterministic relation between the unfolding of mutually coordinated behaviors between living systems and physico-chemical events within the boundaries of a single living system. Of course this does not mean that physiology and the production of behavior are altogether unrelated. For example, in the case of humans, the nervous system partakes in events in the two phenomenal domains at the same time: While its operations are subordinate to maintaining the living system’s autopoiesis, the nervous system also contributes to the system’s coordinated interaction with another living system. Therefore, the plasticity of the nervous system and the behavioral repertoire of the individual co-evolve (see also Maturana, 1988, section 7). The history of this structural coupling can be understood in terms of training.

Training entails the repeated orienting of the individual in its environment. The human individual is above all situated within a community of others. As Wittgenstein pointed out (1956/1978, 1958/1974), already skilled others evoke and correct our actions and expressions such that by continued practice and correction we become skilled practitioners ourselves that get a sense for what is good, just, wrong, proper, etc. Whether we learn to speak a language or learn to play soccer, such normative training histories are always involved. The result is that we learn to move, speak, feel and so on, much like others around us do.

This cultural training has consequences for the operations of the nervous system. For every individual, therefore, and dependent on her very specific ontogeny, there will be a unique structural congruence between the plasticity of the nervous system and the individual’s behavioral repertoire. To be sure, this uniqueness is constrained by phylogeny. Particular areas in the brain serve particular functions, for instance. Yet, that topology is relatively general and does not concern the unique pattern of activity of any particular brain. The specific functioning of a nervous system can only be understood per individual, in relation to a historical account of that individual’s learning experiences and cultural training. Although it is a commonplace to say that the brain reconfigures when we learn, the precise nature of the relation between brain and learning can in the end only be characterized in terms of an historical (or genetic à la Vygotsky) account of a certain person’s ontogeny.

What the brain does is not a representational state, but a dynamic process that can only be described as a unique temporal configuration or process from an operational point of view. What the actor does is also a temporally extended activity that can only be described from a behavioral point of view, in terms of a training history or a history of normative correction. Enactivism warns us not to confuse both domains and not to conclude, for instance, that there is a causal mapping between a (meaningful) behavioral “state” and a certain brain “state.” Whatever is happening in the brain at a given moment, one can only say that this person is enacting (not retrieving) a certain meaning if one can demonstrate that this person has been trained to adequately use that meaning, or if indeed this person demonstrates the adequate use of that meaning in a domain where this performance is subject to normative correction.

If we only know what the brain does, we cannot know specifically what a person sees or thinks. If we only know what a person sees or thinks, we cannot know specifically what neurons are firing. Current cognitive science claims success in revealing correlations between relatively simple, context-free visual or computational tasks and activity in specific brain areas. This reveals merely that for a given individual, repeated exposure to similar tasks leads indeed to structural congruence between the activity of this individual’s brain and structural features of the “task.” This does, however, not establish that the (cultural) meaning of a given task is to be found in the brain areas that are involved. Cultural learning, or socialization, is therefore not a process of internalization, but a particular way in which the operational domain and the behavioral domain become structurally coupled. Or, it is the particular history in which a body evolves as both a biological and an expressive device. Since structural coupling is itself a dynamic and temporally extended phenomenon, it can only be described historically. Hence our enactive account is inherently historical, or genetic.

Daanen’s attempt to reconcile enactive cultural psychology and social representation theory

As an alternative for shared social representations, we put forward mutual coordination of actions as the inherently social prerequisite for meaning production (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007). This does by no means imply that we “abandon talk of ‘meaning’ and replace it with a concept like ‘sensitivity and feel’,” as Daanen states (2009, p. 376). Rather, meaning can only result from an inherently social situation, enacted in terms of higher order coordination of actions. In Daanen’s reading of our work, however, the notions “second order coordination of actions,” “reflective thought,”“conscious deliberation,” and “representation” seem to be synonymous. He therefore claims that it is possible for social representations to also become non-conscious, thereby constituting an unreflective background of shared tacit knowledge from which we can act meaningfully without conscious deliberation. Daanen subsequently compares this situation to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. Hence, phenomenology (and by extension enactivism) and SRT can be reconciled.

Unfortunately, Daanen’s discussion of Heidegger (as repeated also in Sammut, Daanen, & Sartawi, 2010) shows the same misunderstanding as the one displayed in his interpretation of the enactive position. Both are seen as merely making a pitch for the primary role of tacit or unreflective understanding relative to the more reflective forms of cognition that characterize our conscious actions. It is perhaps no surprise then that Daanen manages to subsume such tacit or implicit knowledge under the label of representation again, proposing what he calls “non-conscious” or “non-reflective” representations.

Daanen probably missed that throughout Being and Time, Heidegger hardly at all mentions the word “consciousness.” He does recognize that Heidegger offers a devastating critique of the Cartesian subject/object schema and that Heidegger demonstrates that the way anything can show up for us as what it is, is premised against a background of a total coordination of our practices. But Heidegger’s critique is more devastating than Daanen seems to acknowledge. Heidegger radically breaks with the very philosophy of consciousness that Daanen attempts to smuggle in again through the backdoor. Heidegger’s point is not merely that most of our background understanding is “non-conscious” or “non-reflective,” but rather that the very conditions of intelligibility reside not in the (conscious or unconscious) mind but in the particular coordination of our practices and the overall style of being that Heidegger refers to as “world.” For Heidegger, “world” refers neither to a pregiven “ontic” reality, nor to the totality of our conscious and non-conscious representations, but to the “openness” that allows entities to show up as what they are in the first place. If there is room in Heidegger’s philosophy for consciousness, it is not primarily as the conscious subject implied in the act of knowing, but as consciousness in the hermeneutic sense of understanding (Verstehen): In Heidegger’s terms, entities can only show themselves as what they are on the basis of the understanding of being that Dasein (to use Heidegger’s term) is; not on the basis of representations that a thinking and acting subject presumably has.

To use again Heidegger’s well-worn example of the hammer: The point is empathically not, as Daanen claims, “that the hammer immediately and non-consciously ‘represents’ a certain means to achieve a certain desired end, and thus ‘represents’ a certain meaning in light of this end” (2009, p. 375). It is rather that the hammer as ready-to-hand is connected to an equipmental totality (e.g., the hammer relates to nails, boards, houses, etc.) that can principally not be fully grasped—whether “consciously” or “non-consciously.” Instead, prior to the hammer showing itself to us as what it is (that is, as what it is for), an equipmental whole is always already disclosed, not by way of representations, but as a consequence of a certain way of being-in-the-world; that is, as a consequence of the way Dasein is disposed to the world.

When this referential totality breaks down we do not suddenly switch from a non-conscious to a conscious mode of coping, as Daanen argues. Rather do we find ourselves in the experience of “unworlding” of the ready-to-hand, a breakdown of referential relations, such that the hammer now shows itself as merely present-at-hand: an “object” with a seemingly independent existence. Although Heidegger does not deny the possibility of knowledge and consciousness, his crucial insight is precisely that not knowledge or representation, but dwelling or engagement with entities in the world, is our primary access to the real. Hence, knowledge in a more cognitive or representational sense can at best only be a further explication of the entities first disclosed in our involved ways of coping. Daanen appears to put Heidegger’s cart before the horse.

Moreover, in spite of his attempts to broaden the representational view of culture to include tacit knowledge, Daanen’s modified version of SRT maintains the tautological problems that we pointed out in our 2007 article (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007). Following Moscovici, Daanen argues that non-conscious representations result from successful “anchoring,” in which an unfamiliar thing becomes familiar through deliberation and subsequently recedes into the background of intelligibility (2009, pp. 378–379). But Daanen also argues that conscious representations emerge from a background of representations-gone-non-conscious, once the taken-for-grantedness of the meaningful activities breaks down (2009, p. 382). The obvious question to be asked is where social representations originated in the very first place. It appears that presupposing an already social and meaningful background out of which social representations emerge and into which they recede, continues to pose as serious problem for SRT.

At the end of his response Daanen claims that “objects” like chairs and hammers simply “represent” the meaning that is their use and that “the meaning of the objects we encounter in the world are the properties of the objects themselves” (2009, p. 382). Daanen refers here to Gibson’s notion of affordances and Costall’s (1995) notion of socialized affordances. But the language of affordances hardly provides a solution in this regard, since what needs to be explained is (as Costall seems to recognize) precisely the normativity of the affordances offered by such things as hammers, chairs, and tables. What exactly allows us to see such objects in their proper use? Objects afford certain uses, says Daanen, both because we implicitly “know how” to use them and because “those objects ‘represent’ a certain immediate and non-conscious meaning for us in light of a specific task” (p. 382). Whereas it is now seemingly the “object,” rather than the actor, that carries the representational burden, Daanen still needs to evoke implicit “know-how” to explain how the object comes to have this semantic or representational power.

Both the circularity and the lingering Cartesianism of Daanen’s proposal are fully exposed when he goes on to conclude that “our tacit and non-conscious ‘background of intelligibility,’ composed of our implicit social representations conferring meaning upon ‘things,’ provides us with a direct and immediate understanding of how the world works” (2009, p. 382). For if we do indeed need implicit social representations to confer meaning upon “things” it is not at all clear how such representations would simultaneously provide us with “direct” and “unmediated” understanding of how the world works.

Conclusion

Ironically, not enactivism but SRT is unable to free itself from the Cartesian dualism that ultimately situates meaning in representational knowledge rather than in our modes of being or dwelling in the world. Moreover, the language of conscious and non-conscious representations surreptitiously keeps reintroducing the kind of mentalism that prevents us from truly making the decisive step toward an inherently cultural and historical psychology. In our view, the real problem with reductionist/representational accounts is that they are principally not historical. In traditional representationalist accounts, knowledge is seen as merely a “state” (or at best a dynamics of states) in the mind, which somehow maps onto a state (or a sequence of states) in an independently existing world. But social representationalist accounts, as well, remain essentially ahistorical since they lack the conceptual means to connect knowledge to practice. They fail to escape the philosophy of consciousness that requires a non-explicated realm of representational entities to mediate between our biological constitution and our actions in the world. Mixing up the two phenomenal domains prevents representational thinkers from recognizing that fatal flaw.

Enactive cultural psychology avoids the Cartesian mentalism by situating consciousness fully in the consensual realm of languaging (i.e., in second and higher order coordinations of actions), while understanding cultural competence as embodied dispositions acquired through recurrent and recursive practice rather than as representational knowledge. Although the relation of enactivism to Heidegger’s thought is far from univocal, we side with Heidegger in the recognition that intelligent action can at base level not be representational, but must concern the total way in which actors are disposed to the world. A central maxim of enactive thought is that “knowing” is “being.” As structurally determined systems we exist simultaneously in two non-intersecting phenomenal domains and in an enactive account the structural coupling between events in the operational and the behavioral domain is inherently historical. From the perspective of an enactive cultural psychology the proper question is therefore not how we acquire representational knowledge. Rather, it is how those two domains become structurally coupled through a process of cultural training; that is, how we acquire the dynamic and embodied dispositions that allow us to act competently within a historical normative world.