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Enacting Environments: From Umwelts to Institutions

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Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy ((PSCEWP))

Abstract

What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to generate a sense of the conceptual space in which this research is going on. I focus on the concepts of sense-making, Umwelts, affordances, cultural niches, epistemic actions, environmental scaffolding, and mental institutions. Despite differences in focus and detail these influences share an underlying world-view; that cognition is relational and world-involving. This way of thinking has clear resonances with dominant approaches in non-Western philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to generate in the reader a sense of this shared extended-enactive world-view in order to open up a space for communication between approaches.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, Thompson (2014).

  2. 2.

    Not all of the “Es” in 4E cognition are necessarily consistent with each other so it is not the case that “extended mind” proponents are necessarily enactivists or vice versa (for some discussions of this, see (Thompson and Stapleton 2009); (Ward and Stapleton 2012); (Ward et al. 2017). Nevertheless, the term “4E” or “4EA” (where “A” stands for “Affective”) serves to capture a general category of approaches that take an attitude of openness to investigating the important roles that body, action, and world variously play in our perception and cognition. It is this broad sense that I am using the term “extended” to capture. This is consistent with the way it has come to be used in the cognitive sciences outwith the metaphysics of mind debates.

  3. 3.

    For an example of the 4E approach being unpacked in respect to Confucian philosophy, see (Ott 2017). For examples of papers putting Japanese Philosophy into dialogue with themes and issues prevalent in 4E philosophy of mind and cognition, see (Krueger 2013, 2020) and (McKinney 2020).

  4. 4.

    For summaries of some of this work, see especially (Clark 1997); (Noë 2004, 2010); (Stapleton 2013).

  5. 5.

    See, for example, (Barrett and Bar 2009) for a clear model of this.

  6. 6.

    Research within these embodied, extended, and enactive approaches has flourished in recent years with the developments in philosophy matched by those in robotics, psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science more generally. For some representative overviews, see (Clark 1997; 1999; 2008); (Di Paolo et al. 2017), (Gallagher 2005, 2017); (Pfeifer et al. 2007); (Thompson 2007); (Varga 2018).

  7. 7.

    Externalism of course has rather different meanings in the various subdisciplines of philosophy. To avoid conflation with these other kinds of externalism (especially e.g., the “twin-earth” semantic externalism of Putnam and Burge), we can talk instead in terms of “extended cognition” in which the term “extended” is broadly construed to include, for example, enactive approaches rather than just referring to the particular line of research following from the publication of (Clark and Chalmers 1998) paper “The Extended Mind”.

  8. 8.

    See Chap. 1 of Andy Clark’s Being There (Clark 1997) and Chap. 3 of Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran’s Sensorimotor Life (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiaran 2017) for accessible introductions to this kind of research.

  9. 9.

    This generalisation captures much of the work that goes under the banner of extended cognition broadly construed as well as enactivism. However, there is work in the extended cognition stream of research that is better characterised as top-down according to this categorisation—indeed, much of the work in respect to the extended-mind hypothesis is representationalist. Nevertheless, much of the research in the extended cognition paradigm that is more cognitive science oriented draws upon and relies upon this kind of bottom-up research, and this is in clear contrast to the classical cognitivist approach.

  10. 10.

    For short, accessible introductions to enactivism see (Di Paolo and Thompson 2014) and (Thompson and Stapleton 2009). In depth presentations of the approach are available in (Thompson 2007) and (Di Paolo et al. 2017).

  11. 11.

    See (Ward et al. 2017) for an accessible introduction to the different enactive approaches.

  12. 12.

    See (Weber and Varela 2002) for an extended discussion of the notion of teleology and its applicability to the enactive project.

  13. 13.

    See,, for example Andy Clark’s Being There (Clark 1997) and Tony Chemero’s review (Chemero 1998), as well as (Thompson 2007). See also (Vörös 2017) for connections to Varela’s thought and (Ziemke and Sharkey 2001) for applications to Artificial Intelligence and robotics.

  14. 14.

    Recently, there has been some work done to unpack the notion of Umwelt, how it relates to the concept of environment, and how these fit with affordance approaches. I am using these terms in the most general sense that they are presented in this work. The reader who is interested in more fine-grained distinctions and their implications is directed towards (Baggs and Chemero 2018, 2020) and (Feiten 2020).

  15. 15.

    See (Von Uexküll 1934/1992: 339). Note however that there can be shared elements in each individual Umwelt so he does not necessarily relegate us to living in isolated solipsistic worlds—a conclusion that would certainly be at odds with embodied-extended-enactive approaches to the mind.

  16. 16.

    Note however that Gibson resists identifying a niche with the phenomenal world of an animal because affordances are for him not merely subjective phenomena. And indeed, some of Von Uexküll’s comments indicate that he holds a Kantian position whereby the real world beyond the phenomenal world cannot be known. However, the notion of Umwelts does not necessitate having this distinction between the phenomenal and objective world. We can read them in light of the idea of sense-making outlined earlier as both being subjective in terms of being enacted and thereby being a perspective, and at the same time being aspects of the world that can be shared—and thus in this sense are objective.

  17. 17.

    A great resource for the connections between the psychologists and the phenomenologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is (Käufer and Chemero 2015). An introduction to phenomenology aimed at cognitive science students.

  18. 18.

    For a deeper investigation into the relational nature of affordances, see (Chemero 2003, 2009).

  19. 19.

    Some accessible introductions for philosophers to these issues are in (Chemero 2003, 2009); (Käufer and Chemero 2015); (McGann 2014); and (Baggs and Chemero 2018).

  20. 20.

    Strictly speaking, von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory and Gibsonian affordances may not be compatible. For example, von Uexküll meant his theory to be constructivist in the tradition of Kant, whereas Gibson’s approach was unambiguously realist. There has begun to be a stream of literature that concerns itself with setting out these differences (and the differences with each and the enactive paradigm) and considering whether the approaches can be coherently connected. See, for example, some of the contributions to the recent Frontiers in Psychology Research Topic on “Enaction and Ecological Psychology: Convergences and Complementarities” https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/10973/enaction-and-ecological-psychology-convergences-and-complementarities#overview, especially: (Corris 2020); (Feiten 2020); and (Crippen 2020), as well as (Baggs and Chemero 2018, 2020). For our purposes, these details don’t matter. I am concerned with the way that the notions of Umwelt and affordances were being used in the extended and enactive literatures in order to engender a certain way of thinking about the mind and the world (that I consider all of the above authors to share) that is distinct from the way of thinking pervasive in the cognitivist paradigm.

  21. 21.

    This neurological disorder is called “utilization behaviour”. See (Lhermitte 1983).

  22. 22.

    See his book Natural Born Cyborgs (Clark 2003) for an extended exploration of this.

  23. 23.

    (Triantafyllou and Triantafyllou 1995) cited in (Clark 1997). See especially (Clark 1997, ch. 11) for discussion of the tuna.

  24. 24.

    (Kirsch & Maglio 1994) cited in (Clark 1997). See especially Chap. 3 for detailed discussion.

  25. 25.

    Also from Kirsch and cited in (Clark 1997).

  26. 26.

    We can distinguish here between debates about the “Extended Mind” thesis which concern the best way of metaphysically individuating cognitive states and discussions of “Extended Cognition” which concern the dynamic loops between brain, body, and world that constitute many of our cognitive activities. It is the latter that is consistent with Sterelny’s approach.

  27. 27.

    Cited and summarised in (Sutton 2010). See also (Sterelny 2010) for his discussion of this in respect to the extended mind thesis.

  28. 28.

    Sutton here directs the reader to Andy Clark’s discussion of Edwin Hutchins’ “distributed cognition” model (Clark 1997, p. 76). “Distributed cognition” is a close relative of extended views but instead of making claims about the constitution or location of cognition, it is a perspective on cognition that sees cognition as emerging from distributed processes (see Hutchins 2014).

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Stephen Hetherington and Dave Ward for providing helpful detailed comments on previous versions of this chapter.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Mog Stapleton

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  1. UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Karyn L. Lai

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Stapleton, M. (2022). Enacting Environments: From Umwelts to Institutions. In: Lai, K.L. (eds) Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_8

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