Enactivism As An Epistemological 'Middle Way'

[DocWatts]

I thought I might share a write up on embodied epistomology that I penned for a philosophy book that I've been working on, '7 Provisional Truths'. The elevator pitch for the book is that it's a 'guided tour' to how our minds acquire valid knowledge about Reality (alternatively, I've also pitched it as a type of 'Field Guide' to construct awareness). The book is an exploration of phenomenology and embodied cognition, which also touches upon aspects of metamodernism. 

The epistemology that undergirds the book is an approach that I've termed 'Enactivism', and its primary emphasis is that minds 'enact', or 'bring forth', an experiential world in accordance with our living bodies and our environment. A central tenet of this viewpoint is the lack of any absolute or fixed boundary between ourselves and the world. As a consequence, both our minds and the world work in tandem to construct knowledge. The basic motivation behind this approach is a to avoid getting bogged down in a tug-of-war over what is or isn't considered to be 'real', and construct a theory of knowledge that's closer to our everyday, lived experience. To that end, this approach adopts a pragmatically oriented metaphysical agnosticism as to whether the bodies that our minds are coupled to are composed of 'matter-stuff' or 'mind-stuff' (I bring this point up here since I'm well aware of the types of metaphysical views that are popular on this forum ) 

 

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The Enactive Approach

In this section we’ll be expanding upon our investigation into certainty. What we’re specifically interested in is how intuitions about certainty influence one’s overall perceptions about what knowledge is. The overall goal of this survey is to serve as a ‘launching-off point’ for the type of epistemology we’ll be constructing over the course of this book. Our eventual aim is to propose a flexible ‘middle way’ for thinking about certainty, grounded in the active role that living minds play in ‘bringing forth’, or enacting, an experiential world. We can think of this ‘middle way’ as a natural extension of the themes that we discussed in our first chapter, which was all about how Minds Disclose Worlds.

We’ll see how this epistemology that we’re proposing threads a course between Absolute and Relative accounts of knowledge. The former contending that knowledge is strictly impersonal (perhaps best personified by the statement that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’); and the latter attesting that knowledge is intrinsically perspectival, being unavoidably conditioned by one’s society and culture.

In contrast to these two camps, the type of epistemology that we’ll be proposing goes by the name of Enactivism. The basis of our term arises from the word ‘enact’. What it alludes to is a process of ‘carrying out’ or ‘bringing to fruition’, which is the lens that we’ll be using to think about how living minds engage with Reality. The basic emphasis here is that our minds give us an experiential Reality to live in that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. One important consequence of this is that knowledge isn’t a pre-existing feature of an otherwise ‘neutral’ Reality; nor is it a collection of context-free facts. Instead, Enactivism contends that knowledge is the culmination of a relational process between a living mind and its environment. The basic emphasis here is that the mind’s role in knowledge is far more involved than a passive receiving and processing of information. Precisely because this is indeed a relational process, minds are active and engaged co-participants in knowledge creation.

As to what this viewpoint means for certainty, while this generative process can and does lead to reliable knowledge about Reality, what it doesn’t provide is absolute certainty. The basic reason for this is that knowledge can never be fully divorced from a perspective. At the same time, this also comes with a recognition that perspectives are unavoidably bounded by biology. Precisely because all human beings are the heirs of a shared evolutionary lineage, from this it is possible to excavate commonalities that are stable across many different types of perspectives.

 

An additional and related aspect of Enactivist epistemology lies in its emphasis that Absolutist and Relativist accounts are true, but partial. What this means is that both viewpoints contain elements of truth, but are partial in the sense that they leave out important aspects of Reality (something we’ll go into more detail on over the remainder of this chapter). While our Enactive approach will aim to synthesize aspects of these two accounts, it also rejects some key assumptions that are common to both. 

The first of these shared assumptions that Enactivism rejects is that knowledge is primarily conceptual, and mostly a matter of holding beliefs. As we’ve seen, this is flawed because it fails to account for how nonconceptual ways of knowing and being are central to everyday life. Our extended survey on the centrality of Situated Coping for everyday forms of knowing and being was an articulation of this precise point.

A second shared assumption which Enactivism repudiates is that thought, and by extension knowledge, is largely disembodied. As we’ll see, this has direct relevance for the role that perspectives contribute to knowledge. Precisely because neither Absolutism or Relativism places a great deal of emphasis on how minds are inherently embodied, both tend to miss the mark on this topic; but for different reasons. With the former largely failing to account for the unavoidable role that perspectives play in what is or is not considered to be valid knowledge. And the latter overemphasizing the social and cultural dimensions of knowledge, while neglecting how our commonalities open the door to stable forms of knowledge that transcend one’s individual and societal context.

Lastly, Enactivism flips on its head the implicit assumption, common to both Absolutism and Relativism, that there’s an absolute or fixed boundary between ourselves and the world. Enactivism calls into question the taken-for-granted view that Reality can be cleanly divided into an ‘external’ physical Reality and an ‘internal’ world of experience; where never the twain shall meet. 

In practice, this boundary is often coupled with a presupposition that one of these two domains is more ‘real’ than the other. We can see this in materialist perspectives that try to ‘explain away’ consciousness, arguing that minds can be approached from the same fundamental framework that’s been used to understand matter and energy. On the flip side of the coin, certain spiritual perspectives contend that our physical Reality is a type of illusion created by our minds. Both instances offer an illustration of something known as reductionism. We can think of this as trying to ‘explain away’ a particular phenomena by conjecturing that it’s in fact a property of something else. 

As we’ll see, one of our aims with Enactivism is to sidestep this tug of war between what’s ultimately ‘real’, and instead offer a more pragmatic perspective that’s grounded in our day to day experience. In questioning the notion of a fixed or absolute boundary between ourselves and the world, our aim is to suggest a more nuanced framing that doesn’t fall into a form of reductionism. To that end, Enactivism cuts across these two camps in its recognition that living minds are also inherently embedded within the world. Put another way, one of the fundamental presuppositions of this view is that the world itself is an indispensable part of what minds are. Consequently, when we speak of what knowledge is, we’re also necessarily speaking of how a mind is embedded within the world.

Edited March 12 by DocWatts