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I investigate the connections between how we interact, how we understand each other, how we understand the world (together), and how all that makes us who we are. Broadly, I study the role of social interaction processes in subjectivity and intersubjectivity.

For doing this, I developed the theory of participatory sense-making (see a video introduction here). This approach investigates how we move together while we interact with one another (including speaking), and how this influences how we understand each other, the world and ourselves, together.

Putting the interaction process at the centre of the study of social understanding entails a detailed and focused examination of it. The social sciences (interaction studies, conversation analysis, context analysis, etc.) already do this, but when Ezequiel Di Paolo and I first proposed it, it was a new idea in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. One pillar of this work is the investigation of individual sense-making, which is the immersed and meaningful engagement of self-organizing living beings with their environment. If we think of how interaction influences sense-making, this has implications for how we think of individuals as well.

One area of application of my work is in autism research. Here my work contributes to better understanding autistic experience and interactions, and enhancing mutual understanding between autistics and neurotypicals, or – as a Dutch blog called it – autism-friendliness.

My work is inherently interdisciplinary. I draw on empirical research from disciplines ranging from anthropology and linguistics, over evolutionary robotics, minimal systems research, developmental, experimental and clinical psychology, to psychiatry, philosophy, and neuroscience.

One issue at the centre of all this, and which we still do not understand very well, is the experience of interacting, and its role in how we understand each other. How is it with the intuition that ‘being in sync’ goes together with understanding each other well? Is it really that simple? In order to investigate this, we need to—literally—embody the investigation of interactive experience. Based on work by Barbara Pieper and Daniel Clénin, I have been involved in developing a method that allows researchers to do just that. Using this hands-on method, called PRISMA, researchers can unfold the experience of interacting, by calibrating and trusting themselves to be the sophisticated instruments with which to grasp intersubjectivity.

A long-time motivation behind my work, one that is becoming clearer and clearer to me over the years, is that there is something that we are not yet explaining – something fundamental to human sense-making. It can be found in the interpersonal capacities of teachers, therapists, doctors, who know something, as humans, that no textbook has taught them, and that the cognitive sciences have not been able to put their finger on. And yet, this is the very thing that makes them good at their jobs. I call this human knowing. When I present my work, to different audiences in different places, people often say that they feel recognised and seen by this work, and sense an affinity with it, and that it is because I am talking about this elusive human knowing. My current thinking aims to bring this closer to the fore.

I am currently thinking a lot about what I call engaging epistemology, or loving and knowing. This work looks at what I think is a fundamental similarity between loving relationships and knowing relationships. At the root of both of these, there is an ongoing, unresolvable tension of “letting be”—a term philosopher Kym Maclaren uses in order to illuminate knowing and intersubjectivity. I think that this concept of letting be allows us to understand that, in loving and in knowing, we ongoingly, dialectically move through this tension. And that knowing and loving are existential, dialectial relations in which each of us, and our relationship, are continually changing and transforming, in relation with each other.

I do a lot of my work in collaboration, often with Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Cuffari, and others. Together with Ezequiel and Elena, for example, we have written Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language (MIT Press, 2018). In terms of research and academia, for a Google Scholar view on how participatory sense-making is being taken up and developing, take a look here.

In recent years, I have become more and more interested in applying and testing, or perhaps rather: practicing participatory sense-making theory. This is why I’ve decided to start researching, teaching, curating, and cultivating it more and more for and with experts beyond academia. In a sense, everybody is an expert in intersubjectivity, and I will be engaging more and more with on-the-ground expertise. Keep an eye out for fresh developments in this direction!