The theme of this year’s Mind and Life Summer Research Institute (June 6–11) was “Intersubjectivity and Social Connectivity”. It was an amazing meeting. What struck me most were, first, the great diversity and interest of the people there and their research and humanitarian work. And second, the most important theme in my view, which unfolded […]
Tag: enaction
The intersubjective turn
We are currently witnessing not just an interactive, but an intersubjective turn in social cognition research.
In this chapter – a draft for an Oxford Handbook on Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Extended Cognition – I explain why I think this is so, and how the framework of participatory sense-making can support this intersubjective turn.
How we affect each other
The social interaction processes we engage in can affect the core of our self-constitution, because the intimate relations between intercorporeality and personal experience can reach deep levels of bodily affection. And so, in and through social interaction, we can truly affect each other. De Jaegher, H (2015). How we affect each other. Michel Henry’s “pathos-with” […]
Will cognitivist, functionalist theories of mind be able to capture how we interact with institutions? In this paper, I argue that they cannot. I propose that functionalism is inherently restricted to dealing with rule-based, hierarchical structures, and cannot deal with the democratic, fluid, embodied, and horizontal aspects of society. The paper puts Carol Gilligan’s work in […]
(Published as: De Jaegher, H. (2010). Enaction versus representation: an opinion piece. In T. Fuchs, H. Sattel & P. Henningsen (Eds.), The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence and Disorders. Stuttgart: Schattauer.) “The existence of other people is a difficulty and an outrage for objective thought” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 349) Current science of intersubjectivity (meaningful […]