Author’s reply to the commentaries: Clearing up misunderstandings about the course-of-experience framework and laying the groundwork for future discussions

Abstract

In the context of this special issue on the course-of-experience framework, we were fortunate to receive far-reaching commentaries from a wide variety of disciplines including enaction, phenomenology, ecological psychology, ecological dynamics, cognitive anthropology and archaeology and the philosophy of mind. The result is an extraordinarily rich set of reflections that critically engage in debate and lay the groundwork for future discussions and empirical research. In this reply, the authors try to highlight the originality of the course-of-experience framework, which is not yet widely known but has the potential to offer a breakthrough in the present-day international ecological-enactive mainstream and an alternative to (Husserlian) phenomenologically inspired enactivist approaches. They also try to set things right concerning the critical dimensions of cognitive ecology, such as the role of material and ‘others’ that they didn’t mention in their original article (in view of the objectives pursued).

The authors would like to thank all the commentators for the debates and discussions initiated in the continuation of their article. These comments will undoubtedly enrich their theoretical elaboration and how they present the course-of-experience framework. More interestingly, readers will more easily identify the convergences, divergences, tensions, and distinctions between the research programs within the enactive paradigm and between these programs and ‘loyal companions’ (like ecological psychology). As pointed out by Steiner (2023), ‘Within the same paradigm, tensions exist. For instance, inside of the enactive paradigm, participants disagree on the relations with analytic philosophy and phenomenology, on the forms of naturalization of cognition, on the nature of consciousness, on the conservation of mental content and mental representations, on the importance one should devote to culture and institutions, on the origins of meaning, and so on’ (p. 169). However, in order to follow a clear path through the many debates, all research programs need to be sufficiently explicit − from ontological assumptions to empirical implementation and validation/falsification. This is the authors’ commitment regarding with the course-of-experience framework. Exhaustively accounting for an entire research program through a single article is quite difficult. In this respect, the associated comments provide a valuable opportunity to address the main issues and gaps through this Authors’ response. It will also be an opportunity to clear up some of the misunderstandings about the course-of-experience framework.

It is difficult to write an Author’s reply without replying to specific comments and especially without being defensive. Also, as Magritte would say, ‘This is not a reply’. This Author’s reply is addressed more to the readers of the comments who would like to continue the discussion (through a second reading of our initial contribution), rather than to the commentators themselves.

Asymmetry | Symmetry

The postulate of an asymmetrical actor-environment coupling and a meaning that is first and foremost ‘in-formare’ has triggered many comments: ‘Why such an asymmetry? Why the priority of the first-person analysis of PRSC on third-person observations? The answer seems to lie in the fact that meaning is first and foremost a property of the agent’ (Steiner, 2023, p. 171); ‘we hold that defending such a notion leads to unnecessary ontological asymmetries that obscure the fundamental role of materiality for cognition’ (Alessandroni & Malafouris, 2023, p. 127); ‘the relationship of close intertwinement and co-constitution that unites the organism and environment makes it untenable to characterize cognition as being driven by individuals’ (Alessandroni & Malafouris, 2023, p. 127); ‘The strands of enactivism and ecological psychology that are converging can do so only by rejecting the claim that meaning is made within animals, which introduces a strong asymmetry between the agent and the environment it experiences. This asymmetry is out of line with the dynamical approaches that ecological psychology and enactivist theories both endorse’ (McKinney et al., 2023, p. 144). The title of the comment of Seifert et al. (2023) is quite unequivocal: ‘Avoiding organismic asymmetries in ecological cognition’ (p. 163). Let us suggest, in a slightly provocative way, that the positions adopted in the commentaries are not always clear. As an illustration, McKinney et al. (2023) later said: ‘That is, the models treat the agent and environment as more or less symmetrical even though in some contexts the relationship could be described asymmetrically focusing primarily on either the agent or the environment. This symmetry, of course, is not in conflict with the enactivist claim that the environment as experienced by an agent is in some sense dependent on an agent, what it can do, what matters to its well-being. This is what sense-making is, after all’ (p. 144). Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to avoid the suspicion that the exhortation to more symmetry (eg Seifert et al., 2023) is actually a pleading for an opposite asymmetry − that is, an asymmetry or a leaning towards the environment and not towards the actor.

The authors are convinced of the appropriateness of these debates on the gradient/spectrum of asymmetry or symmetry, but it seems important to make here an epistemological clarification. Course-of-experience studies are carried out according to the methodology of scientific research programs (Lakatos, 1978) that have been revisited to achieve coherence with the enaction hypothesis (Theureau, 2015). This programmatic ideal has various advantages, notably that of explicitly defining the modalities of research validation, extension and development. Course-of-experience studies pursue this programmatic structuring on the assumption that it is a relevant methodology for the design and evaluation of scientific research and is accompanied by the affirmation of the coexistence of a plurality of programs that may be more or less similar, complementary and competitive. Each research program defines a hard core of fundamental assumptions. These fundamental assumptions are protected from any refutation by a negative heuristics to maintain the coherence of the program for a given time in order to produce empirical results and show (or not) its fruitfulness. The life of the research program is thus based on a double heuristics: one negative that concerns the protection of the hard-core hypotheses, the other positive that tries to refute auxiliary hypotheses. Asymmetry constitutes one of the hard-core assumptions of the course-of-experience framework. And this hard-core assumption (and thus the research program) cannot be disputed or invalidated on the sole basis of an assertion in favour of symmetry, however peremptory it may be. The contestation must be based on a review of the heuristic power and growth capacity of the program, which the course-of-experience framework has demonstrated for more than three decades. The correlate is also applicable, and this is why we do not discredit the symmetrical or more radical transactional hypothesis. What we contest is the interpretation that the course-of-experience and enactive asymmetrical assumptions (a) downplay the importance of the environment, (b) are inconsistent with a focus on cognitive ecology and a transactional perspective (assuming that asymmetry and sense-making can be made, considering ‘human life and any of its parts as irreducibly transactional phenomena’, Roth, 2023, p. 157), (c) revert to agent-world dualisms, (d) preclude taking the actor-environment coupling as a whole, (e) necessarily obscure the fundamental role of materiality for cognition and (f) constitute an ‘early’ enactivist perspective, implying that the present-day enaction can only be a symmetrical ecological-enactive approach.

To clarify the discussion, a distinction should be made between two kinds of symmetries: a radical ‘transactional-psychological’ ontological symmetry, and an ‘anthropological’ ontological symmetry. ¹ In the same vein, it seems important to distinguish a symmetrical ontological hypothesis versus a symmetrical analytical hypothesis. If the course-of-experience framework does not postulate a radical ontological symmetry, it does not refute the analytical fruitfulness of temporarily adopting a more symmetrical unit of analysis. In a way, we suggest reversing the preceding formula of McKinney et al. (2023): the course-of-experience framework treats the actor and environment coupling as more or less asymmetrical even though in some contexts the relationship can be described as symmetric, focusing equally on the actor and the environment. It is essential to study cognitive ecosystems or cognitive ecology (Hutchins, 2010a), but this should be done with the assumption that asymmetry is inherent to living beings. In other words, ‘studying enactive ecology’.

Can the postulate of asymmetry be suspected of being dualist? The course-of-experience framework is ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically an approach of ‘in-betweenness’ and is consistent with both the anti-realism of the ‘middle way’ and the anti-foundationalism of the circular/recursive onto-epistemology (Vörös & Riegler, 2017). The asymmetrical assumption in no way implies a questioning of this. The course-of-experience framework, in the continuation of Varela’s work, is trying to put forward conceptual and methodological tools to provide admissible symbolic descriptions of human activity (Varela, 1979). This enables us to study cognition in practice or cognition-in-the-world with two central preoccupations: the distinctiveness of living beings and the co-constitutivity of subject-object, organism-world or self-other. In the course-of-experience framework, practice/activity (a) is fundamentally considered as the transformation process of the structural coupling between an actor and its environment, and thus (b) must be studied ‘as the dynamics of an actor-environment coupling’. It is the expression of a relation of co-specification in which the actor-pole side and the environment-pole side are related, combined in a whole, and yet remain distinct. Activity cannot be reduced to the properties of any of its two constituent poles. As summarized by Varela (1976) in the formula ‘as actor-environment coupling’, the pair [actor]+[environment] are ‘not one, not two’, and this implies going from a duality to trinity. This basically makes it possible to consider an integration into a whole without necessarily taking the organism-environment functional or cognitive system as the relevant unit of analysis (Seifert et al., 2023).

The asymmetrical assumption is not the prerogative of the course-of-experience framework. It is particularly brought to the forefront by studies questioning adaptability and agentivity (Barandiaran et al., 2009; Di Paolo, 2005; Di Paolo et al., 2018). In these studies, the concept of agency is assumed to be suitable in the cognitive sciences, and introducing adaptability is considered fundamental to explain enactive sense-making (Di Paolo, 2005). Adaptability is defined as the capacity of an organism to regulate itself with respect to the boundaries of its own viability. For Di Paolo (2005), the assumption of adaptability is either missing (and this is problematic) or remains implicit in the passage from autopoiesis (in its original formulation) to sense-making. Let’s try to situate the debate. The initial question is the following: is the concept of autopoiesis sufficient to explain sense-making? Weber and Varela (2002) propose that autonomous self-production leads to two complementary senses of teleology: an intrinsic teleology describing self-production as a ‘concern to affirm life’ and ‘the instauration of point of view’, and an individuality that through self-production is ‘ipso facto a locus of sensation and agency’ (p. 116–117). According to Di Paolo (2005), Their logic is the following: (a) self-production is a process that defines a unity and a norm: to keep the unity going and distinct, (b) encounters with the external world are “evaluated” by the system (through the autopoietic machinery) as contributing or not to the maintenance of autopoiesis, and (c) autopoiesis implies sense-making, an intrinsic perspective of value in the world. There is here a direct relation between intrinsic teleology and sense-making: the original definition of autopoiesis directly supports the second sense of teleology. Di Paolo (2005) distinguishes autopoiesis from the concept of robustness and adaptivity, considering ‘that autopoiesis implies only the former while sense-making needs the latter’ (p. 433). He continues, ‘thus, autopoiesis simpliciter cannot provide the intended grounding for sense-making’ (p. 433). This would require further discussion on the distinction or a spectrum between basic sense-making and adaptive (or agentive) sense-making. In any case, for Di Paolo (2005), there is a subclass of autopoietic systems that are not just robust but also adaptive, that are able to produce a regulation of the structural coupling. For him, it is only when this regulation is at play (for an improved condition of viability) that it is possible to speak of a true interactional asymmetry. This leads to the second concept of agentivity. Agents are capable of adaptively regulating their coupling with the environment (and contributing to sustaining themselves as a consequence) − that is, of changing the conditions that affect how they relate to their surroundings. Three requirements are considered necessary for agency (none of them being sufficient on its own): self-individuation, interactional asymmetry and normativity. A system must meet these three requirements to be considered a genuine agent. The authors addressing agentivity rightly insist on the need to understand and define regulation and interactional asymmetry in terms that are weaker than those of causation, but also less problematic (which resonates with some of the comments) and propose the notion of modulation. For Barandiaran et al. (2009), ‘an agent as a whole drives itself, breaking the symmetry of its coupling with the environment so as to modulate it from within’ (p. 370). Thus, an agent is a system that systematically and repeatedly asymmetrically modulates its structural coupling with the environment. What to conclude from all this? Either we can raise doubts about this direct relation between autopoiesis and sense-making or make the hypothesis that an additional elaboration is necessary through the notion of adaptability, as proposed by Di Paolo (2005). But the notions of adaptability and agentivity also introduce the principle of an interactional asymmetry. In both cases, asymmetry is fundamental. Let’s add that agency and thus asymmetry are inescapable when studying actors in real-world situations, as is our case within the course-of-experience framework. Di Paolo (2005) states that ‘structural coupling alone cannot ground the concept of activity any more than autopoiesis alone was able to ground the concept of perspective, and for the same reasons’ (p. 443) and that ‘Activity, like perspective, is an asymmetrical concept’ (p. 443).

Keeping this in mind, it becomes possible to understand our ‘from within’ perspective as an in-between ‘from-within’ perspective. The ‘from-within’ perspective seriously takes the idea that living beings cognize (perceive and act) in accordance with their organization, thereby bringing forth their own surrounding worlds (their umwelt); these own worlds, in turn, function as dynamic scaffolding of what is relevant for the living beings, thereby guiding and limiting their cognitions (perceptions and actions) (Vörös & Riegler, 2017). Is meaning a property of the agent? No. Is the subject at the source of meaning? No. Is meaning oriented or modulated by the actor-pole side? Yes. But, asymmetry and the “from within” perspective do not eliminate the in-betweenness of meaning. This was particularly well captured by Renault (2023) through the Deleuzian perspective. In her comments, she said, ‘The event [in the Deleuzian perspective] does not correspond here to external facts that impose themselves on a pre-existing individual; nor is it explained, on the other hand, by a subject who actively creates meaning and projects it into the world. On the contrary, experiencing an event is much closer to feeling touched or affected by something that is beyond us than to the feeling of being the agent of what happens’ and ‘The emergence of new meaning is (…) an event − something happens − but the meaning was not properly produced by the individuals. Individual identities emerge thanks to the event and have no existence of their own outside of it. Meaning lies on the border between various pairs that are usually taken as opposites: passive-active, language-materiality, inside-outside − meaning is in between’ (p. 153).

To conclude with the notion of sense-making, the authors’ perspective on this notion is more easily grasped by the idea of instauration. ² Instauration and construction are clearly synonyms. But instauration has the advantage of ‘not dragging along all the metaphorical baggage of constructivism’ (Latour, 2011, p. 310). Apply instauration to sense-making, and all your understanding of sense-making changes, the individual is not ‘the maker’, ‘the creator’, ‘the origin’, ‘the projector’ of meaning, but instead ‘participates in’ or ‘modulates’ the instauration of sense-making. To talk about sense-making as an instauration, (a) avoids confusing ‘making’ with any other idea − creation, construction, projection – which inevitably designates the subject as the ultimate origin of the vector, and (b) reaffirms the role of the environment and its materiality. But, here again, the notion of instauration is not necessarily the opposite of asymmetry.

Social | Individual

Several commentaries criticize and call out the absence of others and social dimension (including sociality and social interaction) in our article, questioning the way in which one can approach the collective action within the course-of-experience framework. As an illustration, McGann (2023) said, ‘The focus of the target article perhaps mitigates against a full accounting; what is present shows promise though also invites questions about how well course-of-experience accounts cope with the kinds of collective action and joint experience that constitute a significant portion of real world activity’ (p. 139). McKinney et al. (2023) even go so far as to suggest, ‘re-align the CEF with the enactive project, which we think is gradually shifting away from individualistic concepts like autopoiesis and sense-making toward social and ecological concepts like participatory sense-making and affordances’ (p. 143). Although we concede that we have not dealt with these issues, even though this dimension is fundamental, notably in its articulation with the individual dimension, the authors resist the idea of a ‘realignment to the enactive project’ through the concept of participatory sense-making (as an injunction or in deference to this concept), irrespective of the conceptual fruitfulness of the proposed notion. It seems very debatable to suggest that there would be early forms of enactivism and new ones, basing this distinction solely on the mobilization or not of the concepts of affordance and participatory sense-making. Here again, we are very concerned about not stifling the multitudes within the enactive paradigm, and this is so even if we are very favourable to the idea of a spectrum from orientational sense-making to joint sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007).

Ironically, the course-of-experience framework drew on the consequences of enaction early on for the study of collective activity and cooperative practices (eg Theureau & Filippi, 1994). ³ This is even before the mentioned studies on participatory sense-making and the enactive approach to social cognition/cooperation (eg Fantasia et al., 2014). And this is precisely because real-world practices imply collective action or collectivity. So, let’s take the opportunity to say something about collective action and joint experience. This will be an opportunity for the authors to point out that their research interests (past and present) indeed clearly coincide with actual works on intersubjectivity, sociality and socially enacted autonomy, the body social problem and the role of social interaction and consensually coordinated actions (eg De Jaegher et al., 2010; Froese & Gallagher, 2012; Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009; Kyselo, 2014; 2016; Maiese, 2019; Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007).

Here again, let’s clear up a misunderstanding right away, ‘others always belong to the structural coupling’ of any actor (Theureau, 2006, p. 92). Every activity (giving rise to pre-reflective consciousness) is full of distant or close resonances to others and full of interaction/coordination with others (in potential, in virtual, or in actual). As all affordances are ‘social’ (see Baggs, 2021), ⁴ all actor-environment couplings and sense-makings are ‘social’, and this is so even when social interactions are impeded by individual potentials for entering interaction or by the dynamics of the social encounters itself (de Haan, 2020; De Jaegher, 2013a; 2021; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). According to De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), there is a spectrum of degrees of participation in sense-making from the modulation of individual sense-making by coordination patterns, through orientation, to joint sense-making.

The course-of-experience framework approaches collective activity and joint experience as interaction/coordination between at least two autonomous actors, each of them engaged in an asymmetrical coupling with an environment that includes others (and intercorporeality). Individuals do not interact ‘directly’ because their interactions are always mediated by the environment (including material), their bodies, and their ‘own world’ interfaces (each individual interacting with others only through the medium of their own world, which derives from their coupling with the environment). The course-of-experience framework intends to adopt a ‘middle way’ between an under-socialized methodological individualism and an under-individualized methodological collectivism. Any so-called individual activity is always [individual|social], and any so-called collective or joint activity is always [social|individual]. The aim is to emphasize not only the self-organization of the collective entities, but also the autonomy of each living entity and the agentivity of each actor involved in these collective entities. In their studies on social cognition, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) attempted to define social interaction within the enactive paradigm: ‘Social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced)’ (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 493). Their view of interaction is congruent with the course-of-experience framework view of collective action (eg Theureau, 2006). For them, an interaction is ‘social’ when two minimal conditions are met: (a) there must be a mutually regulated coupling between two (or more) agents, where the regulation is directed at the coupling itself, and (b) the agents involved in this mutual coupling must not lose their own individual autonomy in the process (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). Consider the requirements for the enactive definition of social interaction proposed by De Jaegher et al. (2016) and supersede the notion of social interaction by the concept of activity (considering that social interaction co-constitutes activity), and you come across the course-of-experience view of collective action: an enactive definition of collective action requires that both the individuals (or individual activity) involved and the collective entities (or collective activity) are autonomous. ⁵ The first autonomy is related to the living being of each actor (autonomy = autopoiesis), whereas the second is precarious and relates to emergence within social systems (in the sense that collective activity gives rise to a new domain of phenomena not reducible to the sum of the individual activities) (autonomy = self-organization). The proposal here emphasizes not only the autonomy of the collective (or collective activity) ‒ which depends on individual contributions (or individual activity) but are not fully determined by them ‒ but most importantly it emphasizes the autonomy of the individuals involved in collective action (or activity). The position is thus ‘neither individualistic, nor interactionist’, nor collectivistic (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2013; Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2017; De Jaegher & Froese, 2009). We again encounter here the interactional asymmetry considering the orientational end of the spectrum of participation as the end where the respective roles of each actor are “purely” asymmetrically divided (De Jaegher, 2013b).

From the analytical viewpoint, the course-of-experience framework considers the articulation of autonomous [individual|social] activities. Documenting collective action and joint experience involves articulating the documentation of each actor’s course of experience, and the constitutive role of the environment (especially of materiality) and bodies. According to this hypothesis, the articulation of [individual|social] activities gives rise to collective or [social|individual] activity that is always ‘precarious’ and ‘decollectivized’ by the same articulation of [individual|social] activities. Collective or [social|individual] activity is continuously a ‘de-totalized totality’ (Sartre, 1960/1976), in the sense of an ‘organized totality whose organization is constantly challenged by individual activities and constantly being reconstructed by these same individual activities’ (Theureau, 2006, p. 96). This definition as a ‘totality’ constantly being ‘detotalized’ and ‘retotalized’ is obviously related to the notions of emergence (local-to-global and global-to-local), reciprocal causality, mutual constraints or co-generativity, and the star*statement relationship (the it/the process leading to it). The [individual|social] activities ‘make emerge’ or ‘lead to’ [social|individual] activity, which in turn ‘enables’, ‘conditions’, ‘constrains’ or ‘contextualizes’ [individual|social] activities without in any way prescribing them.

The course-of-experience framework approach to collective activity and joint experience is very close to and convergent with the participatory sense-making approach. De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) proposed the concept of participatory sense-making as a response to individualistic approaches to social cognition in cognitive science and neuroscience, explaining ‘how one’s cognition and meaning-making involve the activity of others’ (Di Paolo et al., 2018, p. 23). The notion of participatory sense-making describes how individual sense-making is affected by inter-individual coordination. This concept has resonated across disciplines and has found numerous applications. The aspects that converge with the course-of-experience framework are the following: bringing the dynamics of interactive encounters into the foreground, rejecting methodological individualism, and considering the coordination between two or more autonomous agents. Both approaches are characterized by in-betweenness: the entre-deux between individual and interactive or collective orders. Di Paolo et al. (2018) summarized their position as we do: ‘not one, not two’ (p. 194). One difference lies in the focus: social interaction with the participatory sense-making approach and [social|individual] activity in the course-of-experience framework. Even though the participatory sense-making approach must not be construed as a form of interactionism, a focus on the concept of activity rather than on social interaction sets aside this suspicion of interactionism. By the way, we consider that the spectrum between [individual|social] and [social|individual] activities is consistent with the idea of a spectrum of participation. For us, activity as a concept (and not social interaction) plays a pivotal role in our understanding of social cognition, but activity as we have defined it fundamentally (a) involves a spectrum between [individual|social] and [social|individual] activities, (b) includes an interaction/coordination and (c) insists on the continued autonomy of its participants. The similarities between the two approaches are important. Let’s put forward a last idea in terms of perspectives for future work. Although the notion of participatory sense-making is interesting, it seems to be more descriptive and less analytical. The authors of this response consider that the notions of mutual appropriation and incorporeality (Tanaka, 2015) could be very useful. This proposal will undoubtedly be confirmed by Di Paolo et al. (2018), who underline the participation with others and the participation of our bodies: organic body, sensorimotor body, and intersubjective body. The advantage of the course-of-experience framework is that it offers a practical and empirical phenomenology potentially opening the documentation of mutual appropriation, intercorporeality and inter-enaction (Depraz, 2022). For example, it is possible to mention the study of Leblanc et al. (2022), even if further empirical research must be done.

Pre-reflective consciousness | Subjectivity

Let’s have a look at the comments and complements useful to the concept of pre-reflective consciousness. First, Steiner (2023) in his commentary challenges the definition of pre-reflective self-consciousness and the presence of the prefix ‘self-’ which is disputable within a non-egological account of consciousness. We agree with this comment (note that the prefix ‘self-‘ is not used in French) but the authors decided to use the most common formulation in English-language philosophic literature. Sartre (one of the main phenomenology philosophers who is seldom considered in the enaction and cognitive science literature) made a strong case for establishing the impersonal (or ‘pre-personal’) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. The Ego, Sartre argues, ‘is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another’ (Sartre, 1936/2004, p. 1). But he also wrote later in Being and Nothingness that ‘pre-reflective consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of consciousness’ (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 123) and pointed out that consciousness is not impersonal when pre-reflectively lived through but is characterized by a ‘fundamental selfness’ (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 156). Rather than defining self-consciousness on the basis of a preconceived notion of self, Sartre proposed that we should let our conception of self arise out of an understanding of self-awareness. Zahavi (2018) synthesizes the situation correctly and indicates that a significant part of the dispute ‘between no-selfers and pro-selfers is verbal and rather than substantial and centered around the question of how deflationary a notion of self it makes sense to operate with’ (p. 709). As Zahavi (2018), we could assume that the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness is not problematic as long as it is based on a thin and minimalist notion of self, with capture of only ‘the ineliminable subjective and perspectival givenness of consciousness’ (p. 707). Second, self-consciousness does not have its origin in the self but depends upon radical alterity: ‘At the moment, all consciousness seems to me as both constituting itself as consciousness and, at the same time, as consciousness of the other and consciousness for the other (...) I left the individual as too independent in my theory of others in Being and Nothingness ... I had not yet determined what I am trying to determine today: the dependence of each individual on all individuals’ (Sartre & Lévy, 1991, p. 40; author’s own translation). As pointed out by Zahavi (1999), ‘Mundane self-awareness entails a self-apprehension from the perspective of the other, and it therefore has the encounter with the other and the other’s intervention as its condition of possibility’ (p. 164). Pre-reflective consciousness, which is a central piece of the course-of-experience framework, basically implies the others and is to be understood as an ‘openness to alterity’ (Zahavi, 1999, p. 137).

Seifert et al. (2023) dispute the idea that ‘experience does equate with subjectivity’ (even though this is not our position). We agree with this position. The term ‘subjectivity’ is for that reason not used in the original article except in quotes. But perhaps the authors’ arguments are slightly different from those of Seifert et al. (2023). Renault (2023) has nicely captured our understanding of the concept of pre-reflective consciousness and how we try to prevent ourselves from ‘considering subjective experience as a property of individual’ (p. 151). For this reason, the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview is not defined as retrospective introspection (see the following section). In the course-of-experience framework, pre-reflective consciousness is regarded as the cutting edge or the surface effect of the dynamics of actor-environment coupling. Again, pre-reflective consciousness is not an attribute/property of the actor-pole side or an attribute/property of the environment-pole side in the actor-environment coupling (which has consequences for interview and analysis methods where it is important never to forget one of the two poles; see also the following section). Pre-reflective consciousness is an expression of in-betweenness. It is thus not conceived as a subjective experience, nor as the expression of interiority, but rather as ‘un éclatement vers le monde’ (Sartre’s expression). Our sense of self exists because it gives us an interface with the world (including others). This is a distinctive element from (Husserlian) phenomenologically inspired enactivist approaches, including micro-phenomenology, which postulate an ‘enacting subject’ and focuses on a fine description of subjective experience.

‘First-person oriented’ descriptions |Behavioural data

Several methodological aspects are addressed in the commentaries. They are even one of the main topics. Many comments ask: ‘why is the priority of the first-person analysis of PRSC on third-person observations?’ (Steiner, 2023) or ‘on behavioral data’ (Seifert et al., 2023), and are ‘reluctant to accept the assumption that verbal data somehow reflect the first-person perspective better than other kinds of behavioral data’ (McKinney et al., 2023, p. 146). Seifert et al. (2023) assert that ‘verbalization does not equate with subjective experience’ (p. 163) and that ‘methods using verbalization as a process to capture experience, miss what experience is. Verbalization is in itself an experience, a first-person experience, relatively independent of the pre-reflective contents represented in the words verbalized’ (p. 166). Based on Gibson’s theory, Seifert et al. (2023) even go so far as to deny the possibility of direct introspective access to ‘the knowledge of the environment’. A type of knowledge which ‘is not formulated in pictures or words, because it is this knowledge that makes the formulation of pictures and words possible’ (p. 166). It is natural that accessing lived experience raises the question of the investigation method and the reliability of its results. But in some of the comments there is an excessive scepticism about verbalization data. It is not possible to revisit here the debates on the reliability of the results obtained through the interview technique and the validity/consistency of the descriptions produced for the study of human experience. Let us just mention here that the relationship between experience and its verbal description is notably addressed in various extraneous studies to the course-of-experience framework (eg Petitmengin, 2006; Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009).

Considering that the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview is (a) a rigorous and privileged method to access pre-reflective consciousness and (b) a way to construct invaluable data for ‘first-person oriented’ descriptions does not mean minimizing the analysis of behavioral data. ⁶ Behavioural data are essential to the ‘first-person oriented’ descriptions of activity produced within the course-of-experience framework. The documentation of hexadic signs is practically achieved through both the expression of pre-reflective consciousness during self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews and the description of ‘what is done’ on video recordings or during observation. The researcher’s description of the course of experience constitutes a ‘first-person oriented’ description of activity – giving rise to experience or pre-reflective consciousness − that goes beyond the actor’s pre-reflective consciousness and its expression. Also, when McKinney et al. (2023) would like to offer to course-of experience framework ‘a model where the ecological and (socioculturally) distributed aspects of cognition are integrated. Thus, rather than go to great lengths to establish a hexadic sign by eliciting post-hoc narratives, we propose that we rely more parsimoniously on the behavioral data, allowing these data to include reflections prompted by a situated researcher’ (p. 146), we can say that this is already the case and has been since the early stage of this framework. However, the authors agree with McKinney et al. (2023) when they say (and it’s crucial) that, ‘the first-person is a theoretical reconstruction’ (p. 146). This is why we consider the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview to be (a) a rigorous and privileged method to access pre-reflective consciousness and (b) a way to construct invaluable data for ‘first-person oriented’ descriptions, which in no way refutes, for example, some expressivist conceptions of mental phenomena (including the behaviour that is expressive of mental phenomena). Steiner (2018) outlines the main features of Wittgenstein’s expressivist conception of mental phenomena and its relations with enactivism. The concept of expressivity must be seriously considered. The consequence is that mental life is expressed in what we do, or more precisely ‘mental life is expressed (and not realized or represented) in situated patterns of behaviour’ (Steiner, 2018, p. 132), and that first-person judgments are accessible through the observation of what we do. But Steiner (2018) also insists that expressivity is not reducible to behaviours and implies additional assumptions. The question is the following: does the expressivity assumption alone justify doing without an access to pre-reflective consciousness through rigorous interview methods? Is this not an additional guarantee of validity in the production of ‘first-person oriented’ descriptions? Is this not a guarantee of consistency for the descriptions produced for the study of human experience? The course-of-experience framework concedes that one can access pre-reflective consciousness without self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews or without any other verbalization data gathering method, ⁷ but that it is only possible up to a certain point (considering that the umwelt of an actor is not self-evident). We will discuss below the interest of cognitive ethnography, ⁸ but why proceed without certain (rigorous) methods designed for gaining access and studying human experience as it is lived pre-reflectively when they exist?

Micro-phenomenological self-confrontation | Other methods

Hoffding (2023) asks for a comparison with other similar methods and questions pre-reflective consciousness. Moreover, ‘What’s done is done. The bullet’s left the gun’ – We cannot re-live past experience’ (Hoffding, 2023, p. 135). He then formulates two questions: ‘what is the justification for reducing all lived experience to pre-reflective self-consciousness?’ and ‘how can we equate pre-reflective experience with what it showable, tellable and commentable?’ (p. 135). Steiner (2023) also questions our operational characterization of pre-reflective consciousness as what is showable [including mimable], tellable and commentable at any moment by the actor. For him, this characterization is problematic, since it indexes ‘“the being of consciousness itself” on what one can show, tell or comment, as if this ability and the context of its exercises were somehow transparent’ (Steiner, 2023, p. 171).

The authors would like to make some clarifications about self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews and the expression of/access to (past) pre-reflective consciousness. The self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview is the most frequently used interview method in our research program. ⁹ But it is only one of these methods (which all follow the same principle) and one element among others of the methodological workbench of this research program. Another important but more recent method is the micro-phenomenological re-enactment interview within situation simulation through material traces left by the actor’s activity in this past situation (Theureau, 2006). Apart from its own advantages, its name directly expresses the principle of all these methods: to try, through all possible means, to re-place actors at every instant in the past dynamical situation we are studying and to interview them about their activity (giving rise to pre-reflective experience) all along this dynamical situation.

Let’s first go back to the authors’ use of the term ‘self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews’. The term micro-phenomenology and micro-phenomenological interviews are recent. For Depraz (2022), they emerged in 2016 in the context of a discussion at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris between Dominique Pradelle, Michel Bitbol, Claire Petitmengin and Natalie Depraz. The aim with this term was to better connect phenomenology as praxis (or practice) and phenomenological methodologies − especially the explicitation interview − with philosophical (and theoretical) phenomenology. In a first instance, the term ‘micro-phenomenological interviews’ was considered by Pierre Vermersch as a relevant denomination of the explicitation interview he had already developed (Vermersch, 1994). But considering the theoretical and methodological developments peculiar to the micro-phenomenological interview (at the instigation of Petitmengin) and their distancing from the explicitation interview, Vermersch would later say in the foreword to the English edition of his book The Explicitation Interview: ‘At first, I did not oppose [the denomination “micro-phenomenological interviews”], but as time went by, I found that this denomination was too technical, too limited to the field of research, too much belonging to phenomenological philosophy, that is secondary to my project. This name, finally, excluded the whole area of practical intervention. Consequently, I have chosen to keep the term ‘explicitation interview’ as such, with the idea that it will gradually settle in the academic culture’.

The term ‘micro-phenomenological’ was added in our article to describe the self-confrontation interview in order to insist on its relation with these methods (called micro-phenomenological) that are much better known in cognitive science and philosophy (eg Bitbol & Petitmengin, 2017; Petitmengin et al., 2019). But we also wanted to insist on the focus on the dynamical micro-temporal structure of experience as it is lived pre-reflectively. The convergence between the self-confrontation interview and these methods lies in the ambition to collect descriptions of the micro-dynamics of experience in its pre-reflective dimension with a high level of reliability and a fine degree of granularity. It is therefore a minimal definition of micro-phenomenology that we adopt here, without a strong theoretical entrenchment in micro-phenomenology and its Husserlian inspiration. It is instead used in the perspective of developing a full-fledged non-egotic enactive empirical phenomenology. Micro-phenomenology is considered extensively by cognitive scientists as a new scientific discipline that enables them to explore our lived experience. It was developed by Claire Petitmengin within the context of the neurophenomenological research program. It is not only an interview but also an analysis method for gaining access to and investigating subjective experience as it is lived pre-reflectively. We remain cautious at this time on the convergence between micro-phenomenology and the course-of-experience framework to the extent that mutual discussions are required, even if mutual enrichment would be beneficial in terms of analysis method (eg Valenzuela-Moguillansky & Vásquez-Rosati, 2019).

Comparing self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews with other methods, as suggested by Hoffding (2023), would be useful but would require a sizable number of words. We can briefly address some common points between and distinctive features of the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews within the course-of-experience framework and the explicitation interviews or micro-phenomenological interviews. However, it is important to affirm firmly that these methods (and approaches) have more in common than they have in difference.

The explicitation interview is a method initially developed by Pierre Vermersch for pedagogical purposes and for analysing professional practice (Vermersch, 1994). This method draws its inspiration from some of Piaget’s ideas combined with a North American psychotherapeutic method and (later on) Husserl’s phenomenology. The purpose of the explicitation interview is to guide verbalization towards the experience of an effective ‘time-bounded’ action and to support the ‘subject’ (Vermersch’s notion) to access the pre-reflective knowledge inscribed in this action. The aim is to gain understanding about ‘how’ this action was done, putting the implicit knowledge of this action into words. The method starts, like the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview, from the acknowledgment that a large part of our actions is unrecognized and remains unnoticed, or pre-reflective in the phenomenological language. This lack of awareness is due to our absorption in the content, the ‘what’ of our action, to the detriment of this action itself, the ‘how’. The explicitation interview requires a fine retrospective description of an effective action by the actor. This focus on the detailed description of the course of action carried out is a very strong common point between Vermersch’s work and the course-of-experience framework. ¹⁰ The distinction between the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview and the explicitation interview is that Vermersch assimilates the explicitation interview, by incorporating the advances of his psycho-phenomenological approach, to a form of guided retrospective introspection (Vermersch, 2009). ¹¹ He assumes that the traces left in the actor’s body by the action in the past situation are a sufficient prerequisite for the evocation of the past lived experience of an action. For the course-of-experience framework, the remembering is considered as genuinely dynamically situated. ¹² It depends not only on the actor’s body, but also on the actor’s situation of re-enactment, as it is embedded in the actor’s larger situation at this moment of re-enactment. The more the actor can be put back into his or her past situation, the more fruitful the interview will be. During the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview, video recording is the main support to re-place the actor in the past dynamical situation. We will see further on that these theoretical distinctions have consequences in the rules to be followed during the interview.

The micro-phenomenological interview was an adaptation of the explicitation interview to the domain of cognitive science research for describing experiences associated with any kind of cognitive process, including embodied processes such as perception or emotion (Petitmengin, 2006). It was complemented by a method for analysing verbalization data and detecting regularities in the form of generic structures (Petitmengin et al., 2019), as well as by methods for validation, to thus become micro-phenomenology. The micro-phenomenological interview method starts from the same assumption that a large part of our experience usually remains unnoticed or pre-reflective. But some differences have gradually emerged between the explicitation interview and the micro-phenomenological interview that focus less on action than on the sensorial modalities associated with the singular experience to be described. The micro-phenomenological interview is thus to help the ‘subject’ to retrieve or ‘evoke’ the experience, whether it is in the past or only just over, by retrieving precisely the spatio-temporal context, and then the visual, auditory, tactile and kinaesthetic and possibly olfactory sensations associated with the very start of the experience to be described. The ‘grounding’ in phenomenological philosophy is also strengthened in the micro-phenomenological interview, although it is important but secondary within the psycho-phenomenological and course-of-experience research programs. For example, Petitmengin et al. (2019) consider that ‘the first key to an effective interview consists in eliciting an époche by helping the subjects to choose and describe a singular experience’ (p. 694).

Now, let’s consider in detail the unfolding of the different interview methods. The explicitation and micro-phenomenological interview methods aim at creating the conditions (and encouraging to carry out specific acts) for the actors’ verbalizations only through specific prompts and questions: ‘to guide interviewed subjects in the process of becoming aware of the unrecognized (pre-reflective) part of their experience and describe it precisely’ (Petitmengin et al., 2019, p. 694). The explicitation interview makes it possible to guide the ‘subject’ (Vermersch’s notion), without induction, as he or she makes the transition from ‘pre-reflected consciousness’ (préréfléchi, in French, Vermersch’s notion) to reflective consciousness, about a singular lived experience in the past, and more specifically a lived experience of an effective action. The micro-phenomenological interview triggers a form of ‘phenomenological reduction’, then assists the subject in retrieving or ‘evoking’ past singular experiences, and finally helps the ‘subject’ to perform acts of attention about this evoked experience, to describe it faithfully. Psycho-phenomenology and micro-phenomenology are based on a Husserlian view of pre-reflective consciousness. Pre-reflective consciousness is only supposed to appear by contrast with the modification of consciousness and through reflection − that is, through the transition to reflective consciousness. The act of becoming aware of pre-reflective lived experience is constitutive of both interview methods (explicitation and micro-phenomenological interviews).

In contrast, the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview method does not postulate the absolute necessity of reflection and transition to reflective consciousness to access pre-reflective consciousness, and it does not encourage an act mobilizing a ‘reflective activity’ or a ‘réfléchissement’ (to use the terms of Piaget). It is rather a question of avoiding them, or, if they occur, of distinguishing them from the expression of pre-reflective consciousness to limit their impact on the continuation of the interview (bringing actors back to their immediate self-awareness in the past situation). ¹³ Within the course-of-experience framework, pre-reflective consciousness is not waiting for reflection (but could lead to possible reflection) and is not uncovered only through reflection. The changeover to Sartre’s conception of pre-reflective consciousness is fundamental. Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. He also considers that it is the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible. It is this idea of immediate self-awareness that leads to the definition of pre-reflective consciousness as ‘showable [including mimable], tellable and commentable’ to an observer-interlocutor at any instant under favourable conditions, and to an interview method which invites actors to show, mimic, tell and comment on elements that are meaningful to them without a reflective act. This operative definition assumes that there is not only language that participates in the expression of pre-reflective consciousness. The ‘showable’ and ‘mimable’ encourage taking into account deictic gestures, simulated gestures or metaphorical gestures (Petitmengin, 2006) as an expression of pre-reflective consciousness.

The micro-phenomenological self-confrontation interview, like the other two methods, is based on the observation that it is usually not possible to describe an experience (or activity giving rise to experience) while it is unfolding. It is therefore necessary to do something with the temporal gap between the initial pre-reflective experience and its description. One of the keys to these interview methods is thus to help the ‘subject’ (or, in the course-of-experience framework, the instantaneous ‘virtual subject’) to re-enact or evoke her past pre-reflective experience (diachronically and synchronically), whether it is in the more distant past or only just over, through the conditions of the interview (video recordings and so on) and specific prompts and questions. What is at stake is essentially to ‘de-situate’ the actors from both the interviewing situation and the usual speech position (formal, abstract or distant), and ‘re-situate’ them in the past situation under study and an embodied speech position (and thus not ‘de-situate’ them anew through inappropriate questioning). At the beginning of the course-of-experience framework, only the re-enactment conditions of the interview were questioned and theorized. Later on, the embodied speech position was borrowed from Vermersch (1994) in order to supplement these re-enactment conditions. This position means that when the ‘subject’ (Vermersch’s notion) speaks of the past situation, he or she is present in thought in the experience of this situation. The ‘subject’ can verbalize an experience related to this past situation and remains connected to its concreteness and embodiedness. The purpose of the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview is also to encourage an embodied speech position and help the participant to evoke the pre-reflective experience of the past situation. In both the explicitation interview and the self-confrontation interview, it is assumed that participants evoke a moment when they recall it to the point that the past situation becomes more vivid and present for them than the present situation. But we must not forget that the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview involves re-enacting past pre-reflective experience. The participant is not rethinking a past thought, nor performing a thinking-act that is identical or similar to the past. Re-enactment is a presence to past experience in the present situation. It’s neither mere recall, nor even reliving the past situation. Also, we must remind the reader that, for the course-of-experience framework, pre-reflective consciousness is defined as ‘showable [including mimable], mimable, tellable and commentable’ (see above). The problem lies not only in an actor’s embodied speech position but also in that actor’s embodied and situated speech and semiotic position, which concerns both the actor and his environment. The techniques we borrowed from Vermersch (see below) in order to reach and maintain an actor’s embodied speech position address only a part of the problem. Until now, this problem has not had a general and theoretical solution. But it must be stressed that the problem is both larger and less dramatic for the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview than is the problem of the embodied speech position for the explicitation interview. In the second case, the success of the interview depends entirely on the interviewer’s behaviour; in the first case, success also depends on the traces of the past activity present in the video recording and on other elements given (observation, material traces) to the actor. Therefore, a large part of the problem is solved before the interview itself, namely by the way the video recording was made and by other traces of the past activity that can be added to support the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview. As we wait for a general methodological guide for these video recordings, it is important to mention that different publications have addressed issues such as the framing of the video image, the use of a subjective camera, the use of wide angle to get a large image of the actor’s body and the environment, and the combination of the three (see the overview in Theureau, 2006).

Please, let’s consider the series of techniques Vermersch (1994) formulated for the identification of and the guiding towards the embodied speech position that are used both in self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews and micro-phenomenological interviews. Concerning the identification of the embodied speech position, Vermersch mentioned various observable verbal and a nonverbal indicator of this speech position (eg dropping of the eyes, speech rhythm slowdown, congruence of the verbal and nonverbal…). Concerning the guidance, he suggested avoiding anything that requires direct explanation, in particular ‘why-questions’ or questions that look for the verbalization of causality and theoretical knowledge. As he stated, it is essential to bring participants back to evocation each time they shift from it towards the verbalization of generalities, comments, beliefs, judgments, explanations, or theoretical knowledge about it. He insisted on the relationship between active guidance and non-directivity in the conduct of the questioning in the explicitation interview. Renault (2023) formulates specific questions related to the guidance of self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews: the role of the hexadic sign ‘in the way questions are asked or in the design of the interview itself’ (p. 154) and our insistence on ‘not interfering in the interviewee’s experience’ (p. 154). The self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview adopted Vermersch’s principle of combined guidance and non-directiveness. A ‘content-empty’ or ‘structure-driven’ questioning enables the researcher to obtain a fine-grained description of pre-reflective experience without inducing the answers or the contents of awareness and without creating ‘false memories’. Some prompts are oriented towards the synchronic dimension of pre-reflective experience (ie the landscape of pre-reflective experience) and others towards its diachronic dimension (ie the temporal evolution of this landscape), to use the same words of micro-phenomenology.

For both explicitation and micro-phenomenological interviews, the rules during the unfolding of the interview are not limited to the techniques presented above. They also contain positive rules. The most important is the rule to make the ‘subject’ explicitate, one by one, the ‘layers of experience’ (Vermersch, 2006) or the bodily, cognitive, emotional and discursive dimensions of experience (Depraz et al., 2017). Therefore, contrary to the explicitation and micro-phenomenological interviews, the exploration of the ‘layers of experience’ (Vermersch, 2006) is pragmatically limited during the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview. Documenting activity giving rise to experience imposes not adopting this last discontinuous, ‘time-breaking’ and ‘introspective’ technique during the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview. To formulate it otherwise, within the course-of-experience framework, the expression of pre-reflective consciousness is inextricably linked to the instant of a ‘dynamically situated’ re-enactment (that’s why self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews are simultaneously dynamical re-situating and re-enacting interviews) and not only to a re-enactment based on inert bodily anchors resulting from the past situation. As a consequence, the interviewer is very cautious about not cutting off too much of the expression of the actor’s pre-reflective consciousness concerning any instant of activity, which would risk getting the actor out of the dynamical re-situating and re-enactment.

Also, let’s consider another rule expressed by Petitmengin et al. (2019), who indicate for micro-phenomenology not starting ‘either in the interview or in the analysis, from a set of predefined categories supposed to characterize any experience’ (p. 702). Evidently, the ‘layers of experience’ that we just considered above are one of these predefined categories and their use shows that the solution is not in the absence of any of these predefined categories but in the theoretical precision of the predefined categories to be used and the epistemological precision of the moment to use them. Concerning the second precision, we propose as ideal a strict separation between the interview as data construction and analysis, and a strict separation between research studies on the activity-sign hypothesis and/or those aimed at producing knowledge related to the generic experiential structures (or invariants). We further propose ‘applicative’ activity-sign studies such as those aimed at producing knowledge related to domain-specific experiential structures (or invariants). The course-of-experience framework encourages free expression of pre-reflective consciousness all along the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview by the actor − who controls the unfolding of the video − and the use of the hexadic sign components as predefined categories (we would say ‘poles of distinction’) all along the analysis of the data constructed to both test their heuristic power and validate (not falsify) them. But this ideal is only relevant in research studies having among their objectives to validate (not falsify) the hypotheses behind these hexadic sign components. In applicative activity-sign studies, when the activity-sign theory is supposed to have sufficiently resisted empirical falsification, researchers often rely on hexadic sign components for a ‘structure-driven’ questioning and an extensive exploration of the landscape of pre-reflective experience. These components of the hexadic sign are still to be specified ‘in content’ at every moment.

Let’s end our comparison by pointing out that beyond the interview technique, there are a multitude of possible mutual enrichments between psycho-phenomenology, micro-phenomenology, and the course-of-experience framework regarding analysis methods. As an illustration, Vermersch turned to semiotics in some of his work (Vermersch, 2012). For what concerns micro-phenomenology, the analysis aims at identifying the structure of the singular experiences that have been described − and in particular their diachronic/synchronic structure − while tracking generic experiential structures. The primary objective of micro-phenomenology is to discover the generic pre-reflective structures (or invariants), but in an iterative way, given that we cannot avoid the detour through singular experiences. Similar objectives are pursued within the course-of-experience framework, and the analysis methods could be fruitfully joined.

Re-enactment | Material traces

Let’s consider the most distinctive element of the micro-phenomenological self-confrontation compared to the explicitation interview and the micro-phenomenological interview. We assume that confronting actors with the audiovisual traces of their past activity (and/or observational data and other recordings) facilitates the re-enactment and evocation of past pre-reflective consciousness, if the other conditions we mentioned above are respected by the interviewer. Video recording recreates for the actors rich traces of their past asymmetrical interactions with their environment and supports the re-enactment of elements of their past situation and activity under study, without basing it exclusively on the mechanisms of concrete memory (by permitting, for example, an actor to point to the screen, to describe some behaviours perceived on this screen), the questioning related to bodily dimensions, the diachronic description of pre-reflective consciousness or the congruence checking between verbalizations during the interview and recorded behaviours. These advantages should be accompanied by even more precautions: not to overlook bodily feeling and sensations, or to spread out the synchronic description of pre-reflective consciousness without breaking the diachronic dynamics, as we have already pointed out above. About what we have just written, we might come back on a comment. Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023) note ‘that objects embody memories thanks to their form and the history of uses that people have performed with them, making them powerful tools to elicit the re-enactment of certain forms of material engagement’ (p. 129). We are in complete agreement with this. Material objects (ice axes, for example) are sometimes accessible during the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview and support the ‘mimable’ dimension and the evocation of the bodily feeling and sensations, as well as the perception of the opportunities for action that they offer. Furthermore, the audiovisual recording is itself an object, making it a powerful tool for re-enactment. A video recording constitutes an ‘audiovisual temporal object’ that is characterized by ‘its flow’. For Stiegler (2010), the condition of appearance of a temporal object to consciousness is its disappearance; it disappears as it appears. The example used is that of a melody. A melody is an important example of primary retention (see Husserl) in the sense that it constitutes a flow in time: as each individual note appears and subsequently disappears, the newest note contains within it (retains) the previous note. The advantage of such objects for re-enactment is that their flow coincides with the stream of consciousness of which they are the object. In other words, the audiovisual temporal object has the particularity of having a flow structure similar to our pre-reflective consciousness structure generating processes of synchronization and facilitating, in our case, the re-enactment. Finally, a few words should be said about another form of interview in the course-of-experience methodological workbench that we mentioned above − the re-enactment interview within situation simulation through material traces (Donin & Theureau, 2007) − and compare it with the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview. The self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interview and the re-enactment interview within situation simulation through material traces can be distinguished mainly by the types of traces that are used. In the second interview method, the traces are essentially discrete and material traces of the actor’s past activity. This method requires the constitution, dating and serialization of the material traces. The re-enactment interview within situation simulation through material traces is particularly useful when recording is impossible or when activity is documented over long and discontinuous periods (with difficulty in maintaining documentation at a fine degree of granularity of the micro-dynamics of the experience, in its pre-reflective dimension). Unlike the self-confrontation, the re-enactment interview through material traces is still underdeveloped.

Enacting self-confrontation | Reflexivity

Many comments on self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews raise the question of ‘enacting self-confrontation’, paying particular attention to reflexivity in research. Reflexivity here means addressing our own activity as researchers based on the same presuppositions as those governing the research itself. As stated by Stewart et al. (2010), ‘the issue of reflexivity as an interesting and valid question’ (p. xvi) for the enaction paradigm but could ‘easily introduce fatal contradictions’. For example, in her comment related to the methodological procedure, Renault (2023) says, ‘In representational perspectives of cognition, this type of methodological procedure is generally associated with a precaution on the part of the researcher not to contaminate the meaning of what is being said. In an enactive perspective, however, such contamination is an inherent aspect of experience, an expression of the fact that meaning is neither in the subject nor in the world… Thus, it is worth exploring how the course-of-experience framework conceives the role of the research device itself in the study of cognition from-within’ (p. 154). The course-of-experience framework cannot avoid being reflexive and applying to itself. We cannot pretend to already have an entirely satisfactory solution, but work is in progress to ‘apply’ the whole scheme of enaction and the course-of-experience framework to ourselves as researchers (Poizat, 2022; Theureau, 2015). Regarding the self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews, the concepts of languaging (addressed by McKinney et al., 2023), inter-enaction, intercorporeality, participatory sense-making and re-enactment are good candidates to clarify what happens during the interviews. Micro-phenomenology provides important insights, given the studies that have focused on the micro-phenomenological interviews themselves (Depraz, 2022; Heimann et al., 2022), but also given the scientific agenda of researchers like Nathalie Depraz, which is to renew phenomenology as praxis and phenomenological practice thanks to enaction. As an illustration, Bitbol and Petitmengin (2017) assume that the intersubjective dimension of the micro-phenomenological interviews allows investigating the intersubjective dynamics at play in the enaction, and vice versa.

Peircean semiotics | Enaction

‘Why is Peircean semiotics necessary for the framework?’ (Hoffding, 2023, p. 135). This is also an ongoing topic in the commentaries. For McKinney et al. (2023), the course-of-experience framework with the ‘incorporation of Peircean semiotics is problematic’ (p. 145). They pursue, ‘If CEF uses Peircean semiotics for merely analytical purposes, the criterion for evaluating the use of the semiotic apparatus is whether it produces new insights into the range of empirical phenomena with which CEF is preoccupied (…) Instead, we critically attend to the assumptions underlying CEF’s adoption of semiotics as an ontological premise’ (p. 145). In the course-of-experience framework, Peirce’s semeiotic is used with analytical purposes. The aim is to rigorously describe activity and/or cognition in practice, and our empirical findings confirm the interest of the extended thought-sign hypothesis through the activity-sign hypothesis. A strong coherence is nevertheless expected between ontological or epistemological commitments. McKinney et al. (2023) consider that ‘Peirce’s semiotization of cognition is at odds with the radical embodied tenets of enactivism which is resolutely nonrepresentational’ (p. 145) and understand ‘the interpretant functions as a quasi-representation in Peirce’s semiotics’ (p. 145). From the authors’ perspective, the reliance on Peirce is in no way contradictory to enaction. It would be useful to return here to the various forms of enactive anti-representationalism and ‘radicalness’ (Steiner, 2014). These debates are ever-present in the literature. The authors’ response is to discuss here two misinterpretations related to Peirce’s semeiotics. First, the authors would like to argue the anti-representationalist nature of Peirce’s semeiotics (Paolucci, 2021). Second, they would like to strongly reject the idea that ‘CEF’s reliance on linguistic data, paired with a structuralist ontology of language as composed of linguistic units (Demuro & Gurney, 2021), forces them to treat practice and cognition as unit-based, and thus aligned with Peircean semiotics’ (McKinney et al., 2023, p. 145). Nothing in this quote is consistent with the course-of-experience framework or with what the authors have said in their article. This is very surprising.

As noted, it is essential to periodize Peirce’s work and distinguish three periods (Peirce I, II, III) in Peirce’s categories and semiotics. Peirce (I), in relation with his first idea of three categories, focused his semiotics on the triadic sign. It could at least be conceded to McKinney et al. (2023) that Peirce (I) clearly didn’t escape from representationalism, mentalism and the domination of linguistics, his three categories being built by successive prescissions (a non-reciprocal distinction he borrowed from medieval scholastics) of Being. But these categories were later reviewed in two steps. And it is to Peirce (III) and his six new categories (three fundamental plus three degenerate categories) ¹⁴ that the course-of-experience framework refers, providing, arguably, the hexadic sign he hadn’t provided. Peirce has argued since the beginning that we have no power of thinking without signs. Positively, this means that every thinking process is made up of signs (which also explains our scepticism about the idea that languaging transcends semiosis). Peirce (III)’s six categories and the resulting hexadic sign are resolutely nonrepresentational and follow the enactive asymmetrical assumption: the state of preparation (E, A and S) orients/modulates the Representamen R and the course-of-experience unit, and the results of all the process is the Interpretant I. They clearly liberate semiotics from the structuralist ontology of language, contrary to what is indicated by McKinney et al. (2023). It is also questionable to talk about the Interpretant as a quasi-representation, at least after Peirce (I). Let’s recall that Peirce’s notion of Interpretant is a component of the triadic sign that, like the notion of Representamen, is also a component of the hexadic sign. As assumed by Paolucci (2021), according to Peirce, ‘cognition does not serve to represent the world, but to effectively act in it’. He quotes: ‘In order to act in the world in an effective way, it is necessary to bring forth worlds through meaning, and meanings are not representation of the world, but ‘tendencies actually to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future’ (CP: 5.487)’ − that is, habits.

Again, the peculiar semeiotical analytical framework proposed within the course-of-experience framework is an enactive reading of the latest version of the Peircean categories (‘A guess at the riddle’). Its current version dates to 1997, except for a few details and variations in its content and wording, and it has largely shown its fruitfulness in empirical research. The hexadic sign, which governs all data processing, was designed to capture the asymmetrical actor-environment interaction, to produce admissible symbolic descriptions over more or less long periods of time, and finally to document the activity giving rise to pre-reflective experience with the utmost analytical rigour.

Meaning is not considered the ‘product’ of an interior; nor is it projected onto a meaningless environment. It is a surface effect of the coupling between the actor and the environment, and it is always characterized by this in-betweenness despite the asymmetry of the coupling. Each component of the hexadic sign is in-between or more precisely the expression of the actor-environment coupling. However, it should be added that no component has relevance in itself. Each component is a distinction pole or a distinction tool only useful for the analyst. To describe in an admissible manner practice, meaning and experience as a whole, it is indeed the specific relations between these six poles that need to be informed.

Materiality | Cognition

In their commentaries, Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023) question and regret the seeming lack of consideration for materiality in the course-of-experience framework. We have already expressed ourselves on this regrettable effect of our paper, as design issues and materiality are central for the authors. Coming from the direction of archaeology, the Material Engagement Theory naturally assumes a focus on materiality and an artefact-oriented perspective. Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023) argue that ‘the agent could neither pre-exist nor be independent of materiality but acquires its character as such in and through the material engagement it sustains with things’; that ‘cognition is not a property of the individual but an emergent result of the brain-body-environment system. Cognition is thing-ing, namely thinking and feeling with and through things’ and that meaning emerges from ‘the in-between space that material engagement creates rather than from the activity of an organism’ (p. 127). The authors of this response are perfectly aligned with these arguments, which could be restated using the same words. If the core of the transactional approach is to consider that ‘cognition is the continuous process by which brain, body, and world co-constitute each other, giving rise to particular socio-material dynamics’ (Alessandroni & Malafouris, 2023, p. 127), then the enactivism and the course-of-experience framework are ‘transactional’. The authors clearly insisted at the beginning of the original article that the course-of-experience framework defines practice as enacted, lived, situated, embodied and enculturated, and considers that cognitive phenomena are outcomes emerging from the orchestration of elements of distributed cultural-cognitive systems, embodied and embedded in practice. Activity, as the unit of analysis, is precisely useful not to attribute a distributed cognitive process solely and wrongly to the individual, but to integrate all the accumulated or sedimented resources of the cultural-cognitive ecosystem into the study of cognitive processes. Further, activity is considered to be central to the empirical study of embodied interactions with culturally organized material and social worlds. The course-of-experience framework has always had connections with Distributed Cognition Theory, which explains the emphatic reference to the work of Edwin Hutchins at the beginning of the article. Recently, enaction has been called on in Distributed Cognition Theory (Hutchins, 2010b, 2010c), thereby accelerating in a way the rapprochement between the course-of-experience framework and Distributed Cognition Theory (Theureau, 2020). By the way, the course-of-experience framework adheres to the argument that the dynamics of the distributed system (whether it be material or social) cannot be reduced to the properties of any of its constituent parts. We assume, as do Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023), that meaning emerges in ‘an in-between space that material engagement creates’ (p. 127) and from an active engagement with material anchors. But this is while considering, as Hutchins (2008) says, that ‘the enaction approach reminds us that every meaning that is apprehended is made, not received’ (p. 2012).

We have previously seen that Alessandroni and Malafouris (2023, p. 127) suggest adopting a more robust transactional hypothesis and consider that ‘organism and environment should not be seen as separate ontological categories that come to interact with each other but as two terms of a transactional process of continuous becoming’ (p. 127). According to them, ‘the transactional and enactivist hypotheses differ in the relative importance they assign to the organism. Thus, in the transactional hypothesis, the organism is only one of the terms that participates in the process of cognitive becoming and contributes to the transactional relation in a way that is symmetrical to how other human and non-human agents (e.g., other people or things) do’ (Alessandroni & Malafouris, 2023, p. 128). They suspect that the course-of-experience framework leads ‘to unnecessary ontological asymmetries that obscure the fundamental role of materiality for cognition’ (p. 127). The asymmetry assumption is in no way an obstacle to the unveiling of the constitutive character of materiality for cognition, nor a denial of the being of technical objects. Asymmetry is not a negation of various modes of existence (or ontological pluralism). The authors are convinced of the potential analytical utility of blurring the ontological boundaries between organism and environment for the study of socio-material practices, and of breaking with the dominant objectivist ontology to bring things to life, but without assuming the indiscernibility of the modes of existence (Latour, 2013).

Within the course-of-experience framework, we take seriously the hypothesis that technical objects have their own mode of existence and complete it with two other hypotheses (Poizat, 2015): (a) technical objects are a milieu in the coupling between the actor and the environment and (b) technology/materiality is anthropologically constitutive and constituent. This notion of milieu designates this in-between space that is neither interior nor exterior, neither inside nor outside, and that is not a simple intermediary either. In other words, technical objects are massively involved in the coupling without being flatly on the actor-pole side… nor on the environment-pole side (see, for example, the processes of appropriation).

The second assumption is that technology/materiality is ‘anthropologically constitutive and constituent’ (Havelange, 2010). To assume that technology is anthropologically constitutive means that technology is not outside of human activity or cognition but is inherent to it. The technical object can be regarded as an originating prosthesis (Stiegler, 1998). The prosthesis is not an extension of the human body: it is the very constitution of this body as human (Leroi-Gourhan, 1964/1993; Stiegler, 1998). Stiegler (1998) also talks about epiphylogenesis to designate the conservation, accumulation and sedimentation of individual experiences by inscribing and organizing inorganic matter, thus becoming organized inorganic matter. This epiphylogenetic memory, consisting of technology, is constitutive of humanity because it allows not only the storage of human gesture in the material world, but also and especially the transmission of all knowledge and all know-how. The concept of epiphylogenesis is related to the criticism of Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of externalization. According to Stiegler (1998), the externalization of the hand and the brain in a tool is not the expression, the movement, or the manifestation of intelligence or humanity already constructed or given. It is instead the externalization by which the interior constitutes itself. There is a co-constitutive movement: no term precedes or is the origin of the other. Havelange (2005) summarizes this position as follows: ‘Humans are the operators and not the inventors of the technical objects, and all of human evolution has its foundation, not in Homo Faber, but in the laws of evolution specific to the technical object grasped in its structural coupling with humans − themselves in constitution’ (p. 24). To then say that technology/materiality is anthropologically constituent means that technical objects play a role in the coupling between the actor and the environment, and that this role is constituent (Havelange, 2010). This constituent role can be fulfilled in a more or less incorporated or transparent manner. In any case, when they are perceived or appropriated, technical objects open or capacitate or empower possibilities for agents’ actions and their relations with the environment, all while constraining them. Technology becomes a power for engagement in the world once the process of corporeal, cognitive and social integration/appropriation has begun (Havelange, 2010). This constituent role can be expressed in two directions (Havelange, 2010): towards cognition and towards social.

Inspired by Simondon’s category of the transindividual, Stiegler (1998) and Stiegler and Rogoff (2010) proposed the notion of transindividuation to reaffirm the anthropologically constitutive and constituent dimension of technical objects and to emphasize the metastable psycho-socio-technical dynamics that characterize humans. This notion emphasizes the being of technical objects and the meeting of three individuation regimes: individual, collective and technical. Transindividuation is the transformation of I to we and we to I, and it is correlatively the transformation in the artificial environment inside of which the Is are able to meet as ‘we’ (Stiegler & Rogoff, 2010). Thus, the concept of ‘transindividuation’ does not stop with the individuated ‘I’ or the inter-individuated ‘we’, but it is the process of co-individuation within a preindividuated milieu, in which both the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are transformed through one another. According to Stiegler (1998), technology has a role in the emergence of the transindividual because the preindividual milieu is made up of technical objects that participate in this ‘metastabilisation’ of the individual and collective co-individuation.

Clearly, the course-of-experience framework and the Material Engagement Theory should work together to unravel the constitutive character of materiality for cognition, but also to elaborate a more robust analytical semeiotic framework inspired by Peirce’s theory in order to study meaning by interfacing human semiosis and non-human semiotic anchors. The complementarity of Malafouris’s and Peirce’s theories have already been pointed out (Iliopoulos, 2016, 2019). A joint analysis could clearly enrich the course-of-experience framework. The semiotic framework proposed by Iliopoulos (2019, 2016), based on Peirce’s triadic model, makes it possible to trace the nature, emergence and evolution of material signs and would be complementary to the documentation of ‘practice as semiosis’ within the course-of-experience framework, leading to a description that goes beyond human (Kohn, 2013; Leblanc et al., 2022).

Cognitive ethnography | Enactive anthropology

Finally, we would like to discuss the contributions and integration of cognitive ethnography lessons in the course-of-experience framework workbench and the perspective of an enactive ethnography. The course-of-experience framework gave rise to methodological advances that were both original and related to other research programs. The discussion has been incessant with proponents of distributed cognition, even though Hutchins has always been reluctant about verbalization data (Theureau, 2020). The opposite is not true since ethnography, and more particularly cognitive ethnography, is a fully fledged component of the course-of-experience framework workbench. As mentioned in the original article, self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews (like re-enactment interviews within situation simulation through material traces) are always conducted after a preliminary ethnographic work that prepares for their implementation and provides a common background between the actors and researchers, thereby contributing to the ethical conditions of the research. However, ethnographic data are not limited to the preliminary phase. Ethnographic data are usually collected in addition to video recordings and self-confrontation micro-phenomenological interviews (Azéma, Secheppet, & Mottaz, 2022). These ethnographic data are used to document: the activity on longer time scales; the role of the body, material or cultural historical processes more closely (with the condition of documenting the generative passages with the activity giving rise to pre-reflective consciousness); and the constraints/effects affecting the course of experience. In other words, ethnographic data are essential for one of the explicit purposes of the course-of-experience framework: combining intrinsic description and extrinsic or external descriptions. It should be noted here that cognitive ethnography can document some of the pieces of the history of pre-reflective consciousness through behaviours and communications. However, we don’t consider that ‘the technical expertise [of the observer] in the domain under study’ and ‘observations of agents immersed in cognitive events’ are sufficient to understand how they perceive, experience and emote a given situation. In any case, it is possible to do better and be more rigorous in terms of first-person oriented description. Let us add that drawing closer to the ‘own world’ or umwelt of an actor is not self-evident. When interviews are combined with observations in ethnographic studies, it often leads to a mess of different verbalizations − all considered relevant in ethnographic investigations. Hence, the attention given to create suitable conditions for the expression of pre-reflective consciousness. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the authors agree with the comment that ‘the first-person is a theoretical reconstruction, and basing that on what is said, rather than what is done, depends on a linguistic and philosophical tradition’s adoration of the word’ (McKinney et al., 2023, p. 146). Rethinking cognitive ethnography and/or developing an enactive-inspired ethnography would be a promising area for further work. We are currently examining this pathway as part of a more global and systematic work on the prospect of an enactive anthropology, with the objective of reviving the scientific endeavour of cognitive anthropology under the assumptions of enaction. But it’s still a work in progress.

The authors of this response hope to have cleared up some misunderstandings, but above all to have laid the foundations for future discussions and fruitful collaborations between research programs.