Editorial: Introduction to the special issue on the course-of-experience framework

This special issue on the course-of-experience framework comprises an original article (the special issue target article), nine commentaries and an Authors’ reply. Through this issue, our aims were (a) to offer a comprehensive presentation of the course-of-experience framework, (b) to provoke dialogue with other research programs within the enactive paradigm (or those that are closely related to it), and (c) to turn attention towards practice in enaction and cognitive science. 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. The special issue concludes with an extensive Authors’ reply. The excellent questions and the crucial points raised by the commentaries have been an opportunity to clear up some of the misunderstandings about the course-of-experience framework, but also to pursue the scientific debate. 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).

Through this editorial, I would like to emphasize two main points to keep in mind while reading this special issue. First, the course-of-experience framework is a research program that has a long history (see Poizat & San Martin, 2020). It began in the 1980s and 1990s. The first synthesis of this research program appeared a few years later through the works of Theureau (1992), Pinsky (1992) and Theureau and Jeffroy (1994). We are sure everyone will agree that it is difficult to summarize 30 years of theoretical, methodological, and empirical back and forth in one research article. More importantly, the studies conducted over those years, and still today, have confirmed the ‘progressive nature’ (primary criterion in a research program’s logic) of the course-of-experience framework, both in terms of heuristic power and growth capacity. Second, within the course-of-experience framework, researchers are trying to combine ontological, epistemological and ethical assumptions with empirical studies of the messiness of real-world practice, and with design purposes ¹ . To state this a bit provocatively, the challenge implicit to the course-of-experience framework is to avoid trapping enaction in a philosophical ghetto and confront it with real situations ‘that matter’ (with all the associated methodological and ethical challenges). While attempting to meet this challenge, we have found that some of the results seemed to have consequences for the philosophy of mind, but several of the debates initiated in the commentaries − certainly important for the actual philosophy of mind and 4E philosophy − are in fact far from our concerns.

The original article (Poizat et al., 2023) had two goals: (a) to insist on the need to give a prominent place to practice in enaction and an enactive approach to real-world practices in pursuit of a deeper understanding of cognitive phenomena, and (b) to underline the methodological/analytical value of the course-of-experience framework for the cognitive sciences from the perspective of moving towards a rigorous ‘first-person oriented’ description of real-world practice that gives rise to pre-reflective consciousness.

But the notion practice first needs to be clarified. The authors used the notion of practice as an equivalent to the notion of activity − which is the preferred term in the course-of-experience framework − to facilitate debate/discussion within the academic culture of the cognitive sciences. Importantly, however, practice is not literally synonymous with activity, and this may lead to ambiguities. Chaiklin (2019) suggests the need to differentiate the practice concept from the activity concept. For example, activity is not reducible to historically formed practice, even if it may be interesting to give an account of the generative passages between activity and historically formed practice. Activity is also not reducible to action or ‘doing’, even if this is a core component of activity. Note that the concept of activity is often related to the life process and living being. Fichtner (1999) is even clearer: ‘Activity is not what an organism does. Rather, the organism consists in its activity. Activity is the mode of existence by which organisms establish themselves as subjects of their life processes’ (p. 55). From activity to enaction, there is one step ² .

The notion of practice was introduced to the international cognitive science literature around the enaction paradigm and through the lens of phenomenology in the book On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (Depraz et al., 2003). Phenomenology philosophy (as represented by a selection of authors: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, in chronological order) was an essential component or background in the early stages of enaction. However, it should be stressed that ‘Husserl’s turn toward experience and the “things themselves” was entirely theoretical, or, to make the point the other way around, it completely lacked any pragmatic dimension’ (Varela et al., 1991, p. 19). Depraz et al. (2003) strengthened the ties between (Husserlian) phenomenology and enaction (given the reciprocal contributions between them), going beyond a purely philosophical use of phenomenology. In their book, the authors ‘seek the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience’ (Depraz et al., 2003, p. 1). This book addresses many issues: the pragmatism of experience, phenomenology as praxis (not only theory), phenomenological reduction as praxis, phenomenological practice and the phenomenological methodologies. On this occasion, the authors state that ‘practice is the privileged site for grasping experience’ (Depraz et al., 2003, p. 155). On one side, phenomenology as praxis/practice becomes legitimate through enaction, with a privileged methodological principle: ‘to describe the process of becoming aware from its very enaction, to describe it as it is carried out’ (p. 155). And on the other side, enaction is enriched with a rigorous and practical approach to human experience.

Behind the original article lies another ambition: to encourage the cognitive sciences (at least the enactive perspective) to go beyond the movement developed in On Becoming Aware (Depraz et al., 2003) and to put activity centre stage by considering that (a) the fundamental ‘unit’ of the life process is activity, (b) activity is the privileged site for grasping experience, (c) activity is a chain of successive enactions and (d) it is through activity that the actors enact or bring forth their world (ie a world that is meaningful). All these points have been present since the very beginning of the course-of-experience framework and were presented in its first synthetic publication (Theureau, 1992) ³ . The notion of practice, and even more of activity, enables us through ‘intension’ and ‘extension’ to extend the notions of action (into enaction) ⁴ and ‘making’ (into sense-making). Let’s have a look at the promising path offered by the course-of-experience framework.