Sense-Making in the Wild: The Historical and Ecological Depth of Enactive Processes of Life and Cognition

Abstract

The enactive approach characterizes life and cognition as sense-making. The standard description of sense-making entails the co-emergence of an agent’s self and a meaningful world, as well as the emergence of a normativity that guides the behaviour of the coupled agent-environment system. This emergent process happens at different levels of interactions: biological, sensorimotor, intercorporeal and linguistic. Sense-making therefore accounts for the natural origins of intentionality and meaning and gives continuity to the emergent enactive processes of life and mind. The standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and neglects many historical and ecological aspects relevant to the scientific study of life and mind processes as they happen in concrete fields of action. To address this issue, I propose the enlarged description of sense-making in the wild, which is based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development defines sense-making as a historically situated process that transforms the previously given dynamical configuration of the agent-environment system into a new one. Enactive-situated normativity asserts that in addition to the agent’s self-maintenance and the material constraints of the agent-environment system, many dynamical constraints, ecologically situated, shape the origin, maintenance and development of sense-making processes. Finally, transverse emergence describes the transformational process of the whole agent-environment system dynamically, as a reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors that exhibit the typical behaviour of the system. Sense-making in the wild thus aims to facilitate conceptual tools to study enactive cognition, as it happens in concrete fields of action.

1. Introduction

The enactive approach defines cognition as a form of sense-making (Di Paolo, 2018; Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014; Thompson, 2007). A living organism is an autonomous system that enacts its own identity or self. The constitution of this self brings forth, at once, a meaningful world. The meaning of the organism’s world is determined by the relevance of some aspects of its material surroundings that sustain its identity. From a third-person perspective, the organism’s self and its meaningful world constitute a coupled agent-environment dynamical system (A-E). ¹ The A-E interactions can have positive or negative values for preserving the agent’s self. Establishing these values is thus a normative phenomenon. Enactive normativity accounts for the constitution of the specific patterns of behaviour we observe in each A-E. The emergent process that constitutes the A-E and its norms of behaviour is sense-making.

Sense-making happens not only at the biological level of an A-E, it also occurs in an agent’s sensorimotor interactions with its material environment and the intercorporeal coordination among two or more agents (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2017). Any cognitive activity is grounded either on sensorimotor interactions, on intercorporeal coordinations, or both (Di Paolo et al., 2018). Hence, defining cognition as sense-making offers an account of the natural origins of meaning and the continuity of processes of life and mind (Thompson, 2007).

This standard description of sense-making is nonetheless too abstract and misses many historical and ecological aspects that constitute processes related to life and cognition. These aspects are often relevant for scientific areas such as cultural anthropology and psychiatry, which need more detailed accounts of the situatedness of sense-making processes in specific social groups and individuals (see, e.g., de Haan, 2020a; van Cauteren, 2020).

To solve this issue, I propose to conceive sense-making as a dynamical transformative process that involves historical and ecological depth. This depth involves multiple dynamical constraints that shape the emergence of identities, meanings and norms of sense-making. It is historical because it consists of the influence of constraints constituted through the historical temporality of the A-E. It is ecological because it involves constraints located in the environment over and above the self-maintenance processes of the agent’s identity. Accordingly, sense-making is not a process that brings forth meaning in a bare physicochemical landscape but a transformational process of pre-established situated norms into new ones. Sense-making is a process of norm development that we can understand dynamically as a transversal process of emergence that cuts across the historical and ecological dimensions of an A-E.

The main aim of showing this broader conception of sense-making is to deliver a conceptual tool for researchers that need fine-grained descriptions of sense-making processes as it happens in the field. Consequently, I call this description sense-making in the wild, which is constructed as follows. Section two describes the standard description of sense-making within the framework of the enactive theory of biological autonomy, showing the continuity of sense-making processes at the different levels of interaction of an A-E. Section three argues that the standard description of sense-making does not account for all the relevant aspects that the areas of cultural anthropology and psychiatry require. This shortcoming of the standard description motivates our pursuit of a broader definition of sense-making. Section four sets the pragmatic grounds to build the definition of sense-making in the wild, which aims to account for the historical and ecological depth of life and cognition processes. Section five shows that sense-making, at some level of description, is a process of norm development and not a surplus of significance. Norm development discloses the historical depth of sense-making. Section six argues that an account of enactive-situated normativity needs to enlarge the classical definition of enactive normativity, when focused on concrete processes of life and cognition. Enactive-situated normativity comprises the ecological breadth of sense-making. Furthermore, section seven argues that sense-making as norm development is a process of transverse emergence regarding the ecological and historical dimensions, from a dynamical point of view. Finally, section eight clarifies that the standard description of sense-making and sense-making in the wild are not mutually exclusive. Both descriptions are helpful for the enactive theory, and the value of their use depends on the specific purposes of our scientific practices.

2. Living and Cognizing as Sense-making

The concept of sense-making is part of the enactive theory of biological autonomy (Thompson, 2007). First, this section specifies the main aspects of the standard description of sense-making within this theory. Next, it shows how this description operates at the sensorimotor and intercorporeal levels of an A-E’s interactions.

2.1 The Standard Description of Sense-making

The theory of biological autonomy defines living organisms as autonomous systems that remain in precarious conditions (Thompson, 2007). When the constitutive parts of a self-organizing system (e.g., objects, values or processes) constitute an interdependent network, the system has an operational closure (Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014). Interdependence means that if one of the processes, values or objects constituting the system is no longer present, other components will also be lost, and the integral unity of the system will be broken. A self-organizing system with operational closure is an autonomous system, and its condition is precarious if its operational closure is continually threatened. As physical systems, living organisms are always menaced by entropy. To persist despite its precarious condition, living systems interact with their environments to renovate the material components of their autonomous organization. Adaptivity is the ability of living systems to modulate its interactions with the environment, to sustain its viability or the tendency of the system to preserve its autonomy (Di Paolo, 2005). Therefore, living systems are autonomous systems in precarious conditions with adaptive behaviour (Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014). Living systems are also named agents because they can establish an asymmetrical relationship with their environment by modulating their interactions to preserve their autonomy (Barandiaran et al., 2009).

The surroundings provide resources to help the agent sustain or endanger its viability. The positive and negative values of the environment are specified by the agent’s identity (i.e., its specific autonomous organization) (Thompson, 2004). Once there are assigned values in its surroundings, an agent is interrelated with a meaningful environment (Thompson, 2007). Henceforth, I will call the agent’s self-identity and correspondent meaningful environment the agent-environment system or simply A-E.

Given the capacities and abilities of agents to modulate their interactions with the environment to sustain their viability, the A-E interactions also have positive and negative values (Di Paolo, 2005). Establishing values for the environment and for the A-E interactions based on the self-preservation functions of living organisms is called normativity (Barrett, 2017; Mojica, 2021). It is a normative phenomenon because, for enactivists, agents are beings sensitive and responsive to action-oriented values (Colombetti, 2014). From a third-person perspective, this enactive normativity also explains the establishment of the specific regular patterns of behaviour we observe in an A-E (Barandiaran & Moreno, 2006). Sense-making is thus the emergent process that constitutes the A-E and its enactive normativity (Thompson & Stapleton, 2009).

We can now distinguish three fundamental descriptive aspects of sense-making:

(S1) Sense-making transforms a physicochemical environment into a meaningful world (Thompson, 2007). Varela (1991) called this type of transformation a surplus of significance in the environment.

(S2) Sense-making also describes the co-emergence of both an agent’s self and a meaningful world (Thompson, 2007).

(S3) Finally, sense-making entails the emergence of an enactive normativity (Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014).

S1, S2 and S3 constitute what I will call The Standard Description. This description entails that the agent’s autonomy and the material constraints of the A-E are the only two relevant constitutive aspects of sense-making. Later, I will argue that this idea limits our understanding of living and cognitive processes at some levels of description. First, let’s briefly survey how The Standard Description applies to other interactional levels of an A-E.

2.2. Sense-making: From Life to Mind

For an autonomous living system, an environmental feature is significant or relevant because interacting with that feature impacts its bodily dynamical states, supporting or threatening its viability. Since the purpose of self-preservation is intrinsic to the constitution of living systems (Weber & Varela, 2002), enactivists believe that all organisms are sensitive to what is positive or negative for their self-maintenance.

The sensitivity of basic living systems to meaning and norms is controversial. Enactivists call this feature primordial affectivity (Colombetti, 2014) or simply sentience (Thompson, 2022). We must distinguish two crucial aspects of this sentience. From an external perspective, we observe a responsiveness of all kinds of organisms to their environments, which fits well with the supposition that they are sentient beings. This supposition is founded on dynamical interpretations of phenomena like chemotaxis (Egbert et al., 2010). However, sentience also implies a feeling from the organism’s perspective (Thompson, 2022). Nobody has solid empirical evidence of what sort of feeling basic organisms like bacteria possess or if they have any sentience. ² The enactive approach nonetheless argues, from a transcendental point of view, that via empathy we can recognize the sentience of other living beings, thanks to our own condition as living beings (Jonas, 1966; Thompson, 2022). ³

For the time being, and following Di Paolo (2018), I call sensitivity the sentience that all living beings are supposed to have from the enactive standpoint. Sensitivity is more importantly attributed to all living organisms based on an observed behavioural responsiveness of agents than on our concrete knowledge of their experiential feelings.

Although controversial, attributing sensitivity to all living organisms is helpful for the descriptions and explanations of the enactive approach. It helps enactivists to account for the natural origins of intentionality, which implies the emergence of a subjective point of view, although in its minimal form. ⁴ Sensitivity, as a hypothesis of the dynamical organization of living beings, also explains the flexibility and creativity of the intelligent behaviour of living beings, which is quite different from the blind dynamical behaviour of non-living self-organizing systems (e.g., tornados or flames) (Di Paolo, 2018).

We can now more clearly see The Standard Description at work in metabolism, that is, the most basic form of biological sense-making:

(S1) Metabolism implies the surplus of significance in the environment because of the value the physicochemical environment acquires for an organism, according to its metabolic requirements.

(S2) Metabolism describes the co-emergence of a self and a meaningful world, since the organism’s constitution as an autonomous system is determined by the environment’s resources for its self-maintenance. On the other hand, the constitution of the autonomous system defines the value of these environmental resources.

(S3) Finally, metabolism involves the emergence of biological normativity, a domain of interactions guided by the organism’s purpose: to remain away from its thermodynamical equilibrium—that is, death.

The life and mind continuity thesis (Thompson, 2004; 2007) tells us that biological sense-making evolves when agents possess sensorimotor systems. Hence, we can observe the same type of processes in acts that we can more appropriately call cognitive (e.g., perception, intelligent actions, social coordination, etc.) (Barandiaran, 2017).

Living beings with sensorimotor systems establish regular patterns of interactions with the environment that enactivists call sensorimotor habits (Di Paolo et al., 2017). These habits are constituted by movement and sensory feedback correlations—what O’Regan and Noë (2001) named sensorimotor contingencies. One sensorimotor habit, such as riding a bicycle, constitutes an autonomous network of coordinated sensorimotor contingencies (e.g., pedalling, etc.) with operational closure. Note that, if one of the sensorimotor coordinations that constitute the habit is lost, the correct performance of the action will no longer be possible. So, the network of sensorimotor coordinations that constitute a habit is interdependent and has operational closure. Since changes in the material conditions of the environment or the body constantly challenge the agents’ habitual procedures, the sensorimotor system exists in precarious conditions. Hence, the system needs adaptivity to avoid the loss of the proper performance of sensorimotor habits (Di Paolo et al., 2017). The living agent is nonetheless the one that is sensitive to the organizational conditions of the sensorimotor habit and the one that truly exhibits an adaptive behaviour. I will come back to this issue later (section 6.1). For now, I will explain how sensorimotor habits imply The Standard Description:

(S1) There is a surplus of sensorimotor significance. This significance is based on the possibilities for action the environment affords to the agent to sustain the habit’s viability.

(S2) There is a co-emergence of a sensorimotor self, founded on the self-organization of the body to accomplish a sensorimotor task and a meaningful sensorimotor environment that affords the opportunity to complete it, sustaining the sensorimotor self.

(S3) A new level of normativity that guides the interactions of an A-E to sustain a sensorimotor habit also emerges, a sensorimotor normativity.

When sensorimotor interactions with the environment involve interactions with other agents, a third and more particular form of sense-making emerges: participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). In participatory sense-making, two or more agents co-enact a significant aspect of the world while interacting in bodily coordination. Merleau-Ponty (1964) named this kind of phenomenon intercorporeality. A solitary agent cannot achieve a participatory meaning alone because each agent must respond to the tension or dissonance resulting from confronting its intentions and individual habits with the emergent dynamics of the collective action. The intentions and habits of other agents constantly alter a single agent’s intentions and habits. As a result, a new sense of the world proper to the social dimension of cognition is enacted by individual agents, even when their interactions with others remain only virtual (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2017).

The coordinated action of agents produces the emergence of a self-organizing system and even an autonomous and intersubjective one. The interdependency of the actions of each participant to sustain the viability of an autonomous intercorporeal system constitutes an operational closure. This system is in precarious condition since the failure of social coordination can lead the organization of the emergent system to collapse. The adaptive behaviour of participants can nonetheless mitigate the decay, since they can individually or jointly regulate their interactions (Di Paolo et al., 2018). However, like in the case of sensorimotor habits, the sensitivity is exclusive to agents. They are the ones who enact a social self-identity that serves to sustain the autonomy of the intercorporeal system. We can thus observe The Standard Description in participatory sense-making as well:

(S1) Participatory sense-making involves a surplus of significance in the environment co-enacted with others.

(S2) An agent’s repertoire of bodily skills to coordinate actions with other agents constitutes a new social self-identity. The social identity of an agent is correlated to the emergence of a social meaningful world constituted by the possibilities the environment provides for the participation in socially coordinated actions.

(S3) Intercorporeality involves a new level of normativity. There may be multiple layers of normativity at work in social coordination, ranging from the individual regulations each agent performs to sustain social coordination, to different forms of co-regulation (gestures, dialogues, linguistic expressions, etc.) that multiple agents accomplish together for the same purpose (Di Paolo et al., 2018).

To conclude, The Standard Description involves biological, sensorimotor and participatory sense-making. In the following section, I will argue that we must improve this description.

3. The Missing Constitutive Aspects of Sense-making in The Standard Description

The Standard Description falls short to recognize all the relevant aspects that constitute processes of life and cognition. In this section, I show this shortcoming by arguing that The Standard Description’s utility is limited when applied to the more detailed level of description of sense-making in two scientific areas: cultural anthropology and psychiatry.

3.1. The Case of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology studies the cultural variation of human groups. Van Cauteren (2020) has recently proposed using the enactive theory to understand the differences among different cultural groups in human-animal relationships, by analysing the human practice of hunting. Here, I briefly review Van Cauteren’s proposal to understand why The Standard Description is insufficient to explain this phenomenon from an enactive point of view.

Ethnographic studies show that many hunter-gatherer groups in North America practice rituals after killing a prey animal (Birket-Smith, 1930). These rituals show respect for the lives of animals, attributing to them a spiritual life that can transcend the death of their bodies. Ethnographers think these groups attribute personhood to animals (Hallowell, 1926). Such a conception of animal life contrasts with the standard viewpoint of Western societies, which typically assume big animals possess sentience but not mental lives and emotions equal to ours (Rowlands, 2016). Hence, they don’t deserve the same respect shown to human persons.

Here, I cannot go deeper into debates about personhood and animality. What matters about these discussions is Van Cauteren’s enactive explanation of cultural variation on this issue, which defies the standard epistemological and ontological explanations in the field.

Epistemological explanations affirm that hunter-gatherers have a different epistemological perspective from ours, assuming that the foundation of Western knowledge is better justified than theirs. While our thinking is founded on scientific knowledge, hunter-gatherers beliefs are based on magical thinking (de Castro, 2003). Such an explanation is less credible every day since we are increasingly acknowledging that the dominance of Western epistemologies over others is grounded more on the political and economic dominion of the West, than on their intrinsic epistemic value (de Sousa Santos, 2009).

Ontological explanations, on the other hand, entail pluralist views on human culture. We can presuppose that there are as many ontologies as human sociocultural groups. Ontologies are based on socially constructed worlds (Evens, 2005). However, recognizing the plurality of worlds requires a meta-ontology that anthropologists can use as a medium to link and articulate the multiplicity of ontologies. When trying to build this meta-ontology, anthropologists run into the problem of incommensurability (van Cauteren, 2020). Hence, ontological explanations are problematic too.

Van Cauteren thus suggests an enactive explanation. Human-animal relationships are enacted and involve different types of sense-making. Persons of different cultures enact different relationships with animals, because the constitution of their sense-making involves diverse historical and ecological aspects (van Cauteren, 2020). These aspects include different biological needs, sociocultural relations, affective experiences, and religious (existential) beliefs.

The sense-making of the hunter–prey relationship is not a layer of meaning imposed on their material surroundings. The hunter–animal relationship enactment emerges due to hunters’ development in their natural and social niches. We need to look at the ecology of the hunter–animal system and the history of their relationships to fully understand the origin and development of their sense-making.

Van Cauteren’s enactive proposal looks promising, but The Standard Description is insufficient to understand hunter–gatherers’ sense-making. It is not enough to know how agents make sense of their material environment for the self-maintenance of their living bodies, habits and traditions. In isolation, it is even insufficient to analyse the constitution of an emergent social relationship between hunters and prey (a participatory sense-making process). We must look at sense-making in the midmost of the multiple dimensions that constitute the behaviour and beliefs of hunter–gatherers. This kind of scientific explanations pushes us to examine the different constraints that shape the emergence, sustaining and development of hunter–gatherer sense-making.

3.2. The Case of Enactive Psychiatry

One of the most promising fields of application of the enactive theories nowadays is psychiatry. Many researchers are currently building paths to understand psychiatric disorders as problems related to one or more aspects of sense-making (de Haan, 2020a; Fuchs, 2018; Maiese, 2022; Nielsen & Ward, 2020). de Haan (2020b, 2020a) develops one of the most complete and rich analyses of psychiatric disorders (PD) from the enactive standpoint.

de Haan (2020a) appeals to the enactive approach to deal with the integration problem in psychiatry. The integration problem looks for a theoretical framework that articulates the explanations and coordinates the interventions of a PD’s different levels of organization. De Haan articulates the different levels of explanations, in order to understand PDs as disorders of sense-making.

Our sense-making establishes regular patterns of behaviour that are useful for a person to adapt to the conditions of the environment and to self-maintain either herself or the social systems in which she participates. Hence, a malfunction of sense-making causes the person to fail systematically in her adaptive behaviour and causes tensions in her self-maintenance processes or those of her group.

The malfunction of a sense-making process has many causal trajectories, analytical dimensions and intervention areas. de Haan (2020a) recognizes four main dimensions of a PD: biological, experiential, sociocultural and existential. The first dimension refers to the biological processes that affect the ‘normal’ functioning of the brain-body-world system. The second dimension to the affective experience a person has of her world. The social dimension worries about the social norms and values that affect – negatively or positively – the person’s sense-making. Finally, the existential level refers to the self-reflection (conscious or not) a person makes of her situation, including the PD.

De Haan’s approach to PDs recognizes that sense-making involves multiple entangled dimensions and can affect each other to originate, sustain and develop it. As in the case of cultural anthropology, the worry of enactive psychiatry is to understand the concrete intermingling of the different components of sense-making that we cannot know looking at the person’s autonomy and the materiality of the environment, alone. Instead, multiple dynamic constraints at different levels of an A-E organization are involved in the constitution of sense-making.

de Haan (2020a) also describes sense-making as a contingent and temporal process. It is contingent because it depends not only on the autonomous constitution of the agent, but also on the current dynamic state of the individual and its situation. It is temporal because it is constituted in time. Finally, sense-making remains the same if the A-E does not change significantly and develops when the conditions of the system change.

The Standard Description is not adequate for the practice and interests of an enactive approach to psychiatry, just as it is not for cultural anthropology. We need, therefore, an improved description of sense-making.

4. The Pragmatic Character of a Broad Description of Sense-making

A broad description of sense-making needs to account for the many dynamical constraints implicated in the origin, maintenance and development of a form of sense-making. These constraints are primarily historical and ecological. Sense-making needs to get volume and acquire a historical and ecological depth. This new description of sense-making with depth is sense-making in the wild.

This section sets the grounds for building sense-making in the wild. First, I clarify the pragmatic spirit of the enactive approach and how my proposal follows the same spirit. Then, I argue that we need to bring forth the historical and ecological depth of sense-making by redefining The Standard Description.

4.1. The Enactive Approach: A Pragmatic and Embodied View of Science

The concepts we use in science and philosophy do not need to be an exhaustive list of descriptions of the world phenomena. Such a view presupposes a world in itself with a definite set of properties that we can eventually describe with an appropriate scientific language and observations (Carnap et al., 1969). The social turn in philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962), proposes a view of science as a sociocultural and historically situated activity that is constantly – but sometimes discontinuously – transforming itself, due to theoretical, practical, social, political and economic interests (Longino, 2006).

Once we abandon the unrealistic attains of positivist views of science, we can engage in more pragmatic and plural views, where science provides us with tools to change our societies (Kitcher, 2001). We still need to care about better or worse scientific tools, but evaluating scientific approaches is different and more flexible. (Kellert et al., 2006). If science helps address our common interests as social groups, we need valuable tools for this aim (Eldridge, 1998).

The enactive approach is committed to this pragmatic conception of science (Varela et al., 2016). Varela (1996), for instance, clearly visualized the endeavour of the nascent approach as building new practices that help us overcome the establishment views in cognitive science and their traditional problems. Furthermore, enactivists conceives cognition as involving contingency, ambiguity and open-ended boundaries (Varela et al., 2016). Enactivists indeed use models of dynamical and complex systems because these are helpful mathematical tools that deal with the contingency and open-endedness of cognitive processes (Buhrmann et al., 2013). The enactive approach also stays open to continuous feedback between the different aspects that build their theoretical claims and practical methodologies. That includes building concrete explanations with abstract concepts, while also refining and rethinking abstractions with the concrete applications of the theoretical stands (Di Paolo et al., 2018).

I aim to build the description of sense-making in the wild from this pragmatic view. The purpose is not to replace The Standard Description, but to expand it when our levels of description require more details about the concrete situatedness of sense-making processes, as is the case of cultural anthropology and psychiatry.

In the following subsections, I unfold my proposal of deepening the historical and ecological dimensions of sense-making, by redefining the main features of The Standard Description.

4.2. The Historical and Ecological Depth of Sense-making

Sense-making in the wild should be helpful to understand processes of life and cognition more accurately when they happen in real and concrete scenarios. For this task, the broader description of sense-making needs to bring forth the historical and ecological depth of this phenomenon.

The historical depth of sense-making brings forth three main sets of dynamical constraints that are relevant for the temporal constitution and unfolding of sense-making processes. First, the dynamical constraints that were constituted in past of the A-E, which enable and limit the current constitution and behaviour (configuration) of the A-E. These constraints can be either a previous configuration of the A-E, or just dynamical preconditions that set the necessary grounds for the emergence of the system that are part of what Di Paolo (2020, p. 791) calls sources of pre-individuality (i.e., ‘…the undifferentiated condition of nature in the absence of distinct phases, before undergoing determinations’). It also comprises the dynamical constraints that were constituted in past of the A-E that can or cannot be currently relevant for the present configuration of the A-E, but that we believe enabled and limited the configuration of A-E in a previous developmental stage. Finally, the historical depth of the A-E contains the relevant dynamical constraints currently configuring the A-E that we believe enable and limit the probable developmental pathway of the A-E in the future. ⁵

The ecological depth of sense-making, on the other hand, involves those dynamical constraints that currently enable and limit the behaviour of the A-E but that are not directly related to the self-maintenance processes of the agent’s identity. As we shall see later (Section 6.2), they typically pertain to the self-maintenance processes of another self-organizing system (Mojica, 2021).

Sense-making in the wild, recognizing the historical and ecological depth of sense-making processes, also involves a movement that transforms the already established ecological field, historically constituted, where an agent is situated. When a new form of sense-making emerges, in this picture, the ecological field is transformed and, while doing so, exhibits the relevant historical constraints that were needed to achieve the new configuration of the A-E. This new configuration also constitutes a new field of possibilities for further transformations.

Therefore, sense-making in the wild acknowledges that the historical and ecological depth of the A-E is also relevant for the constitution of its current configuration – and the probable configurations of the A-E in the future – whereas The Standard Description implies that only the agents’ autonomy and the materiality of the A-E are relevant aspects of sense-making.

We must notice that not all the works of the enactive approach miss the A-E depth. The descriptions of how language emerges from different levels of dynamical interaction between agents, involving different stages of development of participatory sense-making, do acknowledge the importance of the dynamical constraints that shape the developmental pathways of social agents and their meaningful environments (Di Paolo et al., 2018). However, there has not yet been a significant update on how we should understand sense-making beyond The Standard Description. The closest things to an update are Di Paolo’s (2018) description of sense-making as a resolution of dialectical tensions between the agent and the environment, and De Haan’s (2020a) characterization of sense-making as a contingent and temporal process.

From a phenomenological perspective, Sepúlveda-Pedro (2020, 2023) has argued that sense-making should be understood as a phenomenon of norm development. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s concept of spatial levels (niveaux), he argues that any established perceptual norm (that implies, in enactive terms, the agent-environment sensorimotor coupling) is always founded on another previously given perceptual norm. Perceptual norms remain open to adjustments and reconfigurations, which can eventually constitute a new perceptual norm (Sepúlveda-Pedro, 2023).

Here, I recover this description of norm development but with a different aim. I am making explicit that sense-making, from normative and dynamical perspectives, involves the transformation of the A-E that cuts-cross the historical and ecological dimensions of this system. Accordingly, we can enlarge our conception of sense-making by improving and deepening our descriptions of enactive normativity, as well as the emergent dynamical processes involved in sense-making.

In what follows, I will clarify the description of sense-making in the wild, based on the concepts of norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence.

5. From the Surplus of Significance to Norm Development

The first definitory aspect of sense-making is the surplus of significance (henceforth, The surplus). This is a description of how the activity of a living agent adds a layer of meaning over the bare material world or, as Thompson (2007) also puts it, how sense-making transforms the physical world into a world of meaning.

The surplus is a problematic statement for two reasons. First, it seems to presuppose the pre-existence of a world determined by its physicochemical properties. The agent’s subjectivity seems to project meaning onto the physicochemical reality, implying some sort of mind-world dualism or an epistemological perspectivism (De Jesus, 2018; Wheeler, 2010). As I will argue here, this is not a real problem if we realize that The surplus is a description made from a pragmatic stance without strong ontological claims.

However, I find another problem of genuine concern, namely that The surplus describes an abstract scenario where the historical and ecological depth of the A-E is missing in sense-making processes. This depth matters when our study of life and cognition requires concrete approximations. Therefore, I will argue that, in many cases, it is useful to think of sense-making as a process of norm development.

5.1. The Surplus of significance as a Heuristic Resource

There are at least two interpretations of The surplus. The easiest but wrong interpretation is to think that the ‘surplus’ refers to the meaning that inhabits the interior of a subjective mind and that is projected onto the external material environment. That would presuppose the pre-givenness, as it were, of mind and world. But such a presupposition entails a standpoint of realism or idealism that is not endorsed by enactivists (Varela et al., 2016).

Enactivists are neither naïve nor scientific realists. While they may regard the physiochemical world as a helpful theoretical construction for many human practices, they do not hold that the world is ‘in itself’ a physiochemical one (Varela et al., 2016). Nevertheless, enactivists are not idealists either. Scientific theories are grounded on human beings’ physiological structures, cognitive skills and symbolic, technological and normative resources, all collectively produced and transformed by human societies (Varela, 1996). Science is part of what Husserl (1970) called a lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the bodily and cultural background from which we, as modern human beings, usually experience the world. Thompson (2016) explicitly recognizes that the enactive view of science is, in general terms, similar to Husserl’s.

A careful reading of Varela’s work shows us that the surplus of significance aims to describe a new layer of constraints that limit the space of an agent’s interactions with the environment, but that is additional to the material layer (Varela, 1984). That is, the surplus of significance could entail the emergence of a new level of explanation of natural phenomena that is, in principle, not reducible to its pure physical-chemical level. However, this idea does not establish a metaphysical discontinuity between the living and the non-living, or between mental and non-mental phenomena. Di Paolo (2018) describes the enactive approach as a naturalist but not reductionist (either ontological or epistemological) account of life and mind, which means they look for a continuity of explanations among the different levels of organization of matter and energy but without assuming there are definite ontological or epistemological grounds for these explanations. Scientific practices are the groundless grounds of these explanations indeed (Varela, 1996). Therefore, saying that the environment acquires a surplus of significance in processes of life and cognition is just a helpful heuristic and practical way to describe the emergent aspects that constitute these phenomena.

From the same pragmatic stance of the enactive approach, the real problem is that the idea of a new identity, a new meaningful world and a new norm coming out of the constitution of an autonomous system and its material constitution, is both highly abstract and very uncommon, if not impossible to see in real cognitive and living phenomena. For this reason, I will argue that conceiving sense-making as a process of norm development is a more accurate description of how sense-making processes occur in more concrete situations.

5.2. Sense-making as a Process of Norm Development

Living beings are born due to processes of reproduction that involve not only the inheritance of material constraints from parental organisms to newborn organisms (e.g., genomic structures), but also the processes of interaction between parents and newborns (Oyama, 2000). Parental organisms often provide an initial developmental niche that allows the ontogenesis of new organisms. This ontogenesis occurs thanks to the dynamical constraints that the very processes of development cause (Dupré, 2012). Hence, when the new organism becomes autonomous and independent of the parental organism, it has already developed a particular way to make sense of the world that is not independent of its ontogenesis (Corris, 2022; Raimondi, 2021). The developmental pathway of an A-E is shaped by its materiality and dynamical constraints, resulting from its interactions with other agents and its developmental niche (Griffiths & Stotz, 2018).

At the sensorimotor level, the presence of pre-given dynamical forces that shape the developmental pathway of an agent-environment system is even more evident. The development of sensorimotor habits always depends on the pre-existence of biological constraints and on the constraints other previous habits constitute (Thelen & Smith, 1994).

Our sociocultural practices are also dependent on multiple layers of dynamical constraints that emerge in coordination among two or more agents. I have already pointed to the significance that the interactions between parental and newborn organisms have for the ontogenesis of organisms. All living organisms continuously interact with other agents of the same or different species to sustain their biological functions and autonomy (Dupré & O’Malley, 2009). Feeding from, living inside of, collaborating and competing with other organisms are part of the interactions that shape the behaviour of an organism and the way these organisms make sense of their surroundings (Cummins & De Jesus, 2016). In the case of humans, we inherit from our immediate ancestors many social norms that shape how we develop our bodies, our sensorimotor habits and our interaction with others (Rietveld, 2008).

Given all the richness of pre-given dynamical constraints that shape the origin and development of sense-making processes, we must stop describing sense-making as The surplus does. We instead need to describe it as a developmental process. A process where a previously given A-E configuration and its norms of behaviour enable and limit the possibilities for enacting new identities, meanings and norms. That makes sense-making a process of norm development.

Norm development names the transformation and reconfiguration of a pre-given normative domain that formerly constrained the interactions of an A-E (Sepúlveda-Pedro, 2020; 2023). Such a description of sense-making acknowledges that an agent and its environment are always linked by a historical past that is sedimented in the present constraints of the system. On the agent’s side, these constraints are embodied in its skills. On the side of the environment, they are sedimented in possibilities for action for the agent’s body. Altogether, material and dynamical constraints enable and limit the A-E behaviours in the present, as well as for the emergence of new sense-making norms in the future. Therefore, there is one more invariant constitutive aspect of the agent-environment system: the layer of dynamical constraints that were previously enacted as norms of interaction in the historical past of the system and that shape the becoming of its developmental pathway.

We must notice that norm development does not only look at the past to track the relevant dynamical constraints that enabled the current behaviour of an A-E system, but it also looks at the present to look for those relevant constraints that could shape the development of the system in the future. Moreover, norm development aims to understand the process of self-transformation of the A-E system given all the relevant constraints that lead the system to a particular change of its dynamical configuration. For this reason, I will argue later, in Section 7, that it is also important to understand norm development, from a dynamical point of view, as a process of transverse emergence.

However, to understand sense-making as norm development more clearly, we must address carefully the sort of norms that sense-making processes develop. Enactive norms are not necessarily mere agents’ self-maintenance norms. While the concept of norm development pointed to widening the temporal and historical depth of sense-making, enactive-situated normativity will do the same for its ecological dimension.

6. Enactive-situated Normativity

Enactive normativity is one fundamental aspect of The Standard Description. Defining enactive normativity is not unproblematic, though. It can be controversial if the phenomenon described by this term is indeed normative (Heras-Escribano et al., 2015). Here, I will not address all the problems and controversies around this subject, which would require a whole work on its own. To build a well-founded description of sense-making in the wild, I am only interested in understanding with enough clarity the phenomenon of enactive normativity as it is implicit in The Standard Description and showing how it fails to recognize many ecological aspects that are nonetheless relevant for many sense-making processes. I will then follow Mojica’s (2021) widened description of enactive normativity that is ecologically situated. This enactive-situated normativity, I will argue, brings forth the ecological depth needed to build the broader definition of sense-making in the wild.

6.1. Enactive Normativity

I refer above to enactive normativity as the establishment of positive and negative values the A-E interactions acquires, considering the intrinsic purposiveness of the agent, which is its self-preservation (section 2.1). Enactive norms are thus essentially based on self-maintenance purposes (Mojica, 2021). Enactive normativity is founded on the biological nature of agents. As part of the continuity of life and mind, the same normativity is at work at the sensorimotor and intercorporeal levels of autonomy (section 2.2).

To better understand enactive normativity, I propose to define the main features of enactive norms, recognize the foundations of the values these norms establish, and identify who acts and evaluates according to these values.

Let’s begin with five relevant characteristics of enactive norms: individuality (1), viability (2), flexibility and open-endedness (3), gradualness (4) and contingency or context-dependency (5).

Individuality (1) refers to how the assignment of a normative value depends on one single individual (the agent) and its intrinsic teleology (i.e., the self-maintenance of its autonomy). As each A-E has a concrete history of development and ecological situatedness, the value of its norms of interactions depends on this concreteness (Barandiaran & Moreno, 2006). For instance, the ontogenesis of E coli bacteria can express different genes for metabolizing sucrose or lactose depending on the availability of these components in the niches they live in (Barandiaran & Moreno, 2008). Different situatedness and development establish different norm values.

Individuality is a controversial characteristic of enactive norms since some authors think that norms cannot be based on an individual’s criteria, rather than on the conventions of a sociocultural community (Heras-Escribano et al., 2015). Sociocultural norms, however, entail standards that work as optimal scenarios of how things ought to be (Wright, 1963). Doing something as it ought to be fulfils a criteria of satisfaction. From this standpoint, the community evaluates individuals’ actions and determines whether they meet them. Social standards also provide correction criteria or directions for agents about how to become closer to fulfilling the norm (Wittgenstein, 2007). I will call this description of normativity based on social norms the narrow conception of normativity.

The enactive conception of normativity is broader and looser since enactive norms are not prescriptive but proscriptive (Barrett, 2017). ⁶ The purpose of a living agent, for instance, is not to look for an optimal state of organizational equilibrium but to stay away from dynamical conditions that would imply its unavoidable decay (Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014). Enactivists constantly emphasize that the aim of life implies negativity, since living beings essentially negate their intrinsic negativity (i.e., their precariousness). Although, logically, the double negativity of life is equal to the positive aim of sustaining the viability (self-maintenance) of agents (Weber & Varela, 2002), it denotes that enactive norms are not norms of optimality but norms of viability (Thompson, 2007).

Norms of viability (2), in contrast to norms of optimality, entail many possibilities to satisfy the intrinsic purpose of norms. An organism can adapt its metabolic requirements by increasing the amount of its feeding, or by decreasing its physical activity. People can sustain the balance of their bodies while walking on slippery ice (a sensorimotor habit) either by slowing and modulating the movements of their legs, or by wearing shoes with ice cleats. Hence, while norms of optimality are more specific in their conditions of satisfaction, norms of viability are more flexible and open-ended (3).

Enactive norms are gradual (4) or not based on all-or-nothing values. Di Paolo (2005) argued that in the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980), which precedes the enactive theory of biological autonomy, it was not clear that living organisms are adaptive systems. Without adaptivity, an environmental feature can sustain the self-production and self-maintenance of the living system or cause its death. Still, there are no degrees in the value of the environmental elements and the A-E interactions. They are only good or bad. Adaptivity however implies a gradual assignation of values for these features and interactions.

For Di Paolo (2005), an adaptive system has three main characteristics: robustness, self-monitoring and self-modulation. Robustness means that a system can preserve its organization if it does not pass a threshold of decay that leads the system to its unavoidable collapse. Self-monitoring entails the capacity of living systems to be sensitive to their dynamical states' tendencies and what affects these tendencies. Given these two features, organisms can develop abilities to modulate their behaviour and change their tendencies of viability or decay. Therefore, the value of both an interaction and an environmental element has a degree of positivity or negativity, according to the system’s tendencies. The values of an interaction can even become the opposite under certain contextual conditions. For example, the positive value of water for a human depends on her hydration levels. At some point, water might be harmful when overhydration occurs, and water thus acquires a negative value. Therefore, the gradual values of enactive norms are contingent or context-dependent (5).

Concerning the foundations of enactive norms, we need to consider two different types of components of norms in general: the constitutive aspects of norms and their content (Rietveld, 2008). The constitutive aspects of a norm are the invariant elements defining what is relevant for any norm of the same type. The content of the norms, by contrast, concerns their specific values.

The agent’s self-maintenance purpose is an invariant element across any enactive norm (Mojica, 2021). The behaviour of the living agent is guided by the aim of preserving its autonomy and identity, and any possible evaluation of its behaviour is related to this goal. The interaction is positive if it contributes to the agents’ self-maintenance and negative if it contributes to its decay. The A-E’s material composition determines the enactive norm’s specific content. Breathing in the atmosphere of Earth is positive for animals with lungs, but it is harmful for animals with gills.

Self-maintenance is also an invariant in sensorimotor and intercorporeal enactive norms. In sensorimotor norms, the purpose is to sustain a habit’s emergent autonomous network (such as bodily coordination and material conditions) (Di Paolo et al., 2017). In intercorporeal norms, the purposefulness is preserving the coordination with other agents to sustain a common (cooperative or competitive) task. Other levels of social enactive normativity emerge from intercorporeality, like when agents use social interactions to co-regulate other social interactions (Di Paolo et al., 2018). These emergent levels of social enactive normativity still aim to sustain the autonomy of social coordinations.

We must notice at this point that there is always a double purposefulness of self-maintenance for intercorporeal enactive norms. The agent aims to preserve the viability of the social coordination and its own social identity. The agent’s sensorimotor identity is indeed constituted and shaped by its aim to maintain the viability of the social system. Although unclear, the same duality is already at work in sensorimotor habits. The agent maintains a sensorimotor identity that coordinates the actions of its own body and preserves the autonomy of the habit, which entails the incorporation of changing environmental conditions (Di Paolo et al., 2017).

The dual nature of intercorporeal and sensorimotor norms should bring to our attention that something more is necessary, besides the agent’s self-maintenance and the material conditions of the A-E, in order to reach a more adequate account of enactive normativity. I will address this issue in the following subsection. For now, we will address the problem that sensorimotor and intercorporeal dual normativity brings forth: determining who responds to norms and who does the evaluation according to these norms.

A habit or a social group may form an autonomous system, but they are not systems sensitive to norms. Coordinating an agent’s body with the environment and many agents among themselves implies autonomy, but not adaptivity. ⁷ Living agents modulate their behaviour to preserve habits and social coordinations because they are inherently sensitive beings (Di Paolo et al., 2018). Without this sensitivity, the emergence of habits and social coordinations will follow blind processes of self-organization, like tornados and whirlpools do. However, habits and coordinations are preserved because agents monitor and modulate their behaviour in response to their double normativity (individual and sensorimotor, or collective). As I said above (section 2.2), sensitivity seems to be grounded in the structures of life, as no other autonomous or self-organizing system in nature seems to have it.

As sensitive beings, some living organisms can respond to norms that are not directly related to their biological self-maintenance. Living agents are not overdetermined by their biology because they act to satisfy their viability, not their optimality. If their actions do not contradict their biological self-maintenance, the agents’ actions can also respond to other ends. The most basic sensorimotor and intercorporeal norms are indeed related to the biological needs of agents. For example, a newborn baby sucking her mother’s breast is guided by interrelated biological, sensorimotor and intercorporeal norms. The baby can later use her norm of sucking to relate herself to other objects – for example,, a plastic nipple – and become independent of the biological aim, like when children keep sucking their thumbs for years. As adults, we can use the sucking movements of our mouths to smoke. Smoking is a habit that can threaten our self-maintenance, which shows the independence of habits from biological functions. However, sustaining the habit is still supported by our own sensitivity as living beings (Ramírez-Vizcaya & Froese, 2019). It is our own body that feels the need for a cigarette. Any habit is thus founded on the sensitivity of agents.

Likewise, a flock of birds requires the self-maintenance of sensorimotor coordination among multiple agents (Stapleton & Froese, 2015). The self-maintenance of the flock is achieved thanks to the active participation of agents that modulate their behaviour to maintain the organization of the flock. The flock itself is not a sentient being, and it does not regulate its behaviour, birds do. The answer to who is sensitive to norms and who does the evaluation according to norms should be living agents. Living agents are beings sensitive to norms.

This description of living agents is controversial for two reasons. On the one hand, there is a problem that the narrow conception of normativity brings up: can an individual establish by itself normative values and evaluate its own behaviour according to them? On the other hand, there is the problem of biopsychism: are all living organisms truly sensitive beings?

Concerning the first problem, Barandiaran and Egbert (2014) have already shown how living agents can establish and follow biological norms. Establishing norms does not depend on the subjective feelings of organisms. It happens as a result of interactions between their organizational constitution and the conditions of the environment. The following occurs thanks to the adaptive capacities of organisms (including their robustness, self-monitoring and behavioural self-modulation). We can assert that each living agent is an evaluator of its own norm because it is the one who directly feels the impact (in its body) of doing things correctly or incorrectly. Living agents are therefore sensitive to the conditions of satisfaction of the norm. The ability of agents to modulate their interactions implies that they are also sensitive to conditions of correction. Agents know how to modulate their behaviour to fulfil the conditions of satisfaction (Rolla & Huffermann, 2021).

The remaining problem with the narrow conception of normativity is that it seems that the norm and its value might be accessible only from the agent’s point of view (i.e., from its bodily sensitivity). The Wittgensteinian vein of this narrow conception demands public criteria to determine, from the outsider’s perspective, whether a norm has been satisfied.

Mojica (2020) argues this is not a real problem. From an external point of view, we can evaluate if the agent is doing things right or wrong, since the positive or negative results of the A-E interactions are often observable. Nevertheless, we must accept that it is not always easy to recognize the positive or negative value of enactive norms. From their point of view, agents can also fail to recognize the requirements of a norm and fulfil them. However, the possibility of error is essential to any kind of norm (Heras-Escribano, 2019).

The second problem is more challenging to address. We have evidence of neural processes that monitor and regulate our bodies’ general dynamical states and are associated with affective states that we can tacitly or explicitly experience (Fuchs, 2012). We do not have the same evidence on organisms with no central nervous systems, like bacteria. As I mentioned before (section 2.2), we can observe responsiveness in basic organisms that fits well with the description of self-monitoring and self-modulation of agents that respond to norms of self-maintenance (Egbert & Barandiaran, 2014). We still lack evidence about this phenomenal side of responsiveness (Thompson, 2022). Even for phenomenology, the experiential side of the thesis of life and mind continuity is problematic (Kee, 2020). Therefore, we are forced to merely assume that basic organisms have a bodily sensitivity that in some way resembles our own sensitivities.

As mentioned before, enactive concepts aim to provide tools for improving our scientific practices. From this perspective, enactive normativity is a helpful conceptual tool for enactive cognitive scientists and biologists. Enactive normativity aids us in acknowledging the open-endedness, flexibility and context-relative behaviour of agents (Reber, 2019). This view contrasts with the adaptationist view that conceives organisms as ruled by blind laws of nature (Dawkins, 2006).

Despite the many benefits of holding adaptationism as a theory of biological evolution in the past, it has been largely demonstrated how this view is highly problematic (Gould & Lewontin, 1979; Jablonka & Lamb, 2014; Laland et al., 2000; Oyama, 2000). Contemporary theories of development and evolution emphasize that many developmental and ecological aspects are central to explaining the process of life (Dupré, 2012). The concept of normativity, at the level of life, encompasses this view in contemporary biology and is gaining terrain in the field (Moss & Nicholson, 2012).

Enactive biological normativity is therefore a subject open to debate and still needs stronger arguments and support from biological and phenomenological research. Still, in my view, this does not entail significant problem for the enactive approach. Even in the worst scenario, if we are forced to drop the assumption of biopsychism (the intrinsic sentience of all living beings), affectivity and enactive normativity are still helpful to describe biological, sensorimotor and intercorporeal interactions of many A-Es.

The real problem of enactive normativity is that enactive norms based on the self-maintenance of agents do not fully account for the situatedness of agents. The development of living agents is determined by many dynamical constraints that shape the body and behaviour of agents over and above their self-maintenance. The classical definition of enactive normativity does not include these constraints. Consequently, a description of an enactive-situated normativity is necessary.

6.2. Enactive-situated Normativity

In sensorimotor interactions and intercorporeal coordinations, enactive normativity is dual since the agent responds to the self-maintenance of its own identity and contributes to the self-maintenance of habits and social coordination. It means that if we are looking for an explanation of an A-E behaviour at these levels of interaction, we need to look, at least, at two different normative layers.

Mojica (2021) acknowledges that many dynamical constraints beyond the agent’s self-maintenance and the material constraints of the A-E need to be accounted for by an enactive theory of normativity. She proposes a helpful solution for this issue: In addition to the agent’s self-maintenance processes for the constitution of an enactive norm, we always need to consider the interdependence of the action and functions of agents with other dynamical processes that are part of other self-organizing systems. These systems can be a part of the agent’s body or the environment. A lung, for instance, is an organ that self-sustains its biological functions, vital for the self-maintenance of a mammal’s body. Nonetheless, the activity of the mammal is equally necessary for the self-maintenance processes of the lung. The mammal and the lung are interdependent systems, as their self-maintenance processes are interrelated. This sort of normative interdependence is what we see in sensorimotor habits and social coordinations.

The coordination of a bird’s flock is interdependent with the sensorimotor activity of every flock member. A bird’s sensorimotor activity is also interdependent with its biological functions, making the whole bird-flock-environment system normatively interdependent. Furthermore, this concatenation of normativities is also interconnected to the dynamical conditions of the environment: atmospheric pressure, wind speed, etc. Here, the agent’s action is situated in an ecological field.

I will call Mojica’s description of normativity enactive-situated normativity. ⁸ This normativity acknowledges the ecological depth of sense-making processes and enables a better understanding of norm development.

Defining enactive-situated normativity concerns the content and constituent aspects of enactive norms. At all levels of interactions enactive norms involve more than the self-maintenance of agents. Enactive norms are interdependent with other dynamical processes that could be part of the same agent, the autonomy of other agents, the autonomy of systems without adaptivity (like habits and coordinations), or of a simple self-organizing system without operational closure (like the material but also dynamical conditions of the environment).

Enactive-situated normativity does not necessarily reject the classical version of enactive normativity. Rather, it specifies further the many dynamical aspects involved in the self-maintenance and development of living agents and their environments at a more refined description levels. At some level of description, enactive normativity is enough to explain cognitive and living phenomena. At more detailed levels of description, we need the enactive-situated normativity account.

Cultural anthropology, for instance, needs to understand the hunter–prey relation in a complex normative context where many different levels of normativity enable and limit humans’ sense-making of animals. Likewise, psychiatry needs to understand the emergence of abnormal forms of sense-making in the intersection of multiple normativities that sustain this abnormal sense-making.

Once we have looked at sense-making as a process encompassing many dynamical constraints beyond the agent’s self-maintenance, we can also improve our understanding of sense-making as a process of norm development.

Since agents are always nested in dynamical ecological fields, these fields can explain the origin of the concrete content of sense-making norms in the past, the causes of their stability in the present time and their possible development in the future. The environment, as a dynamic field, co-evolves with agents (Di Paolo, 2018). Together, they continue to develop as new variables continue to appear, either on the side of the agent, or on the side of the environment. That is, enactive-situated normativity not only exposes the ecological depth of sense-making but also opens the door to a clear view of its historical depth (Mojica, 2021).

Norm development and enactive-situated normativity have now shown sense-making’s historical and ecological depth. The only description missing of sense-making in the wild is the movement itself that either sustains the existent forms of sense-making or develops the agent-environment system into new forms. That is what a broader understanding of sense-making as an emergent process will show.

7. From Synchronic to Transverse Emergence

The subject of emergence is deep and complex in the sciences of the mind and the sciences of life (see, e.g., Kim, 2006; Wimsatt, 1994). Here, there is no need to get into deep discussions about this concept, since the enactive approach uses it pragmatically and tries to avoid the endless metaphysical discussions that defend or reject reductionism in science (Dupré, 2012).

To build the description of sense-making in the wild, we need to clarify the notion of enactive emergence that is at work in The Standard Description. Then, I will show that the most explicit form of enactive emergence, described by Protevi (2009) as synchronic emergence, helps understand the constitution and dynamical stability of an A-E. Still, it cannot explain the developmental process that implies sense-making once it is situated in the historical and ecological depth of the A-E. Later, I follow Protevi’s description of two additional forms of emergence, namely diachronic and transverse emergence. These are necessary to understand sense-making in the wild.

7.1. Enactive Emergence as (Flat) Synchronic Emergence

The enactive view of emergence is not directly concerned with discussions of the impossibility of reducing explanations of consciousness to the physicochemical activity of the brain (e.g., Chalmers, 1995). People supporting the idea that consciousness emerges from brain activity and that some of its features (e.g., qualia) are ontologically irreducible to this activity also defend what Chalmers (2006) calls strong emergence. By contrast, Chalmers names weak emergence as the view that we cannot fully explain and predict certain phenomena because we do not know – and may be cannot ever know – all the variables and causes that would thoroughly explain their occurrence. This weak emergence is the typical emergence referred to in works of dynamical systems theory and complex systems. The term emergence in this weak sense has a very practical purpose and does not pretend to hold any strong ontological or epistemological commitment. ⁹

Dynamical systems theory aims to understand and predict the behaviour of systems that change in time due to fluctuations in the variables that affect them (van Gelder & Port, 1995). The behaviour of some dynamical systems is not linear because they show non-steady fluctuations even when the change in the value of their variables remains constant. This happens because dynamical systems generate an internal set of constraints that affects the system’s behaviour (Thelen, 1995).

A landscape of attractors configures a dynamical system’s stable set of constraints. Attractors can be roughly understood as tendencies of the system to stabilize its behaviour, even if variables affecting the system fluctuate in their values (Kelso, 1995). The system’s attractors compensate for fluctuations of its variables. However, if the value of the variables that affect the system changes dramatically, the system could start falling into states of metastability, which means that the regular order of the system begins to exhibit moments of disorder (Bruineberg et al., 2021). Metastability can lead the system to re-adapt its dynamic behaviour and eventually reshape the landscape of attractors, producing a change in the system’s behaviour patterns.

We must acknowledge that the system’s attractors are not pre-given. Instead, they ‘emerge’ because of processes of self-organization. They are not fixed either, as they can change and evolve in time. Hence, attractors result from the system’s interactions with the multiple variables that affect and constitute it.

In this context, Protevi (2006, 2009) has distinguished three types of emergence in dynamical systems that have been relevant for developing the enactive approach: synchronic, diachronic and transverse emergence.

Synchronic emergence is focused on describing the relation between the global-to-local and local-to-global constraints of the system, without considering its temporal development. ¹⁰ The local parts of the system constitute and sustain the systemic global organization, while the global organization creates a set of constraints that partially determine the activity of the local parts of the system. Therefore, a reciprocal constraining of parts and whole sustains the stable structure we observe in a dynamical autonomous system.

Synchronic emergence fits well with Thompson’s definition of emergence as the co-emergence of self and world. Thompson defines emergence as the mutual co-determination or co-specification of the parts and whole of a system. An autonomous living system shows a mutual co-determination of its parts and whole. However, the co-emergence of the agent-environment system fits with the same description of mutual co-determination. The constitution of the autonomous system determines what is meaningful in its surroundings, but the characteristics of these significant emergent aspects of the world also determine the identity of the autonomous system.

Regarding the emergence of the normative domain of interactions of an agent-environment system, we can also think of it as part of the synchronic emergence of the agent-environment system. In the terminology of dynamical systems theory, the mutual co-determination of the agent and the environment entails the establishment of a landscape of attractors that stabilize their patterns of interaction. These stabilized patterns of interaction reveal the presence of an enactive norm for the system’s behaviour.

The regular tendency of a dynamical system to respond to a specific input can represent an enactive norm. The attractors' landscape illustrates the regular tendencies of the behaviour of a dynamical system. However, for an A-E, the constitution of the landscape of attractors crucially depends on the constraints that constitute the dynamical organization of the autonomous system. That makes it possible to interpret the constitution of the attractors of the A-E as enactive norms. In contrast, the attractors of other dynamical systems that are not autonomous (e.g., a whirlpool) would not be necessarily normative, at least not in the sense that the enactive approach conceives normativity (i.e., as self-maintenance).

We must notice that we can include the ecological depth of sense-making into the synchronic emergence picture. We can add additional dynamical constraints of other autonomous and self-organizing systems, located on the side of the environment, to the variables that constitute the landscape of attractors of an A-E, and further explain the stability of the system. It is the diachronic process of transformation of the system what we still miss in synchronic emergence.

7.2. Diachronic Emergence

If we look at the historical depth of sense-making processes, diachronic emergence is also involved in the emergence of a self, a world and an enactive norm. This type of emergence refers to the constitution and transformation of dynamical system attractors (Protevi, 2006). ¹¹ The diachronic emergence of a new configuration of the A-E would refer to the self-organizational processes that lead the system to constitute and eventually transform the pre-given dynamical constraints of the system shown in the landscape of attractors.

The historical dimension of sense-making is already open by the very notion of adaptivity (Di Paolo, 2018). Since a living system is open to the environment and needs to adapt itself and its behaviour to the environment for accomplishing its self-preservation activities, it follows that the A-E evolves in time, preserving its autonomous organization but changing its concrete behaviour, bodily-identity and norms. Nonetheless, The Standard Description does not seem to entail the fact that every new process of emergence in sense-making is preceded by constraints at wider temporal scales.

In Varela’s (1996) work on neurophenomenology, we can see how local-to-global and global-to-local constraints determine experience in a temporal dimension as well as in the spatial one. Thompson (2007) recovers this view for an account of bodily temporal experience in human beings, but he does not seem to incorporate this diachronic dimension of emergence to The Standard Description.

It is more easier to find diachronic process of emergence in the enactive works on sensorimotor habits (Di Paolo et al., 2014; 2017). From a dynamical point of view, understanding sensorimotor interactions as processes of diachronic emergence requires showing how the current constraints of the system shape the way the system evolves in time. The sensorimotor system evolves according to the constraints produced in the past and, on the same basis, generates new constraints. The emergence of a new bodily skill or a new sensorimotor sense-making involves the reconfiguration of the landscape of attractors of the agent-environment system.

The diachronic emergence of the A-E and its enactive normativity is nonetheless compatible with The Standard Description. This is what happens in dynamical system models of sensorimotor habits that picture the constitution of bodily coordination, considering as relevant variables only the material constraints of the environment (Buhrmann et al., 2013). These accounts do not necessarily consider the previous stages of the A-E development or other dynamical constraints, which could involve the active participation of other agents.

The constitution of new attractors in a dynamical A-E makes it already possible to operationalize norm development. Nevertheless, transverse emergence is the most accurate way of picturing sense-making in the wild.

7.3. Transverse Emergence

Protevi (2006, 2009) refers to processes of transverse emergence as the emergence of a new organizational whole that involves the readjustment of the forces that constrain the interactive elements of the whole A-E. Protevi (2009) finds that transverse emergence occurs particularly in the sociocultural domain of human beings. Human life involves changes in technological environments that transform the life of social groups and even the biological physiology of individuals. The changes caused in the environment by human activity restructure the interactions of the A-E and cause the human body to reshape itself (see also Malafouris & Renfrew, 2013). In this manner, transverse emergence points to the reconfiguration of the whole A-E by recognizing the pre-existence of a set of forces already at play in the system (i.e., the current attractors). ¹²

Transverse emergence does not reject or contradict the synchronic emergence of parts and wholes of the living agent or the stable dynamics of an agent-environment system. In fact, it entails this type of emergence. Likewise, transverse emergence comprises the diachronic transformation process of a dynamical system’s attractors, allowing us to see the historical development of the whole A-E. Transversality highlights the co-dependence of the agent and the environment in the transformational process and in the inner dialectics that motivate the changes of the entire agent-environment system.

Protevi (2009) compares transverse emergence to the claims of the extended mind hypothesis, where technological artefacts can shape the development of our cognition (Clark, 2008). However, as Hutto and Myin (2013) claim, enactive cognition is not extended but extensive, since it always involves the entanglement of the agent and the environment.

Following the account of an enactive-situated normativity, we can infer that the same sort of dynamics present in sociocultural environments is also at play in the interactions of an A-E, in all its different levels of interactions. This is because the norms of sense-making sediment the environment and make it a field of forces that constrain the behaviour of the system and its possibilities for a new change (i.e., its possibilities for establishing new forms of sense-making). Of course, human sociocultural environments are often more dynamic and richer in possibilities regarding the self-transformation of A-E than those of pertaining to animals' milieu. Still, the transversality of the system’s transformation is essentially the same.

I will now summarize the claim that transverse emergence is the best approach for operationalizing sense-making in the wild. Synchronic emergence describes the constituted attractors' landscape of the dynamical agent-environment system, which entails the stability of an A-E configuration and its norms of behaviour. Diachronic emergence describes this landscape’s constitutional and transformational processes, which entail establishing and developing a new norm. Transverse emergence, like diachronic emergence, describes the transformation of the A-E configuration and its norms of behaviour. However, transverse emergence in contrast to bare diachronic emergence explicitly acknowledges the deep ecological dimension of the A-E because it comprises the reconfiguration of the system within the multiple ecological and temporal constraints that constitute the system. As such, it also entails the possibility of understanding the self-transformation of the A-E caused by other dynamical and ecological motivations that are not intrinsic to the agent’s identities self-maintenance.

8. Situating Sense-making

After reviewing the concepts of norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence, we can now specify the description of sense-making in the wild by reshaping the three main aspects of The Standard Description. Following this, I will argue that adopting sense-making in the wild does not entail the rejection of The Standard Description. It only offers a more proper conceptual tool for enactive studies of life and cognition that need to consider the situatedness of agents in their real fields of action.

In Section 2.1, I described three key aspects of The Standard Description that we can now reshape, considering the incorporation of the concepts of norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence:

(SW1) Sense-making involves the process of transformation of a pre-given configuration of the A-E. This transformational process consists of developing previously given norms into new ones.

(SW2) Sense-making describes the transversal co-emergence of a self and a meaningful world. The pre-given identities of the self and the world suffer a reconfiguration of the synchronic structure that mutually co-determines new identities, thanks to diachronic processes of transformation that cut across the whole A-E.

(SW3) Sense-making entails the development of the enactive-situated normativity, which includes the agent’s self-maintenance and other interdependent normativities that shape the ecological fields where agents' actions occur.

Sense-making in the wild is therefore the development of the previous configuration of the A-E and its normativity, which involves many dynamical constraints beyond the agent’s self-maintenance purposefulness. Sense-making as norm development can be understood dynamically as a process of transverse emergence whereby the landscape of attractors that exhibit the current normativity of the A-E is reconfigured, changing not only the system’s behaviour, but also constraining the possible developmental pathways to follow.

This broader definition of sense-making does not aim to reject or replace The Standard Description. Instead, it looks for the expansion of our conception of sense-making, recognizing the ecological and historical depth of life and cognition, when the study of these phenomena requires us to acknowledge this depth.

The Standard Description suited an account of how meaning and normativity arise in nature. It is not wrong, but it is highly abstract and insufficient when furthering certain studies of life and cognition, such as those of cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Sense-making in the wild is a less abstract view that can help us appropriately identify agents’ situatedness in their real fields of action.

In his book, Cognition in the Wild (1995), Erwin Hutchins criticized cognitivist research programs not just because they falsely localized all the relevant causes of cognition in the human brain, but also because their study methods usually isolated cognition in the controlled environments of the neuroscientific laboratories. Cognition in the lab impeded cognitive scientists from observing how an individual’s cognition is often – if not always – distributed in complex sociomaterial networks. In the same spirit, I encourage enactivists to adopt the description of sense-making in the wild when the study of a process of life and cognition requires it.

Sense-making in the wild entails its own weaknesses. We must be aware of the limits of our philosophical and scientific resources and learn that we cannot always ascertain all the relevant contingencies that foster the occurrence of a phenomenon. Ideally, enactive cognition must strike a balance when studying and explaining life and cognition. There are no general recipes to follow, and it is more likely that experts in their field will find the proper solutions for their problems and use only the most helpful concepts for their practical purposes. In this regard, sense-making in the wild aims to be a new and supportive resource for scientists and philosophers committed to the enactive and ecological views of cognitive science.

9. Conclusions

I criticized the traditional conception of sense-making because it neglects the depth of the ecological and historical dimensions of life and cognition. Accounting for this depth is sometimes relevant to our scientific studies. As a solution, I propose describing sense-making in the wild, based on three fundamental concepts: norm development, enactive-situated normativity and transverse emergence. Norm development widens the historical dimension of sense-making, acknowledging that sense-making involves either a process of reconfiguration of a previously given dynamical configuration of the A-E, or at least the emergence of a new configuration from a previously given set of dynamical constraints that enable and limit the emergence of the A-E in the first place. Enactive-situated normativity widens the ecological dimension of sense-making by recognizing that, in addition to the agent’s self-maintenance and the material constraints of the A-E, many dynamical constraints are ecologically situated and shape the origin, maintenance and development of the A-E and its normativity. Finally, transverse emergence describes, from a dynamical point of view, the process of norm development, which happens amid the historical and ecological dimensions of life and cognition. Hopefully, sense-making in the wild will facilitate new possibilities to study enactive cognition more adequately, as it happens in the fields of action of all living beings.