Hello,Worlds: A Ludic Theory of Cognition

Abstract

This article lays the foundation for a ludic theory of cognition. At the core of this approach are two theories of mind and world brought into dialogue with one another: enactive cognition and ludic sociology. Combining these two approaches results in a theory of cognition in which social agents and game players alike rely on cognitive play to enact and inhabit worlds of meaning and significance. In the first section of the article, I draw out the relationship between enactive cognition and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu's ludic sociology, consolidating them into a ludic theory of cognition. In the second section, I examine how the ludic nature of cognition facilitates and inhibits understanding between agents and players, such that cognitive play itself is seen as the means by which we understand ourselves, each other, and the worlds around us.

Introduction

This article puts forward a ludic theory of cognition by integrating the enactive theory of cognition with a ludic approach to sociology. Enactive cognition argues that the world is not an already meaningful, external domain merely awaiting our perception of it; nor is it a subjective, internal representation of an objective, and external environment. Rather, each of us learns to enact or bring forth the world based on how we interpret or make sense of it. Ludic sociology argues that social agents make sense of and understand the social world just as players interpret and understand the world of a game. Drawing on these two theories, ludic cognition offers an account of both game and world in which social agents and game players alike rely on cognitive play ¹ to enact and inhabit domains of meaning and significance.

The notion that the game/world ² is not merely perceived or processed but enacted and inhabited runs counter to our everyday experience. Whether it's the playspace of a familiar game or the surroundings of a familiar space, the game/world appears to us as though it exists independently of us, its meaning and significance already “out there” awaiting our perception. However, this phenomenon is, in fact, a cognitive bias known as naive realism (Ward & Ross, 1996). Naive realism describes our tendency to believe that we perceive the game/world directly, as though our experience is not mediated by our bodies and senses. This bias in our cognition leads us to assume that how the game/world appears to us is how it actually exists and thus how it must appear to other players and agents as well. As we will see, this sense of immediacy we experience regarding the game/world and what it means is a kind of illusion—from the Latin lūdere, meaning “to play”—one that we embody and iteratively develop through play, that is, through interacting with and making sense of the game/world. The result of such sense-making is an embodied sense or feeling—what's called practical sense (Bourdieu, 1990a), our “feel for the game” (Bourdieu, 1990a).

Play is approached here as a process of practical sense-making and thus the means by which we come to enact and inhabit the game/world. Within the enactive theory of cognition, sensemaking is a rudimentary form or basic function of cognition. As enactivist scholar Thompson puts it, “Living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth … significance and valence [which] do not preexist “out there,” but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction” (Thompson, p. 158). To describe thi,s as a form of play is to recognize the ludic nature of the relationship between mind, body, and game/world. If cognition itself involves practical sense-making and if practical sense provides us with an embodied “feel for the game,” then the “illusion of immediate understanding” (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 20) we experience toward the game/world (naive realism) is a product of agents and players enacting and inhabiting the game/world through play (practical sensemaking).

In the first section of this article, I establish the principles of ludic cognition, drawing out the relationship between enactive cognition and ludic sociology, and consolidating them into a ludic theory of cognition. Here, interpretation or sensemaking ³ is approached as a form of cognitive play; agents not only relate to the world through cognitive play, they enact it, just as the player habitually enacts a world of meaning and significance from the playspace of a familiar game. The second section examines the affordances of ludic cognition in furthering our understanding of each other. If we take seriously the implications of ludic cognition—that each of us comes to enact or bring forth a game/world of our own and that our capacity to understand the game/world as other agents do depends on our familiarity with their ways of making sense—then we are obliged to interrogate not only the recreational and social games we play, but the ways in which these games teach us to make sense of ourselves, each other, and the worlds around us. In this way, cognitive play—as that bodily and mental activity through which we develop, iterate upon, and revise our ways of making sense of the game/world—is seen to have an expansive, ethical function in our efforts to bring about more just, inclusive, and compassionate worlds.

Section I: Cognitive Play

Naive Realism

We have a tendency to believe that we experience the world directly and objectively, unmediated by our bodies, senses, and embodied ways of making sense. Psychologists Ross and Ward refer to this phenomenon as naive realism (1996), a cognitive bias they illustrate through numerous experiments, many of which involve games. In one particularly illustrative example (Newton, 1990), participants were asked to play a melody of a familiar song by tapping their fingers on a table. Prior to the exercise, those tapping were asked to estimate the accuracy of those guessing the tune, with participants anticipating a 50% rate of success. In actuality, those guessing were correct just 2.5% of the time. In the experiment, those tapping the tune reported hearing the music quite clearly in their minds and mistook the presence of the melody in their experience of the world as though it were present for all agents.

For Ross and Ward, our tendency toward naive realism leads us to make a number of assumptions, expressed in the first person: (1) I believe that my perception of the world is direct, that I see the world exactly as it exists, and that I make sense of and respond to the world in a largely dispassionate, rational, and unmediated way; (2) I believe that, generally speaking, other rational agents perceive and react to the world in the same or similar ways that I do; and (3) given that I perceive the world directly and that other rational agents perceive the world as I do, when I encounter those whose experience of the world deviates from my own, I attribute these differences to deficiency, ignorance, ideology, or bias (pp. 110–111). One of the consequences of this cognitive predisposition is that we have a tendency to more readily understand agents who have a similar way of experiencing the world and we tend to readily misunderstand those whose experience differs from our own.

Rather than approach naive realism as a defect in our cognition, I approach this phenomenon as an extension of the ludic and enactive nature of cognition. That is to say, play predisposes us to establish and maintain the illusion of a game/world we immediately understand. ⁴ This begins by recognizing that play itself is a form of “cognitive interactivity” (Tekinbaş & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 59), a kind of “interpretive participation” (2003, p. 59) that occurs between ourselves as embodied players and the rule-bound playspace of a game. Viewed in this way, “[i]nterpretation in games is the act of play” (2003, p. 374). This relationship between interpretation and play extends beyond the playspace of recreational games as agents also make practical sense of their social environments as well. Both the gameworld and the social world emerge through ludic acts of practical sensemaking, or what I refer to here as cognitive play. We experience naive realism, then, just as a player experiences a familiar game—by embodying a way of playing in the game/world, which is to say a “way of being in the world, of being occupied by the world” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 135, emphasis in original).

Cognitive Play

Cognitive play is rooted in the play that exists between the structures of our minds and the structures of the environment. These structures afford us a degree of interpretive agency over what we register about and how we choose to make sense of our environments. When our minds are unstructured by the environments in which we play—as is the case for newborns, when we experience a truly novel situation, or when we play a game for the first time—we find ourselves struggling with what features of the game/world to take note of and how to interpret them. However, by routinely registering certain features and not others, and by choosing to interpret those features in particular ways and not others, we exercise a degree of agency over how we structure our minds in response to the structures of our environments. Through this playful structuring or cognitive plays each of us comes to habitually register and interpret various features of our environments. Hence, two players can play the same game and two agents can occupy the same social environment and nevertheless feel as though they are playing different games, that they are, in fact, worlds apart.

Our interpretive agency and the cognitive play it affords us reflect that players and social agents alike do not make just any interpretations of our surroundings. Rather, when we engage in cognitive play, we find ourselves responding to the “imminent necessity” (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 61) of the game/world and the practical, situational demands made on our bodies, senses, and embodied ways of making sense. In this way, we can approach cognitive play as a form of practical sense-making. Following Bourdieu, practical sense provides recreational players and social agents alike with a “feel for the game” (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 66); it is the “practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game—a mastery acquired by the experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that, for instance, techniques of the body do)” (1990a, p. 61). The result of cognitive play (practical sensemaking) is an embodied, practical sense or feeling toward the game/world, one that “ensures the active presence of past experiences” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 54) in present perception, providing us with “the illusion of immediate understanding” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 20). “If … your mind is structured according to the structures of the world in which you play,” Bourdieu writes, “everything will seem obvious and the question of knowing if the game is ‘worth the candle’ will not even be asked” (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 76–77).

Consider the experienced chess player who, through countless matches, has made practical sense of the game and the “imminent necessity” of its gameplay. When this experienced player sits down to play a new match, what is present in their perception of the board is passively apprehended within a sense or feeling for how the game has been played in the past (practical sense), for example, how the pieces can move; the risks and rewards that accompany particular actions; offensive and defensive strategies a particular arrangement of pieces allows for; etc. Here, we can see that at least some interpretations of the playspace need not be made anew with each and every play session; rather, the player encounters the playspace as though they have already interpreted or made sense of it, creating the illusion that the meaning and significance they perceive already exists “out there.”

Following Bourdieu, this ludic phenomenon extends from recreational games to social games, which is to say “games that are forgotten qua games” (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 76–77), that is, routinized social activities. By regularly responding to the “imminent necessity” of our social situations in and through our embodied ways of making practical sense of them, we find that we no longer need to make certain interpretations of our social environments in order to perceive them as meaningful and significant. Rather, as enactivist scholar Thompson puts it, through an agent's sensemaking “what is present now is passively apprehended within a sense that has its roots in earlier experience and that has since become habitual” (Thompson, p. 32).

Through cognitive play (practical sensemaking), we progressively and iteratively develop the illusion of a game/world that we, in turn, appear to immediately understand. This is an illusion as the meaning we perceive in the present is in fact the product of having interpreted or made practical sense of the game/world in the past. This contradicts our naive understanding of the game/world as an independent and already meaningful domain, arguing instead that we are not passive recipients of an always already meaningful game/world; rather we are actively involved in its enaction.

Enactive Cognition

In The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (2016), Varela and co-authors Thompson and Rosch lay the foundation for what has become known as the enactive theory of cognition. ⁵ As Thompson establishes in the revised introduction, enactivism begins with the assertion that “human cognition is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action” (p. xviii). As noted above, enactivists place particular significance on interpretation or sensemaking, characterizing it as the means by which agents enact the world: “Living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth … significance and valence [which] do not preexist ‘out there,’ but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings” (Thompson, p. 158). In turn, our minds and bodies come to reflect the ways in which we routinely or habitually make sense of the world: “one's lived body is a developmental being thick with its own history and sedimented ways of feeling, perceiving, acting, and imagining. These sedimented patterns are not limited to the space enclosed by the body's membrane; they span and interweave the lived body and its environment, thereby forming a unitary circuit of lived-body-environment” (Thompson, p. 33). In this way, enactivism distances itself from theories of mind and world, such as cognitivism, that are predicated on creating an internal representation of the external world. As Thompson writes: “a cognitive being's world is not a pre-specified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but is rather a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being in and through its mode of coupling with the environment” (p. xxvii).

In separating world from environment, enactivists are taking inspiration from animal studies and in particular the work of von Uexküll. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (2010), Uexküll draws a distinction between the environment—meaning the physical and chemical structures that make up a space—and a world-environment (Umwelt) or world—an organism's embodied experience of an environment. This distinction helps stress that the environment itself has no determinate meaning, for example, whether a structure is large and insurmountable or small and easily overcome; whether a chemical is beneficial and attractive or harmful and repulsive; whether something is wieldy and useful or unwieldy and useless, etc., all are relative to the body, senses, and embodied ways of making sense of a given agent. In contrast, the meaning of the world-environment (Umwelt) is always determinate, bounded by an agent's body, senses, and embodied ways of making sense which determine what agents register about and how they can interpret their surroundings (interpretive agency). Thus, while a person, a dog, and a house fly may all occupy the same room, they are at one and the same time worlds (Umwelten) apart from one another (von Uexküll, p. 96).

Enactivism builds on this distinction by noting that the world-environment (Umwelt) is not a pregiven domain but is iteratively and progressively enacted or brought forth through embodied action. This thesis was first developed by biologists Maturana and Varela who built on von Uexküll's distinction between environment and world in works such as Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980) and The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (1987). For Maturana and Varela, the relationship between embodied action and experience constitutes a kind of enactive circuit by which all cognitive organisms come to realize the world around them: “This circularity, this chain of action and experience, this inseparability from a certain way to be and the distinct way the world appears to us, tells us that every act of realisation creates a world” (Maturana and Varela, 1987, p. 26). ⁶ Varela would go on to develop this notion of an enactive circuit throughout the remainder of his career, including with coauthors Thompson and Rosch in the aforementioned The Embodied Mind (2016).

Ludic cognition, drawing on these observations, argues that the plurality of worlds (Umwelten) originates in the various kinds and degrees of play that exist between the cognitive structures of embodied agents and the physical, chemical, and social structures of their environments. As our bodies, senses, and environments vary, so too does the play between mental and environmental structures, and thus how we come to enact and inhabit the illusion of a game/world we immediately understand. That is to say, by engaging in cognitive play, agents assert a way of being in the game/world rooted in how they play and routinely make practical sense of various playspaces or environments. Here, we can recognize, as enactivists do, that cognitive play (practical sensemaking) is both an active and a passive process of meaning-making (Thompson, 2010, p. 29). Like the player's journey from initiate to expert, enaction begins by actively interpreting our environments, exercising our interpretive agency over what features of the environment we register and how we interpret them. As we continue to play the game, we come to passively or habitually register particular features and make particular interpretations—that is, we develop a “feel for the game” and what it means—such that without conscious effort or direction, we come to bring forth from any environment a world (Umwelt) of meaning and significance.

This can be illustrated in a variety of ways but is perhaps most apparent during childhood cognitive development. For instance, at the outset of the sensorimotor stage (Piaget, 1952) ⁷ infants have yet to develop the “sedimented ways of feeling, perceiving, acting, and imagining” (Thompson, p. 33) needed to coordinate their bodies and senses with their physical environments. That is to say, the child does not yet passively register and interpret those features of their surroundings that are relevant to their bodies, senses, and how they move, and as such they find themselves continuously and actively involved in making sense of their environments. However, as the child engages in sensorimotor play (Piaget, 1951) ⁸ and routinely makes practical sense of the world they form mental “schemes of habit” (Piaget, 1977), what I refer to here as cognitive habits. Our cognitive habits are embodied “schemes of perception, thought, and action” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 14) acquired through cognitive play (practical sensemaking); we rely on our cognitive habits to routinely enact or bring forth meaning and significance from our surroundings in accordance with our interpretive agency. For instance, at the conclusion of the sensorimotor stage of development children typically embody the cognitive schemes or habits needed to coordinate how their bodies move with how they perceive physical space. At this point, the child no longer needs to interpret the physical environment, rather they possess a practical sense or feeling for distance in relation to motility, creating an “illusion of immediate understanding” toward the physical world (e.g., of what is near or far).

Cognitive Habits

A player or agent's practical sense—their “feel for the game”—is comprised of the cognitive habits they have iteratively developed and acquired during cognitive play. Thus, our cognitive habits reflect the passive and habitual ways in which we have made practical sense of the game/world in the past. Conceptually, they are analogous to terms such as cognitive schemes (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), schemes of habit (Piaget, 1977), and mental schemes of perception, thought, and action (Bourdieu, 1989), while placing emphasis on the habitual ways in which these cognitive structures structure our experience of the game/world. Here, I am approaching habits as pragmatists do, treating them as stable cognitive patterns of meaningful activity that form the basis of the meaning we encounter in the game/world. ⁹ As pragmatist scholar Dewey remarks: “Through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home, and the home is part of our every experience” (2005, p. 104). Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl makes a similar observation, writing that habit is “the function of consciousness that shapes and constantly further shapes the world” (quoted by Bernet et al., 1993, p. 203).

Enactivists refer to an agent's cognitive habits as their “[embodied] history of sense-making,” what Bourdieu calls habitus (Bourdieu, 1990b). Cognitive habits are indicative of how we have exercised our interpretive agency in the past, that is, what we have routinely registered about and how we have consistently chosen to make sense of our environments. Thus, our cognitive habits constitute “the link … between … structure and agency” (Maton, 2014) by acting as “a system of durable cognitive structures … which orient the perception of the situation and the appropriate response” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25). In this way, cognitive habits “[capture] how we carry within us our history [of sensemaking], how we bring this history into our present circumstances, and how we then make choices to act in certain ways and not others” (Maton, 2014, p. 51). Our cognitive habits “ensure the permanence in change that makes the individual agent a world within the world” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 56) and thus act as “the site of our understanding of the world” (Calhoun et al., 2012, p. 329), providing agents with a “sense of reality, or realities” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 60). It is our cognitive habits that establish “the illusion of immediate understanding, characteristic of practical experience of the familiar universe” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 20) by providing agents with a “practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation—what is called in sport a ‘feel’ for the game, that is, the art of anticipating the future of the game which is inscribed in the present state of play” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25). From this, it follows that our cognitive habits are “the social game embodied and turned into a second nature” (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 63).

Structural Coupling

While our cognitive habits reflect the routine ways in which we make sense of our environments, they do not fully account for the immediacy with which we perceive the world as a seemingly always-already meaningful and significant domain (naive realism). Indeed, this is a central concern for enactivists who dispute the cognitivist model of the mind which argues that agents encounter the world indirectly as we expend considerable time and effort translating sensory information from an external domain into an internal approximation. One needs only witness a skilled tradesperson in action or an expert player engaged in a familiar game to recognize the immediacy and familiarity with which we encounter and interact with the game/world. In order to explain this phenomenon, we need another concept from cognitive science: structural coupling.

When we engage in cognitive play and form cognitive habits we structurally couple with our environments. Structural coupling describes the process by which the external structures of an agent's environment become internalized (via practical sensemaking) as cognitive structures, while internal cognitive structures become externalized (via enactive cognition) in how the agent perceives, thinks about, and interacts with the environment. It is through structural coupling that agents regulate the play that exists between the structures of our minds and the structures of our environments, resulting in our habitual enaction of a relatively stable, seemingly independent game/world.

The notion of structural coupling is integral to both enactivism—where an agent's world is “enacted through a history of structural coupling” (Varela, Thompson, Rosch, p. 156)—and ludic sociology—where habitus is formed by “the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72) such that there is “ontological complicity between mental structures [of the agent] and the objective structures of social space” (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 76–77). Indeed, it is this emergent, “ontological complicity” between mental and environmental structures that lead us into “the illusion of immediate understanding” toward the game/world, an illusion we must first learn to establish. In the example of sensorimotor coordination above, the child's mind is initially unstructured by the play of the physical world; however, through sensorimotor coordination the child comes to structure their mind according to the structures of their environment, coupling one with the other. It is because the child's cognitive structures are already aligned with the structures of their environment that “what is present now is passively apprehended within a sense that has its roots in earlier experience and that has since become habitual” (Thompson, p. 32).

In this way, we can think of structural coupling itself as a kind of game played out between the structures of our minds and the structures of our environments. Consider an agent with no knowledge of a particular language, for whom spoken words appear as indistinct sounds while written words are a jumble of meaningless shapes. As this agent makes sense of what is said and written, they find themselves participating in a language-game (Wittgenstein, 1958) ¹⁰ in which the external structures of the language (e.g., spelling, grammar, and pronunciation) inform the internal cognitive structures of the agent. In turn, the agent externalizes those internal structures (via enactive cognition) in their perception of the game/world. By playing language-games, agents come to experience the “illusion of immediate understanding” toward language and discourse as what once appeared to be meaningless sensations (e.g., an indistinct sound, a confusing shape) now appear to be—and seem to have always been—meaningful, distinct signifiers (e.g., clearly articulated/legible words).

If structural coupling is indeed a game, we would expect to see it unfolding in the recreational contexts as well. To wit, consider an agent playing an analog or digital game for the first time. Here, the player initially encounters the playspace unstructured by the “play of the game”; at this stage, there is an abundance of play between agent and environment as the possible interpretations of the playspace are practically boundless. However, once the game is underway, we find that our interpretive agency and thus our practical sensemaking is bounded by the structures of the playspace and the “imminent necessity” of the gameplay—for example, you cannot move to just any space on the checkerboard, only those that correspond with your color; you cannot travel wherever you please in a 3D platformer, you can only reach those places your avatar can jump to; etc. By adjusting “the play of the mind” to fit the “the play of the game,” we come to internalize external constraints on our interpretations of the playspace, organizing our internal cognitive structures in such a way that we habitually enact from and thus perceive the playspace as a domain already structured by what we routinely register as significant and meaningful, for example, we already sense what spaces we can and cannot move to in checkers; we already feel how far an avatar can jump in a platformer; etc.

Thus, to say that cognition is inherently ludic is to recognize the play that is involved in making sense of and structurally coupling with any environment. As Hans observes in The Play of the World (1981), the ludic nature of cognition “calls into question the distinction between the illusory structures of play and the illusory structures by which we order our lives” (p. 5). Are the structures and rules of a game different in nature—cognitively speaking—from the social structures that make up lives? “The stronger argument,” Hans writes, “is that, instead of play's structures being fictional and arbitrary … it is only through play that the structures we live by grow and change” (p. 5). That is to say, it is through cognitive play that we adapt to the changing “play of the world,” whether that's the evolving world of a recreational game or the historical developments of a society: “The role of play is not to work comfortably within its own structures but rather constantly to develop its structures through play. It is through play that man [sic] adapts to his changing world, that he constantly challenges and changes the rules and structures by which he lives” (p. 5).

Section II: Hello, Worlds

Worlds Apart

One of the consequences of mistaking our illusion of the game/world with the game/world itself (naive realism) is that when we encounter those with differing interpretations or “worldviews” we reflexively treat them as subjective or irrational in contrast to our (supposedly) objective and rational understanding (Ross & Ward, 1996). This is explained in ludic cognition as differences in our “illusions” of the game/world and what it means (practical sense). In effect, ludic cognition argues that when agents embody the same or similar cognitive habits, they share in an “illusion of immediate understanding” toward the game/world and when agents do not have cognitive habits in common, they possess a distinct illusion and thus tend to perceive dissimilar agents as delusional, literally “playing false.” This discrepancy in cognitive habits between agents leads us toward a naive understanding of the game/world, one that can inhibit our capacity to understand the game/world as other players/agents do. Ross and Ward noted this in their analysis of naive realism, which they associated with a range of cognitive biases impacting social interactions, including the false consensus effect—our tendency to believe that the choices we make are more common or normative than those who make opposite decisions—and attribution bias—our tendency to erroneously attribute reasons for the behavior of others based on our own assumptions. All of which culminates in “failures in perspective taking … failures to make adequate allowance for construal differences [which] are ubiquitous throughout the social sphere” (p. 115).

In terms of ludic cognition, naive realism manifests in the assumption that we experience the same illusion—the same “play of the game/world”—as other agents do, leading to a kind of naive intersubjectivity, that is, most of us, most of the time naively believe our fellow agents perceive one and the same game/world as we do. And yet we have noted that as our bodies, senses, and environments vary, so too do our cognitive habits (i.e., our embodied history of sensemaking or habitus), and thus the play of the game/world. If we are not critical of the ludic and enactive nature of cognition, we can find ourselves trying to understand others as variations of ourselves, relying on processes such as identification and self-oriented empathy (Coplan, 2011). Given that how we make sense of and play in the world constitutes a “way of being in the world” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 135, emphasis in original), these intersubjective processes can function as a kind of ontological reductivism, one that interferes with our ability to understand how other agents exist in and inhabit the game/world in ways that differ from our own.

To illustrate this consider, the double-empathy problem (Milton, 2018) describes how neurotypical people readily empathize with other neurotypical people; autistic people readily empathize with other autistic people; but across these neurotypes, the groups struggle to empathize with one another. ¹¹ As social psychologist Milton notes, the inability to empathize in these situations stems from “a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing ways of experiencing the world” (Milton, 2018). In a world dominated by neurotypicals, autistic people find themselves frequently misunderstood as their illusory understanding of the world is seen as a distortion of the (supposedly) objective, self-evident world that neurotypicals are more familiar with. While we could stress the differences between neurotypes here as the basis for these distinct ways of experiencing the world, this would miss the broader point that as our cognitive habits differ, so too does our experience of the game/world. Here, our neurotypes are but one aspect of our identities and social locations that impact what we routinely register about and how we routinely choose to make sense of our environments (interpretive agency).

In Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006), Alcoff describes the dynamic, emergent relationship between identity and sensemaking. For Alcoff, identity is “a site from which one must engage in the process of meaning-making” (43) or sensemaking; identity is “a generative source of meaning, necessarily collective rather than wholly individual, and useful as a source of agency … [it is] a way of inhabiting, interpreting, and working through, both collectively and individually, an objective social location and group history” (pp. 41–42). Our identities reflect that how we make sense of the game/world is bounded and tempered by our agency in the game/world, which in some sense is constitutive of how we exist in the game/world: “When I am identified, it is my [interpretive] horizon of agency that is identified” (p. 42), Alcoff writes. “[I]dentity is the product of a complex mediation involving individual agency in which its meaning is produced [or enacted] rather than merely perceived or experienced” (p. 42).

In this way, our age, gender, race, sexuality, ability, neurotype, and other formative aspects of our identities have an outstanding influence over cognitive play, our “feel for the game,” and in particular what we register about and how we make sense of our environments, that is, our interpretive agency. This, in turn, provides us with a “durable” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25), transposable sense of space, that is, a social location. Thus, when literature scholar Mohanty writes that “[s]ocial locations facilitate or inhibit knowledge by predisposing us to register and interpret information in certain ways” (1997, p. 234) we can recognize the presence of cognitive habits, mental “schemes perception, thought, and action” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 54) that predispose us to register and interpret the environment in certain ways and not others. It follows that understanding others requires not dispelling the illusion of another's game/world but sharing in it. Indeed, just like learning to play a new game, social cognition involves developing novel cognitive schemes and habits in exchange for a novel way of perceiving the game/world.

Participatory Sensemaking

Thinking of social cognition as a form of play has roots in both enactivism and ludic sociology. In terms of the former, enactivists describe the process by which agents collaboratively make sense of the game/world as participatory sensemaking. Cognitive scientists Jaegher and Paolo coined this concept and define it as “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own” (p. 13). Participatory sensemaking cultivates our capacity for social cognition (p. 3) by facilitating the exchange of cognitive habits between agents. This, in turn, cultivates our capacity for enactive intersubjectivity (Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009), our ability to enact or bring forth the game/world as other agents perceive, think about, and interact with it. It is through participatory sensemaking that we exchange cognitive habits rather than relying exclusively on our own, enabling us to overcome our naive tendency toward identification and self-oriented empathy and to embrace other-oriented empathy (Coplan, 2011), that is, understanding others as they understand themselves: “In other-oriented perspective-taking, when I successfully adopt the target's perspective, I imagine being the target undergoing the target's experiences rather than imagining being myself undergoing the target's experiences” (p. 13). And unlike self-oriented empathy, when we orient ourselves around the sensemaking of others we not only avoid but counteract biases such as false consensus effect and egocentrism (p. 13). ¹²

In the context of ludic cognition, we can think of participatory sensemaking as a collaborative form of cognitive play. Above we established that through cognitive play (practical sensemaking) we develop and explore our interpretive agency—that is, what we register about and how we make sense of our environments—in response to the “imminent necessity” of various tasks and activities. When we engage in participatory sensemaking we subject how we make sense of the game/world to the interpretive agency of distinct agents such that we come to habitually register what others find meaningful about the environment and to interpret those features in analogous ways. In effect, we learn to play the game by another player's rules. By rules here I do not mean the formal, explicit rules of a game but rather the player's internalization of those external structures that predispose us to play the game in particular ways and not others. As sociologist Kennedy puts it, “The better we become at playing the games we master the more difficult it becomes to describe the rules we follow in doing so. These rules become part of our practical logic, part of our ‘feel for the game’” (Kennedy, 2016, p. 83).

Consider children with food allergies, a group that faces a pervasive lack of social understanding, leading to higher incidences of fear and anxiety, and a lower quality of life (Avery et al., 2003; Fenton et al., 2011). There is a distinction between the formal rules the food-allergic child obeys—for example, “Avoid foods containing peanuts”—and the internalization of those rules as a series of cognitive habits—for example, food-allergic children have the habit of scrutinizing packaged goods, invoking unique patterns for efficiently identifying allergens and their many synonyms; they frequently avoid unlabeled foods, such as baked goods, as their contents are difficult to ascertain; at school, they tend to eat meals in safe spaces with trusted parties and routinely track who is in their environments and if they can be trusted (Fenton et al., 2011; Mandell et al., 2005). For the food-allergic child, these rules have been made implicit and self-evident through a social history of practical sensemaking; they are embedded in the child's world as they are a part of how the child has learned to make sense of and thus enact and inhabit the world.

When we engage in cognitive play with other agents (participatory sensemaking), and “play the game by another player's rules,” we encounter “situations where, through coordination of sense-making, one of the interactors is oriented toward a novel domain of significance that was part of the sense-making activity of the other” (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 14). In doing so, we take on the cognitive schemes and habits of other agents, internalizing what is external to that agent (participatory sensemaking) and then externalizing those distinct ways of making sense of the environment in our own enaction of the game/world (enactive intersubjectivity). Food-allergic children, for instance, make reference to nonfood allergic allies who help them establish and maintain safe social environments. These are individuals who have observed and participated in the “practical sense-making activity” of food-allergic classmates, siblings, and friends such that their own “feel for the game” can be oriented toward enacting “a novel domain of significance,” for example, allies help track potential risks, they get into the habit of examining food packaging for allergens and inform others of potential safety issues in the environment (Fenton et al., 2011; Mandel et al., 2005).

Common Sensemaking

While enactivism accounts for the social aspects of cognitive play through interpersonal processes such as participatory sensemaking and enactive intersubjectivity, ludic sociology emphasizes broader social factors—such as class, gender, and race—as a communal source of cognitive habits. Like chess players who have never played a match against one another but nevertheless share a common understanding of the playspace of the game and how to interpret it, agents need not participate in one and the same instance of a sensemaking activity in order to enact and inhabit the game/world in analogous ways, for example, food-allergic children at different schools come to interpret social spaces in similar ways (Fenton et al., 2011). This stems from the fact that agents who belong to the same social groups find themselves routinely participating in the same or similar social activities or games (Bourdieu, 1990b, 1998).

A social game (Bourdieu, 1990b) is a structured social activity that, in turn, structures the cognitive activity or play of its players. When agents play the same or similar social games their practical sense—their embodied “feel for the game”—comes to function as a common sense that is shared among fellow players/agents. At the same time, our identities influence what kinds of social games we play (e.g., gendered division of labor) and the positions from which we play them (e.g., in a patriarchal social structure, men occupy positions with more agency than women and nonbinary people). As Calhoun notes, “those who occupy similar positions in the social structure will have the same habitus” (2012, p. 329), that is, similar cognitive habits. Thus, we can recognize a range of cognitive habits common to particular groups, such as socioeconomic class (e.g., class habitus, Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 58), gender (e.g., feminine habitus, McNay, 1999; masculine habitus, Topić, 2023), race (e.g., Black habitus, Young, 2010; Lofton & Davis, 2015), and sexuality (e.g., queer habitus, Merabet, 2014), as well as habits that exist at the intersection of various social identities (e.g., Black masculine habitus, Wallace, 2002).

It follows that what we often refer to as common sense is, in fact, the practical sense that is common to particular social groups. This follows from the ludic nature of cognition itself as the contradictions we encounter in common sense are, in fact, the product of the various and varied social games we play, games that, as anthropologist Louw reminds us, “are not fair games; actors engage in them from unequal positions, with unequal powers, endowed with unequal amounts of capital to invest” (2007, p. 12). Thus, as Marxist philosopher Gramsci observed, “[c]ommon sense is a collective noun, like religion: there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process” (1971, pp. 325–326). ¹³ Gramsci's insight into common sense reflects that in any given society there are ways of enacting and inhabiting the game/world that are common to some groups that, in turn, contradict and at times compete against the sense that is common to other groups. As anthropologist Crehan remarks in Gramsci's Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives: “[a]ll too often one rational being's obvious fact is another's questionable, or flat out wrong, assertion. There is more than one common sense” (2016, p. 45). At the same time, we are prone to perceiving the game/world as a common, shared space or domain (naive realism). In this way, “we all live in a commonsense world, just not the same one” (2016, p. 47).

By approaching common sense as the practical sense that is common to particular social groups, we can see that each of us comes to possess a self-evident or “common sense understanding” of the game/world that is shared with and reinforced by those who play the same or similar social games with equal measures of agency, an understanding that diverges from the practical sense common to agents who participate in distinct social games or who possess greater or lesser degrees of agency. In fact, what practical sense we do have in common with other agents “help[s] persuade us that there is indeed a single entity, common sense” (Crehan, 2016, p. 47), a shared “feel for the game” as it were. This leads to contradictions not only in our understanding of the game/world (e.g., competing “worldviews”) but in our enaction of it as we habitually register and interpret different aspects of even the same playspaces or social environments while naively believing that we nevertheless inhabit one and the same game/world. When discrepancies in our experience of the game/world arise, this naive perspective obscures the fact that other agents possess distinct cognitive habits, that is, distinct ways of enacting and inhabiting the game/world.

Compulsory Sensemaking

It follows that the practical sense common to some groups contradicts and at times competes against the sense that is common to other groups. Thus, in a stratified society agents find themselves contesting over what makes practical sense and to whom, a contest in which socially dominant groups exercise their outsized authority by imposing ways of making sense on those they dominate. As Crehan puts it: “Those [agents] that emerge from less privileged locations are forced to exist within the interstices of the dominant explanations; an ability to impose commonsense truths, which assume that existing power relations are the only ones possible, is a crucial dimension of any power regime” (2016, p. 51).

Here, we can make the connection between common sense and hegemony. In Black Feminist Thought (2000), Collins identifies four interlocking systems of oppression, including the hegemonic domain of power. ¹⁴ As sociologist Brown summarizes, “Hegemony refers to the system of ideas developed by a dominant group that justifies their practices … in this domain of power old ideas that uphold the system get refashioned as society changes over time. Through ideology, culture, and consciousness, the beliefs of the dominant group get normalized as common sense ideas that support their position. Additionally, many members of subordinated groups might endorse these ideas as well” (2019).

In the context of ludic cognition, the hegemonic power of common sense manifests in the “imminent necessity” of the social games played in society as subordinate agents find themselves compelled to make sense of or interpret the game/world according to more dominant groups. In a patriarchal society, for instance, women must navigate what makes sense to men; in a heteronormative society, queer people must navigate what makes sense to straight people; in a society that privileges whiteness, people of color must navigate white supremacy; etc. In these and other ways, the practical sense favored by dominant social groups becomes part of the practical logic or sense with which marginalized and disenfranchised agents enact and inhabit the game/world. At the same time, socially dominant members of society have no analogous compulsion to make sense of the game/world as marginalized people do. It follows that, in a stratified society, it would be inaccurate to say that agents are involved in participatory sensemaking. A more accurate term might be compulsory sensemaking as agents lower in the social hierarchy find themselves compelled to make sense of the game/world according to those in more dominant positions. In such circumstances, to challenge existing power relations—for example, by drawing attention to the unfairness of the social games we play or the compulsory ways in which some agents are compelled to make sense of the game/world according to others—is to challenge how privileged members of society maintain authority over the game/world itself. “The power of the white world is threatened,” Baldwin wrote, “whenever a Black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions” (1993, p. 78).

Conclusion

Taking a ludic approach to cognition leads us to question the illusion of the game/world as a singular, shared, pregiven phenomenon. As our bodies, senses, and social environments vary, so too does “the play of the game/world” and “the illusion of immediate understanding” that accompanies it. In making sense of the play of the game/world, then, there emerges a plurality of worlds (Umwelten) and thus a plurality in logic or sense by which agents navigate and negotiate those worlds (practical sense). This plurality and diversity in practical human experience are obscured when we approach the game/world naively (naive realism); by taking the meaning and significance of the game/world for granted, we risk limiting our understanding of others to how we exist in and are occupied by the game/world (identification, self-oriented empathy), while allowing the inequality in society to dominate our minds, our sense of self and others, and how we understand the world around us (compulsory sensemaking).

In this way, ludic cognition finds common cause with projects like Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. ¹⁵ Like the approach to mind and world being developed here, Freire is concerned with our acceptance of the world and “how little [we] question it” (p. 76), a naive position through which we “‘receive’ the world as passive entities” (p. 76) as opposed to agents actively involved in its enaction. From this uncritical perspective, learning about the game/world amounts to little more than making ourselves a “better ‘fit’ for the world [that] … the oppressors have created” (p. 76) for us.

Conversely, we challenge the status quo and the distribution of power in society by cultivating “a critical perception of the world” (p. 111), one that challenges “the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world” (p. 75) where “a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (p. 75, emphasis in original) or enactor. As Gramsci observed, each of us must “work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world” (1971, p. 323). Ludic cognition offers a means of doing just that—to recognize for ourselves that understanding the game/world is, at one and the same time, an open-ended, iterative effort in understanding other players and agents as well. When we expand the play of the game/world beyond our own ways of making sense, we create space for other ways of “being in the world, of being occupied by the world” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 135, emphasis in original) and in so doing we get into the habit of understanding the game/world as other players and agents do.