Hanne De Jaegher

Can social interaction constitute social cognition

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles - contextual, enabling and constitutive - it can play in social cognition. We show that interactive processes are more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual.

Social understanding through direct perception? Yes, by interacting

This paper comments on Gallaghers recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535-543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.

Embodiment and sense-making in autism

In this article, I sketch an enactive account of autism. For the enactive approach to cognition, embodiment, experience, and social interaction are fundamental to understanding mind and subjectivity. Enaction defines cognition as sense-making: the way cognitive agents meaningfully connect with their world, based on their needs and goals as self-organizing, self-maintaining, embodied agents. In the social realm, the interactive coordination of embodied sense-making activities with others lets us participate in each others sense-making (social understanding = participatory sense-making). The enactive approach provides new concepts to overcome the problems of traditional functionalist accounts of autism, which can only give a piecemeal and disintegrated view because they consider cognition, communication, and perception separately, do not take embodied into account, and are methodologically individualistic. Applying the concepts of enaction to autism, I show: How embodiment and sense-making connect, i.e., how autistic particularities of moving, perceiving, and emoting relate to how people with autism make sense of their world. For instance, restricted interests or preference for detail will have certain sensorimotor correlates, as well as specific meaning for autistic people. That reduced flexibility in interactional coordination correlates with difficulties in participatory sense-making. At the same time, seemingly irrelevant “autistic behaviors” can be quite attuned to the interactive context. I illustrate this complexity in the case of echolalia. An enactive account of autism starts from the embodiment, experience, and social interactions of autistic people. Enaction brings together the sensorimotor, cognitive, social, experiential, and affective aspects of autism in a coherent framework based on a complex non-linear multi-causality. This foundation allows to build new bridges between autistic people and their often non-autistic context, and to improve quality of life prospects.

On the Role of Social Interaction in Individual Agency

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.

Enaction and Psychology

The enactive approach to cognitive science aims to provide an account of the mind that is both naturalistic and nonreductive. Psychological activity is viewed not as occurring within the individual organism but in the engagement between the motivated autonomous agent and their context (including their social context). The approach has been developing within the fields of philosophy, artificial life, and computational biology for the past two decades and is now growing within the domain of psychology more generally. In this short paper we outline the conceptual framework of the enactive approach. Illustrative research questions and methods for investigation are also broached, including some existing examples from theoretical, behavioral, and computational modeling research. It is suggested that an enactive psychology provides the basis for the conceptual framework of the enactive approach.

The co-creation of meaningful action: Bridging enaction and interactional sociology

What makes possible the co-creation of meaningful action? In this paper, we go in search of an answer to this question by combining insights from interactional sociology and enaction. Both research schools investigate social interactions as such, and conceptualize their organization in terms of autonomy. We ask what it could mean for an interaction to be autonomous, and discuss the structures and processes that contribute to and are maintained in the so-called interaction order. We also discuss the role played by individual vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of social interaction processes in the co-creation of meaningful action. Finally, we outline some implications of this interdisciplinary fraternization for the empirical study of social understanding, in particular in social neuroscience and psychology, pointing out the need for studies based on dynamic systems approaches on origins and references of coordination, and experimental designs to help understand human co-presence.

What does the interactive brain hypothesis mean for social neuroscience? A dialogue

A recent framework inspired by phenomenological philosophy, dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition and robotics has proposed the interactive brain hypothesis (IBH). Whereas mainstream social neuroscience views social cognition as arising solely from events in the brain, the IBH argues that social cognition requires, in addition, causal relations between the brain and the social environment. We discuss, in turn, the foundational claims for the IBH in its strongest form; classical views of cognition that can be raised against the IBH; a defence of the IBH in the light of these arguments; and a response to this. Our goal is to initiate a dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and enactive views of social cognition. We conclude by suggesting some new directions and emphases that social neuroscience might take.

What made me want the cheese? A reply to Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto

I would like to thank Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto for taking the time to write these insightful responses. I will try to address three of their points. First, what should the precise status of the interaction process in studying social cognition be? Do I really mean that the interaction is the only important thing to study about social cognition? Second, and intimately related to this is the question of the individual: doesn’t what happens in the individual play a crucial role in social understanding? The third is a point about methodology: how to make an enactive/embodied point about social cognition in a landscape dominated by individualist and cognitivist approaches? Concerning the status of the interaction process, I stand by the assertion that studying it is the starting point for understanding social cognition. The point of this is not that the interaction details are something to fit into an existing picture. It is that centering on the interaction changes the research landscape and turns the endeavour of understanding social cognition on its head. The interaction process indeed is not the be all and end all of social cognition. However, putting it at the centre of the map opens up a new vantage point, a different way of studying social cognition, aspects of which are the history, needs, state, emotions, goals and capacities of the individual, neurology, the influence of context, society and culture, and so on. There is also the question ‘what makes social cognition precisely social?’ In traditional research, this was defined simply by the object of cognition being someone else. But isn’t social about a certain kind of interaction? In taking the social interaction process seriously, we found that it can become autonomous – in a strict formal sense (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). If this is the case, the idea that meaning and intentionality are situated with individuals changes from a given into a question. In traditional approaches, the individual represents the ‘reality out there’ and this is where meaning comes from. One big problem with this is that it does not ground meaning. Taking instead the hypothesis that the interaction process can become autonomous to mean that it itself has intentions would of course be silly. What does become possible on such a view is to spell out in detail how intentions can form and transform in social interaction. It allows us to envisage meanings not needing to be exclusively individually mediated, but that maybe they come into existence in a way more closely related to how waves form in the ocean. For instance, a couple of days ago I was having dinner with my partner and a friend. At some point, I was cutting some cheese for myself. I noticed my partner looking at the cheese and thought I would offer him some, because it looked like he might want some. When I did so, he accepted it. I asked him whether he had wanted it while looking at the cheese before (i.e. while I had noticed him looking at it and he had noticed me looking at him and it), and he said that he had not really. The desire for cheese in this case only crystallised at the point of accepting the slice from me. This indicates that fresh intentions can sprout from interactions and that what may often happen is that we back-track, newly emerged meaning in hand, and ‘stick’ this meaning onto our previous actions. It may have looked like he wanted the cheese, since I noticed him looking at it before, but in fact, the desire only took shape at the point of receiving it. Noticing him looking at the cheese and thinking that he might want some may have been a kind of direct perception. On the other hand, it was not just that he looked at the cheese, we also looked at each other and back and forth to the cheese, and he also to our friend. If anything in that coordination of gazes and actions had been different, I would probably not have developed the inclination to give him some. Hence illustrating that the precise coordination in an instance of interaction makes a difference to its significance for the participants.

One step forward, two steps back – not the Tango: comment on Gallotti and Frith

Does it take two to tango? According to Gallotti and Frith [1], one thing required for joint action is the right psychological attitude, namely ‘mental representations’ in a ‘we-mode’, which they paradoxically describe as both irreducibly collective and belonging to the individual. However, by eschewing the explanatory power of interaction dynamics in favour of individual mental attitudes, the authors are unable to account for how the we-mode functions, gets coordinated, or is even possible.