In the paper “Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence” Alva Noë offers an exciting and dense insight into his philosophical thinking. Combining his classical work on the active nature of perception (Noë 2004) with his more recent inquiries into philosophical method, presence, the arts, and human nature in general, Noë now aims at a more thorough account of conceptual understanding (2012).
Noë’s proposal must be seen in light of the paradigm shift in the philosophy of mind and cognition, from a cognitivist and representationalist view to a distributed or embodied perspective on the mind. It is one of the so-called “E-approaches” to the mind (enactive, extended, embodied and embedded) that transcend the classical view of the mind as being an isolated entity located in the brain that passively represents an outside and independently-given world (e.g., Shapiro 2011; Clark & Chalmers 1998; Noë 2004; Varela et al. 1993; Thompson 2007; Kyselo 2013). There are significant differences between these views (and they will be of relevance below), but generally speaking they all rest on the assumption that cognition is not in the head and instead requires bodily action and the environment. Noë uses these insights from the E-approaches to expand on the disembodied and representationalist view underlying the intellectualist approach to concepts, and in this way, he provides a timely and innovative elaboration of conceptual understanding that is more encompassing than previous approaches.
I am sympathetic to Noë’s approach. Methodologically speaking, he illustrates what he promotes as the right style of philosophical analysis, an inquiry into the so-called “third-realm” that remains “in-between—neither entirely objective nor merely subjective” (Noë 2012, p. 136) but open for “conversation or dialogue” (Noë 2012, p. 138). My comment should be considered an elaboration in the same vein.
I agree with Noë with regards to the more general project of questioning traditional conceptions in philosophy of mind by adopting an embodied and distributed perspective. That said, however, I think that there is a problem with his proposal. Even though it provides a great number of important insights, I think, third-realm fashion, Noë’s proposal fails as a general theory of understanding. The reason for this is that in a crucial way his own epistemological pre-conception of mind is not yet fully separated from the paradigm that it seeks to overcome: while Noë acknowledges the role of the bodily and active individual, he accepts a dichotomy that is prevalent in the traditional paradigm, namely the split between the individual and the world of others. His approach inherits what I have called the body–social problem (Kyselo & Di Paolo 2013; Kyselo 2014). The body–social problem is the third in a series of dichotomies in the philosophy of mind and the successor to the classical mind–body problem and the more recent body–body problem (Thompson 2007). The body–body problem is the question of how the bodily subject can be at once subjectively lived and an organismic body that is embedded in the world. The body–social problem elaborates on this and is concerned with the question of how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual mind. Philosophers of cognition systematically assume that the mind is essentially embodied, while the social world remains the context in which the embodied mind is embedded. On this view, the social arguably shapes the mind, but it does not figure in the constitution of the mind itself.
In what follows, I first show that Noë’s proposal entails the same presupposition and thus invites a new form of methodological individualism that risks limiting conceptual understanding to the endeavour of an isolated individual subject. I then introduce and discuss an alternative proposal for a model of the individual mind as a socially enacted self. I argue that since the world of humans is a world of others and our social relations are what matters most to us, the social must also figure in the constitutive structure of human cognitive individuation.[1] The human mind or self is not only embodied but also genuinely social. From an enactive viewpoint the self can be considered as a self–other generated autonomous system, whose network identity is brought forth through individual’s engagement in bodily-mediated social interaction processes of distinction and participation. Distinction and participation refer to the two intrinsic goals that the individual follows and needs to balance. Distinction means to be able to exist as individual in one’s own right. Participation refers to an openness to others and a readiness to be affected by them. It refers to the sense of self as connected and participating. Both goals are achieved through engaging and relating to others. The processes that constitute the identity of the human mind are therefore not defined in terms of bodily but rather interpersonal relations and interactions. On this enactive approach to the self, the body is not equated with the self but instead seen as that which grounds a double sense of self as a separated identity and as participating. The body mediates the individual’s interactions with others (Kyselo 2014).
I outline how the model of the socially enacted self can combine with and elaborate Noë’s actionist account of concepts so as to arrive at an even more encompassing view of human understanding as well as a deeper appreciation of its fragile nature.