Now, Kyselo has criticized actionism not for ignoring the social, but for failing to treat the social as constitutive of human cognitive organization. Kyselo’s point is that for actionism, other people and our relations to them “shape” the mind, but they do so in the same the way that any environmental conditions cause, constrain, or enable human experience; the view makes no allowance for the stronger possibility that other people and our social relations with them are actually constitutive of what it is to be a human being. So she writes, with actionism as one of her targets in 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. (Kyselo this collection, p. 2)
And she goes on to explain:
I argue that since the world of humans is a social world of others and our social relations is what matters most to us, the social must also figure in the constitutive structure of human cognitive individuation. The human mind or self is not only embodied but also genuinely social. (ibid., p. 2)
In a footnote, she then elaborates:
By saying that sociality matters constitutively for the human self, I mean that without continuously relating and engaging in interaction with others, there would be no human self as a whole. The social is not only causally relevant for enacting self-hood, but it is also an essential component of its minimal organizational structure. (ibid., p. 2)
Now, I admit that the language of earlier work (Noë 2004, 2012) can be taken to suggest something like crypto-individualism. In so far as I talk about presence as something that thinkers and perceivers “achieve,” and in so far as I insist that, in achieving the world’s presence in thought and experience, we also achieve ourselves, it can perhaps sound like I am describing the enactive feats of a heroic solitary agency.
I admit that’s how it sounds. But I was careful to warn against being misled in this way. So, for example, in a passage immediately following one that Kyselo cites, I write:
But we are not only animals. I am also a father, and a teacher, and a philosopher, and a writer. These modalities of my being were no more given to me than my ability to read and write. I achieve myself. Not on my own, to be sure! And not in a heroic way. Maybe it would better to say that my parents and my friends and family and children and colleagues have achieved me for me. The point is that we are cultivated ourselves—learning to talk and read and dance and dress and play guitar and do mathematics and physics and philosophy—and in this cultivation worlds open up that would otherwise be closed off. In this way we achieve for ourselves new ways of being present.
Here I explicitly repudiate heroic individualism; we achieve ourselves with and through others; we are cultivated by a world full of others and that’s the setting in which we bring the world into focus for consciousness.
Perhaps another feature that feeds the appearance of crypto-individualism is the availability of an idealist or anti-realist reading of enacting or achieving presence. It is not in fact my view—Kyselo herself is clear about this—that we make the world, or construct it. The world shows up for us, in perception, and in thought, and for action. But it doesn’t show up for free. Just as you can’t encounter what a text means if you don’t know how to read, so you can’t see what is there to be seen without the battery of understandings necessary for reaching out and picking it up.
We don’t make the world, just as we don’t make other people. In fact, the world, and others, are necessary for us to achieve contact with it in three distinct ways. First, our experience of others and the world depends on their existence. If they weren’t there, we couldn’t achieve access to them. Second, our possession and exercise of the relevant skills may require the presence and participation of others. Think of the turn-taking dance that is conversation; you can’t do that without the other. Third, our possession of perceptual and cognitive skills of access depends on our development in the setting of personal relationships.
Does the commitment of actionism to these three kinds of dependence of our experience on our engagement with others meet the standard of offering an account of other people as not merely shaping but as constituting our mental lives? If not, I hope to be told why.
Let me offer a final example to try to clarify what is at stake. Take a baseball team. There will be nine players on the field at a given time during a game: a pitcher and catcher, three basemen, a shortstop, and the three outfielders. Notice that there are two different ways in which we can individuate these players. We can pick them out by the role that they play—by their position, in baseball parlance—or we can pick them out by the player, that is, by the particular person who is playing the role. Take the shortstop, for example. The shortstop is the near outfielder, or the far infielder; he is positioned between 2nd and 3rd bases. His job is to field balls hit to him and to deliver the balls to teammates in ways that work to his team’s advantage. For our purposes it is important to notice that a shortstop is a social creature in the sense that a) to be a shortstop is to play a role that can only be specified by naming other positions and shared goals and needs, and b) that there is no such thing as a shortstop outside of the context of convention, practice, and history—for that is what baseball is: a structure in a temporally extended space of convention and practice. A shortstop, we might say, is a thoroughly social kind of thing. It is constituted by social relations.
Notice that this way of thinking about what it is to be a shortstop takes nothing away from the fact that shortstops are embodied and that they are in continuous dynamic exchange with their physical environment. The quality of a shortstop is usually framed in terms of the range of ground he can cover, the softness of his hands, the strength of his arm, the delicacy and control of his footwork, and finally, his understanding of what to do in the split-second heat of play. Physical and intellectual skill are all properties of this essentially social being, the shortstop. And this is so for all the other players.
Now, the fact that being a shortstop is something “whose identity is brought forth through body-mediated social interaction”, as we could say, borrowing Kyselo’s words (this collection, p. 2), doesn’t entail that the flesh-and-blood human being who is playing shortstop is also in the same way identity-dependent on his or her social relations. The individual existence of the man, after all, the actual guy, the living human organism, is presupposed by his entering into the kinds of relationships that can make it the case that he is also a shortstop.
This sort of consideration can be generalized: just as we can distinguish the player from the position he plays, so we can distinguish the human being from the person he or she also is. Personhood is enacted, achieved, or performed in ways not so different from the way being a baseball-player is undertaken. A person is defined by nesting and overlapping roles—daughter, employer, citizen, rebel, lover, failure, and so on. And these roles are genuinely constitutive of who or what a person is, of his or her identity. Truly these constitutive features that make a person the person she is are robustly and thoroughly social, in all the ways being a shortstop is social. You can’t be a person on your own, any more than you can be a shortstop on your own. Persons are creatures of normative, evaluative spaces. Persons are performers. They perform their personhood. And they bear the ever-present burden of being evaluated. That, finally, is the difference between mere action and performance. Performance, as distinct from mere action, happens against the background of the possibility of being judged (good dancer, good father, good lover, good student, etc.).
Personhood is enacted. But what about being human? Is that enacted as well? Is one’s status as a human being, like one’s status as a person, or a shortstop, something that is accomplished through one’s body-mediated social interactions?
This much is clear. Being a distinct human being is antecedent to entering into the kinds of relationships that constitute one’s being a person, or a shortstop. So it can’t be that it is the same kinds of relations with others that constitute one’s personal identity (in my sense) that constitute one’s organismic identity as a human being. My question for Kyselo, then, would be: why should we say that human beings, above and beyond the persons they enact, are, in the relevant sense, constitutively social? Or better still, the question is: what is the relevant sense of “constitutively social”?
Let me be clear that I think it would be a mistake to hold that personhood, bound up with practice, convention, and history, though it is, is merely cultural, and that this cultural structure is stamped or imposed onto a pre-given biological substrate (the human being). No, each of us is both a human being and a person and any comprehension of our nature needs to do justice to both of these. A biological theory of us will be a theory of creatures who are both persons as well as organisms and will take seriously the way these loop back and down and the way they interact.