1 Introduction

Philosophers and scientists alike have long been interested in the question of how our being-in-the-world allows us to experience in a plethora of ways and to behave meaningfully. In extending the framework suggested by Scott Jordan and Brian Day, this commentary suggests integrating recent neuroscientific evidence with perspectives from pragmatism, anthropology, and phenomenological thought. The commentary shall be programmatic in the sense that it prepares the way for further argument and discussion by making available new perspectives that invite the reader to look beyond the “classical” argument and thus benefit from various disciplines. The driving questions are: How can we as biological systems that are self-organizing and constantly adapting make sense of our surroundings? How can we grasp our world via perception? How can we skillfully engage with the world? How can the rich connections between organisms and environment lead to our particular lifeworlds; lifeworlds that allow individual experiences and that are themselves constantly changing in reaction to them?

One dominant approach to reality and truth has been the correspondence approach of computational cognitive sciences that assumes that reality can be revealed by science, independently of the personal perspective of an observer. The task of correspondence theories is to understand the relation between observer and observer-independent reality; a task that assumes dichotomies between inner and outer, between objective and subjective. Facing the limits of those approaches, Scott Jordan & Brian Day (this collection) suggest bridging the riff between the inner and the outer by acknowledging that there is in fact no gap between the organism and its environment. If one wants to avoid the dualistic trap that asks how something inside the “mind”—such as thoughts or ideas—can represent the outside world, one challenges the seemingly essential dependence of cognitive science on representations.

Much neuroscientific, psychological, anthropological, and philosophical work, both old and new, suggests that we understand cognition as arising from the actions of embodied agents that engage skillfully in a meaningful world (Beauchamp & Martin 2007; Brooks 1991; Clark 1997; Graziano et al. 1994; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Noë 2004; O’Regan & Noë 2001; Thompson 2010; Varela et al. 1991; Wilson & Knoblich 2005). This understanding can ultimately help us avoid the correspondence theorists’ notorious problem, how the external is connected to the internal. Organisms that are embedded and situated do not need to represent the external environment as they are always already about the contexts in which they live. Moreover, for the situated organism, “the situation is organized from the start in terms of human needs and propensities which give the facts meaning, make the facts what they are, so that there is never a question of storing and sorting through an enormous list of meaningless, isolated data” (Dreyfus 1992, p. 262). Understanding organisms as always already existing in meaningful interaction[1] with their environment and thereby constantly adapting and changing is relevant not just for topics in philosophy of mind but also for epistemology and metaphysics. The metaphysical question of how mind, body, and world are related is tightly linked to epistemological questions about how we can experience the external world. The central tenet is how experience can happen at all, i.e., how the experiencing organism can relate meaningfully to the world.

This commentary furthers the line of thought described by Scott Jordan & Brian Day (this collection) by suggesting further perspectives from neuroscience, pragmatism, and anthropology for approaching cognitive systems as experiencing, bodily systems that are in constant, value-laden interaction with the world; rather than as systems that primarily mirror an external reality from a position separated from the world. Here, I will combine arguments from John Dewey, in particular his work on experience, and anthropologist Timothy Ingold, with recent neuroscientific approaches that support a view that challenges classical correspondence approaches. This will allow a thicker description, i.e., a dense description specifying details and patterns and considering contextual factors, of human experience and cognition.