Participatory Sense-Making

Description

Hanna Dejaegher:

"Together with Ezequiel Di Paolo, we have extended the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process itself can take on a form of autonomy (operationally defined). This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. This notion defines a spectrum of participation, from simpler cases of orientation of individual sense-making to joint sense-making (exemplified in acts that can only be completed socially, like the act of handing over an object). The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only."

(https://hannedejaegher.net/research/participatory-sense-making/)

More information

Video : "“Participatory sense-making – An integrative framework for the study of intersubjectivity,” [1]

* Article: Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. By Thomas Fuchs & Hanne De Jaegher. Phenom Cogn Sci (2009) 8:465–486, July 2009

URL = https://hannedejaegher.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/fuchsdejaegher09psmmutincorp.pdf

"Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation.

This process may be described

(1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents;

(2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality.

Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood."