Notes on Enactivism and Pragmatism

Taking a break from both work and energy modeling to prepare for the Varela International Symposium tonight.

On the Resource Page for the symposium, they list written works by several of the presenters, including Evan Thompson. One paper that caught my eye was Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle by Di Paolo, Thompson & Beer [@Di_Paolo:2022:laying]. The first time I heard of the free energy principle was in a paper by Pietarinen, so the title reminded me of previous efforts to understand the differences between enactivism and pragmatism. I’ve accumulated several documents that address this relationship in the past, so I ended up toggling between this paper, Paolucci’s Cognitive Semiotics [@paolucci:2021:cognitive], Thompson’s Mind in Life [@thompson:2007:mind], and Di Paolo’s Toward an Enactive Conception of Productive Practices [@Di_Paolo:2023:toward].

The relationship between pragmatism and Buddhism was mentioned in Kalupahana’s A History of Buddhist Philosophy, where he marked the relationship between William James radical empiricism and Buddhism. I still have not read James, but I’d read enough pragmatism at this point to feel like they were fellow intellectual travelers. I think this one was step towards abandoning my meditation practice, although certaintly family and work were also major cotnributors.

The theme of the symposium includes references to AI, and I still hold out hope that the study of a pragmatism-informed cognitive science may help with the design of *cognitive language agents”, or perhaps neurosymbolic computation. I’ve done a little work on this lately that I’ll hopefully I’ll outline soon.

Enactivism was developed within Buddhist influences, with Varela being a practicing Buddhist, with Thompson being more adjacent. These links have clearly helped his work endure, with this symposium a clear marker.

Thompson references von Uexkull but neither semiotics or pragmatism. This is consistent with the idea that enactivism grows from phenomenology

Sean Gallhager has developed explicit links between pragmatism, 4E cognitive science, and enactivism. His book Enactive Interventions includes a chapter arguing that pragmatism is an important precursor to enactivism.

Of these, Paolucci is most inclusive, as he discusses enactivism along side of semiotics. He also references Material Engagement Theory, the subject of Di Paolo’s productive practices paper.