Cognitive scientists might give one of the following two answers in response to this. According to the first, they might assume that the body is equated with the self. When speaking of the individual, then clearly no longer referring to the brain, they mean the lived and living *body* as a whole. According to this, there is an embodied core self, which is equated with the individual embodied or living organism (Parnass and Sass, 2010, p. 230). Other recent approaches associated with the idea of such an embodied core self are, for example, Albahari's (2007) concept of *perspectival ownership*, Damasio's (2006) *core consciousness* and Zahavi's (2008) *minimal self*, which considers self from a phenomenological viewpoint of bodily subjectivity. It is assumed that such a bodily, minimal self is present from birth (Krueger, 2011).

Even though proponents of this answer (the self is equal to the body) would probably agree that embodied and social aspects of self are closely interrelated, there seems to be a strong intuition that something about the self remains entirely independent from the question of sociality (Zahavi, 2008, 2010) and that this something – a core self, if you will – can be associated with the body as an organic, separate and individual entity. The social in this version is of course not irrelevant, yet because it provides the context in which the minimal bodily self is embedded, it figures non-constitutively in the individuation of self3. In other words, there can be a self as a whole without the social. I call this claim about the interrelation of body, social and self the *social as contextual* claim.

3I rely on a recent distinction made by De Jaegher et al. (2010) between *contextual*, *enabling,* and *constitutive* roles of the social for cognition.

The other way to answer the question of how social and bodily dimensions relate with regards to the individuation of self as distinguishable unity is to assume that the social, instead of the body, is the primary source of individuation. One might call this the *social as constitutive* claim. It states that the core self relies on social processes and that it could not be a self without them. On this account, in its most minimal sense, the self is not neuronal or bodily, but must be essentially a social self.

There are not many researchers in cognitive science who would currently adopt this position decisively, a notable exception being De Haan (2010) who criticized the notion of a *minimal bodily* self and claimed quite specifically that the self, in its minimal sense, is a social self. The idea of self as social is of course not new; it can be traced back to the work of researchers such as Mead (1934), Buber (1947/2002), Vygotsky (1986). Hermans et al. (1992) suggested over a decade ago that the self is social and dialogical in the sense that "other people occupy positions in the multivoiced self". However, it is not clear whether these approaches make an essentialist/constitutive or a contextual claim about the role of the social for the self. In order to argue for a *constitutive* role of the social in the individuation of the self as a whole no stronger statement about the status of the body might be required as it leaves the possibility open that the relevant processes of self individuation could be mediated in terms of mere brain activity, thus trivializing the role sensorimotor structures and other non-neuronal bodily structures. Hermans and Gieser (2012), for instance, locate the biological basis of the dialogical self in the orbitofrontal cortex and the subcortical limbic system, thus leaving the relation between self as bodily and self as social underspecified (Cresswell and Baerveldt, 2011). An emphasis on the role of the social in the constitution of the self as a whole might therefore risk to downplay the other achievement in cognitive science, the embodied turn.

It is possible to make a stronger statement about the role of the body for an essentially social self. But for a claim that the body plays a non-trivial role in the social constitution of the self as a whole to make sense a clarification is required on what counts as a body. That is because embodiment, commonly understood, still equates with organismic embodiment as well as with movement (for a discussion see Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2013), and there is nothing social about the organismic or the moving body *per se*. Nevertheless, whether or not the essentially social self is seen as neurally or bodily mediated, it would still be in tension with the contextual social contribution claim according to which the body is the primary source of individuation.

This is the prevalent tension in cognitive science with regards to the individuation of self. In reminiscence of the body-mind problem or as a successor to the body-body problem I will call it the *body-social problem*, i.e., the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self (Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2013). This tension exists for any approach in cognitive science making a claim about the self as a whole or coherent unity, thus implying a more-than-pluralistic notion of the self. Proponents of an embodied view of individuation risk giving lip service to the social while those emphasizing the role of the social risk doing the same with respect to the body. Both approaches are

mutually exclusive. Without due conceptual clarification, adopting either version, i.e., a primacy of embodiment or a primacy of the social, reduces the other. The assumption that the body individuates the self while the social remains merely context puts into doubt the second disciplinary development in cognitive science, the social turn, and would reinvite accusations of methodological individualism. One could argue that while now there no longer exists a dichotomy between the brain as individual and the world of others, there still exist a dichotomy between the body-as-individual and the world of others. Yet it remains unclear how to work an embodied perspective into an account that takes seriously the role of the social in individuation, when the relevant contribution could equally be made by the brain.

To see that this body-social problem is not an abstract theoretical issue, consider two empirical examples: social pain and locked-in syndrome. Firstly, Eisenberger (2011) has shown that the experience of social rejection (in her example, being excluded from participating in a game) leads to the same activation of neuronal circuitry as physical pain (in reaction to increased temperature). This arguably suggests that people who are socially rejected experience this as similar distressing as bodily pain. Eisenberger argues that this has evolutionary reasons. Humans rely on "social connection" in order to ensure their survival. Social rejection hurts so we avoid (life) threatening situations in which we find ourselves separated from others. Here it seems that the body constitutes the core of human existence as a biological whole. Through pain signals it ensures its integrity, while the social is a means to the same end.

Secondly, consider locked-in syndrome, a case of global paralysis, which leaves a person's entire body paralyzed (with the exception of minimal eye movement, such as blinking), yet her consciousness preserved. The patient's bodily capacities are drastically restricted. Yet inquiries about the quality of life in patients with locked-in syndrome reveal that their self-reported well-being does not differ significantly from that of "normal" subjects. These studies show that the patients'well-being is not equated with physiological capacities. What mattered is that that they were able to engage with others, be recognized and experience themselves as subjects. Locked-in syndrome was not considered a physiological but rather social condition (Gosseries et al., 2009; Lulé et al., 2009). These findings seem counter-intuitive for an embodied approach to the self. If the self was equated with the body and the bodily self is what grounds first-person subjectivity then the patients' wellbeing should be worse, since locked-in syndrome affects the body as a whole.

How we interpret these empirical examples will in each case depend on which version of body-social relation to the self we adopt. Should we explain bodily experiences (such as social pain) and self experience (positive quality of life in LIS) using a theory of the self seated in bodily or organic processes or do these cases rather show that human nature and thus the self is genuinely social and that the body plays an important, but rather enabling role?

One option to avoid a pluralistic or pattern approach to the self (in which body and social co-exist as different aspects of the self) and to still provide an alternative for a cross-disciplinary approach to the self, is to adopt an essentialist perspective, according to which the self as a whole is either embodied or social. But this option risks privileging one dimension, while reducing the other to a contextual element. Either view remains problematic for the purposes of cognitive science. A pattern approach acknowledges diversity without integrating, while an essentialist view offers a sense of unity but at the risk of being reductive and of trivializing the role of either the social or embodied turn in cognitive science. Does this mean we have to decide that one of the two is less relevant or are merely dimensions of a lose pattern of self?

I do not think so. There is a way to argue for a more than pluralistic perspective that does not require one to assume an essentialist perspective on the self as being *either* embodied *or* social. I propose that the body-social problem can be resolved by adopting an enactive approach to the self. However, this point requires nuance and elaboration, since I think there is a version of enactivism that does address the role of bodily and social processes in the emergence of individual autonomy – namely, participatory sense-making – yet still gets us into the same trouble with the body-social problem.

## **THE ENACTIVE APPROACH TO COGNITION**

A central proposal of the enactive approach is that there is a continuity of mind and life, i.e., that mental phenomena can be understood based on the principles that describe the organization and behavior of all life, including the simplest life form such as the single cell organism (Varela, 1997; Thompson, 2007). The philosopher of biology Hans Jonas provided some of the basic definitions of living and cognitive identity. They have been taken up by more recent research in the enactive tradition. The most important idea with respect to the present paper concerns how Jonas conceived of the relation between the individual organism and the world. According to Jonas, the boundary, i.e., that which allows us to identify the individual organism *as* individual is an emerging distinction. He says:

Sameness, while it lasts ... is perpetual self-renewal through process, borne on the shift of otherness. This active self-integration of life alone gives substance to the term "individual" ... its very existence at any moment, its duration and its identity in duration is, then essentially its own function, its own concern, its own continuous achievement (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. 80).

Crucial to Jonas' idea is that the processes involved in the emergence of the organism are in principle not different than those of the organism's environment. These organic processes have a "double nature:"

the materials are essential to [the organism] specifically, accidental individually; it [the organism] coincides with their actual collection at the instant, but is not bound to any one collection in the succession of instants ... "[d]ependent on their availability as material, it [the organism] is independent of their sameness as these; its own, functional identity, passingly incorporating theirs, is of a different order (ibid.).

This means that the individual organism creates its identity as an organism by negotiating a permanent tension between a need for material resources from the world that "it is made of" and the simultaneous drive to emancipate or free itself from *some* of the material processes, so it can exist as an independent individual. The organism's identity thus relies on organic matter that

serves as "constructive material" on one side, and yet at the same time provides identity by being organized in a particular functional way ("a different order"). A fundamental tension exists at the heart of organic life, between a general dependence on material resources and a striving for emancipation from them. Jonas called this tension "needful freedom" (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. 80).

Needful freedom means that an organism's identity is ontologically relational and interactively constructed. Jonas sees the organism as a precarious being, remaining restless as long as it is alive. As Thompson has put it, the "organism has to change; stasis is impossible" (Thompson, 2007, p. 152). It is concerned with its own survival and with having to avoid conditions that lead to disintegration, i.e., its death. The organism is thus permanently in need because in order to survive it has to continuously interact with the environment. One can say that the organism is therefore relatively, but never fully, "in control" of the construction of its very identity.

Over the last decades Jonas' ideas have been elaborated and more formally expressed in various ways, which together ground an enactive view of cognitive individuation (e.g., Maturana and Varela, 1980; Varela et al., 1993; Varela, 1997; Weber and Varela, 2002; Di Paolo, 2005; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo and Thompson, 2014). The basis for this view is the notion of *autopoiesis*, according to which living beings are defined as self-organized autonomous networks that produce and sustain themselves as a systemic whole – an *identity* within a particular domain (Varela, 1997; Maturana and Varela, 1980, 1987). The production and maintenance of such an identity requires that some relations between the processes of the network remain constant despite structural dependence on the environment. This characteristic of identity has been referred to as *operational closure* (Maturana and Varela, 1987; Di Paolo et al., 2010). More recently these ideas have been elaborated in order to understand not only biological but also cognitive individuation. Some enactivists propose that cognitive systems are best conceived as *autonomous* systems. According to this idea, a cognitive system's identity is a network of processes that self-produces and maintains the network as an *inter*connected network, i.e., each process in the network is not only enabling but also enabled by some other process. The identity is sustained under"precarious conditions," since without being organized in an interconnected way the individual processes making up the network would risk running down and the network as a whole could dissipate (Di Paolo and Iizuka, 2008). In line with Jonas, from the enactive perspective cognitive beings are thus considered intrinsically purposeful beings: they strive to maintain life, which is considered a natural property (Weber and Varela, 2002).

Based on this concern for survival, cognitive beings develop a perspective on the world, from which environmental features and interactions are evaluated and acquire a meaning and a normative status. Not every aspect of the world matters. The normative status of environmental aspects and interactions depends on whether they count as threatening or beneficial to the basic goal of identity maintenance (Di Paolo, 2005; Thompson and Stapleton, 2009). Here lies, according to more recent proponents of the enactive approach, the difference between a mere living system and a

living cognitive system. A cognitive system's perspective on the world depends not only directly on its physical survival – the "mother-value of all values" (Weber and Varela, 2002, p. 111) – but enlarges its action possibilities, from immediate reactions to existential perils, to a recognition of more fine-grained ways to maintain its existence. A cognitive system evaluates its interactions *adaptively*, thus flexibly regulating and changing its own conditions of identity maintenance (Di Paolo, 2005). Cognitive individuation in the autonomous self-production of identity entails a view of cognition as goal-directed, value-driven and purposeful. Cognitive systems have a basic intrinsic twofold goal: to create and maintain an identity and to generate sense or meaning.

For that reason cognitive identity of the autonomous system cannot only be grasped from a third-person, operational definition of the processes involved in its individuation; instead, it requires a view from which the world is encountered and interactions are evaluated *by the system* itself. The enactive approach thus adopts a complementary perspective on cognition, one which also considers the perspective of the cognitive system itself. On this view, research on cognition also relies on subjective and phenomenological observations from 1st and 2nd person perspectives (Varela et al., 1993; Lutz, 2002; Lutz and Thompson, 2003; Petitmengin, 2006). With regard to the question of the self, this means taking the first-person perspective – and therefore subjective experiences and phenomenological investigation – seriously, when it comes to describing its basic structures.

## **THE BODY-SOCIAL PROBLEM IN ENACTIVISM**

Let me now consider how the aforementioned two shifts in contemporary cognitive science, the embodied and the social turn, are accounted for in current work in the enactive tradition. In the enactive approach, the body is what grounds a cognitive system's identity and individuates it as a living entity. It allows the autonomous system to differentiate itself from the environment (Di Paolo and Thompson, 2014) and it is also the means and reason for the cognitive system's engagement and evaluations of its interactions with the world (Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2013). On the one hand, the body is assumed to inform the cognitive system how it is faring with regards to its own intrinsic goals – for instance through emotions (Colombetti and Torrance, 2009; Colombetti, 2014) – but it is due to being embodied that, on the other hand, a cognitive system can have any goals at all. If bodily existence were not finite, nothing would matter to a cognitive system. The individuation of identity and sense-making – the adaptive regulation of interaction with the world – can be realized in various ways, including, for example, through the appropriation of non-physiological tools (Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2013). This is based on the life-mind continuity hypothesis, according to which autonomous self-individuation is not limited to biological processes but can be found at higher levels of cognition, too. This brings us to the second shift in contemporary cognitive science, the question of how, for researchers in the enactive tradition, the social figures in the individuation of cognitive identity.

That human life is not merely biological but also social has been taken seriously by some proponents of the enactive approach (Gallagher, 2001; Thompson, 2007; De Jaegher and Froese, 2009; De Jaegher et al., 2010; Di Paolo et al., 2010). One central example for this that I focus on now is "participatory sense-making" (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). Participatory sense-making reflects a classical idea from sociology and system theory, that based on the dynamical behaviors of (at least two) individual agents an interaction process emerges that exhibits new properties irreducible to the individuals concerned, so that it can be described as a new systemic entity (Luhmann, 1992). It uses the concept of autonomy to characterize this new systemic entity as a *social* form of autonomy, an "interactive autonomy." Participatory sense-making elaborates on the idea that identity is not passively given but brought forth through interactions with the environment. But it is concerned with a form of autonomy in the relational processes based on coordinated *social* interactions of participants (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Colombetti and Torrance, 2009, p. 32).

Recent proponents in the enactive tradition acknowledge that human cognition is not brain-bound, but a matter of embodied, sensorimotor engagement with the environment, as well as a matter of social interactions, as the example of participatory sense-making shows.

But with regards to the present issue, the body-social problem, I show now that the enactive approach currently entails an ambiguity about the role of social interactions for the individuation of identity. To explain this requires, as a first step, to disentangle two senses, in which social interactions appear to be relevant for proponents of participatory sense-making. Firstly, in that social interactions matter with regards to a group of (classically two) individuals, jointly creating the autonomy of the interaction process. Here we look at an autonomous system whose identity as a whole is defined in terms of human social interactions. It is a group identity. Secondly, participatory sense-making also says something about the role of social interactions for the individual: they enlarge individual cognitive capacities.

Participatory sense-making thus implies that there are individuals involved in social interaction. But what can be said about their nature as individual identities? This question remains implicit within the theory. But let me point out some indications of what could count as an answer to what the individual is for participatory sense-making. There are at least two possible readings. One option would be to say that social interactions matter not only for augmenting the individual's cognitive capacities but also for its identity as such. This seems to be what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, p. 492) have in mind when they write that their "perspective bypasses the circularity that arises from pre-conceiving individuals as ready-made interactors. Individuals co-emerge as interactors with the interaction." In this vein one might characterize the individual identity as essentially a (socially) relational and interacting being, in other words, as a participant.

This however, raises a worry. Critics might argue that an identity that is defined as being relational or a participant in social interactions runs the risk of dissolving in the interaction process, effectively becoming invisible *as* an individual identity (Hutto, 2010). But why should a focus on the interaction dynamics imply that there is no individual contribution or that the individual risks dissolving? One reason could be that as of now in participatory sense-making the individual's nature as a relational being is underdetermined with respect to *its own identity*. It appears that the intrinsic purpose of participatory sense-making is not directed at the emergence and maintenance of the individual's identity but at that of an overall interaction dynamics, in other words, at the group identity. From this perspective, the individual participants of course make an important contribution. They act as constituents of a higher order dynamics, in that they "sustain the encounter, and the encounter itself influences the agents and invests them with the role of interactors" (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007, p. 492). The problem is that if being relational means being part of a process whose properties are irreducible to the individual (p. 494) and if, as De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, p. 493) say "the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization," then for the individual to be an individual it would have to adapt to an external norm. This norm has to do with the group's identity and the interaction dynamics of which the individual is part. If that were generally be the case, then the individual would actually not be autonomous but rather heteronomous, as it is not governed by its own laws of self-organization. The individual would risk dissolving because it merges with the social environment rather than emerging from it.

Note that De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, p. 492) try to avoid the worry that identity is lost in interaction dynamics. They emphasize that "the autonomy of the individuals as interactors must also not be broken ... [o]therwise the individual (as the other) would "become a tool, [or] an object." They appear to defend their view by saying that a person is individuated from others *qua* being *embodied.* This is supported by quotations such as the following: "When we speak about cognitive agents in interaction, the basis for such a coupling can take various shapes and involve various perceptual systems, sensorimotor flows, neural, and physiological processes, external objects, and technological mediation." Co-regulation involves "bodily variables, such as relative positions and timing between movements, coordination between perceptual systems, and neuro-physiological variables" (ibid.). Such wording suggests that the individuals involved in participatory sense-making are bodily beings. If the mentioned processes and mechanisms of co-regulation ground the individual's identity then it would be an individual that moves, has a brain, interacts with material environment, in short is a body. However, it would also be, as it were, unsocial because nothing in the definition of the body as such is social. The identity of the individual is then defined not in social terms, but remains bodily. Ironically, in their very attempt to keep the individual from dissolving, participatory sense-making therefore risks to downplay the role of the social. The body, while differentiating the individual from others, would be a locus of isolation, not a means of connection and engagement.

One way for proponents of participatory sense-making to avoid this second horn of the dilemma would be to admit that individuation of human identity is not fully determined in terms of bodies in isolation but requires that the body engages in *socially mediated* interactions with the world. This would permit a view according to which both claims come together: individuals are not merely embodied, but they are also interactors. This may be the view that proponents of participatory sense-making are actually arguing for. However, this position would suffer from the first horn of the dilemma of the body-social problem, for it implies that the social matters only as a context, in which bodily individuals relate to each other as otherwise ready-made identities. Participatory sense-making risks trivializing the role of social interactions as mere context, a position that stands in stark contrast to the original claims of the theory.

When it comes to defining the individual, the enactive approach currently thus gives an ambiguous answer to the body-social problem. With regards to embodiment and the role of social interactions for the self as a whole, it remains caught in a dilemma. With its identity heteronomically defined as being a participant, the individual either risks immersing and getting lost in the social interaction, or the individual becomes isolated, with its identity defined in terms of bodily processes. Like other research in embodied and social cognitive science that attemps to define the individual as a whole, participatory sense-making actually runs the risk of being individualistic, not in the sense that it implies a split between an objective and material world and the brain-bound individual, but rather a split between a material and social world and *body-bound* individuals.

To conclude, while participatory sense-making is essential for understanding social cognition as a processual and interactive phenomenon and will be important to understand some of the underlying dynamics of group identity construction and interrelations of individuals, its concept of the individual remains ambiguous. We have still to provide more steps within the conceptual move from the low-level cellular to the higher, bodily and social levels of autonomy.

Without further conceptual clarifications and a definition of what counts as the individual, the concept of autonomy, which is considered a crucial building block for the enactive approach to human cognitive individuation, remains underspecified. If this remains the case, critics of the enactive approach might find it difficult to see how the notion of autonomy can help cognitive scientists address important questions at the intersection of individual and social cognition.

As we will see in the remainder of this paper, the notion of individual autonomy can be elaborated following the classical logic of the enactive position itself. In the next two sections I outline how one can account for the individual in cognition in a way that avoids the body-social problem without being reductive or essentialist. I propose an approach to the self that acknowledges plurality while also offering an idea how it might form a coherent unity.

## **AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO THE SELF**

In this section I outline an account for the individual self in a way that avoids a tension between the role of bodily and social processes in cognitive individuation. From an enactive point of view, it is therefore crucial to carefully distinguish on the one hand between two different kinds of identity that the enactive approach refers to as autonomous system – the identity of a group (autonomy in the interaction process) and the identity of the individual (individual autonomy). On the other hand, we also need to differentiate two kinds of organizational principles – one in terms of bodily and organismic, and the other, in terms of social interaction processes. What I focus on here is how bodily and social processes matter for individual autonomy.

We must also acknowledge that, while the individualism entailed in an (essentially) embodied view of the self is reductive, it also has an important point: it introduces a distinction between the individual and the world and thus makes it distinguishable as what it is: an individual, and not the world. As I argue in the following, it is not the distinction between individual and world *per se* that we should give up, but the degree to which a brain- or body-bound view would force us to endorse it. Speaking about separation from the environment (and thus about the individual as an identifiable whole) does not rule out that social interactions are vital for cognition (as participatory sense-making has it) nor force us to assume that the individual is an isolated being parachuted into the social world. The solution is to reconcile both views by finding a common ground from which a middle way can emerge.

I propose that this common ground can be derived from the logic of the individuation of organismic identity entailed in Hans Jonas' notion of "needful freedom." The notion captures a principle that I believe is most useful for beginning to conceptualize the basic organization of the human self as a distinguishable unit of explanation. This principle is what I will call the individuation *through and from a world*: an individual identity reflects, in its structure and existential needs and concerns, the world *from* which it continuously emerges; but, in order to exist as an individual, it thereby also emancipates itself from the world *through* those very same processes.

This principle demands two things: first, that the processes defining an identity are in principle of the same kind as those of its environment and second, that there is not only interaction with the world but also *emancipation* from it. The two together ground the tension between needing the world (needful) and striving to emancipate from it (freedom).

In line with the hypothesis of the life-mind continuity, I propose to use the principle of individuation *through and from a world* to inspire a new look at the individual self, which can be formalized in terms of the enactive notion of autonomy. The key idea for this to temporarily free Jonas' notion from the realm of the bodily and organic and to wonder what it would mean for a human *social* individual to be needful and free. The body-social problem for participatory sense-making (and cognitive science in general) arises when, while making the embodied and social turn, one does not fully endorse the principle of *through and from a world*. Freeing, I should thus emphasize, really means to bracket for a moment any role that the body might play in the individuation of human cognitive identity and to instead consider human individuation as a social process rigorously and all the way down (the body does play a non-trivial role but I will get to this in the next section). This means to define the human self *organizationally* as a whole in terms of social interactions and exchanges with the environment. In this context I refer to social interactions as virtual or actual interpersonal engagements of at least two individuals, but also processes of self-relating and being related in social relationships4. The types of processes that individuate the self as identity are therefore relational in nature (Tschacher and Rössler, 1996). This realization means that the self is never seen as given or as something that an individual just *has* – it is an achievement, constantly open to change and, at best, something *between* individuals. The self thus never just *is* but rather emerges continuously and jointly relying on behavior and action and on doing and being together with others.

The next important step is to thereby take seriously that, while the principle of individuation *through and from a world* entails the individual's emergence in dependence on the social world, it also requires its emancipation from it. Without this second aspect, that is without a distinction, the individual would dissolve in social interactions, becoming invisible *as* individual. Again, to introduce this distinction does not require a shift to an ontologically different kind of identity, say the body (or brain). It can be achieved at the same level. It simply means that the social processes involved in individuation matter in different ways: in providing the "material" on which the individual's identity constructively relies, but also in forming its identity as that particular social individual standing out against the social relations of which it is made. I believe Mead captured the same idea in principle when he said, in *Mind, Self and Society*, that the self is "an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current" (Mead, 1934, p. 182).

In this way we begin to expand Jonas' concept of needful freedom, from referring to biological individuation, to an individuation in terms of social interactions. However, to say that the individual emerges through social interactions is not quite enough to capture the idea of freedom and emancipation entailed in the principle of *through and from a world.* Individuation must also involve a particular flexibility and the possibility of ongoing emergence, not just of a one-time instantaneous independence. We have seen this in the case of the organism whose freedom is relative in the sense that it "coincides with their actual collection at the instant, but is not bound to any one collection in the succession of instants" (Jonas, 1966/2001, p. 80). The organism is always dependent on organic matter but what allows it to be an individual organism is that it is not always dependent on the same organic matter.

I propose that just as the organism's metabolism continuously exerts a choice by taking in only particular processes, while avoiding others, so too the socially organized individual cannot incorporate all social interactions or relations at the same or throughout time, but rather and at different instants in time only particular collections of them. The basic idea is thus to transfer the temporal dimension entailed in Jonas' perspective on individuation to the level of the human individual and to capture the tension of *through and from a world* by admitting that, while individuation always relies on social interactions and relations, these can vary and matter for the individuation of self to different degrees. In principle the individual does therefore not depend on any single

4My requirement for an interaction to count as social is therefore lower than typically assumed in enactive social cognition. A social interaction need not involve equal subjects. A relation between an infant and its care-giver, a prisoner and guard or between an ego-centric and empathic person is social even when the recognition of subjects as free and autonomous individuals might have different degrees.

one of them. The construction of human identity occurs not in terms of organismic, but rather *social needful freedom.*

Social needful freedom would do more justice to the role of social interactions and relations than current models of the individual in cognitive science allow: they do not merely matter in that they constitute the individual's identity as a participant in an interaction or belonging to a group. It is also through social interactions and relations that the individual can free itself and enable itself to move away from some interactions and/or to engage in certain others. Because at different instants in time the individual can engage in certain or disengage from certain other relations, it achieves a relative or functional degree of independency, a mobility that is social. In this way the individual frees and distinguishes itself through time, not merely through being a moving separate body. Nevertheless, as long as it is an individual, it cannot free itself fully from the social interactions and relations, since they are the general "relational material" that it is made of and only against and through which the individual could ever be emancipated5.

Let me now indicate how the idea of social needful freedom can be used for elaborating the enactive notion of autonomy as introduced in section "The Enactive Approach to Cognition," so that it can inspire an approach to self that is integrating without being reductive or essentialist. I would like to emphasize that I aim to initiate the beginning steps toward re-thinking the concept of autonomy to ground novel approaches to the self, not to provide a full-fledged theory of the self.

The model is basic in the sense that it conceptualizes the self at the most encompassing level required for understanding it as an organized unity, while however abstracting over particular phenomena of self, inter- and intra-individual variations, as well as across development, disposition and enactment of self and the particular cultural context, in which the self is embedded in. Indications of how this abstraction can be used to illuminate the different manifestations and dimensions of self will be given later. Right now the goal is to help in avoiding the trap of thinking of the self either as individualistic and embodied, or as social and potentially lost in interaction.

The first step toward a definition of individual autonomy in terms of social cognition is to begin thinking the individual as arising from a sea of social relational, not merely bodily processes. In this way the autonomous network is therefore not only

a metabolically "self-generated identity" (Di Paolo et al., 2010) but actually also, and necessarily, an identity that remains open to structural change generated in interaction with others. It is a *self-other-generated* network. This means that the organizational process that constitutes the identity of the individual are defined in terms of interpersonal behavior and action6. Let me now determine in a second step just how these processes are minimally organized so that they bring about the individual as self-other generated autonomous network.

Capturing the idea of social needful freedom in terms of individual autonomy, the autonomous network that constitutes an individual's self must be organized such that, while principally relying on social relations, it can also resist and therefore free itself from some of these relations. I propose to use the term *distinction* to capture the emancipation as individual *from* certain social relations. Without emancipation there could be no identifiable entity (phenomenologically corresponding to a sense of ipseity, or of alterity in perceiving the other). Being distinct or emancipated however, does not mean that this individual merely stands out, independently, against a vast and unchanging sea of social interactions and relations. In addition to distinction, social needful freedom also entails that the individual continuously becomes individual *through* social interaction and relations. I thus suggest using the term *participation* to denote the other side of social needful freedom: the possibility to organizationally rely at different moments in the succession of time on different instantiations of social interactions and relations (see **Figure 1**)7.

Both kinds of network processes, those enabling distinction and those that enable participation, are required together to ensure social needful freedom and to bring about the individual as a network of autonomous self-other organization. Without distinction the individual would risk becoming heteronomously determined and forced to rely on the next best or only a limited set of social interactions. But without participation and its act of openness toward others, the individual eschews structural renewal, thus risking isolation and rigidity. This describes what some enactivists refer to as "precarious conditions" of autonomy (see "The Enactive Approach to Cognition"). In this case, distinction and participation both keep the individual from a particular risk, namely

5The idea of social needful freedom might be in tension with some phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity (e.g., Henry, 1988 or Husserl, 1992/1930). The sense of self in our self-other relation involves a first-person givenness and therewith a sense of separation from others and, at the same time, there is something about the experience of the other that escapes my own experience. This seems to contradict my idea that the individual can never free itself from the social as material of its own self-constitution. I am afraid I cannot do justice to the rich body of phenomenological inquiries into self and understanding others in this paper. But generally speaking I am convinced that the idea of social freedom is in principle compatible with phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity. What it challenges are some deep intuitions about the structure of first-person perspective and to which extent experiences of ipseity and alterity are conclusive to it. The suggestion that, contra Henry's absolute immanence, it might be relationally co-enacted, is not to replace, but rather to complement phenomenological inquiries. My hope is that the proposed *organizational* perspective herein helps to specify just the how first-person perspective is constituted. This could be seen as part of an ongoing dialog between cognitive science and phenomenology of intersubjectivity.

6Such overlap of behavioral and identity constructing processes can already be seen in non-human animals. Fisher spiders for example store air bubbles trapped on the surface of their body, thus mechanically stabilizing the bubbles (so called "plastrons") to prevent them from collapsing under water. They then use the oxygen contained in the bubbles to survive for longer periods than they otherwise could, under the water surface (Flynn and Bush, 2008). Thus the survival of the insect under water relies not only on constructive processes (of its metabolism) but also on a particular behavioral and interactive strategy (collecting bubbles, storing them etc.).

7Note that social relationality need not translate to actual engagement, or actual interaction, with others. The self in the mode of *distinction* is not suddenly socially unrelated, rather it is socially related in two ways: first, in order to be distinguishable as individual it relies on particular social relational processes that favor its distinctiveness, and second, it is related in that the social relational processes that do not favor or do not matter for its distinctiveness necessarily act as the system's environment only against which is visible as unity. Similarly, being in *participation* does not mean to cease to exist as separate individual; were this the case, no *one* would be distinguishable as participant. For this reason participation is not equal to participatory sense-making. The latter adopts a more narrow perspective on the individual, which is determined heteronomously, in terms of its contribution to a group identity.

**FIGURE 1 | Socially enacted autonomy.** The graphic illustrates the basic organization of the network of processes that constitute the self as individual socially enacted autonomy. The network processes are social interactions and relations (the blue-red grid) that are spanned between two poles, distinction (blue ball, D) and participation (red ball, P). D and P are interconnected in that they enable each other. Together, the poles determine and qualify the overall tendencies of the network processes (indicated by the blue thin arrows left and the red thin arrows on the right) as having more or less distinction/emancipation and participation/openness. The network processes are in tension (the double arrow in blue and red). When social interactions and relations exhibit higher tendencies toward P, the "pull" from the opposite pole D ensures that the processes do not end up in a extreme degree of P. In this way the network avoids the risk of dissolution. Vice versa, when social interaction and relations have a higher degree of D then the network's organization tends to balance this with increasing tendencies toward P, thereby avoiding the risk of isolation.

isolation from others or the dissolution in social interactions, and they enable each other in doing so.

I propose to capture these ideas in the following definition for human socially enacted autonomy of the individual:

Individual autonomy is a self-other generated network of precariously organized interpersonal processes whose systemic identity emerges as a result of a continuous engagement in social interactions and relations that can be qualified as moving in two opposed directions, toward emancipation from others (distinction) and toward openness to them (participation).

Because of the tension between a risk to dissolve or to become isolated, the individual, much like the organism, remains permanently concerned with the continuity of its own existence. But while mere living systems strive to survive by avoiding interactions with the environment that threaten their biological survival, the human self *qua* self-other generation has to avoid tendencies in social interactions leading to social death.

Just like the organism in its metabolic autonomy, the social human being follows an intrinsic existential norm guiding behavior and evaluations of interactions. The important difference is that the organismic identity as a bodily whole is secured by homeostasis ensuring the body remains stable throughout different interactions with the environment. In the case of the social self, the stability of the unity is not achieved by individual biological or bodily means, but through engaging with others, by learning first how to and then continuously negotiating the balance between the processes of distinction and participation. This balance between distinction and participation is achieved by navigating a range between two extremes, total distinction and total participation and to thereby coregulate, monitor, identify and seek to avoid tendencies of falling into either of them. This could be the social version of what some enactivists refer to as adaptive regulation (**Figure 2**). The negotiation of distinction and participation can be seen as a co-enacted, quasi-homeostatic principle keeping the self relatively stable and alive as a socially organized and organizing existence.

Mere organismic systems adaptively evaluate their interactions with regards to nutrition needed for the maintenance of metabolism. They seek the right kind and amounts of food, avoiding poisonous food and preferring especially nutritious food. Humans need an additional kind of nutrition. Because human autonomy is co-generated with others, it is necessarily vulnerable to disturbances and conflict. Others can fail or refuse to contribute to a person's identity affirmation, which could ultimately interfere with the very organizational network that constitutes human autonomy. Particular interactions (or the lack thereof) would lead to problems, either with regards to the individual's experience *as* somebody individual or with her experiences of being somebody that is *connected* with others. For them to adaptively regulate their own states and interactions with the social environment means to evaluate actions with regard to their contribution to a *socially defined boundary*. To this end, processes enabling or limiting *recognition* of the twofold need for emancipation (distinction) from and openness to others (participation) can be relevant8. In line

8An important question for further elaboration is how processes of distinction and participation could be mediated in linguistic terms. To this end, it might be fruitful to relate the present argument to Maturana's work on languaging and the creation of consensual domains in which individuals co-structure their social, not merely organismic, identities (Maturana, 1978). A further crucial linkage exists to developmental psychology. Research showing the vital role of intersubjective engagement in early infant development (e.g., Trevarthen, 1993; Braten, 2004; Stern, 2009) could be relevant for specifying how processes of distinction and participation organize the initial development of socially enacted autonomy. The educational psychology of Bruner, who was also the first to use the term "enactive," could inspire further elaborations of how children continuously expand their self-reflexive capacities and understanding others through active, intersubjectively structured learning (Bruner, 1996).

**FIGURE 2 | Adaptive regulation of the twofold basic norm of distinction and participation.** The three graphics illustrate different degrees of distinction (D, blue ball) and participation (P, red ball) in different contexts. Graphic **(A)** illustrates an individual featuring a stronger experience of participation (e.g., when being in love, dancing tango, emerging in the crowd at a concert). Graphic **(B)** illustrates an individual with an equally strong degree of distinction and participation (e.g., in the intimate encounter or during a fight with a close person). The third graphic **(C)** illustrates an individual that experiences a higher degree of distinction (e.g., during a conference talk, in non-transcendental states of meditation). with the present suggestions one could say that social recognition is vital throughout life (Ikäheimo, 2009). Recognition is the nutrient required to co-construct the boundary of the self. If this were not the case, solitary confinement would not be chosen as one of the harshest punishments. As studies with prisoners have shown, social isolation can lead to serious short-term and long-term psychiatric disturbances such as paranoia and hallucinations (Grassian, 1983; Haney, 2003; Guenther, 2013) and as research on social exclusion and ostracism shows human contact is needed to sustain a minimal social identity and prevent social death (Bauman, 1992; Williams, 2007).

According to the present proposal social death has two faces. It could occur when the individual gets stuck in the extremes of either of the two dimensions, distinction or participation. An extreme degree of distinction would mean that the individual has lost its connection to the very structures that it is made from (it risks dying from isolation), while an extreme degree of participation would mean that the individual has lost its individuality (it risks dying from dissolution). There are examples that approximate such extreme degrees in disorders of the self and particularly in symptoms of schizophrenia (Parnass and Sass, 2010), such as social or self-isolation (extreme distinction) or loss of agency (extreme participation).

Recall from section "The Enactive Approach to Cognition" that the enactive approach also provides a route for integrating a thirdperson, organizational perspective with the subjective dimension and phenomenological perspective of the system itself. Though it is outside the scope of the present argument, a thorough and long-term investigation concerning how the processes of distinction and participation structure subjectivity is as yet required. In the remainder of this section I provide some examples to indicate how humans ensure their survival as social existence through interactions and relations that generate or prevent processes of distinction and participation.

The above definition of socially enacted autonomy proposes that humans co-generate their identity following a twofold norm. This can be used to structure the individual's perspective on the world in terms of subjective experiences that are evaluated according to whether and how they serve survival, i.e., in this case, the maintenance of the self.

Both distinction and participation are (experienced) types of social interactions and relations, though they say nothing about the amount or actuality of engagement. Distinction roughly means that a person experiences herself as emancipated and distinguished from certain social interactions and relations. It involves a sense of separation and of being someone in her own right. This can apply for a diversity of self-conscious experiences (whether positively, negatively or otherwise evaluated): doing yoga, nervousness in front of an audience,feeling disconnectedfrom your partner, being proud of an achievement, being the stranger at a party, but also the joyful experience of finally being alone after having spent the entire day with other people. Such experiences mirror the basic structure of social autonomy, as striving to maintain a particular degree of emancipation as individual. Participation then generally refers to experiences of feeling both connected and open. It involves a sense of readiness to affect and to be affected by the other. Again, there are manifold examples: the sense of self as curious when falling

in love with someone, the pull we feel when finding somebody sexually attractive, afeeling of letting go when dancing tango, being one with the crowd at a concert and so forth. Such experiences refer to the basic structure of social autonomy as striving to remain connected and open to particular types of social interactions and relations (see **Figure 2**).

I have given examples, in which either a sense of distinction or participation is more prominent. However, these two qualities – of experiencing oneself as separatefrom others and as somebody willing to engage – precede or follow each other, and they can even overlap. There are situations, in which we experience the shift from one quality to another quite clearly. If, e.g., in a difficult discussion our partner finally seems to understand what we want to say, a relief or a sudden relaxation may appear, upon which we begin to feel less separated from the other and begin to experience a readiness to be open again. Yet something about this readiness is already found in feeling separated and misunderstood – one can at the same time feel the need to just overcome the conflict and to be in harmony again. Similarly, at a conference presentation we can experience both a sense of separation from the audience (for instance because of nervousness in the face of criticism) and a sense of eagerness to engage with it (because we would like to discuss our ideas) at the same time. One of the clearest examples of the presence of these two basic kinds of experience is perhaps found in moments of emotional intimacy, or better, in the struggle therein. In an intimate encounter, experiences of wanting to engage and connect to the partner and fear of rejection or of losing oneself are situated very close to each other and individuals can sometimes continuously oscillate between them. In such moments humans can struggle to find the fine attunement between a readiness to let go and be open to other (participation) while, at the same time, an attunement to owning yourself and remaining visible as another individual (distinction). Emotional intimacy is mostly rare, perhaps because it is where the necessarily open and vulnerable self is at its greatest risk.

In contemplation of human existence, it is our task to remind and "elucidate those fundamental aspects that are so familiar to us, so taken for granted, that we often fail to realize their true significance and even deny their existence" (Zahavi, 2008, pp. 127–128). According to the present proposal, what is so familiar to us simply is human life and how it continuously expresses itself to ourselves through sequences of experiences of being more or less separated and of being more or less connected. What we struggle to recognize until we are in a social or personal crisis, in non-transcendental meditation or adopting a researcher's and philosopher's stance, is that *both* these experiential dimensions are shades of something that is fundamental to our nature: we need and we want to be individuals in our own right, distinguished, able and free but we thereby also need others and want to be connected, vulnerable, supported and receptive. It is when our standard self-other perception is challenged that we appreciate that these needs are probably never achieved independently from others. Being both emancipated and relational should not be treated independently, both conditions the self at the same time.

This basic model of socially enacted autonomy could constitute an important conceptual move for an enactive approach to the self. It offers an organizational principle for approaching the self as a co-generated and co-maintained whole. On this view, the self is not just a lose collection of aspects but has boundaries that are generated through interacting and being related to others. The self in its most minimal sense, thus escapes the body. It is never fully separable from the social environment, but instead determined precisely in terms of the types of social interactions and relations of which it is, at the same time, a part. Without an ongoing engagement with other people, and without their contribution, there is no generation of self.

Yet, that is not to say that the self is essentially social and "nothing more." The argument is not in favor of a disembodied conception of the self. To the contrary, as I show in the next section, in this organization of the self as social existence the body plays a more than a trivial role.

## **TOWARD RESOLVING THE BODY-SOCIAL PROBLEM**

As a consequence of the above proposal, speaking of the embodied self cannot mean that the self *is* the body. Through birth we indeed become a bodily identity, as we "emancipate" ourselves to some extent as physiological entities in a material environment. However, to emancipate as a self, as identity which differs not from organic bodies but *from other human subjects*, a further process of individuation is required (Mahler et al., 2000). This process of individuation, so I suggest in this paper, is achieved through social interactions and relations.

This proposal is fully compatible with the idea of an embodied self where the body, rather than being considered the seat of the self, changes its status and becomes the self's means and mediator.

The body is then non-trivial for the self as a whole to the extent that it functions as a matrix of co-constructed existence, helping (together with the brain, of course) to organize human social existence and to monitor and regulate the intrinsic goal and minimal purpose of the self: to be some*one*.

It is an open research question how bodily consciousness relates to the human (social) self from an enactive point of view. At this point I can only hint at it. For the enactive approach the creation of a living and cognitive identity brings about a perspective, which is considered as a minimal form of consciousness. This chimes well above mentioned research on the bodily basis of selfconsciousness. The idea is to then extend these ideas to the social domain. If, as I suggest, the self is not a bodily but socially coenacted identity, and if consciousness arises with the creation of identity, then an essential part of (bodily) self-consciousness may emerge through relations with others. Bodily self-consciousness, embodied emotions and existential feelings can then be seen as ways of informing an individual about its state of being in a world of others.

Conjoining the embodied turn with the social in a more than pluralistic sense, the idea of the self as socially enacted continues to do justice to the embodied turn in cognitive science, which recognizes the non-neuronal body, but risks reducing it to a developmental role. It could also pick up where extended functionalist approaches to embodiment remain inflationary (Kyselo and Di Paolo, 2013). Acknowledging that (cognitive) identity is irreducible to the physiology of one's own body while at the same

time considering the body a matrix of an enacted social existence, provides the body with a more clearly defined status. It is not a rock or remote island, but it is also not a random vessel. On the present account, being someone implies being an individual that one can connect to and that remains open to being affected by others. The body plays a major role in making this possible. It is an interface for connection. But the structure of that body interface to the world is not rigid. It is fluctuating, a subject to permanent change – change that mostly happens in reaction to and in dependence on our relations with other beings. In continuation of Bernstein's theory of motor psychology, according to which bodily movement shapes the brain's motor system instead of bodily movement being controlled by the brain (Thelen, 2004), within the logic of the argument at hand, there might be a further reversal regarding the relation between body and sociality. The body is not merely a means but also an imprint of social engagement. As a consequence, bodily consciousness alone would be insufficient to ground even the most minimal sense of the human self. Instead, it might be seen as a kind a sensor for monitoring social engagements and relations with the goal of social homeostasis. This sensor does not merely reside within the realms of the individual's body and actions, it is also co-constituted in and through the space created between individuals.

Of course, there is something quite crucial to insisting that a person feels their very self changes when they change bodily aspects of their existence, be it when they become sick, suffer an accident leading to disability or even when they only change slightly, say with getting a new hair cut or dress. But we can admit this without also arguing that body and self are ontologically the same. The point I want to make is that many bodily changes matters for someone because of what they mean with respect to this person's relation to the social world and how she fares in its relation to others. Bodily experiences acquire a social meaning and I propose that this meaning is generally evaluated according to the twofold norm of distinction and participation. The new hair is not merely a change to some biomaterial that grows out of my head. It is a change to the way I look, and thus relate to myself and to others, and of course to the way, in which others relate to me. My partner might notice the difference in style and compliment that I look fresher, more beautiful etc. But if after my haircut I went to work for *medicins sans frontiers*, the change of style would probably not matter much. The point is what I feel about my haircut depends on how I saw and now see myself and on how others have seen and now see me. It requires an implicit act of relationality to make this bodily change significant for my self.

Let me now come back to the two empirical examples, introduced in section "The Body-Social Problem in Cognitive Science" where this point becomes more pressing: the possibility of positive quality of life in LIS and social pain. Recall first the case of LIS patients, who despite being globally paralyzed, report a positive quality of life. One way of making sense of this is by adopting what I would call a cognitive adaptation strategy. In a recent study, Nizzi et al. (2012) conducted interviews with LIS patients to assess how the paralysis affected their sense of personal identity. They found that patients can adjust very well to the objective change in physiology and actually "feel the same as before the accident." According to the authors, this is because the patients maintained a positive subjective "bodily representation" (p. 435). If positive quality of life has to do with a positive self representation then this adjustment strategy can explain why patients feel well despite the paralysis. However, Nizzi et al.'s (2012) interpretation seems to presuppose a disembodied view of the self. Whether or not the body is subject to severe objective change plays no role for the patient's self as long as she consciously decides that it does not. One of the problems for an explanation of well-being in LIS is that it risks trivializing the role of the non-neuronal body for the self – all the necessary work could be done by a bodily representation, presumably located in the brain. For an (essentially) embodied approach to the self this interpretation must seem counter-intuitive. The embodied self implies that there is a relation between objective physiological change and subjective experiences of self and well-being. On adopting this view, one would probably have to assume that LIS, being a global bodily paralysis, is in a sense also a disorder of the self and of (bodily) self consciousness. If the self is equated with the body and the bodily self considered as grounding first-person subjectivity, then the patients' well-being should be affected. And yet, as the results of Nizzi et al.'s (2012) interviews and other qualitative studies on LIS patients seem to suggest, this is not the case. The embodied approach to the self (as a whole) would thus actually make a counterfactual prediction.

The proposed model of the self as socially organized autonomy could provide an alternative to the cognitive adaptation story. On the enactive interpretation, the self remains non-trivially embodied in the sense that it is mediated by the body; the body is part of the interface organizing the individual's social existence. According to this perspective, the patient can adapt to the new situation precisely because she is not the physiological body, but a genuinely social self. The physiological change matters because it changes the ways, in which the patient is able to relate to others and, in which others relate to her. To the extent that these relations are still given, even the most minimal form of communication – as can be seen in the usage of brain computer interfaces – can suffice to enact the processes necessary for the individuation of self (distinction and participation) and thus for integrating bodily changes into a positive sense of self. This interpretation is also empirically supported by studies of less severe forms of disability. Babies with Moebius syndrome, for example, lack facial expressions and are unable to show their care-givers "that someone is home" (Cole, 2009, p. 351). This can affect how care-givers react to their children. They might respond to them with "reduced signals" which can in turn cause "emotional impoverishment" (Cole, 2009, p. 354). For patients with spinal cord injury "disablement [ha]s nothing to do with the body. It is a consequence of social oppression" (Cole, 2009, p. 348). Paralysis is "not simply a physical affair ... but an ontology, a condition of our being in the world" (Murphy, 1990, p. 90). Despite global restrictions, the LIS patient is still "yearning for intersubjectivity" (Dudzinski, 2001, p. 43). Statements such as these suggest that it is through being related to others that bodily changes can affect and be integrated in our self. The fact that the "quality of life often equates with social rather than physical interaction" (Gosseries et al., 2009, p. 199) makes sense when the boundaries of the self are not determined

by bodily processes alone, but rather in terms of relational and co-enacted processes. LIS can be considered a disorder of the self to the extent that the body is restricted as the individual means of social relationality, not as the seat or constitutive basis of the self. More accurately, like other cases of disability, LIS should be seen as a "disease of social relations" (Murphy, 1990, p. 4). This also means, for better or worse, whether she is able to integrate severe bodily changes and lead a happy life, does not entirely depend on the patient herself, but also on the support and recognition of others.

An interpretation of well-being in LIS makes sense from a disembodied view, but the idea of the self as mediated by the body offers a non-reductive explanation, doing justice to both, the embodied and the social turn in cognitive science.

The present proposal also makes sense in light of the fact that social rejection hurts (see "The Body-Social Problem in Cognitive Science"). One might be tempted to read this fact prima facie as evidence for the primacy of the organic body in individuating the self as a whole and so as supporting the idea of the (essentially) embodied self. This is indeed what Eisenberger seems to have in mind when arguing that the pain is evolutionary beneficial since it helps to ensure survival. On such a reading, the social matters, contextually in allowing an individual to survive as a biological identity (a minimal bodily self, if you will). The social rejection of being excluded from participating in a game hurts because it indicates a risk, namely that others will not be there to help protect the biological self 9.

The alternative would be to consider the evidence that the major source of concern for human existence does not stem from nuisances within the organic body itself, but rather from the fact that human existence is organized socially. Thus, instead of reducing sociality to the role of the means to a biological end, why not take the evidence as direct support for the fact that humans are concerned about their existence as social beings? I would agree with Eisenberger that the pain of social rejection is beneficial for survival. But in light of the present consideration, this survival is not merely biological. Rather, the empirical example can be seen as support for the hypothesized relation between socially enacted autonomy and the fundamental role of social recognition as enabling the processes of distinction and participation. Social rejection constitutes a potential violation of recognizing me as someone others can connect to or who can connect to others, but it also risks reducing my ability to be seen as a distinct individual. On assuming that the body mediates a socially enacted self, pain of social rejection could be one of the body's clever ways of cautioning the self against the lack of recognition and its ultimate consequence, *social* death. I would thus reverse the

9One might wonder whether and to what extent this can be extrapolated to human identity in general. It could invite an odd argument according to which humans must suffer physiological pain for every social activity in which they are not included. This is obviously not the case. Whether a certain interaction counts as a case of social rejection might be better determined by evaluating whether it means something to the person, and this depends on how she is related or wants to be related to the people involved in the interaction. If a person does not care to be included in the activity, then she would not feel rejected and therefore also not experience physiological pain. Even if the person desires to be included, if she reassures herself that that the exclusion is temporary, she avoid interpreting the situation as a rejection and thus remain pain-free.

standard argument: the social does not help the bodily self as a whole, instead the body is helping the self to survive as a social whole.

To conclude these considerations on the quality of life and pain of social rejection, there is no logical reason that forces us to prefer one of the three possibilities of interrelating body, self and sociality (disembodied, essentially embodied or bodily mediated). The first example supports both a disembodied and a socially enacted view of the self, while the second example seems to be plausible on both an essentially embodied and on a socially enacted and bodily mediated account of the self. I am thus not arguing that my approach is the only game in town. What I would like to suggest however is that it might be preferable for the purpose of cross-disciplinary dialog, since it rises to the challenge of the body-social problem without avoiding either, the embodied or social turn in cognitive science. At the same time it might have advantages over a pattern approach to the self, since it does not merely account for diversity but also provides an account of the self as a coherent unity and determines how other dimensions such as sociality and (neural and more than neural) embodiment might integrate as aspects of this unity.

## **CONCLUSION**

In this paper, I have introduced the body-social problem, the question for cognitive science of how bodily and social aspects go together in an account of the human self as a whole. I have discussed the problem in more detail with regards to research on social cognition in enactivism, where it translates to the question of how bodily individual autonomy and higher, socially enacted forms of autonomy, are interrelated.

I proposed the principle of individuation through and from a world to extend Jonas' notion of needful freedom and to ground an integrative perspective on the embodied and social self. According to this principle, humans emancipate themselves not merely through organic, but also interpersonal, interactions. Their identity emerges out of a tension concerning social freedom: humans strive to distinguish themselves from others as individuals, yet at the same time they also strive for connection with, and being affected by, others.

I elaborated on the enactive approach to individual autonomy and indicated how this discussion can inform an approach to human identity as co-generated and organized in terms of an adaptive regulation of social distinction and participation processes. I have argued that the enactive approach to the self can be a way for cognitive science to avoid the dilemma of the body-social problem. One does not have to choose between positing an isolated bodily individual or an individual as mere participant. The positive contributions entailed in both horns of the body-social dilemma are brought together in an integrative way. In this view, humans are participating and therefore able to emancipate themselves, and because they emancipate themselves they are able to participate. The self is constitutively social, not merely developmentally, but throughout its life. The body's role is to mediate that social existence and is the major key to ensuring the twofold goal of maintaining both distinction and participation, leaving the possibility open for non-physiological forms of self-co-maintenance, using tools and language-based technology.

The paper provides an alternative to a pattern approach to the self. It acknowledges diversity but as shown in the context of empirical examples, such as the positive quality of life in patients with global paralysis and the pain of social rejection, it also offers some ideas for how they integrate.

These considerations are not meant as a final word on the question of how self, body and sociality interrelate. The paper provides some novel and basic conceptual suggestions for cognitive science to integrate embodiment and sociality in a way that neither underestimates the role of interpersonal relations, nor runs the risk of losing the individual through an overemphasis on group and interaction dynamics. I propose them as steppingstones toward a biologically based, yet social and experientially plausible approach to human individuation. Further investigations, to this end, are required, including philosophical inquiries on self and intersubjectivity at the intersection of philosophy of mind and phenomenology as well as philosophical anthropology. Further required are explorations of existing linkages to intersubjective approaches to self and subjectivity in other fields of cognitive science, especially developmental psychology, psychiatry, and social neuroscience.

# **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

I would like to thank Gabriel Levy, Mike Beaton, Elena Cuffari, and Ezequiel Di Paolo for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work is supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, "TESIS: Toward an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity" (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828).

# **REFERENCES**

Dennett, D. (1992). "The self as a center of narrative gravity," in *Self and Consciousness*, eds F. Kessel, P. Coleand, and D. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Received: 14 May 2014; accepted: 19 August 2014; published online: 12 September 2014.*

*Citation: Kyselo M (2014) The body social: an enactive approach to the self. Front. Psychol. 5:986. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00986*

*This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.*

*Copyright © 2014 Kyselo. This is an open-access article distributed undertheterms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Interaction and self-correction

# *Glenda L. Satne\**

Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

## *Edited by:*

Ezequiel Alejandro Di Paolo, Ikerbasque – Basque Foundation for Science, Spain

## *Reviewed by:*

Julian Kiverstein, Institute of Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Manuel De Pinedo-García, University of Granada, Spain

#### *\*Correspondence:*

Glenda L. Satne, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140-142, 5th Floor, 25.5.20, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
# **INTRODUCTION**

Conceptuality traditionally seems to impose specific challenges to the possibility of a naturalistic account of mind. The issue I address in this paper is how to specify the normative abilities that are associated with conceptual competence in order to meet a very popular challenge in recent developments of philosophy of Mind, what I call the naturalist challenge (NC). I do not intend to provide a complete or even general account of conceptuality but, more modestly, I try to specify certain conditions that a naturalistic account of conceptuality should accommodate, conditions that define a framework of specific questions and concerns, in particular in relation of our capacities of conceptual self-correction, that lead us, I argue, to prioritize a certain approach *vis-à-vis* others: the interaction theory of mutual understanding. In the context of that general approach, I claim it is possible to account for self-correction in a way that is compatible with the challenge at issue.

Addressing the problem of conceptual competence within a naturalist framework makes it necessary to meet the NC, that is, to account for:

(1) the evolutionary path from creatures without language or thought to creatures with both abilities without postulating any explanatory and/or evolutionary gap1.

In this paper, I address the question of how to account for the normative dimension involved in conceptual competence in a naturalistic framework. First, I present what I call the naturalist challenge (NC), referring to both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic dimensions of conceptual possession and acquisition. I then criticize two models that have been dominant in thinking about conceptual competence, the interpretationist and the causalist models. Both fail to meet NC, by failing to account for the abilities involved in conceptual selfcorrection. I then offer an alternative account of self-correction that I develop with the help of the interactionist theory of mutual understanding arising from recent developments in phenomenology and developmental psychology.

## **Keywords: interaction, self-correction, naturalism, normativity, evolution, conceptual abilities**

(2) the capabilities of learning or acquiring conceptual contents – and a natural language – without producing or presupposing any explanatory and/or evolutionary gap or committing to the existence of non-natural entities.

And a further constraint:

(3) Answers to (1) and (2) must be able to justify the attributions of intentional attitudes to children and non-human animals2.

There are two main strategies that have been adopted toward this challenge. Both of them, when broadly construed, define two general models of conceptual abilities that may be described in terms of the adoption of a first-personal perspective or a thirdpersonal one. The first one, that can be called the first-personal model, includes those attempts to understand conceptual abilities that focus on the individual's brain states, conceiving them as dispositions or informational states that are related in appropriate ways to the environment such that they can be conceived as constitutive of the competence involving a specific concept. According to this model, NC is met because the explanatory work is made by a naturalistic specifiable notion, i.e., one that can be found pervasively in the natural sciences, the notion of *causation*. What makes a state constitutive of the competence according to a concept is its being properly *caused* by that to which the concept refers to or is about. In this sense, these approaches are causalist accounts of the nature of conceptual competence.

1It was J. Levine the first to use the expression in the context of the discussion of reductivist accounts of the mind. He said: "In the end, we are right back where we started. The explanatory gap argument doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature. Of course a plausible explanation for there being a gap in our understanding of nature is that there is a genuine gap in nature. But so long as we have countervailing reasons for doubting the latter, we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the former" (http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Levine.html). Even if Levine was referring to another aspect of the mind, the point still applies in relation to the development and evolution of conceptual capacities. The use of the expression "evolutionary gap" is meant to emphasize the need of having an explanation of

how certain capacities evolved from others, instead of postulating a gap in nature. "Explanatory gap" refers to what Levine calls a gap in our understanding, i.e., the insufficiency of a certain set of explanatory tools to infer or otherwise explain conceptual capacities.

2"Justification"in this condition is to be understood in broad terms. Thus, it is meant to cover a broad range of explanatory accounts of those attributions, not merely accounts that will take those attributions to be literally true. There is nevertheless a minimal constraint that justification places in these explanations. It requires that the explanation of the attributions is based on the abilities displayed in the behavior of the organism to which the attributions are made.

The second approach I examine focuses not on the individual brain states but on the attributive standpoint of an interpreter that can understand an individual's behavior conceptually, thus undertaking a third-personal perspective. This strategy is known as an interpretationist account of conceptual abilities. NC is met – so the defenders of this position claim – because this perspective is not committed to there being any specific reality of concepts over and above the interpretational activity of taking the behavior at issue to be explained in terms of the attribution of the concepts in question.

My aim in this paper is twofold:

## **CONCEPTUAL ABILITIES: BASIC NOTIONS AND CONSTRAINTS**

There seem to be good reasons to think that no matter how we define conceptual abilities nor the position we assume concerning the scope of conceptual content and its articulation with experience, being able to apply concepts presupposes as a necessary condition – though of course not sufficient –being able to distinguish between correct and incorrect applications of them in actual cases. This is what we may call the *normative constraint on conceptual abilities*3.

Such constraint can be defined as follows:

Further precisions are required in order to understand correctly the constraint. As it may be apparent, the normative dimension involved in the ability to apply concepts involves the possibility of error.

There are nevertheless two notions of error or mistake that must be distinguished. In particular, there are two different kinds of mistakes that we attribute to others in their use of concepts. On the one hand, we may attribute error to someone when she misapplies a concept. I call this *misapplication or conceptual mistake*. On the

other, we may attribute lack of competence to a person regarding a concept when she lacks the concept or is simply not applying the concept at all. This I what I call *absence of application*. Such distinction will prove especially fruitful when assessing whether a model of conceptual abilities can fulfill the normative constraint accommodating the requirements of NC.

Consider the following cases:

In the first case, we attribute to John that he is adding wrongfully, in the second one that he simply is not adding. While (i) is a case of conceptual mistake, (ii) is just a case of absence of application. The crucial difference lies in the fact that while in the former case the concept in question is relevant to the evaluation of the action, i.e., is relevant for the way in which the performance is carried out; in the second case the concept is not relevant for explaining his performance, it is simply absent4. Following our previous constraints, to account for the normative constraint specified in (1) and (2) above, it is necessary to be able to account for the abilities that underlie the attribution to a subject that she is committing a mistake in the use of a concept (conceptual mistake), and to distinguish that case from a case in which the subject is simply not applying the concept (absence of application), i.e., it is necessary to account for when and how someone who uses a concept, commits and recognizes conceptual mistakes and accordingly self corrects her use and to distinguish that case from one in which the subject is not applying the concept at all.

How should we then understand self-correction in application of concepts? Self-correction in the relevant sense seems to involve three dimensions of performance:

As it will be shown in the following sections, both causalist and interpretationist accounts of conceptual abilities fail when accounting for the distinction between cases of misapplication or conceptual mistakes and cases of absence of application and the consequence of this failure is their inability to meet NC.

## **THE CAUSALIST CONCEPTION OF CONCEPTUAL ABILITIES5**

The way in which competence regarding a specific concept X can be defined in causal terms is the following:

3For a full list of necessary conditions for the possession of conceptual abilities, see Camp (2009) and Scotto (2010).

4Of course there are cases like (ii) in which we say that John should have been adding and *ante* that there is then an *error of performance*. But in such cases, what we mean is that *he should have known the concept*: the problem resides precisely in the absence of application of that concept and not a misapplication of it.

5Forbes (1984), Ginet (1992) and Fodor (1998) are some of the advocates of this approach, although it is much more broadly accepted.

John is competent with respect to concept X iff given certain conditions C, John is disposed to apply X to y iff X(y) is true6.

In this framework, conceptual mistakes are modeled in terms of the failure of a mechanism: conditions C are not given. The reason for this failure might be internal to the mechanism, that is, that the mechanism is malfunctioning or it might be the absence of one of the enabling conditions required for the mechanism to work.

I claim that when assuming such way of understanding conceptual competence, there is no non-question-begging way of distinguishing between conceptual mistakes and absence of application.

It is important to bear in mind that if John's mistakes can be accounted for equally as conceptual mistakes according to a concept, or as a case of lack of application, there would be no way to account for the capacity to make conceptual mistakes. Say John says "5 + 6 = 12." We would be immediately inclined to think he was adding and adding wrong. But he could equally be performing a different operation, say, +∗, and doing it correctly. If an account of conceptual capacities could not distinguish between both cases, it would fail to explain what is for John to have any conceptual ability and to distinguish this from the case where this ability is merely absent.

The causalist model fails to provide a plausible distinction between conceptual mistakes and absence of application at least for two reasons:

The first reason is that, according to this model, the subject's reactions/dispositions to apply concepts can be described in terms of different concepts. So in this model it is not possible to distinguish between cases of conceptual mistakes and cases of lack of application. As Boghossian (1989)7 famously pointed out, the same reactions can be described using different concepts. This further requires for the model to distinguish different responses as appropriate or not in specific contexts, and in order to identify the proper set of responses we need to distinguish the good cases from the bad ones, conceiving these as cases in which conditions C fail, in the example at issue conditions C would include John cognitive mechanisms working fine, including normal functioning of attention, memory, etc. The problem is that we can only distinguish the two cases by using the concept we want to reconstruct, stipulating which is the concept in question, for example, stipulating that when John says that "6 + 5 = 12," he is using the concept of addition. But this means that we have to presuppose its content without accounting for it in terms of reactions, opening an explanatory gap. Importantly, there is no distinction between absence of application and misapplication that does not depend on stipulating the concept at issue and thus presupposing

the pertinence of that very distinction. It is important to bear in mind that this problem rises independently of whether the account takes these processes to occur at the subpersonal level or at the personal one. In either case, there is no non-question-begging way of distinguishing that the behavior accords with one concept and thus is a case of conceptual mistake and not mere absence of application of that concept8. Thus, the proposal fails to meet NC9.

The second reason why this view fails to make the distinction between misapplication and absence of application is that this account does not give a proper account of self-correction. According to this kind of theory, the source of error is a failure in conditions C, but this kind of error is independent of the subjects being able to identify it in practice. The mistakes are of such a nature that the subject may be unable to identify them (direct access to them could even be impossible for the subject) and modify his use of concepts according to the identification of error and its sources.

In fact, conditions C are not conceptually linked to the concepts the subject is applying or trying to learn. But self-correction seems to be a key ability to account for the process of learning new conceptual contents through training. Can this theory account for the connection between the identification of mistakes and conceptual abilities that seem constitutive of the process of learning conceptual contents and linguistic terms associated with them? As shown before, they cannot. This amounts to a failure to meet NC, since there is an explanatory/evolutionary gap concerning how new concepts are learnt and from this perspective the fact that concept users are able to apply concepts correctly and self-correct themselves if mistaken seems to be a complete mystery.

However, someone may hold that there are second order dispositions to evaluate reactions (corresponding to the component (b) of self-correction described above). The idea would then be that by positing them it is possible to account for self-correction and still defend a purely dispositional account of conceptual competence10.

But a similar problem arises: if those (second-order) dispositions were fallible and learnt, they would require dispositions of higher order to be learnt. This involves a vicious regress. If, on the contrary, those dispositions are not fallible and learnt, they are some kind of *sui generis* dispositions. This leaves their nature unexplained: are they to be conceived in causal terms? It seems that they must not be, in order to avoid the previous difficulties, but then another notion of conceptual ability must do the work here. This leads to an explanatory gap. Thus, the theory fails to account for NC (2) since it cannot explain the learning and acquiring of conceptual contents in a naturalist way (it fails by

6According to the kind of concept, conditions C will vary. They may for instance include normality in the subject's cognitive functions as well proper external conditions, so for example, were the concept a perceptual one, then proper conditions of illumination will be included as well as the proper functioning of the visual system. 7Kripke (1982) and Wright (1989) have also argued for the same conclusion. The main claim, as we will see, is that the causalist way of specifying conceptual competence is circular, in as far as it presupposes the very concept that is supposed to be specifying by the identification of the relevant dispositions. For a discussion of this see Satne (2005, chapter 3).

8One might think that I am presupposing that self-correction as I define it is a personal-level concept and thus unable to challenge subpersonal accounts of conceptual abilities. On the contrary, the definition is neutral with respect to this. I thank one of the anonymous referees for pressing this point.

9Fodor (1990a) specifies the concept in question in terms of higher order relations of asymmetrical dependency between causal relations of this sort. But the problem reappears in a slightly different form: postulating asymmetrical relations between causal relations in the absence of a naturalistic explanation of why those relations should hold merely restates the problem at issue (Hutto, 1999, 2009, pp. 47–48, p. 22; Cummins, 1989).

10Again, the account could sensically hold that this mechanism is to be understood as operative in a subpersonal level.

opening an explanatory gap when introducing the *sui generis* dispositions involved in self-correction). And it also fails to account for NC (1) since its inability to account for self-correction shows a corresponding failure to draw crucial distinctions between the capabilities of artifacts and other sorts of entities, some of them capable of self-correcting in ways that others are not. There is, according to this model, only one basic kind of mechanism that explains all of these *prima facie* different phenomena. But then the proposal fails in explaining the nature and complexity of different abilities in terms of more basic or previous ones, and so fails in drawing the relevant distinctions between abilities and capabilities of different complexity in a natural and gradual scale11.

# **THE INTERPRETATIONIST ACCOUNT OF CONCEPTUAL ABILITIES12**

I have presented three dimensions that are involved in selfcorrection:

If causalism thinks of level (b) by analogy with (a) and fails to account for (c), interpretationism stresses level (b).

Briefly sketched, according to this model to be a conceptual creature is to be a language user. Both notions are accounted for in terms of interpretation: to be a conceptual creature is to be able to interpret other creatures' actions as meaningful. The interpretation of language is just a part of the global task of attributing meaning to other creatures' behavior. To interpret someone is to attribute meaning to their conduct conceiving it as oriented by wishes and beliefs in the context of a common perceived world. In sum, to interpret someone is to implicitly construct a theory about the content of their beliefs, wishes and the like, in the context of a world where both the interpreter and the interpretee are commonly situated.

The emphasis in this view lies then on component (b), the evaluation of the actions of a subject according to concepts. Accordingly, the model defines conceptual competence as follows:

John is competent with respect to a concept X iff John applies X to y only when the interpreter would apply X to y, or y is such that the interpreter would have applied X to it, had his beliefs been slightly different in a way that matches John's (assuming that the attribution of the belief that y is X to John respects principles of rationality, charity, humanity and causality regarding the interpretation of John's behavior as a whole)13.

The attribution of error – in the sense of conceptual mistakes – is captured as a difference between the perspective of the interpreter and the perspective of the interpretee regarding a special case of application. This may happen in a number of ways. It might be the case that the subject makes a perceptual judgment about something that is openly accessible to both the interpreter and the speaker or it might be that the claim involves a judgment that is not immediately connected to the commonly available perceptual evidence for both speaker and interpreter. Both cases are structurally similar according to this theory, even if they are distinct in terms of the role that each kind of judgment plays for the interpreter to construct the ongoing understanding of the speaker's discourse. While the former constitutes the beginning of the interpretational process, the latter depends on previous judgments concerning what the speaker is taken to believe, intend and desire.

The structural similarity resides in that, for the interpreter, to be able to interpret the speaker's judgment she would have to assume that the speaker shares with her a vast optimized majority of true beliefs. Because of the general theory about what the speaker is trying to convey at that particular moment, the interpreter can then attribute local mistakes to what is asserted. The difference between the two cases is then that in order for the interpreter to make sense of what is being asserted she would start by attributing to the speaker that he is related to the same environment that she is and by that token that he perceives and holds to be true beliefs about that environment that are the same as those she herself holds. It is only with specific evidence to the contrary that the interpreter will withdraw this particular attribution and then attribute to the speaker an error of judgment regarding what both are commonly perceiving. Error will then be explained as a matter of difference between what the interpreter takes to be the case and what she can make sense of the speaker trying to convey, taking into account all the other evidence she has about his beliefs, desires, and the like. The cost of attributing error to commonly held judgments is so vast that rationality constraints on the interpretation dictate to attribute a difference between her perspective and the one of the speaker regarding some other judgment. This is all left on the hands of the interpreter who can then make sense of the behavior in different ways, all compatible with the evidence. The rule is always to attribute the less possible mistake, which is just the content of the principle of charity that governs interpretation.

This model turns out to be problematic when trying to distinguish between conceptual mistakes and absence of application – and hence to account for conceptual abilities. There are at least three difficulties worth mentioning:

(1) Following the principles of interpretation, the conduct of the interpretee can be described either way, as a case of

11Another relevant candidate to account for the normativity of conceptual abilities is teleosemantics, a model that appeals to the notion of biological function and the evolutionary history of the organisms to explain representational content. I would not consider this proposal in detail in this paper. The main reason is that as Fodor (1990b) has argued, biological function is not sufficient for intensionality: we can explain the behavior at issue according to one concept or other as long as they are co-extensional in the relevant *de facto* situations. In the present context this would amount to a failure to distinguish between conceptual mistakes according to a concept and absence of application of that concept. For a detailed treatment of Teleosemantics and the problems it rises for explaining conceptual content see Hutto and Satne (2014), where I argue that a story of that sort is part of the explanation of the relevant capacities but not yet sufficient to account for the normativity of conceptual content.

12Davidson (1975, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1992, 1994, 2001, 2005), Stalnaker (1984), Dennett (1991), and Brandom (1994) are some of the main advocates of this approach. Further specifications are required that distinguish their positions. I may dispense of introducing such distinctions here since nothing especially important for the arguments presented in this section follows from drawing these distinctions.

13I will be following mainly Davidson's presentation of the central traits of the theory although a similar case, with correspondent adjustments, can be made for Dennett's, Stalnaker's and Brandom's accounts.

misapplication of a particular concept or as a case of absence of application. The concept of error is just a tool for interpreting another person's behavior, an attribution that can be canceled by a better interpretation. Hence, this theoretical reconstruction does not distinguish between conceptual mistakes and absence of application.

In sum, the model fails to meet NC (2), since it cannot explain the learning of conceptual abilities as a gradual process. This implies an explanatory gap regarding the acquisition of language, in particular in the acquisition of the concept of error to be attributed to oneself and others. For these reasons, the model cannot account either for continuity in nature, i.e., for the way in which complex abilities of some natural entities emerge through gradual changes and combinations of more basic capabilities exhibited by other natural entities, and this is a failure to meet NC (2). And this also means that this kind of theory cannot explain our attribution of thought to animals and children, such attributions would be at the most mere "ways of talking14," that would not be justified in terms of the abilities exhibited by the behavior of such agents, i.e., the theory cannot answer to NC (3). This leaves unexplained the nature of their capacities and the connection between their ways in the world and ours.

# **MY STRATEGY TO MEET NC: CONCEPTUAL MISTAKE AND STANDARDS OF CORRECTION**

The above considerations have shown that both causalist and interpretationist accounts fail when accounting for component (b) of self-correction, i.e., the ability to evaluate the performance (a). Thus, in order to overcome their difficulties we need to offer an explanation of level (b) of the self-correction dimensions that (i) is not reduced to mere causal reactions, as in the case of causalist models. The strategy is to include an evaluative component that is not conceived in terms of level (a). Second, the account of (b), must (ii) not presuppose articulated contentful thought, as is the case of interpretationists account. As in the previous cases, the account of (b) needs to (iii) have the relevant consequences for (c).

Before presenting my strategy, there are some distinctions and precisions that are worth making. The aim to give an account of conceptual competence seems to be a highly ambitious one and there are of course a number of different proposals all of which would deserve to be seriously taken into account when analyzing what the correct answer to NC might be. One issue that is of particular relevance in this domain is the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual content. As it is known, many current theories of conceptual competence attempt to address what I am calling the NC precisely by drawing that distinction. Nevertheless, I neither address this specific topic in this paper nor I explore alternative attempts to bridge the gap between the conceptual and non-conceptual domains15. I can dispense of doing that since what I would be arguing for is neutral to those further worries. It should be noted that my claim is not that all cognition should be conceptual but rather that to account for conceptual abilities while meeting NC, the account needs to meet the normativity constraint. So my point is the following: no matter where you draw the line between the conceptual and the non-conceptual, meeting NC requires giving an account of some sort of basic cognition that cannot be reduced to mere dispositions but that, at the same time, can be accounted for in terms that do not presuppose the grasping of propositional fine-grained thoughts.

My proposal is to think of this more basic competence as a normative one and to model the minimal conceptual ability at issue as an ability to respond to standards of correct behavior in a way that suffices to distinguish between cases of absence of application and cases of misapplications of the standard16. The proposal is then to describe that behavior as a behavior of responding to specific standards of correction (hence being assessable as right or wrong according to those standards). Such an account must be one that conceives conceptual abilities in terms of more than mere causal mechanisms without thus committing to an explanatory gap concerning the emergence of propositional fine-grained articulated thought.

We can now define more precisely our question concerning the possibility of accounting for the normative constraint on conceptual abilities accommodating NC in the following terms: what features must a behavior have in order to count as a conduct that is sensitive to correctness patterns (unlike a behavior describable in merely dispositional terms) without thereby committing to it being explained as depending on propositionally articulated thought, thus leading to an evolutionary and explanatory gap.

Surprising as it might appear as first glance, I suggest that the crucial move to answer this question is to focus our attention into the kinds of interactions that basic intelligent creatures are able to deploy. This move is not completely novel in the literature. It was

14For a proposal exactly along these lines, see Hutto (2008).

15For an overview of the main views that endorse non-conceptual content and discussions thereof, see York (2003).

16Some may think that responding to a specific standard of correction should not be classified as a conceptual behavior, but instead representational, and that we should reserve the term "conceptual" for propositional articulated thought and behavior. At this point, this will perhaps be a terminological issue. For a proposal along those lines, see Schmitz (2012, 2013).

perhaps Dewey (1929) the first to emphasize that second-personal interaction is key to the learning of language- and this is a tradition that one can find exemplified in the later Wittgenstein as well as in Davidson's and Brandom's writings17. The crucial point to get clear about though is what *kind* of interaction we are referring to. In particular, we need to specify what features of the behavior at stake, if any (1) display sensitivity to standards of correction and (2) are both basic and at the same time sophisticated enough to meet NC.

A final further constraint on a proposal of this sort is for it to accommodate the available empirical evidence concerning language and concept acquisition. A first step could then be to take a look at the available evidence concerning language acquisition. The empirical study of the way in which such abilities are learned and deployed may help us identify the nature of the capacities involved. Furthermore, it is obvious from an empirical point of view – or at least denying it would be highly implausible – that small children do not have fine-grained articulated thought from the start, so the study of children's development should exhibit the possibility of acquiring the capacity to grasp propositional articulated thoughts departing from previous nonpropositional capacities that characterize the child's earlier stages of development.

I propose that a natural candidate to account for the right kind of behavior capable of accommodating the normative constraint is what I call *sensitivity to correction*, that is the disposition to modify one's behavior in the light of salient assessments of others with whom one is interacting. This claim still needs to gain support from empirical as well as conceptual grounds and I do try to provide such support in the remaining sections of this paper. Available evidence from developmental psychology will also provide some interesting cases of how this second-personal interaction can be conceived. Hence, while taking a look at empirical evidence, I expect to back up both my claim that a middle path between dispositionalism and interpretationism is in order and that such middle path is to be thought of in terms of a second-personal kind of interaction.

# **EXAMINING THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY**

As I said, one natural place to look for an answer to this question, framed with NC in mind, is the way children learn concepts.

Csibra and Gergely (2009) have argued that adults–children interaction is essential to the learning of conceptual content. They have conducted a number of experiments that suggests that there is a crucial difference in the subsequent behavior of the infants if they have learnt merely by observation – when the children are just observing the behavior of adults – or through being explicitly taught – i.e., when there is explicit demonstrative reference through the use of language to the objects the concepts apply to in a context in which the child is addressed. What they noted is that only in the latter case children generalize the result to all similar cases, while in the former they conceive of the case as contextually and situationally bound. This provides us a first indication

that interaction plays a crucial role in learning and displaying conceptual abilities as opposed to other kind of learning, where no language is involved.

A second indication that the sort of interaction that humans are capable of might be key to the development of their conceptual abilities comes from primatology. Tomasello (1999) and Tennie et al. (2010) have claimed that chimpanzees are capable of emulating behavior but not of abstracting this conduct from the situational bound contexts in which they first perceive it. This means that while they are capable of imitating the use of tools in performing a specific task governed by their own interests and goals, they do not grasp the general meaning of the object nor of the end that is displayed in the behavior in a way that can be detached from the context and the objects they are observing and using in that specific occasion. This fits well with Csibra and Gergely's (2009) studies suggesting that the interactive aspect of learning in humans involves a capacity to grasp the general, rulelike content of linguistic terms and behavior in a way that is not available to other creatures, and that this specific learning of general meanings takes place through particular training instances in the context of adult–child interactions, not being possible for children isolated from those interactions or for primates other than human who are not capable of those sorts of interactions (ibid)18.

Furthermore, Tomasello and Racokzy (2003) and Schmidt and Tomasello (2012) have studied the conduct of children regarding the enforcement of norms, and they observed that at two years of age children not only asses their behavior according to norms, accompanying what they do with statements of the sort "this is what we do" or "This is how it is done," but also that they teach others (puppets but also adults that they identify as outsiders to the community) and that they complain when others do not conform to what they understand the social norm dictates in that particular situation. This means that children are ready to understand normative standards of behavior and to teach them to others at a very early stage of the development of their conceptual capacities and that they generalize the appropriateness of what they tend to do to all others with whom they are interacting, expecting them to act as they do and complaining if they refuse to do so.

How can this then help us to address NC, considering such behavior is exhibited by young children but not by other primates?

As I said before, there are a number of philosophical theories that have focused on the nature of human intersubjective exchanges to account for our capacity to grasp linguistic meanings. Haugeland (1990) and Brandom (1994) for example, have suggested that it is our attitude of treating a performance as right or wrong in particular contexts what makes that conduct right

17Wittgenstein (1953), Davidson (1984, 2001), and Brandom (1994). Also Hutto and Myin (2013).

18Csibra and Gergely (2009) have called this specific aspect of the way human beings teach and learn from each other "natural pedagogy." Tomasello (1999, 2014) argues that primates are incapable of engaging in joint action with other primates or humans because they lack the ability to form intentions about other individuals intentions. Here I am not committing to the particular explanation Csibra and Gergely (2009) give of the abilities in which this sort of interactions are based, nor to Tomasello's explanation, in both cases highly sophisticated Theory of Mind abilities seem to be required. Regardless of their explanations, the evidence points toward a key role for interaction in the ability to learn and apply conceptual contents. With the idea of meeting NC, I provide a different and less demanding understanding of what is at issue in interaction that accounts for these differences.

or wrong, and that this is a socially structured practice, in which we treat each other as committed and entitled or not to further actions as if we were playing a social game, the rules of which get specified by us treating the different moves as appropriate or not. Wittgenstein (1953) has also been read as defending a view according to which language should be thought of as a cluster of games that we play together and that it is internal to those games that certain moves are allowed or forbidden. The moves would then be correct or incorrect according to the game in the context of which they are assessed. Nevertheless, these theories are problematic if, as in Brandom's theory, the moves of the game are thought to be propositionally articulated or if they imply interpretational stances on the part of the participants, as interpretationist accounts do. As I have argued before, such positions, if taken to be the whole story, turn out to be unable to meet NC. So I suggest that the right place to look at for is not the domain of interpretational theory but rather a different kind of interactionism, in particular interactionist phenomenologically based theories19.

Such theories start from one basic insight about the nature of social cognition: the fact that we are able to understand directly and correctly emotions on the face of others and their behavior as intentional and goal-oriented from the very first experiences of encountering others. This has been called "primary intersubjectivity." It involves a kind of recognition of others that is displayed by newborns and that is characterized precisely by neither involving any kind of inferential cognitive mechanisms nor any mediation through articulated thoughts, such as attributing states to others. That notwithstanding, it involves more than just mere reactions to stimuli. More precisely, it involves grasping the meaning of the other person's reactions. As Scheler famously described it: "that experiences occur there [in the other person] is given for us in expressive phenomena – [...] not by inference, but directly, as a sort of primary "perception." It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy" (Scheler, 1954, p. 10).

Phenomenology then provides us with a different route to understand the empirical findings of developmental psychology on the nature of normative behavior. It allows us to understand in what sense we are able to grasp the rightness or wrongness of what we are doing without committing us to think of this in a propositionally loaded way. According to these theories, based both in early development psychological studies and a phenomenologically based explanation of them, there is, from the very beginning of our lives, a way of tuning the other person's emotions and it is that tuning, we might think, what first teaches us about the distinction between right and wrong, good or bad, this way or not-this-way.

Having taken a brief look at some recent works on Phenomenology and Developmental Psychology, we have found concurring support for the need to abandon the third-person perspective characteristic of interpretationism, but also the confinement within the first person perspective, characteristic of causalism. Such works suggest the convenience of prioritizing

interlocutors' interactions in face-to-face encounters in which the emotional recognition of the emotions of others might play a key role in our entry to language. It is in this domain, I argue, that we find the kind of behavior that allows distinguishing between conceptual mistakes and absence of application in a way that does not imply yet the reflective and explicit grasping of the standard to which we are nevertheless responding. In particular, I argue that it is our emotional response to approval and disapproval attitudes expressed in the interlocutors emotional behavior what allows us to learn from others language and criteria of correct use for words in contexts of use. Thus, this responsive behavior constitutes a kind of minimal conceptual competence vis-à-vis naturalist and normative constraints. How this allows us to accommodate the normative constraint answering at the same time to NC will be the topic of the next and final section.

## **INTERACTION AND SENSITIVITY TO CORRECTION**

As I have claimed, if the problems of interpretationism and causalism are taken seriously what we need to find is a form of behavior that is not reduced to causal reactions but does not presuppose the ability to entertain articulated thoughts. Furthermore, I have shown that taking into consideration the evidence from developmental psychology regarding the learning of language and norms, the right kind of behavior seems to be essentially interactive.

Advocators of the phenomenologically based interactionist theory usually draw a distinction between two different kinds of intersubjectivity that characterize capacities that are displayed at different stages in the child's development. First, primary intersubjectivity (to be found from birth) is constituted by the ability to recognize emotions and reactions in other person's faces without the use of any theoretical tool in face-to-face encounters. It is a capability that is primary, not acquired, but innate. The conduct of others is recognized as intentional, as directed toward an end. It involves temporal, auditive, and visual coordination with someone else with whom the baby is interacting. It is not substituted by other types of interaction but coexists with them, as a precondition for other abilities and as a complement of them. Later on20, children engage in secondary intersubjectivity, a kind of interaction that is characterized by the ability to identify objects and events in pragmatically meaningful contexts by shared attention mechanisms (based on the abilities gained through engaging in the previous kind of intersubjectivity). In this stage, children refer to the adults gaze when the meaning of an object is ambiguous or unclear. It is in the context of this kind of engagement with others that children learn a natural language by being taught and exposed to it in all sort of interactions21.

19Trevarthen (1978, 1979), Hobson (2002), Reddy (2008), and Rochat (2012) have defended and developed this theory from a psychological point of view. Gallagher (2001, 2004, 2007), Gallagher and Hutto (2008) and Gallagher and Zahavi (2008) have provided reasons in favor of if from the philosophical one.

20There is some debate about when exactly this happens among advocates of the interactionist theory, ranging from 6 to 18 months of age depending on the author. 21Gallagher and Hutto (2008) have claimed that narratives play a crucial role in the way in which children learn different perspectives and build a conception of themselves and of others that is enriched *vis-à-vis* the primary and emotional sort of engagement characteristic of the initial encounters with others. Even if this may be so, a previous question to be made, following our previous considerations, is how is it that children learn to respond to concepts as standards to assess their own conduct.

My suggestion is that the right place to look for the ability of self-correction is in the context of the capability of engaging in primary intersubjectivity22. It is in that domain that children display a disposition to respond to others, characterized by an attunement to their expectations and an ability to shape their behavior as a way of responding and satisfying the demands of others, paying special attention to the kind of response that their behavior elicits in the adult. This kind of exchanges is possible through common engagements in face-to-face encounters where the emotions of both are directly perceptible for each other. The common contexts in which those interactions take place include objects and their properties, which, as the interaction evolves and the answers become more stable, begin to be understood as independent standing qualities and objects. Throughout this process, joint attention mechanisms among other capacities come into stage and help to develop an early stage conceptual understanding and a primitive form of using concepts that will later became much more sophisticated, gaining independence from particular assessments and responses. Nevertheless, they will never lose their connection with actual uses and assessments of others.

How can we then distinguish between conceptual mistakes and absence of application in this early stage of development? In the previous section, I have examined some relevant work in developmental psychology on the nature of normative behavior and learning. Those studies suggest that interactions are key in that they elicit and display normatively informed behavior that is exhibited in the way in which children respond to adults in learning through two basic attitudes: *generalizing* (what they take to be *correct*) and *enforcing* on others the norm (actively correcting each other, showing that they are not only passively responding to the environment but spontaneously conceiving of what they are doing as an *standard of correction* to which themselves and all others are *supposed to conform*). Accordingly, in the context of the kind of interaction just described, I suggest there is a specific ability that constitutes a better candidate than mere reactions or articulated thought to meet NC. I call such ability *sensitivity to correction*. It can be defined as the disposition to modify one's own behavior regarding the application of a specific concept in the light of the consent and dissent of others with whom one is interacting in face-to-face encounters. Sensitivity to correction so defined is precisely the feature of human behavior that allows us to accommodate the normativity constraint without abandoning the naturalistic conditions of adequacy that constitute NC.