Participatory Sense-Making and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis

Hanne De Jaegher, University of Sussex

Narrative Alternatives to Theories of Mind, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, 12-15 Jul.

Both explanations of social cognition in terms of Theories of Mind (including simulation theory) and those in terms of a Narrative Practice are born from a perspective in which social cognition requires a very high level of mediation (i.e. the distance between the direct components of a cognitive activity and its meaning). This may be because they are focused on our capacity to explain and predict actions in terms of reasons.

What happens if we start from the opposite position: that most of everyday social understanding involves minimal mediation? After all, it has been proposed that the so-called ‘precursors’ (e.g. intentionality detection) in theory-explanations or the capacities of primary intersubjectivity, be explained along low-mediacy lines – for instance in calls for embodied accounts. A full understanding of narrative practice will require a progression from those minimal mechanisms to the complex skill that understanding a narrative is. This allows us to refocus on the more basic questions: what are narratives? How are they achieved? How do we engage in them in the first place?

The proposal presented in this paper is based in the enactivist notion of sense-making, which is the active engagement of the cogniser with her world, an engagement which generates meaning and value (Varela 1991; Thompson 2004). Extending this notion into the social domain, required putting the social interaction process at the centre of the investigation. This resulted in the concept of Participatory Sense-Making (De Jaegher 2006; De Jaegher and Di Paolo In preparation). In this perspective on social cognition, interpersonal coordination is fundamental. Hutto (2007) and Gallagher and Hutto (2007) also consider such coordination to be important, but they remain vague about how it works and how it connects to the narrative capacity for ‘reason understanding’.

In contrast, Participatory Sense-Making brings together physical coordination in social interactions (of movements and utterances) with the coordination of sense-making or cognitive activity. It explains how social understanding is achieved in the interaction process between participants in an encounter. It substantiates the Narrative Practice hypothesis, in that it provides a way to account for how people engage in the kinds of conversations that underpin the exchange of and engagement with narratives. But it does more: it suggests that in order to understand the origins of the narrative capacity, less emphasis should be put on investigating people’s engagements with others about narratives (i.e. where narratives are “objects of joint attention”, Gallagher and Hutto 2007, section 6), and more on how we engage with others in the joint construction of (the meaning of) narratives. In sum, Participatory Sense-Making may provide the framework for connecting highly mediated reason explanations with our simplest social and sensori-motor capacities.

References

De Jaegher, H. (2006). Social Interaction Rhythm and Participatory Sense-Making: An embodied, interactional approach to social understanding, with implications for autism, Unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

De Jaegher, H. and E. Di Paolo (In preparation). "Participatory Sense-Making." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Gallagher, S. and D. D. Hutto (2007). Understanding others through Primary Interaction and Narrative Practice. The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Hutto, D. D. (2007). Folk Psychological Narratives: The Social Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Thompson, E. (2004). "Life and mind: From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3(4): 381-398.

Varela, F. J. (1991). Organism: A meshwork of selfless selves. Organism and the Origin of Self. A. Tauber. Dordrecht, Kluwer: 79-107.