The enactive naturalization of normativity: from self-maintenance to situated interactions.
History and philosophy of the life sciences December 2, 2021 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s40656-021-00479-3 via PubMed
Summary
Autopoietic enactivism grounds normativity in self-maintenance: living agents evaluate events as better or worse for preserving their own precarious identity. This view extends biological norms to cognitive and social norms, but it struggles to explain how individuals can act according to non-individual norms or form social habits irrelevant to their own constitution.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Distinguishing external normative criteria from an agent's self-constitution explains how agents can engage with non-individual norms and acquire socially situated habits. |
Abstract
The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their responses in terms of what is better or worse to maintain their own precarious identity. Thus, normative behavior emerges from living organisms. Under this basic understanding of normativity as self-maintenance, autopoietic enactivism defends a continuity between biological, cognitive, and social norms. The self-maintenance of an agent's sensorimotor identity establishes the cognitive norms that regulate its behavior, and the self-maintenance of its social identity determines the social norms. However, there is no clear explanation of how individuals, who by their very constitution are primarily moved to interact with the world under the norm of self-maintenance, could interact with the world driven by non-individual norms. Furthermore, understanding all normativity as self-maintenance makes it unclear how agents establish genuine social interactions and acquire habits that have no implication for their constitution as individuals. So, to face these challenges, I propose an alternative notion of normativity grounded on a Wittgensteinian, action-oriented, and pragmatic conception of meaning that distinguishes between an agent with a normative point of view and external normative criteria. I defend that a normative phenomenon is an interaction that is established by an individual point of view as defined by autopoietic enactivism and that is part of a self-maintaining system. The latter establishes the external normative criteria to evaluate the interaction, and it may or may not coincide with the identity of the interacting agent. Separating external normative criteria from the self-constitution of the interactant agent not only solves the challenge but potentially explains the situated and relational character of agency.