Human experience and the enigma of culture: Towards an enactive account of cultural practice
Symposium organized by the NCPG on the 8th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), April 25-28, 2000, Sydney (click here for the covering text).

The central question of this symposium concerns the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation culture/experience holds that experience becomes 'cultural' when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an 'enactive' approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Enactivism implies a radical turn with regard to some of our most obvious intuitions about the 'social', the 'cultural', the 'personal', and even the 'biological'.

The first paper, by Theo Verheggen and Cor Baerveldt investigates the possibility for -what could be called- an 'intrinsically social psychology'. It is observed that even social psychology is largely a science of individuals. At best, the social or cultural 'dimension' is added afterwards, on the basis of what psychologists observe to be 'shared' representations, models, or ideas. In this paper it is contended that any account of the social in terms of supposedly shared features reduces the social to merely an aggregation of individuals. As an alternative, an enactive approach to social and cultural phenomena is proposed, which centers on the way social actors consensually coordinate their own actions. The implications for a truly social and cultural psychology are drawn.

The second paper, by Paul Voestermans and Cor Baerveldt, addresses the recent trend within the psychological and cognitive sciences to apply evolutionary models to the investigation of what is supposed to be a universal human nature. Although both evolutionary psychology and enactive cultural psychology dismiss the idea of the human brain as a general purpose machine, it is argued that adaptive meaning construction cannot be accounted for in terms of shared, 'wired in' mental programs. Instead, enactivism focusses on the cultural framing of meaning that takes place within a community of experiencers. To what extend some sort of 'biology of meaning' needs to be drawn into this discussion will be the central issue here.

The third paper, by Cor Baerveldt and Paul Voestermans concentrates on discourse as a reality constituting practice. In line with the enactive approach, the claim is made that social phenomena -including discourse- can only exist within the interactions between experiencing social agents. Cultural forms are considered to emerge from consensual coordinations of actions, which cannot be adequately understood in terms of an already established cultural order. It is argued that discourse is only one particular way in which reality is consensually constituted. Paradoxically, however, it is often not a an 'objective' or 'public' reality that is at stake for social actors, as is suggested by rhetorical psychology, but the genuineness or authenticity of their own 'personal' experience. Some empirical implications of an enactive approach for the study of discourse will be discussed.

From enactivism to an `intrinsic social psychology'
Theo Verheggen & Cor Baerveldt (click here for the complete text)

Many social scientists have come to realize that `the social and cultural domain' has been left out of psychology for too long. Even social psychology is essentially a science of individuals. Nowadays, social philosophers, social psychologists and cultural psychologists -among others- attempt to restore the omission by `reclaiming the social' or `restoring the cultural dimension' in psychology. These enterprises entail a number of almost classic problems that need to be dealt with: What is a social (inter)action? What is a group? What is the difference between an individual and a social fact, and can both be distinguished at all? Although these questions appear to be age-old, answers are anything but obvious.

John D. Greenwood argued for carefully distinguishing between what he calls `intrinsically' social actions and relations, and behavior and relations that merely involve an aggregate of individuals that have certain attributes in common. This is an important concern, although Greenwood's solution is unsatisfactory: whether an action is intrinsically social or not, depends on a set of arrangements, conventions and agreements surrounding that behavior. As so many social psychologists, he attempts to locate `the social' in a set of principles, codes and practices that people within the same culture somehow seem to share. As such, the social is confused with what is shared while it is the scientist who in fact constructs the group on the basis of what he observers to be shared features. Moreover, it at least suggests that `the social dimension' can be added to the individual from outside. The questions remains, however, how these conventions come to guide or structure human experience. From where do they derive such authority that people appear to actually obey them?

In order to offer a way out of these problems, we draw on the enactivist framework. The notions of what is an individual, what is a group, and what is social behavior need to be reconceptualized. Starting from experience and the patterning of experience, we attempt to show that both are inherently social from the outset. In our view, on the basis of the enactivist paradigm psychologists can gain a better understanding of the (psychological) processes by which people come to coordinate their actions with respect to each other. Moreover, they can do so without reverting back into solipsism or self-contained individualism.

Understanding the way in which people coordinate their experiences opens up the path for a psychology that is not individual social psychology, but one that rightfully can be called `intrinsically social psychology'. As such, enactivism can offer a fruitful contribution to `reclaiming the social' in psychology, and in the same vein deal with what is cultural in the generation of human behavior.

Cultural psychology meets evolutionary psychology
Paul Voestermans and Cor Baerveldt (click here for the complete text)

It is quite surprising that theoretical psychologists have joined forces with philosophers and empirically oriented psychologists alike in transforming Darwin's idea of natural selection and its elaboration not just into the cornerstone of evolutionary biology, but of cognitive science and the psychological science of culture in particular. The central claim of evolutionary psychology, made clear in primers and textbooks, is the existence of an evolved robust universal human nature, which involves the sharing of a species-typical and species-specific architecture of adaptations. A further claim is that there exists uniformity in adaptations that are enforced by the way selection and sexual recombination operates.

The aim of this paper is to show that enactivism and an enactive view on human experience need not be inimical to the operation of biologically prepared and highly differentiated mental programs within the experiencing process. However, the usurpation of adaptive meaning construction (a key process in the generation of human behavior) in terms of shared 'wired-in' programs, which are conceptualized in nativistic and naturalistic terms, is counterproductive in coming to grips with the cultural framing of the experiencing process. There are better models to come to grips with the psychological unconscious (no to be confused with the Freudian psychodynamic unconscious).

The idea of memes (Dawkins) or public representations and its epidemiological spread through the population (Sperber), as attempts to deal with the cultural production of behavior, is another counterproductive strand of thoughts in that they both lean heavily on the brain as a shared idea-duplicating device. Enactivism enables us to conceptualize the critical features of the experiencing process, which in turn can be used in understanding psychologically the workings of the cultural framing of experience. It is an alternative to explaining this process in terms of hardware-like features, which trivialize the meaning production that goes on in a community of experiencers.

Cultural practice and the consensual validation of experience
Cor Baerveldt and Paul Voestermans

The central role of human experience in the constitution of social reality is generally underrated by social scientists, not in the least by cultural psychologists. An enactive cultural psychology, however, starts from human experience as a basic condition of all social and cultural phenomena. Its main contention is that social interactions can only exist between experiencing social agents. Therefore, although human conduct is indubitably socially and culturally patterned, we should refrain from prematurely adducing already established cultural meanings as an explanation for those patterns. We claim that the fundamental question of cultural psychology should not be how people internalize ready made cultural meanings, but how 'personal' sense becomes coordinated in such a way that it gives rise to cultural meanings. An account of meaningfully patterned human actions asks for an explication of the principles that are involved in the coordination of those actions, that does not already include the outcome of those very same actions.

The enactive approach we propose looks upon cultural forms as co-operative domains of interaction, or consensual domains. In a radical way enactivism claims that 'reality' does not precede human action, but emerges as a consequence of the way in which social actors learn to coordinate their own actions with respect to other social actors. Within the domain of human interactions, the study of discourse or 'languaging' is of particular interest to a an enactive cultural psychology. Discursive interactions can also be considered as reality constituting practices. Contrary to a more rhetorical approach to discourse, however, enactivism stresses that discursive interactions are often not concerned with dispute about particular versions of reality. What is primarily at stake for the social actors is the genuineness or validity of their own experience. As such, personal sense can be situated within the public domain, as something which is always at stake or at risk. We claim that discourse can often most fruitfully be analyzed, not as talk about reality, but as an ongoing consensual validation of experience

Last updated: August 2000
Maintained by Cor Baerveldt