My experience of the civil war [in Chile] taught me that epistemology (...) shapes the world we live in and the human values that we live in." I extract this quote from a text by Francisco Varela where he talks about his experience of the day of the coup d'état of the Chilean generals in 1972 which pushed him into exile: that of the abandonment of all his certainties about the world he lived in, facing an event for which his research and teaching work had not prepared him, and which was the product of a long process - Francisco Varela speaks of "a process of extreme polarization of the Chilean' society ", that his certainties and his work had prevented him from perceiving. The epistemology of which he speaks is manifold: that of researchers like him; those of those who, like him, participated in the current cultural and social progress; those of the actors and supporters of the military putsch. This thesis questions "political science". It was not extended by the enactive research beyond what Francisco Varela wrote in the remainder of this text. However, we can rely on them to initiate this extension, as I propose to do.

What is the share of surprise and novelty in a microphenomenological explanation interview? How is the relationship between interviewee and interviewer placed under the sign of surprise? How does the novelty of the experience discovered during an interview offer an important criterion for the success of an interview? Here I will reread the Varelian epistemology of enaction in the light of the surprise model within the framework of microphenomenology. 

The theme of this presentation is the potential of a broad enactive approach to transform the theory and practice of eLearning. I begin with a thought experiment suggesting the transformational power of a broad enactive approach: “Does the ship cause the wake, or the wake cause the ship?” This presentation suggests a framework for future research on the topic of enaction and eLearning and makes three main points. (1) A broadening of the enactive approach in cognitive science is mirrored by a narrowing of the enactive approach in education giving rise to limitations and challenges. (2) Grasping that eLearning is enaction, not self-action or inter-action, shows the transformative power of enactive eLearning. (3) A case study of an eLearning course suggests that effective, deep, and engaging eLearning is enactive. I explain how enactive eLearning fundamentally rethinks what it means to learn and think and transforms how we understand evolution and information.

The study of experience has been installed as a relevant element in the study of cognitive phenomena. However, its incorporation into cognitive science has been largely done by following an objectivist frame of reference, without reconsidering the practices and standards involved in the process of research and validation of the results. This has given rise to a number of issues that reveal inconsistencies in the understanding and treatment of some crucial aspects of first-person research. In this presentation, we will outline a research proposal that aims at contributing in the establishment of a framework for the study of experience that addresses these inconsistencies. Particularly, we will identify challenges facing the study of experience – in particular those linked to the understanding of memory, expression, and intersubjectivity in exploring experience – and propose to reframe them under the enactive approach. Moreover, we will explore the prospect of gaining insight into theoretical and methodological strategies for dealing with these issues by extending our vision beyond the field of cognitive science to its neighboring fields, focusing on the field of somatic practices.

This presentation is the result of reworking my doctoral thesis in educational sciences, specializing in arts education. By questioning myself on the reasons why action, like a red thread, accompanied my pedagogical intuition, I retrace the path of thought as I have traveled, lived and experienced it. Defending such an intuition, however, requires deference to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, because our field of research, the plural sciences of education, tends to be interested in the biological, psychological and social roots of learning. We will therefore present how the notion of enaction was concretely introduced into our artistic pedagogy, so as to open the discussion on its issues in teaching.

I came into contact with enaction by chance in 2011. A colleague forwarded me a call for chapters for a book dedicated to enaction in the arts. I didn't know anything about enaction, but reading the argument of the appeal, I had an (enactive?) experience. What that appeal described made total sense to me. So I decided to answer it, and I immersed myself in many readings in the subject of enaction, and in particular the book “The Embodied Mind.” Enaction quickly became one of my research topics. I first explored the concept of action applied to the creative process, especially for this call, and also by participating in several conferences on or around this theme. I have also endeavored to try to construct interventions that allow this concept of enaction to be experienced in real time. I also explored the application of the concept of enaction in pedagogy, and enactive pedagogy in turn became one of my research themes. I will take stock of this work and suggest some possible extensions.

Experience and the mind in general, so I will claim, is temporally extended, and massively so. Moreover, for many mental phenomena, this temporal extension is stronger than “merely causal”. What is experienced now, for example, is what it is because of its past and future. Without its very specific history, this experience could not occur. Massive experiential bloat runs counter to established intuitions about causality and explanation. But causality and explanation require historical bloat themselves, or so I will argue. I’ll show how bloat is present by highlighting the role of anticipation in memory. What we remember often depends on our habits and acts of anticipation, and such spread in time, taking memory with them in an extensive temporal flow. Bloat has practical consequences, when we want to intervene on experiences. Bloat also has consequences for how to think philosophically about minds—it introduces a factor of perennial indeterminacy.

Enactive, embodied approaches to cognition come in conservative and more radical varieties. Those on the radical end of the spectrum assume that minds are constituted by intelligent activity as opposed to standing apart from it and directing it. As such, radical of E-cognition directly challenge traditional representational-computational theories of mind and cognition. As they have gained traction over the years they have been heralded as a new paradigm for the sciences of the mind. This presentation: explains why some radical E-approaches qualify as truly revolutionary; motivates 'going radical' over ‘remaining conservative’; and examines the practical implications 'going radical' has in the domains of education and training.

The paper explores the trope of a “reflective scientist”. The trope seems to have played an important role in the foundational years of enactive approach, but has fallen by the wayside in the subsequent developments of the field. The main of the paper is to address the question as to what it means to reflexively apply the notion of enaction to the scientist him/herself: if cognition does not stand for representation of the objective world (self-subsistent reality) but for bringing forth (en-acting) of a milieu (organism-related domain of meaning), what does this mean for the nature of scientific cognition and science in general? By drawing on the insights from the life-science debates in the first half of the 20th century about the life-mind and organism-milieu relation, I will try to flesh out the notion of so-called “ouroboric thought”, a type of reflection which steers the middle path between disembodied intellection and lived sensation.

In this talk I will initially discuss how BMI experiments will continue to play a major role in basic research by showing how they have already allowed us to demonstrate the existence of a variety of neurophysiological functions, such as space coding and social interaction mapping, not commonly associated with the motor cortex of non-human primates. I will also describe a combination of approaches that will allow BMI to fulfill its long-anticipated mission of providing new therapies for patients suffering from severe spinal cord injuries. In this context, I will describe the clinical advantages of a protocol that combines multiple non-invasive techniques into a single neurorehabilitation approach for such patients.

Enactive thinking is known for being an "embodied" approach to understanding mental phenomena. The body is sometimes described as the origin of basic values, which become the driving force for self-organising complex adaptive systems of body-environment interaction. A strong focus on the body plays both a theoretical role - offering ways to naturalise value and meaning - and a rhetorical one - providing an anchor for a new mode of thinking for those unhitching themselves from neuro-centric and abstract computational approaches. But how we think about the enacted body matters a great deal. Enactive thinking has converged with the themes of a number of longer-standing feminist perspectives about the complex, dynamic aspects of embodiment, which entangle physical, biological, social, cultural, and other flows of activity. These flows which gives rise to the kinds of animating dynamics that enactivists have drawn upon in their naturalised notions of value and meaning. In this talk I want to explore some of the ways in which the enacted body arises, and how understanding as a dynamic entanglement of values leads to particular ways of thinking about experience and action.

At its core, phenomenology is a philosophical endeavour. Given its distinctly philosophical nature, one might reasonably wonder whether it can offer anything of value to positive science. Can it at all inform empirical work? There can, however, be no doubt about the answer to these questions. For more than a century, phenomenology has provided crucial inputs to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Within the last few decades, phenomenology has also been an important source of inspiration, not only for theoretical debates within qualitative research but also for ongoing research within the cognitive sciences. But what is the best way to practice, use and apply phenomenology in a non‐philosophical context? How deeply rooted in phenomenological philosophy must the empirical research be in order to qualify as phenomenological? How many of the core commitments of phenomenology must it accept? In my talk, I will discuss and assess some different answers to these questions.

The lecture explores the concept of circularity as a means of explaining the relation between the phenomenology of lived experience and the dynamics of organism-environment interactions. It will be developed in a threefold way: (1) as the circular structure of embodiment, which manifests itself (a) in the homeostatic cycles between brain and body, (b) in the sensorimotor cycles between brain, body and environment, (c) in the interdependence of an organism’s dispositions of sense-making and the affordances of the environment; (2) as the circular causality which characterizes the relation of parts and whole within the living organism as well as within the organism-environment system; (3) as the circularity of process and structure in development and learning. Here I will argue that subjective experi¬ence constitutes a process of sense-making that entrains neurophysiological processes so as to form modified neuronal structures, which in turn enable altered future interactions. On this basis, embodied experience may ultimately be conceived as the integral of current organism-environment interactions, which has a top-down, formative or ordering effect on physiological processes. 

In recent years numerous researchers have discussed a pragmatic turn in cognitive science. The general consensus is that this turn, or return to pragmatism is closely tied to the advent of non-representational embodied cognition (EC) sometimes referred to as 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) cognition. In some regards the pragmatic turn just is this turn to embodied action-oriented cognition that came to the fore starting in the 1990s. I’ll argue, however, that this is an oversimplification in a number of ways. First, in regard to the timing; second in regard to how pragmatism may have already been influencing mainstream cognitivists even prior to the turn to EC; and third, in regard to how pragmatism relates, somewhat unevenly, to the variety of EC theories. 

Pragmatist thinking links up with certain aspects of enaction as developed by its main theorists (Gallagher, 2014). In order to reflect on the synergies between these movements, we will present the orientations of a research program dedicated to the theoretical, methodological and practical exploration of pragmatist-inspired ethics. First, we will review the pragmatist ethics developed by our interdisciplinary research team working in health ethics. We will emphasize the roles played by situational understanding of moral issues, the experiential and existential anchoring of human values, scenario-based deliberation and imagination, enaction as an approach to the implementation of ethics, and participatory methodologies to develop what we call a “living ethic”. Then, we will present work in progress defining the experiential nature of ethical deliberation as well as the evaluation of its dialogical and pedagogical contribution. Finally, we will present an action-participatory research project aiming to better understand the experience and to equip people with rare diseases.

This contribution addresses the issue of the "dead end" experience in the individuation process. As part of the course of action research program, it is based on the activity-sign hypothesis - which articulates the enactive perspective and the semiotics of Peirce - as well as on the notion of individuation of Simondon. After putting into perspective how the question of meaning is taken up by various authors taking part in the enactive approach, we underline the significance of the experience of uncertainty in the face of breakdowns in anticipation, which can generate experiences of dead end in individual experience. These dead ends express a withdrawal of the dynamic of meaning as well as a hindrance to the experience of the continuity of time. The abductive and iconic dimensions of meaning therefore play an essential role in "going beyond" them and facilitating the acquisition of new knowledge and the revival of individual developmental dynamics. Likewise, they seem essential to us for thinking about the development of collectives, as well as for imagining future scenarios from the active perspective.

In this paper, we approach the notion of clinical intuition from a complex thinking perspective, as second-order or emergent complex thinking. This proposal is based on a recent conceptualisation of complex thinking, with foundations in an enactive view of cognition and a relational worldview. We will discuss the theoretical, methodological and pragmatic challenges posed to and by a research program focused on the development of a process of complex case conceptualisation aimed at supporting family support practitioners dealing with complex cases. This research involves the design and evaluation of protocols and strategies to help practitioners enact core organisational properties of the complexity in living and human social systems, at the level of their own thinking, to manage its unfolding, and their experiences, as contributions to the coupling process. Under given conditions, new (relational) information (differences) may emerge, through the coupling process, in the form of clinical hypotheses (descriptions, explanations, anticipations) which may guide decision-making and the management of the change processes in conditions of significant uncertainty and limited information.

This conference will offer a general introduction to enaction and will culminate with the introduction of the keynote speaker, Michel Bitbol.

QBism (Quantum Bayesianism) is a minimalist but daring interpretation of quantum theory, which allows its "paradoxes" to be dried up at their source. The quantum physicist seen by QBism does not describe a pre-existing “outside world”. Instead, it anticipates the phenomena that emerge from the interaction between "physical systems" and a predicted agent of instrumental prostheses, the bets of each agent on the phenomena it brings out.

The QBist design is comparable to the enactive theory of cognition. I distinguished two lectures. According to the external reading of enaction, knowledge and the known world co-emerge from a coupling between the embodied subject and his environment. According to its internal, phenomenological reading, knowledge is a process of creation of meaning, which associates with each class of perceptions procedures of adaptive anticipation. The articulation between external and internal conceptions of enaction will be used to defuse the tension between the "objectivist" and "subjectivist" aspects of QBism.

In 2005, within the Costech research unit of the University of Technology of Compiègne, we created a team called "cognitive research and enaction design" (CRED), which still exists to this day. The "enaction design" proposal was itself the product of a research enterprise born in the mid-1980s at this university and which fostered the meeting of cognitive sciences inspired by the second cybernetics with a general reflection on the technical fact. The synthesis of this meeting is a general thesis formulated as follows: technique as anthropologically constitutive or constituent (implied by human experience). From there, "enaction design" is presented as a relational engineering attentive to the genesis and transformation of the signifying experience of the actors, a lived experience constrained and empowered by the technical context with which they continuously engage, bringing about their worlds. The conference will go into the details of this business of realization. 

Our methodological discussion is based on a phenomenologically inspired study of the experience of runners self-quantifying using portable digital devices. We have implemented a protocol allowing subjects, equipped with a dictaphone, during their running session and in real time, to verbalize the dynamics of their thoughts, emotions and feelings. It will be a question of appreciating their interests and limits, by confronting them in particular with retrospective type methodologies (self-confrontation and explanation), in-situ interviews (running interviews) and the “thinking aloud” protocol. Real-time self-explanation is relevant so as not to break the continuous flow of lived experience, but it inevitably impacts it. Like the "observer effect" highlighted by Bohr and then Devereux, a "self-observing effect" will be put forward: the simple fact of having to explain your experience during your sporting activity transforms it. The researcher must therefore control the deformations specifically induced by his protocol.