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Hanne De Jaegher. Participatory Sense-Making.      

I'm a researcher of philosophy and cognitive science. My main interest is in the broad question how do we understand each other (social cognition, intersubjectivity)?

My philosophical home is enactive theory, which is a school of thought that sees strong links between self-organisation and cognition, or between life and mind. Within this framework, I investigate what role the process of interacting plays in understanding each other and understanding the world together. For this I am developing the concept of participatory sense-making.

Putting the interaction process at the centre of the study of social understanding entails a detailed and focused examination of it. This is being done in the social sciences (cf. interaction studies, conversation analysis, context analysis, etc.), but it is a fairly new idea in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences (exceptions can be found in, e.g., dynamical systems approaches).

In my doctoral dissertation I extended the enactive notion of sense-making into the social domain, which allowed me to characterise social cognition as participatory sense-making. This is based on taking the interaction process seriously, and connecting the interpersonal coordination of movements (incl. speech) with the coordination of sense-making activities.

I also apply the idea of participatory sense-making to the disorder of autism, initially to have a testbed for my ideas, but eventually I would like to see what the idea can mean for the diagnosis and remediation of the disorder.

Another strand of my research is the question of what methodologies there are or can be developed in order to study the role of interaction in intersubjectivity. These range from minimal, over psychological, to experiential. As part of this, I?m replicating and extending an experiment developed by Auvray et al. (2009), that suggests that interactions have constitutive affects on individuals? performance on a coordination task. This is work I do with Rachel Wood and Ezequiel Di Paolo. I am also working together with Vasu Reddy (Portsmouth) on a study of interaction in a double video set-up (cf. Murray and Trevarthen), and with Barbara Pieper (Munich) on a second-person practical phenomenology approach to the experience of interacting.

I am working with Thomas Fuchs on, among other things, the question: what are the conditions of possibility for self-awareness? Our argument starts from the life-mind continuity thesis (central to enactive theories), which we will attempt apply to the relation of the organismic self and the phenomenal self. Drawing on Hans Jonas, Varela, and others, the notion of self can be applied to the organism as an autopoietic system, even when it lacks signs of self-awareness on that level. The question now is: is there a principled continuity between self-organisation (including self-maintenance, self-production, etc.) and self-awareness?

As part of the DISCOS project, I am also, together with Lorna Lees-Grossman, conducting a series of interviews with leading experts on self-research (Thomas Fuchs, Peter Henningsen, Vittorio Gallese, Gyorgy Gergely, Peter Fonagy, Dan Zahavi, Thomas Metzinger, Steven Laureys, Yves Rossetti, Shaun Gallagher and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone), which we will bring together into a book.

Some relevant literature:

• Auvray, M., Lenay, C., & Stewart, J. (2009). Perceptual interactions in a minimalist virtual environment. New Ideas in Psychology, 27(1), 32-47.
• De Jaegher, H. (2009). Social understanding through direct perception? Yes, by interacting. Consciousness and Cognition, 18(2), 535-542.
• De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485-507.
• De Jaegher, H., & Froese, T. (2009). On the role of social interaction in individual agency. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 444-460.
• Di Paolo, E., Rohde, M., & De Jaegher, H. (Forthcoming). Horizons for the enactive mind: Values, social interaction, and play. In J. Stewart, O. Gapenne & E. Di Paolo (Eds.), Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Fuchs, T., & De Jaegher, H. (2009). Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 465-486.
• Gallagher, S. (2009). Two problems of intersubjectivity. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(6-8), 298-308.
• McGann, M., & De Jaegher, H. (2009). Self-Other Contingencies: Enacting Social Perception. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 417-437.
• Murray, L., & Trevarthen, C. (1986). The infant's role in mother-infant communication. Journal of Child Language, 13, 15-29.
• Pieper, B., & Clénin, D. (2010). Verkörperte Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung sozialen Handelns. Eine leib-orientierte praktisch-theoretische Forschungsperspektive. In F. Böhle & M. Weihrich (Eds.), Die Körperlichkeit sozialen Handelns. Soziale Ordnung jenseits von Normen und Institutionen Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag.
• Reddy, V., & Morris, P. (2004). Participants Don't Need Theories: Knowing Minds in Engagement. Theory Psychology, 14(5), 647-665.