phainomena

Ema Demšar
I understand you because I know you: The influence of past
embodied encounters on social understanding
This paper revolves around the topic of social understanding in face-toface
social interaction and investigates how our pre-reflective understanding
and experience of the other within it are affected by the history of our
embodied encounters. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, to highlight
some core elements that underpin social understanding, and second, to
describe the feeling of familiarity in social interaction and analyze its active
contribution to how we understand others. In the first part of the paper, I
present some phenomenological and enactive accounts of social cognition. I
point out the difficulties of the so-called mindreading approaches, according
to which interpersonal understanding is primarily a matter of mental state
attribution. I describe how understanding of others is facilitated by the
concrete environment of the social encounter as well as the broader social
world of shared practices, norms, and roles. However, such environmental
support of social understanding is hard to pin down and is always achieved
through the concrete process of embodied interaction. Since, in addition, our
grasp of the other is itself essentially interactive, I suggest that the enactive
perspective, which recognizes interaction as the core of social understanding,
is the optimal way to study the phenomenon. The second part of the paper
focuses on the pre-reflective, background feeling of familiarity with the other.
I introduce the phenomenological concept of body memory and explain how
relationships with a history of embodied encounters can, over time, acquire a
partially self-sustaining internal structure, which is often accompanied by the
experience of familiarity. I argue that this feeling also has an active dimension,
since it can shape our experience of and responsiveness to the possibilities
for (inter)action in a particular social encounter. Describing pre-reflective
social understanding as the ability to adequately respond to these possibilities,
I conclude that the feeling of familiarity plays an important role in guiding our
unreflective social interaction and actively contributes to how we understand
and experience the other.
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