phainomena

Toma Strle
EMBODIED, ENACTED AND
EXPERIENCED DECISION-MAKING
1. Introduction
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The considerations that guide this paper mainly come from the realization
of how limited our understanding of decision-making actually is. We have
little knowledge about how common people make decisions in their everyday
lives. We have almost no insight into how the process of decision-making
looks and unfolds from the experiential perspective of decision-makers – how
they understand (and create) uncertainties, outcomes, consequences, etc. We
do not even know whether people interpret situations that are perceived as
decision situations from a third-person perspective as decision situations in
the first place. Having to rely mostly on behavioral and neural data gathered in
very specific and restricted decision situations forces us to postulate abstract
theories and models about what is going on in the minds of decision-makers,
when in fact we have little assurance that they correspond to how people
go about deciding (in the lab, or in everyday life). All in all, we have little
understanding of what sense and meaning decision-making has for decisionmakers,
and thus have a very limited understanding of the phenomenon at
best.
The goals of this paper are to show that mainstream approaches to studying
decision-making – accepting assumptions of traditional cognitive science and