phainomena

PHAINOMENA XXV/98-99
THE HORIZONS OF EMBODIMENT
situations, the process of decision-making, and decisions themselves have
for decision-makers.
4. Decision-making as experienced sense-making
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Di Paolo et al. (2010) characterize five constitutive and intertwined ideas
that define the enactive approach: autonomy, sense-making, emergence,
embodiment, and experience. Although all five are necessary for enactivism,
I will focus on the notions of sense-making and experience, and show how
they pertain to a better understanding of decision-making.
Di Paolo et al. (2010) characterize sense-making in the following way:
“Exchanges with the world are inherently significant for the cognizer and
this is the definitional property of a cognitive system: the creation and
appreciation of meaning or sense-making in short” (ibid.: 39). In this regard,
all of an agent’s (cognizing) activities necessarily presuppose that the world,
the agent’s activities, and the relation of the agent with their world are imbued
with meaning. But where does this meaning come from? As said before,
meaning does not lie in the objective world, waiting to be discovered by the
agent, nor is it already present “inside” the agent, who somehow imposes it
on the world. Rather, meaning is being created by agent’s interactions with
the(ir) world. In this sense, sense-making presupposes a certain perspective,
from which meaning is being “created”. It presupposes an experiential
perspective that is always present for the agent (and not (only) for an
observer), a perspective from which the agent cannot “escape”. Colombetti
makes this point clearly:
“Sense making […] necessarily entails a point of view from which the
system and the environment are evaluated. The adaptive autonomous
system is not just a unity of interrelations among processes but a
perspective on the world that generates meaning and norms for itself,
a locus of inwardness […] The enactive notion of sense making is also
intimately related to the one of Umwelt (literally, “world around”), in
Uexküll’s ([1934] 2010) sense of the environment as experienced or
lived from the organism’s perspective. For a living system to be a sense-