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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 96 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-
TOMA STRLE making system is to live in a world that is always an Umwelt, namely, an environment that has a specific significance or value for it. […] Cognition from an enactive perspective is, rather, the capacity to enact or bring forth a world of sense, namely, an Umwelt that has a special significance for the organism enacting it. (Colombetti 2014: 17–18)” Looking at decision-making, it is not hard to see that decision situations, decisions, and the process of decision-making cannot be separated from the significance and meaning they have for decision-makers. Decision-making is always a perspectival activity from which decision-makers “enact or bring forth a world of sense” that is, and cannot but be, significant and meaningful for them – activity, which is always imbued with the felt horizon that the embodied decision-maker brings forth. Let me now delve deeper into some ideas and provide some examples that show how decision-making should be viewed and researched as an activity of experienced sense-making. Contrary to what most accounts of decision-making imply, alternatives are not entities existing independently of decision-makers, lying somewhere in the objective world or being definable from the researcher’s third-person point of view. Rather, they “exist” (or not) only in the eye of the beholder, who interprets (or not) a certain situation as one that affords or calls for decision-making. Some qualitative studies on decision-making make this point very clear. Klein, Calderwood and Clinton-Cirocco’s (2010) report on the qualitative study of expert fire fighters’ decision-making nicely shows how expert firefighter commanders were not, in fact, choosing or deliberating between alternatives when trying to “decide” what to do in real-life firefighting situations. Rather, they considered (followed) one feasible course of action. They, in fact, did not make any choices – a finding that researchers could not have reached by considering only the “behavioral” or neural responses of expert firefighters in virtual lab settings. If, for instance, firefighters were faced with alternative courses of action in a lab, neatly presented to them on a piece of paper, and told to choose the best one, it would easily happen (as does in most quantitative research on decision-making) that researchers would interpret firefighters’ behavior as deliberation between alternatives. This would be a rather unwarranted conclusion. In light of these considerations, 97
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