Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of PresenceAlva Noë

This paper has three main aims. First, I criticize intellectualism in the philosophyof mind and I outline an alternative to intellectualism that I call Concept Plural-ism. Second, I seek to unify the sensorimotor or enactive approach to perceptionand perceptual consciousness developed in O’Regan & Noë (2001) and Noë(2004, 2012), with an account of understanding concepts. The proposal here—thatconcepts and sensorimotor skills are species of a common genus, that they arekinds of skills of access—is meant to offer an extension of the earlier account ofperception. Finally, I describe a phenomenon—fragility—that has been poorly un-derstood, but whose correct analysis is critical for progress in the theory of mind(both perception and cognition).

KeywordsActionism | Concept pluralism | Concepts | Consciousness | Enactive account |Evans | Fragility | Frege | Intellectualism | Kant | Perception | Plato | Presence |Sensorimotor account | The intellectualist insight | The intellectualist thesis | Un-derstanding | Wittgenstein

Author

Alva Noënoe@berkeley.edu   University of California,Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.

Commentator

Miriam Kyselomiriam.kyselo@gmail.com   Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko UnibertsitateaDonostia / San Sebastián, Spain

Editors

Thomas Metzingermetzinger@uni-mainz.de   Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windtjennifer.windt@monash.edu   Monash UniversityMelbourne, Australia

1 Introduction

The present study takes its starting point fromthe enactive or sensorimotor, or, as I now preferto call it, the actionist approach to perceptionand perceptual consciousness (O’Regan & Noë2001; Noë 2004, 2012). Actionism is the thesisthat perception is the activity of exploring theenvironment making use of knowledge of sensor-imotor contingencies. Sensorimotor contingen-cies are understood to be patterns of depend-ence of sensory change on movement. The pro-posal, then, is that we make use of this know-ledge of the way our own movement gives riseto sensory change to explore the world. Thisknowledge-based or skilful activity is perceiving.

We characterized the relevant kind of know-ledge as knowledge precisely in order to mark thecontinuity between perception and “higher”, moreintellectual kinds of cognition such as thoughtand planning (O’Regan & Noë 2001). At thesame time, we were quick to characterize the rel-evant forms of knowledge as practical, non-pro-positional, as implicit, or as “skill”, precisely inorder to avoid over-intellectualizing perception.

In Action in Perception (Noë 2004, Ch. 6), Idefended the view that perception requires themastery and exercise of concepts. In doing so, Itook myself to be lowering the bar on what it isto have a concept, rather than raising the bar on

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 1 | 15

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what it is to be a perceiver. It was always myview that the resulting account was one in whichunderstanding (mastery and use of concepts, in-cluding sensorimotor skills) and perception (ex-ploration of the environment drawing on a varietyof skills, including concepts, as conventionally un-derstood, and also sensorimotor skills) worked to-gether in human and animal mental life. As I putit later, “understanding” and “perception” arriveat the party together (Noë 2012).

Although actionism places great emphasis inthe importance of movement, action, and thebody for the theory of perception, on the claimthat perceiving is an activity, and on the proposi-tion that perception is not a representation-build-ing activity, it was never the intention of the viewto deny the critical role of understanding andknowledge. The point, rather, was to offer a uni-fied account of perception, consciousness,thought, and action. But the details were not en-tirely worked out. Knowledge, skill, ability, andunderstanding were not carefully defined, and theprecise relation between the account of perceptionand that of conceptual understanding was notspelled out in detail. I try to rectify that here.

My basic strategy in this paper is as follows.In part I, I offer an extended discussion of what Icall intellectualism. I define the view, criticize it,and show how even critics of the view tend toshare many of its presuppositions. In part II, I tryto offer an alternative to intellectualism, namelyconcept pluralism, which builds upon the action-ist conception of concepts as “skills of access”.Concepts, I propose, should be thought of astechniques for enabling access to what there is. Inthis way—the details will become clear later on—I offer a way of thinking about concepts that isunified with the basic elements of the earlier the-ory of perception.

One caveat: I don’t take up the issue of an-imal experience and cognition in this paper, eventhough it is directly relevant to the topic.

I

2 Modes of understanding

Kant (1791) said that concepts are predicates ofpossible judgement. That’s what concepts are.

They are creatures of judgement. He also be-lieved that concepts play a basic role in cogni-tion. They organize the data of sense. Withoutconcepts, sensory experience would be emptysensation; without sensory influx, there’d benothing for concepts to organize. For Kant,judgement gives the basic form of experience(Erfahrung).

Frege (1891) said that concepts are func-tions from objects to truth-values. In this he ap-peared to break with Kant. Concepts havenothing to do with judgement or with our cog-nitive organization. They are before all that.This is in tune with Frege’s well-known anti-psychologism, according to which grasping, un-derstanding, judging, and communicating are ofno relevance to logic or ontology.1 But Fregedoesn’t actually sever the link between conceptsand judgement; he only frames it differently.Concepts figure in what is judged; they belongto judgeable content. So Frege preserves Kant’slink to judgement, but in a de-psychologizedversion.2

Frege’s anti-psychologism gets him intotrouble.3 The fact that concepts are not them-selves psychological, in the sense of being ideasor associations or feelings, doesn’t mean thatthey are not tied to understanding or judge-ment, for nothing forces us to think of under-standing and judgement as psychological in thatsense. At the same time, the claim that con-cepts are “third-realm” entities gives little sub-stance to the idea that they are, in the relevantsense, objective. Finally, if concepts are somesort of occult abstracta, then it isn’t at all clearhow we can grasp them. And surely, whateverconcepts are, it is the case that we can graspthem.

I’ll return to this set of issues later. Butfor now let us agree that for both Kant andFrege, concepts are tied to judgement, wherethis means something like: they are tied to cat-egorizing, to explicit reasoning, to subsumingobjects under concepts. Each of these thinkersoffers an account of concepts, or of the under-1 See, for example, Frege’s “Thoughts“, (1918–1919).2 Not that I mean to suggest that it is right to think of Kant as actu-

ally offering a psychological account. But it might look this way fromFrege’s perspective.

3 As both Dummett (1973) and Baker & Hacker (1984) have noticed.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 2 | 15

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standing of concepts, in what I’ll call the modeof judgement. According to Kant and Frege,grasp or understanding of concepts finds its nat-ural, true expression in judgement.

This paper takes its start from the obser-vation that there would appear to be othermodes of conceptual activity, other ways for un-derstanding (for concepts) to find expression inour lives. At least on the face it, judgementwould not seem to be the only mode of concep-tual understanding.

Take, for example, perceptual understand-ing, or what we might call understanding con-cepts in the perceptual mode. Consider reading.It is difficult to tell, looking at the entrance tothe Taj Mahal, which bits of squiggle are mereornament, and which are writing in ClassicalArabic. You can have this experience, it is avail-able to you, only if you are not fluent in Clas-sical Arabic, or in this style of Arabic script.This marks the spot of the basic phenomenon:there would seem to be a mode of understand-ing that is perceptual in nature. It is im-possible, as a psychological matter, to see mean-ingful text as a mere squiggle. For the one whoknows, for the one who can, meaningful wordsjust show up.

Compare this with the case of a scholarstudying Renaissance paintings in which writingis shown embroidered into the robes of magiand other fabulous figures. Are these scripts ina familiar language, or could they be marksfrom a forgotten one? Or are they pseudo-scripts? How do you decide? A keen problemand one that affords opportunity, for it de-mands reasoning, explicit categorization, andjudgement.4

But nothing like that seems to be going onwhen you are reading. And the point is general:it operates at the level of our everyday seeing.It is difficult, maybe even impossible—psycholo-gically speaking—to see familiar kinds of thingsaround us as mere things. We always see themas this or that.

I don’t mean that when we see, we repres-ent the things we really see around us as this orthat, by bringing them under the relevant con-

4 For a discussion of this fascinating topic, see A. Nagel (2011).

cepts, by categorizing them, as it were, injudgement. The point rather is that the thingswe see, the things around us, are familiar,known, comprehended, understood, and recog-nized, from the very outset. Concepts aregeared in before we are even in a position to askwhat something is or to make a judgementabout it.5

So we have here a distinct way in whichconcepts, or the understanding, can be put touse outside the setting of judgement. Specific-ally, as I’ve said, this is an example of the de-ployment of concepts in the perceptual mode or,more simply, perceptual understanding.

Note, in saying perception is a non-judge-mental mode of understanding, I don’t mean todeny that there might be an interdependencebetween the judgemental and the perceptualmodes. Maybe only one who can judge can per-ceive and precisely because perception enablesjudgement. And maybe it is only of one whocan have perceptual experience that we couldever say that he or she is in a position to judgeabout anything.6 My point is that, on the faceof it, judging is one thing, and perceiving an-other, and yet they are both ways of exercisingthe understanding.

There are other modes, as well. Concepts also get deployed in what I call

the active mode; understanding, that is, canfind expression, immediately, in what we do.There is such a thing as practical understand-ing. And what makes the relevant understand-ing practical is not that it is an exercise injudgement on, as it happens, practical matters.What makes it practical, in my view, is that itis the gearing in or putting to work of one’s un-derstanding in the absence of any call for, oreven space for, reflection or judgement.

The dog walker’s knowledge of dogs, forexample, is put to work in the way he or sheadopts a gait that suits the dog and encouragesor permits it to accomplish its sniffy, doggybusiness; and so also in the way the owner spon-taneously shortens the leash as another dog ap-proaches; it is exhibited, even, we might say, in

5 As Heidegger (1927) would have put it, the things we encounter arealways already familiar.

6 I return to this issue of the unity of concepts in section 6 below.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 3 | 15

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the cool she keeps when the two dogs beginbarking and straining at their leashes. Withouta word, in the absence of deliberation, or expli-cit thought, the owner knowingly engages thenature of dogs.7

And there may be still other kinds of un-derstanding, other styles of conceptuality. Forexample, there is also perhaps what we couldcall the emotional mode, or maybe it would bebetter to say the personal, or even interpersonalmode. Tears, feeling, injury, but also posture,standing distance to others, navigating in a so-cial environment, can all show a highly refinedattunement to situation, relationship, status,goals, tasks, and so on. It takes understandingto do all this, even though we rarely try tomake this understanding explicit and eventhough, very probably, we cannot do this, evenin ideal circumstances. Let us say that in thiskind of responsive engagement with our socialworlds we display understanding.8

To summarize: there is a case to be madefor the existence of at least three, maybe four,distinct modes of understanding. There is thejudgemental mode, the perceptual mode, andthe active mode, and perhaps also the personalmode.

3 Intellectualism vs. the intellectualist insight

I have proposed that there are at least three orfour distinct modes of understanding. I nowturn to the familiar thought that among thesevarieties of expression of conceptual understand-ing, only one—the judgemental mode—is genu-ine. The other modes, according to this idea—that is, the perceptual, the active, the personal7 This example is from Stephen Mulhall (1986). 8 With this last example we move beyond description to the suggestion

of an argument. The thought is that the relevant forms of under-standing couldn’t be underwritten by judgement, since we are notable, as a general rule, to frame the needed judgements. Indeed,something like this line of thought is already suggested in the wayI’ve sketched the perceptual and active modes above. Recall the cel-ebrated case of Oliver Sacks (1970): a man can’t recognize the itembefore him as a glove; his powers of judgement are fine—he describeswhat he sees as a self-enclosed piece of fabric with five outpouchings—and he knows what a glove is. The case is illustrative because itbrings out that it is less the fact that he can’t recognize the glove,and more the very fact that he needs to think about it all, thatbrings home the thought that in our normal life there is no room forthat sort of deliberation.

—are expressive of understanding only derivat-ively, thanks to the fact that they are guided orcontrolled, from outside as it were, by true un-derstanding in the judgemental mode.

I will call this view intellectualism. Intel-lectualism, as I am defining it, is the view thatone modality of conceptual expression is basic,namely, the judgemental, and that the othersare domains where understanding finds expres-sion only derivatively.9

Plato and Descartes seemed to have be-lieved something like this. For them, a meresensation rises to the level of perception, and amere movement to the level of action, only if itis subject to guidance by reason. The soul is di-vided against itself and it achieves integrationonly when it is controlled in the right way fromabove.

Intellectualism is probably the establish-ment view in cognitive science. When you seethe Pole Star, for example, as Fodor & Pyly-shyn (1981) insist, you represent whatever it isthat you really see—a pattern of irradiation ofthe retina, perhaps—as the Pole Star. To sup-pose otherwise is to suppose that vision couldbe, as Gibson (1986) had claimed, a direct pickup of what there is around us. But Pole Star-hood, like the third dimension, is not somethingthat gets projected onto the retina. The what-ness of things, their nature, no less than thethird-dimension itself, are not, strictly speaking,visible. We need judgement, the application ofconcepts (in this case perhaps automatic andimplicit) in the building-up of mental represent-ations, to get something like the world into ourexperience.10

Jason Stanley, in a series of writings(Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011;Stanley & Krakauer 2013), defends what I amcalling intellectualism. You perform a skilful ac-9 Intellectualism can be defined differently. For a variety of approaches

to problems in this vicinity, see Bengson & Moffett (2011).10 This was David Marr’s (1982) view. The content of visual experience

is given in a 2.5D sketch, that is, in a depiction of what is given inthe projection of the world onto the retina. It is only in so far as vis-ion yields knowledge that it goes beyond what is given in this inter-mediate-level representation and gives rise to a fully conceptual 3Dmodel. But for Marr, and for his recent advocates (Prinz 2013), al-though we live in the world of the 3D sketch, our experience is con-fined to the intermediate-level representation. And crucially, forthese thinkers, you don’t need concepts or understanding at the in-termediate level. You just need optics.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 4 | 15

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tion, according to Stanley (2011), only whenyour action flows from your knowledge of truepropositions. He elaborates:

[t]here are all sorts of automatic mechan-isms that operate in a genuine sense sub-personally. The human (and animal) capa-city for skilled action is based upon thesemechanisms. What makes an action an ex-ercise of skill, rather than mere reflex, isthe fact that it is guided by the intellec-tual apprehension of truths. (Stanley 2011,p. 174)

Is intellectualism right? Should we be intellectu-alists?

It is important that we notice, right away,that intellectualism is right about something. Itdoes justice to the fact that there is under-standing, and there is conceptuality, at workwherever we think and perceive and act andtalk, as we have been considering. Conceptual-ity, understanding, and knowledge pervade notonly the mental, but our lives and our being.Certainly, it is in evidence wherever we canspeak of agency. Stanley insists (in the quota-tion above) that we can only speak of skilful ac-tion where there is understanding at work. Heperhaps ought to have said that we can onlyspeak of action at all, as opposed to mere reflex,or mere movement, where there is also under-standing.

The question I would like us to consider isthis: do we need intellectualism to secure thisundoubted intellectualist insight, as I will dubthe recognition of the pervasiveness of under-standing in our perceptual, active, as well asemotional lives? It’s crucial that we notice thedistance between the insight and the thesis. It’sone thing to say that there is understanding atwork in perception and action, and another tothink that what makes this true is that percep-tion and action are grounded on acts of judge-ment. Do we need to think that what guaran-tees and secures the involvement of understand-ing is the fact that our seeings, doings, and feel-ings are guided by judgements?

There are, right off the bat, two obviousgrounds for suspicion regarding the intellectual-

ist thesis. For one thing, intellectualism at leastthreatens to obscure the differences to which Ihave been directing our attention among whatat least appear to be authentically distinct waysof exercising one’s knowledge and understand-ing. And so, it seems, it gets things wrong. See-ing and acting and dynamically reacting, mostof the time at least, don’t look or feel anythinglike bringing objects under concepts in judge-ment.

For another, intellectualism smacks of thearbitrary. Couldn’t we maintain that perceptionis the basic form of understanding and thatjudgement, even in cases of pure reasoning andmathematics, rests on a kind of perceptual in-sight? Or that it is understanding in the activemode that is truly basic? Judgement itself de-pends on the mastery and exercise of conceptualcapacities which are in the first instance prac-tical. You need to know how to use concepts,after all, in order to use them in judgement.

In any case, let us ask again: are therereasons to endorse intellectualism? Why thinkthat judgement is the primary and singular au-thentic modality of real understanding? Why bean intellectualist?

4 Troubles with intellectualism

Stanley’s writings (Stanley & Williamson 2001;Stanley 2011; Stanley & Krakauer 2013) on thetopic are suggestive. However, he seems to mis-take evidence in favour of the insight (that un-derstanding is present in perception and action,as well as in the setting of explicit deliberativethought) with support for intellectualism itself(for the view that judgement governs action andperception). And, on top of that, he may com-mit the fallacy of conceiving the whole genus onthe model of one of its species; like thinkingthat every dog is a cat because, well, they aremammals, or that seeing is a way of touchingbecause, after all, they are both forms of per-ception. In this case it is the fallacy of thinkingthat knowing how must be a form of knowingthat because, after all, it is form of knowledge.

Let’s turn to this last point first, briefly.Stanley (2011) notices that we use “to know”both for propositional knowledge and also for

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 5 | 15

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practical knowledge (know-how). Contrary towhat he suggests, however, there are cognatelanguages where this is not the case. For ex-ample, we don’t express knowing how in Ger-man using the same verb that we use to expresspropositional knowledge (Stanley 2011, pp. 36-37). We use können, which means can; we don’tuse wissen (as in wissen wie).

But in any case, the more important pointis, so what? How dispositive are facts like thissupposed to be? It is common ground, I wouldsay, that know-how is a form of knowledge, anachievement of understanding. The question iswhether it is a form of knowledge of the sametype as propositional knowledge, the sort ofknowledge that gets expressed in judgement.Crucially, all the evidence in the world that it isa form of knowledge doesn’t add up to evidencethat it is propositional knowledge.

Now, as a matter of fact, we know thatknowing how to do something is not merelyknowing that a proposition is true, for any pro-position you might care to think up. For know-ing how to do something implies that you havethe ability to do it (and vice versa), whereas thecorresponding propositional knowledge has nosuch practical entailments.

Stanley would deny this (Stanley & Willi-amson 2001; Stanley 2011). You can know howto perform a stunt but be unable to perform it(because you’ve been injured, say); so, heclaims, possession of know-how cannot be equi-valent to possession of an actual ability. Butthis is unpersuasive. Of course it is true thatyou can know how to do something even thoughyou are unable to do it. But this is because yourbeing unable to do it is not, in the relevantsense, evidence that you can’t do it! Consider:you can’t swim if there’s no water, even thoughyou can swim. You can swim but you can’tswim. Far from showing that know-how andability part ways, this sort of consideration re-minds us that they move along the same rails.

So knowing how to do something isn’t pos-session of propositional knowledge: it doesn’tconsist in being in a position to make certainjudgements. This is a point that Stanley andWilliamson accept, if only implicitly, for theyprovide a different analysis of the cases precisely

to account for the critical link to action in thecase of know-how. Knowing how to do some-thing, on their view, consists in grasping a trueproposition, yes, but it consists in grasping it ina distinctively and irreducibly practical way(making use of practical modes of presenta-tion).11

Again, it is worth noticing that to deny, asI do, that knowing how to do something con-sists in knowing the truth of a proposition, isnot to deny that, as a matter of fact, knowinghow to do something may put you in a positionto make certain judgements, or may require youto appreciate the truth of certain propositions.

This brings us to the first point above: theconfusion of evidence for the insight with evid-ence for the thesis. I am assuming that know-how, like propositional knowledge, is a form ofknowledge. This common ground is already se-cured by the insight: our understanding, ourknowledge of concepts, is put to use in bothcases. So we can readily agree with Snowdon(2004), cited approvingly by Stanley (Stanley &Williamson 2001), that knowing how and know-ing that go together—that where you have one,you have the other. In general, as Snowdon ob-serves, if you know how to do something—say,how to get home from here—then you’ll knowthat all sorts of things are true, such as, for ex-ample, that you need to turn left here, that youaren’t already home, etc. And vice versa. Know-ing how and knowing that, in this sense, com-mingle and cooperate. These considerations areadduced by Stanley, and by Snowdon, I think,to suggest that Ryle was mistaken in believingthat the propositional and the practical are dis-joint and disconnected (1949); in fact they oper-ate together and in support of each other. Thisis an important point and one I endorse. Andthis is exactly what one should expect given theintellectualist insight. After all, understandingoperates in both spheres: the practical and thejudgemental or propositional. Crucially, how-ever, the fact that the practical and the propos-

11 Stanley (2011) offers a different account from that developed inStanley & Williamson (2001). The former is framed in terms ofmodal parameters governing the interpretation of the relevant sen-tences. Although he insists that know-how does not entail ability, headmits that attributions of know-how exhibit more or less the samesort of modality as ascriptions of dispositions and abilities.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 6 | 15

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itional mutually entail each other in this sort ofway lends no support to the intellectualist ideathat one of these, the propositional, is founda-tional in respect of the other; indeed, it weighsagainst that very idea. Why press on and insiston this thesis when, it would seem, the insighton its own is enough to capture the phe-nomenon at hand?

Stanley’s motivations seem fairly clear. Hewants to break with the idea that propositionalknowledge is detached and, as he puts it, beha-viourally inert. He wants to insist that it’swrongheaded to think that athletes and clownsand craftspeople are skilful zombies, whereasphilosophers and mathematicians and physicistsare intellectual workers whose actions exhibitauthentic brain-power. It may be, even, that hethinks this is a point of political significance.

Intellectualism isn’t necessary to secureany of this, however. The insight has alreadydone that.

In fact, intellectualism, as Stanley devel-ops it, threatens to distort the nature of thecognitive achievements that are put to work inour practical, perceptual, and personal engage-ments. This comes out in the discussion of skill.Stanley & Krakauer (2013) defend Aristotle’sclaim (from Metaphysics 1046b) that we canonly speak of skilful action, as opposed to merehabit, or brute capacities, where we can speakof rational control of action, and also where wecan speak of teaching, learning, practicing, get-ting better, or achieving expertise. They defendAristotle’s claim that it is a mark of skilfulness,that you can voluntarily choose to performwhat you can do skilfully badly.

This last point seems unlikely. I can’tchoose not to understand what you say, or tosee writing as mere squiggles, or words as com-posed of bits I need painstakingly to sound orspell out. A guitarist cannot choose to experi-ence the instrument in his hands as strange orunfamiliar. At best, maybe, I can pretend I amunable to do these things.

Is this because talking and reading andplaying guitar are not really skilful at all, thatthey are mere habits outside the range of ra-tional control? Hardly! They’re expressions ofskilful competence, rational understanding and

knowledge if anything is. The mistake is tothink that a performance is only rational if con-trol is exerted in the mode of judgement, as iffrom outside. The understanding that is put towork in our talk and play, as in our thought, isnative to these various styles of engagementsthemselves.

Stanley and Krakauer make a lot of thedemand that skill depends on knowledge offacts. It’s worth noticing, yet again, that insist-ing, as I do, that skilfullness does not consist inthe exercise of concepts in the judgementalmode does not entail that there can be skilful-ness in the absence of the ability to exercisethem in that mode. It may be, as a matter offact—this is related to the Snowdon point above—that only someone who is sensitive to all sortsof facts, for example, about how something isdone, will in fact know how to do it. Thisdoesn’t show that knowing how is a kind ofknowledge of the facts. It shows rather that ourdistinct conceptual capacities may be interde-pendent.

Stanley and Krakauer try to draw a linebetween true skills, which are, in their sense,governed by rationality, and others—for ex-ample perceptual and linguistic skills—that aretoo basic, or too simple to qualify as skills inthe fuller rational sense.12

One problem with this suggestion is thatit is not so easy to draw a sharp line betweenskills and supposedly brute abilities. Take col-our vision, for example, which is innate in hu-mans. Despite this, it turns out that childrenfind it very difficult to recognize and discrimin-ate colours long after they’ve mastered thenames of familiar objects, people, games, etc.As Akins (unpublished manuscript) has argued,this is probably because colours are not simple,as our phenomenology, or rather, our conven-tional wisdom about our phenomenology, leadsus erroneously to believe. Getting blue or yellowor red is to develop a sensitivity to suites ofconstancies and variations—to ecological vari-ation in what I have called colour-critical condi-12 Stanley & Krakauer (2013, p. 5) write: “[b]ut at some point, all such

knowledge will rest on knowledge of basic actions, such as graspingan object or lifting one’s arm. These activities are not skills; they arenot acquired by or improved upon by raining in adult life. Theirmanifestation is nevertheless under our voluntary control.”

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 7 | 15

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tions—that takes time and learning, and allowsfor criticism and reflection. Is colour vision ba-sic? Or is it skilful? It may be both.

This is not a special case. Because seeingis saturated with understanding, it is very hardto find features of our ability that are not mod-ulated by knowledge and context. Granted, theability to discriminate line-gratings of differentdensities is fixed, at its limit, by the resolvingpowers of the eyes; yet our discriminations arelikely to be sensitive to task and motivation, toattention and distraction—that is, very broadly,to our engagement with the meaningful world.So where does skill stop and brute ability be-gin? I am skeptical that learnability, teachabil-ity, or rational control provide an interesting orvaluable demarcation. The most basic reason forthis is that perceiving is never merely registra-tion. It is a matter of knowledgable access (Noë2004, 2012).

There is a second important issue as well.Consider language. Linguistic misunderstandingdoesn’t stop language in its tracks, ejecting youand sending you back to the grammar, written,as it were in advance, by those responsible forsetting up the language. Rather, coping withmisunderstanding—dealing with not gettinghow someone is using words, or how we shoulduse them, or with not knowing how to use them—is one of language’s familiar settings. We ad-judicate and teach and learn and improve andcriticize and define and formalize and evaluatewithin language, not from outside it. Language,contrary to the claims of Chomskyan linguistics,is not a rule-governed activity. It is a rule-usingactivity. And we make up the rules as we needthem and for our own purposes. This may becontroversial. But here’s why I insist on it: ac-cording to the logician’s or the linguist’s pictureof language, first you assign values to primit-ives, then you set up rules governing the con-struction of well-formed formulas. If you thinkof language this way, then it looks like you needjudgement—the application of rules to cases—to secure the meaningfulness of what would oth-erwise be mere marks and noises. But we don’tneed judgement—we don’t need understandingin the judgemental mode—to secure meaning.We don’t need guidance from the outside.

The opposition between habit and skill isa false one; and it is a mistake to think thatwhat marks the opposition is that habit is be-low or before understanding whereas skill is thedeliberate exercise of understanding.

5 Troubles with anti-intellectualism

Some critics of intellectualism argue that per-ception cannot be conceptual, because if percep-tion were conceptual, then perception would bea form of judgement. But the idea that percep-tion is judgement over-intellectualizes percep-tion.13

This is how I understand Gareth Evan’s(1982) argument in connection with the Müller-Lyer illusion. You can experience the two linesin the Müller-Lyer illusion as different in length,even when you know, and so have not the eventhe weakest inclination to deny, that the linesare the same in length. The visual experience isone thing, and judgement another; hence exper-ience is not conceptual.

Now, this is an example of an apparentdisagreement between what you know to be thecase (judgement) and how things look (experi-ence). Things look precisely the way you knowthey are not. Experience and the judgement arein conflict. This shows, I would have thought,that experience, and the corresponding content,share the same kind of content. The fact thatthey are in apparent conflict shows that theyare not somehow incommensurable. So if theone is conceptual, then so is the other.

But more important, for our discussionhere, is that Evans seems to assume that con-cepts can only be in play if they are applied injudgement. Since experience is not judgement,there is no way for concepts to gear in. Butthat’s to accept the basic claim of the intellec-tualist—judgement is the only way for conceptsto get into the act—not to challenge it.

So Evans’ argument against the idea thatperceptual experience is conceptual—what wecan think of as Evans’s anti-intellectualism—ac-tually takes what I am calling intellectualism

13 See Noë (2004, Ch. 6) for detailed engagement with the issue of theconceptuality of perception and the relation between my own posi-tion and that of John McDowell.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 8 | 15

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for granted. It takes for granted that there isonly one genuine and legitimate mode of exer-cise of conceptual understanding, namely thejudgemental.

Hubert Dreyfus (e.g., 2013) is responsiblefor a widely-influential criticism of intellectual-ism that is crypto-intellectualist in just this way.

Reasons, principles, and explicit knowledgeguide perception and activity, according toDreyfus, but only in the case of the novice. Theexpert, in contrast, is one who is engaged, inthe flow. The expert, having mastered the rulesand the concepts, has no further use for them.The expert is able to respond to the solicita-tions of situation and environment with no needfor conscious thought or deliberate judgement.

A favourite example is that of the lighten-ing chess player. There is literally no time,claims Dreyfus, for the chess player to analysethe situation and decide how to move. Movesare made in a flash. To suppose that the moveis guided by reasons or judgement is to fall preyto a myth of the mental, according to which amind-faculty, a faculty of judgement, say, ac-companies our doings and is responsible forthem being expressive of competence, intelli-gence, and understanding. For Dreyfus this ideais a dead giveaway of a distinct type of intellec-tualist psychologism. Yes, Dreyfus grants, if youask the expert afterwards, why he or she madethis move and not that one, he can give you areason. But we have no more ground to supposethe reason was in operation before the playerswitched into the intellectual mode in responseto the question than we do to suppose that therefrigerator light is always on because it is onwhenever you open the fridge to look.

According to Dreyfus, understanding orreason operate only if there are explicit acts ofrule-following, or judgement, that accompany,or even precede, every act. But why believethat? The baseball player doesn’t need to bethinking about the rules for it to be the casethat what he does is subject to them and is car-ried out, so to speak, in their light. The rulesare there—in the form of umpires and rulebooks, and also dictionaries and courts of law,and earnest disagreement among participants—and we have access to them as need arises. The

fact that we can use them, and that we careabout their correct use, is all that is needed forit to be the case that we act under their influ-ence. The influence is not causal. It is normat-ive.

Dreyfus goes further and insists thatwhether or not it is always legitimate to de-mand that the phronesis, as he calls the expert,invoking Aristotle, justifies his or her actions, itwill not in general be possible for him or her todo so. You can’t make explicit the myriad rulesgoverning how we stand or react or explore ordecide because, as a matter of fact, there are nosuch general rules. There is nothing to be madeexplicit. At best the chess master is likely topoint to the situation on the board and exclaim,look! This situation requires this move!

But why is not this exactly the kind ofreply that is required? Recall Wittgenstein’s(1953, §88) example of “Stand over there!” Thiscan be a perfectly precise command, as exact asrationality can require, even when it is not thecase that one can specify, to the millimetre, say,where it is one is supposed to stand. For certainpurposes, in certain contexts, one may needmore precision. But in other contexts the de-mand for precision on the order of millimetreswould be unreasonable. And so my thought hereis that it is to set too high a standard on what itwould be to have a reason for acting to demandthat one can frame it independently of the situ-ation one is in. It is precisely an over-intellectual-ized conception of what it would be to have areason, or to make use of a rule, to suppose thatrules and reasons need to be context-free andsituation-independent, known in advance and ap-plied, as it were, from outside one’s engagedplay14—just as it would be to over-intellectualizethe intellect in general to suppose that conceptsonly gear in in the setting of judgement.

Here’s the point: the use of rules them-selves—which for Dreyfus is the hallmark of thedetached attitude of the intellect—is itself anactivity that admits of mastery and expertiseand so also flow. And so we cannot insist thatrule-use marks the boundary between engage-ment and detachment. 14 See McDowell (1994). His discussion of demonstrative senses and

demonstrative concepts aims at just this point.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 9 | 15

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But once we allow that rules are used, andreasons proffered, from the standpoint of ourengagement—from the inside—, then we neednot fear that we have committed ourselves to anover-intellectualized conception of what it is tobe engaged, just because we allow that we un-derstand and can reflect on what we are doing.

Notice again that Dreyfus’s picture—a pic-ture he may take over from Heidegger (1927)and Merleau-Ponty (1945)—only counts as evid-ence against the idea that concepts and reasonsand rules gear into perception and skilled actionif we suppose that the intellectualist is right,that there is only one way for understanding toget into the act—namely, in the form of explicitdeliberate judgement.

And notice that this way of rejecting intel-lectualism—on the part of Dreyfus, and otherexistential phenomenologists, and perhaps alsoEvans—pays a high price. For it must reject theidea that understanding and reason have anyplace at all outside the range of explicit deliber-ative reason, and so it has to give up the intel-lectualist’s insight, namely that in our engaged,perceptual, and active lives, even when we areexperts, even when we are skilled, our perform-ance gives expression to knowledge, intelligence,and understanding. By accepting the intellectu-alist thesis that judgement alone is the onlytrue way for concepts to gear in, Dreyfus andco. feel they are compelled to reject the ideathat our lives as a whole, beyond the confines ofdeliberate exercise of reason and understanding,can be, or are, at one with our intellects.

What existential phenomenology may finddifficult to appreciate—at least in Dreyfus’s ver-sion of the position—is that conflict, disagree-ment, and disturbance of flow are themselvesbusiness-as-usual; they are normal moments inthe way that even the expert carries on. We sawthis in the language case. Expertise is not im-munity; if anything, it is an evolved opportunityfor new forms of vulnerability. Engagement is,as I shall put it, always manifestly fragile. Thatis, the liability to slip up, to get things wrong,is a built into the nature of the undertaking—ofany undertaking. To go wrong is not, as a gen-eral rule, to stop playing the game—it is notthe game’s abeyance—it is rather a moment in

the development of play. But let’s go back tolanguage. We don’t stop communicating whenwe fail to understand each other. At least thatis not usually the case. Misunderstanding is anopportunity for more communication. Clarify-ing, reformulating, trying again, like criticism,are things we use language to do. The fragilityis intrinsic and manifest. It doesn’t mark outthe game’s limits. It marks one of its modalities.

I stated earlier that understanding in theactive and perceptual modes leaves no room forthe application of understanding in the judge-mental mode. I suggested this was a reason forthinking that judgement can’t be operating be-hind the scenes when we perceive and act. But wecan amend this now in light of our considerationof fragility. It is internal to the very character ofour perceptual and active involvements that theyare liable, not so much to breakdown, in Dreyfus’ssense, as to error, confusion, and other stutter-steps that require precisely that one now thinkabout what one is seeing and what one is doing.Judgement and thought can, in this sense, livecheek-by-jowl with perception and action without,therefore, getting in their way.

In any case, Dreyfus’s criticism of intellec-tualism fails. But it does so precisely because hefails to break with the over-intellectualized con-ception of the intellect at the heart of intellectu-alism. Dreyfus’s anti-intellectualism fails be-cause intellectualism fails. It is, in reality, a spe-cies of intellectualism. Neither Dreyfus, nor hiswould-be opponent, can do justice to the waysin which understanding operates outside thenarrow domain of explicit reasoning. Both sidesfail to accommodate the phenomenon of fragil-ity.

II

6 Concept pluralism: A genuine alternative to intellectualism

So let us now turn our attention to the pro-spects for framing a true alternative to intellec-tualism. What would such an alternative looklike?

A genuine alternative to intellectualismwill be pluralist in that it will reckon that there

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 10 | 15

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are different legitimate and non-derivativemodes of understanding, and so it will hold fastto the intellectualist’s insight that understand-ing is in play everywhere in our lives even as itrejects the intellectualist thesis.

One resource for such a pluralism is Wit-tgenstein (1953). Wittgenstein proposed that aconcept is a technique, and that understanding,therefore, is a form of mastery, akin to an abil-ity. An important fact about abilities is thatthey can be exercised in a multiplicity of ways. Ican exercise my understanding of what a houseis by building one, looking at one, painting one,living in one, talking about one, or buying one.So, from this standpoint, there is nothing moresurprising about the fact that my knowledgecan find expression in what I do, as well as inmy knowledge of a proposition, than there is inthe fact that my ability to read gets exercisedboth when I read a novel and also when I blushat the words on the bathroom wall.

This idea also helps us explain the unity ofunderstanding. If concepts can be applied inwalking the dog as well is in writing a treatiseabout dogs, what is the connection betweenthese two self-standing and non-derivativemodes of exercise of something that, surely, is asingle conceptual capacity: an understanding ofthe concept dog? What gives unity to this un-derstanding?

The idea that understanding a concept ismastery of a technique, a mastery that has mul-tiple, distinct, context-sensitive ways of findingexpression, helps here. One way to express un-derstanding of dog is to talk and write aboutdogs. Another way is to be able to spot dogs onthe basis of their appearance. Still another is towork or play comfortably with dogs. And thelist goes on and on. We put our singular under-standing of what dogs are to work in these dif-ferent ways, and the understanding consists inthe ability to do (more or less) all of that.

We are now in a position to appreciatethat the claim that perception and action are,with judgement, non-derivative, original modesof understanding does not entail that thesemodes are independent of each other. The ideathat the unity of a concept is a matter of unity-in-ability helps bring this out. The fact that

perception isn’t beholden to judgement for itsconceptuality doesn’t mean that there could beperception in the absence of capacities forjudgement. After all, typically, you can’t be saidto know a concept if you can’t apply it in nor-mal perceptual settings. Can you know what atomato is if you are incapable of any active orperceptual engagement with tomatoes?

But we should also be careful. In so far asour concepts have unproblematic unity, then, onthis Wittgensteinian view, this is because theyare exercises of common abilities—abilitieswhich are, of their nature, such as to admit agenuine multiplicity of expressions. But theunity of our concepts is not something that wecan always take for granted.

Is there one concept of dog, or several,brought to life in different situations and sub-cultures at different times, for different pur-poses? Is there unity or just fragmentation? Isthis a shared understanding? These are import-ant questions, not for philosophy, particularly,but for culture. Look at the changes that havetaken place in our thinking about matter overthe last few hundred years. Or, to give a differ-ent kind of example, about gender. We have nochoice but to work it out as we go along.

And crucially, there is no standpoint out-side our thinking, talking, writing, persuading,imposing, regulating, prescribing and also de-scribing, from which these questions can be ad-judicated. This doesn’t make the existence ofdogs a matter of social construction. (Of course,dogs are, literally, bred and so constructed byus.) No, surely dogs have a mind-independentnature. But it does mean that it is hard andcreative and unending work to bring that realityinto focus in our shared thought, talk, percep-tion, and activity.

There is no standpoint outside ourthoughtful practices from which to ask after ourown concepts. For our concepts are our owntools and techniques. This is where Frege wentwrong. He seems to have thought that the onlyway to achieve objectivity—that is, sharability,articulability, and lawfulness—was by supposingconcepts were out there, indifferent to how wegrasp or understand them. In fact, they super-vene on our grasping, negotiating, communicat-

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 11 | 15

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ive activity. Frege made no allowance for fragil-ity.

7 Concepts are skills of access

But can we say more than just that conceptsare abilities? Abilities to do what? Well, we’vealready said: to talk and see and use and judge,and so on.

But I think we can do better. To do so, Idraw on the actionist approach to perceptiondeveloped in earlier work (Noë 2004, 2012). Tobegin to organise an answer, consider two famil-iar facts about visual perception. The first isthat, as Euclid noticed, when a solid opaque ob-ject is seen, it is never seen in its entirety atonce. Things always have hidden parts. Thesecond is that the visible world is cluttered withall manner of stuff. Things get in the way, theview is interrupted, occlusion is the norm.

And yet, despite these striking limitations,we don’t experience the world as cut off fromus, inaccessible to vision, blocked from percep-tion. The partial, fragmentary, and perspective-bound character of our visual access to theworld is not a limit on what we see, a markingoff of our liability to blindness; it is, rather, thevery manner of our seeing. This is fragilityagain.

Not seeing through the solid and opaque,as if it were transparent, is not a perceptualfailing but rather an accomplishment. And re-latedly: we belong to the cluttered environ-ment ourselves. We are not confined to whatis projected to a point. We explore. And it isthat exploring, that doing, that is the seeing.The seeing is not the occurrence of a pictureor representation in the head; it is, rather, thesecuring of comprehending access, thanks toour possession of a specific repertoire of skills,to what there is. The generic modality of theway the world shows up in perception is notas represented, but rather as accessible (as Iargue in Noë 2012). This is why our inabilityto see things from all sides at once, or to ex-perience a thing’s colour in all possible light-ing conditions at once, is no obstacle to thepresence of whole objects and colours in ourexperience.

The immediate environment is present invisual perception, not because it projects to theeyes, but because the person, by means of theuse of his or her eyes as well as other forms ofmovement and negotiation, has access to that toenvironment. Presence is availability, and itsmodalities—visual as opposed to tactual, for ex-ample—are fixed by the things we need to do,the negotiations, to bring and keep what isthere in reach. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus(1921), said that the eye is a limit of the visualfield. But this is wrong: the adjustments of theeye, the need to adjust the eye, difficulties inadjusting the eye, are given in the way we see.Wittgenstein’s point, I suppose, was that theeye doesn’t see itself seeing (unless you look in amirror). But here’s a different model: seeing islike what an outfielder does. To say that the eyeis not in the visual field is a bit like saying thatthe body of the outfielder is not in the field ofplay. But in fact the eye and the head and thehand and the arm and the glove are all in thefield of play. And what we call fielding the playis precisely a temporally extended transactionin that whole environment. And the basis of theenvironment’s availability to this or that modal-ity of exploration, beyond the fact that it isthere, is our possession of the skills, abilities,and capacities to secure our access to it. Theoccluded portions of the things we see are therefor us, present to us, thanks to our skilful abil-ity to move and bring them into view. Percep-tion is fragile.

John Campbell, writing in a related con-text (2002), has said that we shouldn’t think ofthe brain as representing the world; we shouldthink of it as making the adjustments that, ashe puts it, keep the pane of glass between youand the world clean and clear, as if it were con-tinuously vulnerable to becoming opaque.

My thought is that we (not our brains)need continuously to make adjustments to keepthe world in view, and to maintain our access tothe world around us.

But I add: the character of the world’spresence itself is precisely a function not only ofwhat there is, but of what we know how to do,and what we do, and what we must always ofnecessity stand ready to do, just in case, to pre-

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 12 | 15

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serve our access. You need to squint and peerand adjust to see things far away; and thismakes a difference to how those things show up.

This is one reason why it is a mistake tosuppose that we think of the adjustments thatbelong to the ways we bring the world into fo-cus as the brain’s work. No, it is our work, evenif most of it is low-level, unattended, and doneautomatically. For it is this work that gives ex-perience the quality that it has.

The scene is present for us in the mannerof a field of play. This is a fragile presence. Itspresence is not given to us alone thanks to whatmight happen in our brains, thanks to neuralevents triggered by optical events. Its presenceis achieved thanks to what we know how to do.The basis of our skilful access to the world is,precisely, our possession of skills of access.

And this, finally, is what I propose con-cepts are. They are skills of access, or rather, aspecies of such. They are not so much devicesby which we make the world intelligible, asmuch as they are the techniques by which wesecure our contact with the world, in whatevermodality. From this point of view, concepts likedog and matter are of a piece with other skills ofaccess such as the not-quite-articulable sensor-imotor skills we skilfully deploy as we navigatethe scene with our thinking bodies.

From this standpoint, it is worth em-phasizing that there is no theoretically inter-esting cleavage between seeing and thinking(as already argued in Noë 2012). Seeing isthoughtful and thought is perceptual at leastin so far is it is, like seeing, a skilful negoti-ation with what there is, as just another mod-ality of our environment-involving transac-tions. Presence, after all, is always in a modal-ity—that is, it is always dependant on ourrepertoire of skills. And it is always a matterof degree. The hidden portions of the thingswe see show up for us, as does the space be-hind our head, and even spaces further afield.We have access—skill-based, partial, perspect-ive-bound, and fragmentary—to it all.

Perception and thought, from the actionistperspective, differ as sight and touch differ.They are different styles of access to the worldaround us.

8 We use concepts to take hold of things,not to represent them

Let us come back to the more particular line ofinvestigation that has been our concern.

The intellectualist is quite right that in sofar as seeing is expressive of understanding, thisis because we bring concepts to bear in our see-ing. But the intellectualist is mistaken in hold-ing that this is because we categorize what wesee, in the mode of judgement, by applying con-cepts. It is rather that we see with concepts.Concepts are techniques by which we take holdand secure access. Their job is not to representwhat is there; their job is to enable what isthere to be present to us. You can’t see thelaser-projector if you don’t know what a laser-projector is. Your possession of the concept is acondition on the laser-projector’s showing up foryou. It is the ability that lets you encounterwhat is in fact there.

Back to the example of text: your grasp ofthe relevant concepts enables you to read (tosee what is there). Not because it gives you theresources to interpret or decode (although itdoes give you that). But because knowledge letswhat might otherwise be unseen come intoview. Knowledge can also, correspondingly, dis-able us. Your reading knowledge, for example,can make it difficult or even impossible to seethe squiggles, the “mere marks”, which are alsoalways there whenever you read.

And so across the board: we don’t applyconcepts in judgement to what we see in orderto represent things; our possession of the con-cepts is what enables us to make contact withthem themselves. We see with our concepts.They are themselves techniques or means forhandling what there is. Think of the concept inperception not as a category, or a representa-tion, but a way of directly picking up what isthere (to re-use and rehabilitate Gibson’s 1986idea).

And so also for the active modality. Myunderstanding gets expressed in what I do andit gets expressed directly—for example, I exer-cise my knowledge of teacups in the way Ihandle this cup; I grasp the cup with my hands,and also with my understanding. My under-

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 13 | 15

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standing gets put to work in the fact that I amable to do this, in the fact that I know how todo it.

Understanding, I would urge, is put towork, in these doings, directly. We don’t need tosuppose an action is skilful or knowledgeable orexpressive of understanding only when it isguided, as it were from without, by proposi-tional knowledge—as if the understandingcouldn’t inform our practical knowledge and ouraction directly.

And we are now finally in a position tounderstand why this is the case: for then wewould be owed an account of how understand-ing is put to work in judgement. And here, weare just thrown back on what we can do tobring what is there for us into focus, to achieveits presence.

9 Conclusion: The significance of fragility

The world shows up for us in perception andthought, but it has a fragile presence. It showsup in very much in the same way that what aperson means shows up for us when we are inconversation, to return to the language ex-ample. Misunderstanding, outright failure tounderstand, are always manifestly live possibil-ities. It isn’t only solid opaque objects that failto reveal themselves in their totality to thesingle glance. What we are given, always, is anopportunity or affordance for further effort, en-gagement, negotiation, and skilful transaction.The world is present to thought and perceptionnot as a represented totality—an idea in ourminds, a representation in our brains—but asthe place in which we find ourselves, where welive, where we work. The world is a big place,and so there is a lot for us to do if we are to se-cure our footing on its slippery grounds. But aslippery ground is still a ground, and we needto secure our footing.

Presence—in thought and experience—isfragile, in other words. Philosophy has beenstrangely resistant to fragility. Fragility is notfallibility. The point about fragility is that it ismanifest. An object’s colour shows up for us assomething with hidden aspects; it presents itself

to us as something that is always on the cusp ofvariation, always ready to change with the leastalteration in our perspective or in the condi-tions of viewing. A colour, no less than a solidobject, has hidden aspects. We don’t experiencethese aspects as isolated atoms—as if we wereconfined to what the camera sees. What we see,what we experience, outstrips anything that canbe understood in optical terms alone. For wesee, we experience, and we also think about, aworld that manifestly goes beyond what can betaken in a glance. Our skills—our understand-ing, to use the term that has organised so muchof this discussion—gives us access to what thereis.

That access is achieved, but not once andfor all. It is not as though we consume theworld in encountering it so that now we canmake do with what is inside us. Access is awork in process. Presence is fragile, manifestlyso; but it is robust.

Acknowledgements

I have presented this paper at Georg-August-Universtät Göttingen, Ruprecht-Karls-Uni-versität Heidelberg, the University of Iowa, theUniversity of Pittsburgh, Yale University, andalso in Riga at the Riga-Symposium on Cogni-tion, Communication and Logic in May 2013, aswell as at the 2014 Wittgenstein Symposium inKirchberg am Wechsel. I am grateful to theseaudiences for their helpful comments and ques-tions. For comments on the talk, or on the writ-ten paper itself, I would particularly like tothank Michael Beaton, Andy Clark, James Con-ant, Caitlin Dolan, Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly,John W. Krakauer, Zachary C. Irving, EdouardMachery, Thomas Ricketts, Jason Stanley,David Suarez, and Martin Weichold.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 14 | 15

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Mulhall, S. (1986). Heidegger and being and time. Lon-don, UK: Routledge.

Nagel, A. (2011). Twenty-five notes on pseudoscript inItalian art. Res: Anthropologgy and Aesthetics, 59/60,228-248.

Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

(2012). Varieties of presence. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

O’Regan, J. K. & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor accountof vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral andBrain Sciences, 24 (5), 883-975.10.1017/S0140525X01000115

Prinz, J. (2013). The conscious brain: How attention en-genders experience. New York, NY: Oxford UniversityPress.

Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London, UK:Hutchinson’s University Library.

Sacks, O. (1970). The man who mistook his wife for ahat, and other clinical tales.

Snowdon, P. (2004). Knowing how and knowing that: Adistinction reconsidered. Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety, 104 (1), 1-29. 10.1111/j.0066-7373.2004.00079.x

Stanley, J. (2011). Knowing how. New York, NY: OxfordUniversity Press.

Stanley, J. & Krakauer, J. W. (2013). Motor skill de-pends on knowledge of facts. Frontiers in HumanNeuroscience, 7 (503). 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00503

Stanley, J. & Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing how.Journal of Philosophy, 98 (8), 411-444.

Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus logico-philosophicus.London, UK: Routledge.

(1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford, UK:Blackwell.

Noë, A. (2015). Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570597 15 | 15

The Fragile Nature of the Social MindA Commentary on Alva Noë

Miriam Kyselo

In this paper I argue that while Noë’s actionist approach offers an excellent elab-oration of classical approaches to conceptual understanding, it risks underestimat-ing the role of social interactions and relations. Noë’s approach entails a form ofbody-based individualism according to which understanding is something the minddoes all by itself. I propose that we adopt a stronger perspective on the role ofsociality and consider the human mind in terms of socially enacted autonomy. Onthis view, the mind depends constitutively on engaging with and relating to oth-ers. As a consequence, conceptual understanding must be seen as a co-achieve-ment. It is a fragile endeavour precisely because it depends not only on the indi-vidual but also on the continuous contribution of other subjects.

KeywordsBody-social problem | Enactive self | Fragility | Socially enacted autonomy | So-cially extended mind

Commentator

Miriam Kyselomiriam.kyselo@gmail.com   Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko UnibertsitateaDonostia-San Sebastián, Spain

Target Author

Alva Noënoe@berkeley.edu   University of CaliforniaBerkeley, CA, U.S.A.

Editors

Thomas Metzingermetzinger@uni-mainz.de   Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windtjennifer.windt@monash.edu   Monash UniversityMelbourne, Australia

1 Introduction

In the paper “Concept Pluralism, Direct Per-ception, and the Fragility of Presence” AlvaNoë offers an exciting and dense insight into hisphilosophical thinking. Combining his classicalwork on the active nature of perception (Noë2004) with his more recent inquiries into philo-sophical method, presence, the arts, and humannature in general, Noë now aims at a morethorough account of conceptual understanding(2012).

Noë’s proposal must be seen in light of theparadigm shift in philosophy of mind and cogni-tion, from a cognitivist and representationalistview to a distributed or embodied perspective

on the mind. It is one of the so-called “E-ap-proaches” to the mind (enactive, extended, em-bodied and embedded) that transcend the clas-sical view of the mind as being an isolated en-tity located in the brain that passively repres-ents an outside and independently-given world(e.g., Shapiro 2011; Clark & Chalmers 1998;Noë 2004; Varela et al. 1993; Thompson 2007;Kyselo 2013). There are significant differencesbetween these views (and they will be of relev-ance below), but generally speaking they all reston the assumption that cognition is not in thehead but instead involves bodily action and theenvironment. Noë uses these insights from the

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 1 | 11

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E-approaches to expand on the disembodiedand representationalist view underlying the in-tellectualist approach to concepts, and in thisway, he provides a timely and innovative elabor-ation of conceptual understanding that is moreencompassing than previous approaches.

I am sympathetic to Noë’s approach.Methodologically speaking, he illustrates whathe promotes as the right style of philosophicalanalysis, an inquiry into the so-called “third-realm” that remains “in-between—neither en-tirely objective nor merely subjective” (Noë2012, p. 136) but open for “conversation or dia-logue” (Noë 2012, p. 138). My comment shouldbe considered an elaboration in the same vein.

I agree with Noë with regards to the moregeneral project of questioning traditional con-ceptions in philosophy of mind by adopting anembodied and distributed perspective. Thatsaid, however, I think that there is a problemwith his proposal. Even though it provides agreat number of important insights, I think,third-realm fashion, Noë’s proposal fails as ageneral theory of understanding. The reason forthis is that in a crucial way his own epistemolo-gical pre-conception of mind is not yet fully sep-arated from the paradigm that it seeks to over-come: while Noë acknowledges the role of thebodily and active individual, he accepts a dicho-tomy that is prevalent in the traditionalparadigm, namely the split between the indi-vidual and the world of others. His approach in-herits what I have called the body–social prob-lem (Kyselo & Di Paolo 2013; Kyselo 2014).The body–social problem is the third in a seriesof dichotomies in the philosophy of mind andthe successor to the classical mind–body prob-lem and the more recent body–body problem(Thompson 2007). The body–body problem isthe question of how the bodily subject can beat once subjectively lived and an organismicbody that is embedded in the world. The body–social problem elaborates on this and is con-cerned with the question of how bodily and so-cial aspects figure in the individuation of thehuman individual mind. Philosophers of cogni-tion systematically assume that the mind is es-sentially embodied, while the social world re-mains the context in which the embodied mind

is embedded. On this view, the social arguablyshapes the mind, but it does not figure in theconstitution of the mind itself. In what follows,I first show that Noë’s proposal entails the samepresupposition and thus invites a new form ofmethodological individualism that risks limitingconceptual understanding to the endeavour ofan isolated individual subject.

I then introduce and discuss an alternat-ive proposal for a model of the individualmind as a social ly enacted self. I argue thatsince the world of humans is a world of othersand our social relations is what matters mostto us, the social must also figure in the con-stitutive structure of human cognitive indi-viduation.1 The human mind or self is notonly embodied but also genuinely social. Froman enactive viewpoint the self can be con-sidered as a self–other generated autonomoussystem, whose network identity is broughtforth through individual’s engagement in bod-ily-mediated social interaction processes ofdistinction and participation. Distinction andparticipation refer to the two intrinsic goalsthat the individual follows and needs to bal-ance. Distinction means to be able to exist asindividual in one’s own right. Participationrefers to an openness to others and a readinessto be affected by them. It refers to the senseof self as connected and participating. Bothgoals are achieved through engaging and relat-ing to others. The processes that constitutethe identity of the human mind are thereforenot defined in terms of bodily but rather in-terpersonal relations and interactions. On thisenactive approach to the self, the body is notequated with the self but instead seen as thatwhich grounds a double sense of self as a sep-arated identity and as participating. The bodymediates the individual’s interactions withothers (Kyselo 2014).

I outline how the model of the socially en-acted self can combine with and elaborate Noë’sactionist account of concepts so as to arrive atan even more encompassing view of human un-1 By saying that sociality matters constitutively for the human self, I

mean that without continuously relating and engaging in interactionswith others, there would be no human self as a whole. The social isnot only causally relevant for enacting selfhood, but it is also an es-sential component of its minimal organisational structure.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 2 | 11

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derstanding as well as a deeper appreciation ofits fragile nature.

2 The risk of crypto-individualism

Noë observes a dichotomy between what hecalls the intellectualist approach to concepts,the view that concepts are judgments, which isendorsed by Kant and Frege, and the existentialphenomenological approach, such as that en-dorsed by Dreyfus, which argues that conceptsare usually only used by the novice, and thatunderstanding is otherwise already giventhrough context and situation.2 Noë disagreeswith both positions. He rejects the idea thatconcepts are only judgments, fixed and just“out there”, to help us represent the world; yetcontrary to the anti-intellectualists, Noë alsoemphasizes that conceptual understanding isnot limited to the novice, but “at workwherever we think and perceive and act andtalk”. What the existential phenomenologistthereby misses, according to Noë, is that skillfulmastery involves learning and development. Noëassumes that, like intellectualism, anti-intellec-tualism makes the presupposition that conceptsare equal to judgments and thus implicitly re-duces the mind to a “realm of detached contem-plation” (2012, p. 25). For that reason, Noëcalls anti-intellectualism crypto-intellectualist.

Noë seeks to find an alternative to the twopositions by questioning their very fundaments.Rather than assuming that the world is justgiven and that everything is already present tous, Noë emphasizes the active contribution ofthe individual organism (2004, 2009). He pro-poses that we should adopt a pluralistic ap-proach to concepts, according to which concep-tual understanding is basically having the skillsrequired for accessing the world. There are dif-ferent types or modes of access to the world, in-cluding the modes of perception and action, the(inter)personal, and the emotional mode. Onthis pluralistic account, thinking and perceiving

2 The existential phenomenological approach refers to phenomenolo-gists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who investigate the basicstructures of human existence. One of their assumptions is that priorto any reflexive understanding, we are already attuned to the worldsimply through our bodily being in it. Dreyfus calls this pre-reflexiveattunement to the world “absorbed coping” (2013, p. 21).

are not very different from one another. Bothare “a skillful negotiation with what there is,just another modality of our environment-in-volving transactions” (Noë this collection, p.16). From this perspective, judgements belongto a particular mode of access and form part ofa broader set of skills of conceptual understand-ing. Noë then specifies the nature of our accessto the world. The world is not just out thereready to be understood. Rather, it always hasto be made available and actively brought intoview or into “presence”, as Noë puts it. Con-cepts are the means by which we can achievethis. They are the techniques “by which we se-cure our contact” with the world (ibid.). Butbringing the world into presence is not a fixed,one-time or uni-directional endeavour. Concep-tual understanding involves continuous engage-ment with the world; it can change and alsofail. Noë proposes the notion of fragility as akey for understanding conceptual activity as anopen and necessarily vulnerable phenomenon,instead of a perfect application of definite rep-resentations of the world. In this way, he over-comes the limited view of both the intellectual-ist and anti-intellectualist perspectives accord-ing to which concepts are judgments about anindependent world.

One of Noë’s crucial insights is that thetraditional dichotomy between an objectivelygiven world and subjectively experienced, in-ternally-processed data about worldly objectscan be overcome by grounding all conceptualactivity in a broader “common genus”, i.e., skil-ful engagement with the world. But what iseven more important, and in this I think Noëdoes not actually diverge far from Dreyfus andother existential phenomenologists, is that theestablished unity of different modes of under-standing is not merely a unity in terms of stylesof access to the world, but also a unity groun-ded in the individual mind as a whole. Butwhat is that individual mind as whole?

Noë quite clearly presupposes that we arenot our brains. We understand the worldthrough navigating it with our thinking, skilfulsensorimotor body (Noë this collection, 2004).This view breaks with the cognitivist paradigmwith regard to the constitutive elements of the

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 3 | 11

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system that does the understanding, and it alsobreaks with it with regard to the relation of theunderstanding system to the environment: thesystem is not passive, but rather active and dy-namical. What this elaboration implies, yetdoes not make explicit, is the fact that concep-tual activity is done by a bodily agent who un-derstands or has access to the world. After all,conceptual understanding is not just under-standing about something but always also un-derstanding for someone and by someone. Toargue that thought and perception are unifiedas modes of access thus presupposes an indi-vidual who employs these different modes of ac-cess, someone for whom the world can show up.Without an agent that does the understanding,postulating a unification of modes of under-standing would not make any sense, as any un-derstanding would remain an action that hasneither origin nor actor.

This is a point that Evan Thompson, whois also a proponent of embodied cognition, hasalready made on some of Noë’s earlier work onenactive perception (2007). According toThompson, while emphasising the role of exper-iences of objects, Noë underestimates the role ofsubjectivity as such: the “sensorimotor approachneeds a notion of selfhood or agency, because toexplain perceptual experience it appeals to sen-sorimotor knowledge. Knowledge implies aknower or agent or self that embodies thisknowledge” (Thompson 2007, p. 260). This iswhere I think Noë’s underlying epistemology re-quires elaboration. Who or what is the indi-vidual subject that engages in this fragile en-deavour of securing access to the world?

Thompson provides an insight that can beseen as a major step into the right direction: heproposes addressing the body–body problem, i.e.,the question of how the agent can be at oncesubjectively lived and an organismic or sensor-imotor body that is embedded in the world(2007, pp. 235–237), by proposing an enactivenotion of selfhood. According to this notion, in-dividual agency is defined in terms ofautonomy. It is seen as a self-organised networkof interconnected processes that produce andsustain themselves as a systemic whole—abounded identity within a particular domain

(Varela 1997; Maturana & Varela 1987). Ac-cording to Thompson, it is this autonomous selfthat gives unity to the sensorimotor skills interms of self-organisation and operational clos-ure (2005, 2007). Operational closure meansthat some process relations of the autonomousnetwork remain constant despite structural de-pendence on the environment, i.e., each processwithin the network is not only enabling but alsoenabled by some other process. With the pro-duction of such a self-organised autonomousidentity the individual also acquires a basic sub-jective perspective, from which interactions withthe world are evaluated respectively. This sub-jective perspective is what Thompson calls apre-reflective bodily self-consciousness (2007, p.261).

On Thompson’s enactive account, the indi-vidual is now not only active and embodied butalso an autonomous subjective agent. Import-antly however, Thompson shares with Noë a du-bious fundamental pre-supposition, namely theidea that the individual mind or subject can beequated with the individual sensorimotor bodyor organism. The autonomous agent is a self-or-ganised “sensorimotor selfhood” (Thompson2005, p. 10). As a consequence, in bothThompson and Noë’s views, the mind is em-powered and freed, as it is no longer restrictedto the passive, information-consuming existencethat is distant to the world and confined to thenarrow shells of our heads. Nevertheless, it stillremains a mind of a body in isolation: in isola-tion from the world of others.3 This risk of anindividualist account of the agent is the firsthorn of a dilemma underlying Noë’s proposal.The second horn has to do with the fact thatfor Noë understanding is actually not an isol-ated endeavour. The social world is mentioned

3 Thompson clearly recognises the importance of intersubjectivity for theprocess of understanding itself, arguing that “human subjectivity is fromthe outset intersubjectivity, and no mind is an island” (2007, p. 383). Heproposes (in line with Husserl) that humans are from the beginning in-tersubjectively open. However, it seems that Thompson’s emphasis onsociality is either developmentally motivated and concerned with the in-tersubjectively-open intentionality in object perception or a question ofour (rather sophisticated ability) to understand others and to make thedistinction between self and other. But the subject herself, despite beingintersubjectively open, is still a “bodily subject” (Thompson 2007, p.382). In other words, the structures of subjectivity itself, the very net-work processes that bring about the individual as an autonomous sys-tem, are determined bodily, not intersubjectively.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 4 | 11

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throughout the paper in the form of other sub-jects that seem to enable the individual’s under-standing in various ways. Some of the skills ofaccess are interpersonal and also, as Noë em-phasizes, have to be learned.

The question is, how do we learn skills?We usually learn through a teacher, and thusthrough the help of another being. Similarly,how do we discover a piece of art? By discussingit with a friend, who helps to bring about a newperspective on it. The person whom we misun-derstand and try again to understand is anothersubject. Understanding is a highly intersubject-ive endeavour, not only developmentally—in thesense that we need others at some point in lifeto learn a particular skill—but also in a con-tinuously on-going sense, for much of the veryprocess of human understanding happensthrough and with others contemporaneously.Strikingly, however, though Noë admits this inacknowledging that understanding happensthrough communication and thus through thecontribution of other subjects, the social doesnot seem to matter constitutively in his generaltheory of conceptual understanding. The mech-anism and structures of the process of under-standing are defined in terms of sensorimotorprocesses, not in terms of interactions with oth-ers, and the unity that grounds conceptual un-derstanding is constitutively the sensorimotorbody in object-oriented action; it is not, moredynamically put, the individual in its relationto other subjects. The worry is that in Noë’sapproach, the social part of the world wouldtherefore only play the weak role of an outsideand divided context. In contrast, on a strongreading of the relation between understandingand sociality, engagements and relations withothers would have a more than developmentalor contextual relevance. Instead, they wouldalso be considered part and parcel of the verystructure of the process of understanding, andthey would (as I argue below) figure in the min-imal constitution of autonomous selfhood.

Noë characterises Dreyfus’s anti-intellectu-alist stance as “crypto-intellectualist” becauseDreyfus allegedly accepts the premises of the in-tellectualist’s view that understanding is rule-based judgement. Yet one might say that in his

attempt to overcome the dichotomy between ex-istential phenomenology and classical conceptu-alism, Noë inherits a very similar problem.Noë’s actionist approach opens the individualup to the world. But perhaps because he is try-ing to avoid an implication of Dreyfus’ existen-tial phenomenology, namely the risk of losingthe individual (as already immersed) in theworld, Noë also risks over-emphasizing thestatus of the embodied individual, thereby miss-ing the deeper relation between the individualand the social world. The undesirable implica-tion is that conceptual activity is essentially anisolated undertaking (since according to stand-ard approaches to embodiment there is nothingsocial about the individual body or organismper se). It is the lonesome individual by herselfwho navigates through the world, equippedwith a great set of skills that enable her to actand to secure the access to the world.4 BecauseNoë seems to implicitly accept the individual-istic premise of the traditional cognitivist view,one might say that that his proposal is crypto-individualist.

Noë is not alone in making the crypto-in-dividualist presupposition. According to Post-Cartesian and non-cognitivist philosophy of cog-nition, the mind supposedly involves an activeand dynamical engagement with the social andmaterial environment, and also has an experien-tial dimension (Shapiro 2011; Clark & Chalmers1998; Varela et al. 1993; Thompson 2007). Butthe integration of these aspects, and in particu-lar that of the social and bodily dimension withregards to the individual that has or is themind still remains a fundamental question. Thisis what I have called the body–social problem:how can the mind be at once a distinct bodilyindividual but at the same time remain openand connected to the social world? At the mo-ment there is a dichotomy between views thatposit that the mind is embodied and views thatemphasize the relevance of situatedness and em-beddedness. On the former view, the mind isactive but confined to being an isolated indi-4 Note that it does not actually matter whether one posits that the

mind is in the head or in the body, both claims are compatiblewith the weak reading of the interrelation of individual and so-cial world, according to which the social remains separated fromthe individual.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 5 | 11

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vidual. On the latter, the mind is already im-mersed in the (social) world. The first viewrisks a new form of methodological individual-ism where the individual mind, while no longerrestricted to the brain, is now confined to thebody. Here the social world becomes the ex-ternal, independently given world into whichthese newly embodied and active, yet essentiallyisolated individuals parachute (Kyselo 2014).5The second view focuses too much on the inter-action dynamics and risks losing the immersedindividual mind in the world (and social inter-actions), thereby blurring the very epistemolo-gical target of our philosophical inquiry (Kyselo2013, 2014).

The body–social problem reveals a deeperlinkage between Noë and the stance of the ex-istential phenomenologist that he actually seeksto debunk. Both positions disagree with the tra-ditional Cartesian picture of the mind; bothhold that embodiment matters vitally for themind. But notice that they also focus on differ-ent aspects of what a true alternative to theclassical view might look like. The overall al-ternative basically involves a fundamental shiftin thinking about the relation between an indi-vidual and the world. In this vein, Noë is rightto emphasise the individual’s power, giving itmore responsibility in the very construction ofits own mind and of the world it experiences,but so are the existential phenomenologistswhen they focus on worldly embeddedness andthe fact that a great deal of our being in theworld relies on pre-given structures that cansurpass the individual’s capacities. An emphasison individual action and responsibility cannotmean that the individual is all alone. We wouldnot have made enough progress if the main dif-ference between Noë’s proposal and the repres-entationalist division between individual andworld was that now, while being able to movetowards the world, the world does not also movetoward us but remains separate with regard toother subjects. Other people are active, too, andthey shape not merely the world for us but also5 This image is adapted from Varela et al. (1993), who criticise the

traditional view as implying that the environment is a “landing padfor organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world” (p.198) and who instead argue that the relation between world and in-dividual mind is co-determining.

who we are as subjects. But, speaking to thepotential worry of losing the individual inworldly engagements, the solution is of courseneither to negate any need for differentiationnor the necessity of the individual to have itsown share in the very mechanism of under-standing the world. Where I think both posi-tions go wrong is in extrapolating from a partof adult human phenomenology (even when it ispaired, as in Noë’s case, with an objective ac-count of the constitutive mechanism of experi-ence) to a general theory of understanding. Incrypto-individualism the individual mind carriesa heavy burden. It is free from passivity and yetenormously restrained by the responsibility ofachieving the access to the world (and the socialworld), and itself all by itself. Existential phe-nomenologists, in emphasising the importanceof the social world and its pre-given structuresin bringing about understanding then ease theburden and free the individual from some of theresponsibility in achieving this; and yet at thesame time they also risk depriving the indi-vidual of its power and right to have a say inthat endeavour.6

It should be clear that neither position onits own will suffice to overcome the dichotomyinherent in the intellectualist view on concepts.The individual cannot understand the worldsimply by being an individual body, but neitheris the world already understood just by simplybeing immersed in it.

3 Deep dynamics and the enactive self

There exists a middle ground from which thedilemma of having to choose between too muchor too little individualism can be avoided and amore complete epistemological basis for concep-tual understanding achieved. Finding thismiddle ground basically consists in re-thinkingthe nature of the mind and of human under-standing while doing more justice to the deepinterrelation between individual and socialworld. To this end I have recently proposed the6 This commentary is not the place to discuss this issue in detail, but

it should be noted that such a view can be expanded to politicalphilosophy and the philosophy of law, where it might have far reach-ing consequences for questions concerning the nature of individualrights and approaches to legal responsibility.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 6 | 11

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concept of the socially enacted self (Kyselo2014, 2013; Kyselo & Tschacher 2014). On thisapproach, the individual is not sufficiently de-termined in terms of active embodiment; in-stead it is thought to incorporate social and re-lational processes into the structure that makesup its identity as an individual. This suggeststhat without a “social loop” we cannot speakabout the human self as a centre of individu-ation in any interesting sense. After all, humansdo not merely distinguish themselves against abackground of material objects, but, crucially,against the world of other humans. They be-come someone, an identifiable individual againsta world of other individuals and social groups.

This idea should become clearer by recon-sidering, or making more explicit, a number ofinsights already implied in diverse approaches inembodied cognitive science.

First, Noë’s crypto-individualism capturessomething essential about the ways humans ac-cess the world: we often experience the processof understanding as something we do byourselves—the concepts we acquire and employare ours and to a large extent we appear to bein control in our attempts to secure the world.Noë’s other important insight is that conceptualunderstanding is an achievement. It is a far-from-perfect endeavour, involving experiences ofvulnerability, openness, of not always being ableto own and to access the world.

The second insight is appreciated in thedebate on extended cognition. Clark &Chalmers in their now classical paper “The Ex-tended Mind” propose that a tool, such as anotebook or a computer, can count as part ofthe individual mind (1998). This essentiallyfunctionalist position goes against Noë and“beyond the sensorimotor frontier” (Clark 2008,p. 195)—the mind is not restricted to the bodybut spreads across neuronal, bodily, and envir-onmental features. The extended cognition ap-proach to embodiment has been criticised forbeing too liberal, since it lacks both a principleddefinition of “body” and of “cognition”. It re-mains unclear how an environmental prop ortechnology could be integrated into the cognit-ive architecture of an individual mind (Kyselo& Di Paolo 2013, see also Menary this collec-

tion). Yet, despite these shortcoming I believethere are two important insights in this exten-ded functionalist account: first, that the indi-vidual should not be restricted to the biologicalrealm (be it the brain or the body) but incor-porates tools and technologies, and second, thatthe mind transcends the individual and that theworld matters constitutively for determining theboundaries of the mind itself.

The third insight comes from the enactiveapproach to cognition, which proposes that themind is basically an autonomous system thatself-organizes its identity based on operationalclosure. The enactive approach thereby shareswith extended cognition the idea that the indi-vidual is not clearly separable from the environ-ment. On the enactive view, the individual’smind is “defined by its endogenous, self-organiz-ing and self-controlling dynamics, does not haveinputs and outputs in the usual sense, and de-termines the cognitive domain in which it oper-ates” (Thompson 2007, p. 43). Identity is there-fore not a given thing or a property, but rela-tional: brought forth through the individual’son-going and dynamical interaction with theworld. This approach adds an insight derivedfrom philosophy of biology, namely that like liv-ing beings, cognitive beings create an identitythat they strive to maintain, and that under-standing the world depends on the purposesand concerns of that identity (Weber & Varela2002; Thompson 2007) in that they guide andstructure our understanding.7

The three variants of embodied cognitivescience therefore all reject the mind–body di-chotomy and emphasise a dynamical interrela-tion between embodied individual and world.All of them however, either miss or do not fullyacknowledge that the world is social and thatthe individual is also a psychological and socialbeing whose concerns are more than object-ori-ented. This is where the enactive approach tothe social self comes into play. It basically elab-orates on and integrates the above insights, i.e.,action (sensorimotor cognition), co-constitution7 Interestingly, this is also an insight Dreyfus pointed out much earlier

when he argued that the “human world, then is prestructured interms of human purposes and concerns in such a way that whatcounts as an object or is significant about an object already is afunction of, or embodies, that concern” (1972, p. 173).

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 7 | 11

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(extended cognition), and grounding in selfhood(enactive cognition), by adopting a much moreradical perspective on the dynamical interrela-tion between the individual and the world—letus call this perspective deep dynamics. Deep dy-namics means that the nature of the relationbetween individual and world is one of strongco-constitution: not only does the individualactively shape and structure the world, theworld, too, affects the individual in its basic or-ganisational structure. If identity and domaindepend on each other in a strong and mutualsense, as the enactive approach to cognition hasit, then even more advanced non-organismic orvirtual notions of the body do not change thefact that the organismic bodily domain is an in-dividualist domain (Kyselo & Di Paolo 2013). Inother words, the organismic body cannot be re-lated to the social at the same level of organisa-tional closure. The enactive approach to the selfwould suggest instead that the level at whichhuman selves can be usefully operationalised asautonomous identities is social, not merely em-bodied. Admittedly, by emphasising how con-ceptual understanding is shaped through socialengagements with others, Noë’s approach obvi-ously also implies a bi-directional relationbetween individual and world. Similarly, as wehave seen above, Thompson’s sensorimotor sub-ject is also clearly involved in intersubjective in-teractions (2005, p. 408). However, the bi-direc-tional impact in these accounts is more shallowthan in the present proposal, as they considerthe (social) world to play a contextual or devel-opmental role, or to matter with regards toshaping object-recognition. In deep dynamics, incontrast, we expand on the insight of extendedcognition that the mind transcends brain andbody by acknowledging that this not only thecase through interactions with tools but alsothrough our social interactions and relationswith other subjects. The idea then is that quabeing embedded in a social world, the self, andby that I mean the individual as a whole, con-stitutively relies on its interactions and relationsto other subjects. According to this elaborationon the enactive account of selfhood, the self canbe defined as a socially enacted autonomoussystem. It is:

a self-other generated network of precari-ously organized interpersonal processeswhose systemic identity emerges as a res-ult of a continuous engagement in socialinteractions and relations that can bequalified as moving in two opposed direc-tions, toward emancipation from others(distinction) and toward openness to them(participation). (Kyselo 2014)

In line with the concept of operational closure,both types of processes, distinction and parti-cipation, are required to bring about the indi-vidual self. Without distinction, the individualwould risk immersion or becoming heteronom-ously determined and forced to rely on the nextbest or a limited set of social interactions. Butwithout participation and an act of openness to-wards others, the individual eschews structuralrenewal, thus risking isolation and rigidity(Kyselo 2014). The point, however, is that thisform of operational closure contains social inter-actions. In enactive terms, this is to say thatthe individual is at the same time self andother-organized. As a consequence, the self isnot a given nor an individual bodily achieve-ment but also and necessarily co-constructedwith others. Both the individual and the world(that is, other subjects) have a say in the con-stitutive mechanism of someone’s mind. In con-trast to Noë’s presupposition, the mind cannotbe equated with the active body. Rather, thesensorimotor body becomes the ever-evolvinginterface that in being with others co-generatesthe very boundaries of what we call the self(Kyselo 2014).

At this point, proponents of embodimentmight still want to insist that there is some-thing about the body’s role in grounding thesense of self that non-negotiably remains en-tirely independent from social interactions. Iagree, if by “sense of self” one refers to the selfas mere biological identity. However, if by “self”we mean the human self in distinction fromother humans, then the proposed view chal-lenges this intuition. It does this, however,without giving up the insight that the self hasto do with individuation. The enactive notion ofautonomy and self-organization saves the indi-

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 8 | 11

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vidual from immersion in the social world byappreciating that the distinction between indi-vidual and world is an organisational, not onto-logical distinction. Our sense of being a distinctsomeone is something that is achieved togetherwith others, not just qua being a biologicalbody.

The basic idea of the socially enacted selfis therefore not to overcome the tension entailedin the body-social dichotomy but rather to wel-come and recognise it as a necessary property ofmind itself and to thus integrate this tensioninto a general theory of understanding. On thisview, the individual mind has to continuouslynegotiate its identity as an individual agent andits understanding in dependence on other sub-jects. As a consequence, uncertainty, conflict,and a permanent need for negotiation and co-negotiation are part and parcel of being an es-sentially social human mind. This is why itmight be useful to distinguish several senses offragility. Fragile understanding is one of them.But on the enactive account of selfhood, minditself is fragile.

4 Varieties of co-presence

Let us now explore a couple of implications thata deep dynamics view has for conceptual under-standing. By basing conceptual understandingon an understanding of the individual as a so-cially enacted autonomous system, we can dojustice to existential phenomenologists who em-phasize the importance of situatedness and flowand also to Noë’s rightful actionist call foremancipation of the passive individual mind.For Noë, the unity of conceptual modes is de-rived from positing an active, thinking, sensor-imotor body. The present proposal suggests thatthe unity is grounded in a socially co-organizedindividual. Noë’s idea of thinking of experien-cing and understanding the world as a “relationbetween a skillful person and really existingthing” (2012, p. 42), could thus be elaboratedby saying that the intentional relation is also arelation to other subjects, so that intentionalityis actually co-generated. Yet this co-generatedintentionality is not merely about sharing a per-spective on the world; it is a co-generated rela-

tion that feeds into the very organisationalstructure of mind itself. The person involved inthe intentional relation is a social subject. In ac-cordance with the two-fold structure of sociallyenacted autonomy, this would also mean thatself-reflexivity has a social structure, entailing asense of being a self as separate individual anda sense of being open and connected to theworld.

Here lies the deeper reason for why theprocess of understanding is actually fragile. Thefragility of understanding consists precisely inthe fact that the unity of mind is never a given,but is itself an on-going achievement. Since, as Isuggest, this is an achievement with others,presence does not merely depend on what wedo, but also on what others do, and especiallyon what we do with them. In other words, pres-ence is actually co-presence. It is clearly outsidethe scope of this commentary to explicate thisin more detail, but generally speaking it meansthat understanding simply never really is theendeavour of an individual mind. This comple-ments Noë’s perspective and invites future ex-plorations in at least two fundamental senses.

First, with regards to the role of others inempowering the individual by enabling access tothe world: our conceptual skills are acquiredand the acquisition of these skills usually hap-pens in interaction and by learning togetherwith others. But our ways of understanding arealso continuously shaped and mediated by beingwith others, be it through cultural norms, bi-ases, advice, or advertisement. Apart from theobvious fact that much of instantaneous under-standing happens together with others, even inthe absence of others, in the process of under-standing, we often presuppose another subjector at least some implicit act of relationality.Noë says that “there is no such thing as a per-ceptual encounter with the object that is notalso an encounter with it from one or anotherpoint of view” (2012, p. 138). I could not agreemore, and yet I suggest we also embrace theidea that these other viewpoints are not merelydefined in terms of changes in head or body-movement but also in terms of loops to andfrom different subjective and intersubjectiveview points.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 9 | 11

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If conceptual understanding has the pur-pose of bringing us into contact with the world,as Noë claims, then we should not underestim-ate the role of others and of our being open tothem in making this contact possible. To con-sider human understanding as fragile is also toadmit a limitation of the individual’s capacitiesand to allow others and our dialogues withthem to play a fundamental role. In this sensefragility is a source of power.

But that said, and this is the second andfinal implication of the enactive self for the ba-sic nature of human understanding, the socialnature and fragility of mind also limits the indi-vidual’s capacities. When the social plays amarginal and contextual role, the individual’sresponsibility in understanding the world is im-mense and the optimism in the individual’s ca-pacities can become a heavy burden. The otherside of fragility is that the presence of the worldis not only “not for free”, as Noë puts it, but itis actually sometimes not available at all. It isnot available because other subjects have a sayin the construction of our understanding, andgiven that they have perspectives and interestsof their own, their contribution may sometimesbe out of reach, run contrary to what we need,or even confuse us deeply. The fragile nature ofour social mind can therefore also deny us ac-cess to the world.

5 Conclusion

In his book Varieties of Presence, Noë refers toKafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), the story ofGregor Samsa, who wakes up as an insect, lyingon his back, unable to move. Noë uses the storyto illustrate the upshot of his philosophy of un-derstanding. “We are not only animals”, hesays, but we “achieve the world by enactingourselves. Insofar as we achieve access to theworld, we also achieve ourselves” (Noë 2012, p.28).

On the presented alternative, the actionistnature of self-achieved understanding is onlyhalf of the story. I have suggested that ourminds and selves are genuinely social and thustranscend the limits of our bodily existence.The human self vitally depends on others and is

achieved together with them, through negotiat-ing a permanent tension of maintaining a senseof individuality while not losing the connectionto others (distinction and participation).

From this perspective, the point of Kafka’sstory is therefore not so much to deny that weare animals, but rather to claim that we are so-cial animals that achieve ourselves together withothers. Reflecting the basic insight of this pa-per, the story thus illustrates the fragility andsocial nature of human existence. It is an ex-pression of desperation and of the suffering thatcan come when others refuse or are unable tocomply with our basic needs: being recognisedas individual and as someone who belongs toothers. Having lost contact with himself as ahuman subject in the bureaucratic machinery ofhis professional life, Samsa awakes as an insect,his new embodiment an imprint of alienationand loss of recognition. But the loss cuts evendeeper. With his alien embodiment Samsa theinsect is rejected by his family, so that he findsno salvation in his private life. Samsa dies fromsocial isolation. From an enactive view of theself as a joint achievement, Kafka’s The Meta-morphosis captures (like much of his otherwork) the consequences of our deep vulnerabil-ity and limited freedom and the drama of theloss from which we can suffer precisely becausewe are social beings.

The social structures that we depend uponempower our ways of understanding; yet for thesame reason they can also enslave us, and seri-ously limit our mental capacities. This, I sug-gest, is not merely the case for institutions andtheir bureaucratic apparatus but also applies toour direct intersubjective relations, be they withlovers, friends, family, or co-workers.

Presence is therefore not simply availabil-ity—since this would suggest the subject’s un-warranted access to the world. Presence israther a joint achievement, and the nature ofdoing things together is that there will alwaysbe leaps and limitations. In this way, failure andlimited control over the ways we understand theworld are not entirely the responsibility of theindividual and its techniques and skills, but alsoa deeper expression of the genuinely social andco-constructed nature of understanding.

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 10 | 11

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gabriel Levy and MikeBeaton as well as two anonymous reviewers fortheir useful comments. My gratitude also goesto the editors and organisers of the MINDgroup, Jennifer Windt and Thomas Metzinger.The MIND-group has been a unique source ofinspiration and support. This work is supportedby the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network,“TESIS: Toward an Embodied Science of Inter-Subjectivity” (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN,264828).

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Kafka, F. (1915). The Metamorphosis. Kyselo, M. (2013). Enaktivismus. In A. Stephan & S.

Walter (Eds.) Handbuch Kognitionswissenschaft (pp.197-202). Stuttgart, GER: J.B. Metzler.

(2014). The body social: An enactive approach tothe self. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00986

Kyselo, M. & Di Paolo, E. (2013). Locked-in syndrome: Achallenge for embodied cognitive science. Phenomeno-logy and the Cognitive Sciences, 3 (1), 1-26.10.1007/s11097-013-9344-9

Kyselo, M. & Tschacher, W. (2014). An enactive and dy-namical systems theory account of dyadic relationships.Frontiers in Psychology, 5 (452).10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00452

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree ofknowledge: The biological roots of human understand-ing. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications.

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Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA:MIT press.

(2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not yourbrain, and other lessons from the biology of conscious-ness. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

(2012). Varieties of presence. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

(2015). Concept pluralism, direct perception, andthe fragility of presence. In T. Metzinger & J. M.Windt (Eds.) Open MIND. Frankfurt a. M., GER:MIND Group.

Shapiro, L. (2011). Embodied cognition. New York, NY:Routledge.

Thompson, E. (2005). Sensorimotor subjectivity and theenactive approach to experience. Phenomenology andthe Cognitive Sciences, 4 (4), 407-427. 10.1007/s11097-005-9003-x

(2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, andthe sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: The HarvardUniversity Press.

Varela, F. J. (1997). Patterns of life: Intertwining identityand cognition. Brain and Cognition, 34, 72-87.10.1006/brcg.1997.0907

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1993). The em-bodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weber, A. & Varela, F. (2002). Life after Kant: Naturalpurposes and the autopoietic foundations of biologicalindividuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sci-ences, 1 (2), 97-125. 10.1023/A:1020368120174

Kyselo, M. (2015). The Fragile Nature of the Social Mind - A Commentary on Alva Noë.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570573 11 | 11

Beyond AgencyA Reply to Miriam Kyselo

Alva Noë

In this paper I respond to Kyselo’s (this collection) claim that actionism, andother versions of the enactive embodied approach to mind, fail to accord social re-lations a constitutive role in making up the human mind. I argue that actionismcan meet this challenge—the view makes relations to others central to an accountof human experience—but I also question whether the challenge is clear enough. Iask: what exactly does it mean to say that social relations play this sort of con-stitutive role?

KeywordsActionism | Body-social problem | Concept pluralism | Concepts | Consciousness |Enactive account | Enactive self | Evans | Fragility | Frege | Individualism | Intel-lectualism | Kant | Organized activity | Perception | Plato | Presence | Sensor-imotor account | Socially enacted autonomy | Socially extended mind | The intel-lectualist insight | The intellectualist thesis | Understanding | Wittgenstein

Author

Alva Noënoe@berkeley.edu   University of California,Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.

Commentator

Miriam Kyselomiriam.kyselo@gmail.com   Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko UnibertsitateaDonostia / San Sebastián, Spain

Editors

Thomas Metzingermetzinger@uni-mainz.de   Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windtjennifer.windt@monash.edu   Monash UniversityMelbourne, Australia

1 Introduction

In my contribution to this volume (Noë this col-lection), I seek to bring out the truth in intellec-tualism. The intellectualist is right, I concede,that understanding is at work throughout thedomain of agency—whereever we can talk ofperception, or thinking, or action. Understand-ing is pervasive. The trouble with intellectual-ism, I argue, is that it cleaves to an unrealisticconception of what is demanded for understand-ing to come into play. I particular, it adheres toan over-intellectualized conception of under-standing, according to which an action, or aperception, can be conceptual only if it isguided, as it were from above, by explicit acts

of judgment. In my target paper I also criticizeanti-intellectualist views, such as that of Drey-fus, for failing to break with intellectualism;such views reject the pervasiveness of the under-standing because they accept the intellectual-ist’s hyper-intellectualized conception of whatunderstanding is and because they find it im-plausible that our experiential or cognitive livesare intellectual in this way. In this brief reply toKyselo’s excellent commentary, I would like tosay something about what the anti-intellectual-ism of the sort I criticize in the paper gets right.I now want to try to bring out the insight inanti-intellectualism.

Noë, A. (2015). Beyond Agency - A Reply to Miriam Kyselo.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958571068 1 | 5

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2 The truth in anti-intellectualism

If the intellectualist is right that understandingsaturates the space of agency, the anti-intellec-tualist is right that there is also understandingbeyond the limits of our agency. Stanley (2011,cited in Noë this collection) relied on the oppos-ition between the personal and the subpersonal;he supposed that what makes a mere reflex,which is subpersonal, an action, which is per-sonal, is that it is guided by knowledge orreason. But the opposition between reflex andaction is not exhaustive, and the crucial dimen-sion is not that of the contrast between the per-sonal and the subpersonal. Consider conversa-tion, as an example. We can characterize con-versation as a personal-level action. But there isa way of describing the phenomenon that defiessuch characterization. When two people talkthey adopt similar postures, they pause at co-ordinated intervals, they adjust their volumes tomatch each other, they move their eyes andmodify their dialects, all in ways that are gov-erned by their interaction (see Shockley et al.2009 for a review of this literature). Talking iswhat I elsewhere call an “organized activity”(Noë in press). One remarkable feature of or-ganized activities, in this sense, is that they arenot guided by the participants or authored bythem. Another is that they are carried on spon-taneously and without deliberate control. Andyet another is that they are clearly domains inwhich highly sophisticated cognitive capacities—looking, listening, paying attention, moving,undergoing—are put to work.

Notice: I said above that talking, in thesense I have in mind, is not a personal-levelactivity. What I mean by this is that the sort oftight coupling and temporal dynamics, the sortof organization we see at work when peopletalk, is not best characterized at the level ofminutes, hours, choices, etc. that normally char-acterize the personal level. But nor is this aphenomenon of the subpersonal level. For onething, we aren’t interested in something hap-pening in the nervous system of one individual.We are interested in something encompassingtwo (or more) people. For another, we aren’t in-terested in processes unfolding at time-scales of

milliseconds. No. We are interested in whatpeople do, but in a manner that is truly beyondagency. We are interested, here, in a phe-nomenon of the embodiment level (as distinctfrom the subpersonal or the personal level).

And yet we remain, when thinking aboutconversation—or any other organized activity—very much in a domain where we can and mustspeak of cognitive achievement, understanding,skill, and so on.

One upshot of these considerations, then,is that while understanding, as I argued above,is a necessary condition of agency, it is alsopresent beyond its limits. Another is that un-derstanding beyond the limits of agency cannotbe understood individualistically. This is obvi-ous in the case of intrinsically social activities,like conversation, but it is also true for organ-ized activities that can be carried out by solit-ary individuals (such as seeing, for example).

The thing that anti-intellectualism getsright, as I see it, is the appreciation that a greatdeal of what we do, isn’t really done by us:activity happens to us; we find ourselves organ-ized. We are made what we are in the setting oforganized activities.

From the standpoint of the theory of or-ganized activities—presented in more detail inNoë (in press)—we are creatures who are fromthe very beginning caught up in world andother-involving organized activities; these activ-ities form the lived substrate of our biographicallives as persons. Actionism, in these ways, iscommitted to a radical form of anti-individual-ism.

3 The challenge of crypto-individualism

Now, Kyselo has criticized actionism not for ig-noring the social, but for failing to treat the so-cial as constitutive of human cognitive organiza-tion. Kyselo’s point is that for actionism, otherpeople and our relations to them “shape” themind, but they do so in the same the way thatany environmental conditions cause, constrain,or enable human experience; the view makes noallowance for the stronger possibility that otherpeople and our social relations with them areactually constitutive of what it is to be a human

Noë, A. (2015). Beyond Agency - A Reply to Miriam Kyselo.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958571068 2 | 5

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being. So she writes, with actionism as one ofher targets in mind:

Philosophers of cognition systematicallyassume that the mind is essentially em-bodied, while the social world remains thecontext in which the embodied mind isembedded. On this view, the social argu-ably shapes the mind, but it does not fig-ure in the constitution of the mind itself.(Kyselo this collection, p. 2)

And she goes on to explain:

I argue that since the world of humans is asocial world of others and our social rela-tions is what matters most to us, the so-cial must also figure in the constitutivestructure of human cognitive individu-ation. The human mind or self is not onlyembodied but also genuinely social. (ibid.,p. 2)

In a footnote, she then elaborates:

By saying that sociality matters con-stitutively for the human self, I mean thatwithout continuously relating and enga-ging in interaction with others, therewould be no human self as a whole. Thesocial is not only causally relevant for en-acting self-hood, but it is also an essentialcomponent of its minimal organizationalstructure. (ibid., p. 2)

Now, I admit that the language of earlier work(Noë 2004, 2012) can be taken to suggest some-thing like crypto-individualism. In so far as Italk about presence as something that thinkersand perceivers “achieve,” and in so far as I in-sist that, in achieving the world’s presence inthought and experience, we also achieveourselves, it can perhaps sound like I am de-scribing the enactive feats of a heroic solitaryagency.

I admit that’s how it sounds. But I wascareful to warn against being misled in this way.So, for example, in a passage immediately fol-lowing one that Kyselo cites, I write:

But we are not only animals. I am also afather, and a teacher, and a philosopher,and a writer. These modalities of my beingwere no more given to me than my abilityto read and write. I achieve myself. Not onmy own, to be sure! And not in a heroicway. Maybe it would better to say that myparents and my friends and family andchildren and colleagues have achieved mefor me. The point is that we are cultivatedourselves—learning to talk and read anddance and dress and play guitar and domathematics and physics and philosophy—and in this cultivation worlds open upthat would otherwise be closed off. In thisway we achieve for ourselves new ways ofbeing present.

Here I explicitly repudiate heroic individualism;we achieve ourselves with and through others;we are cultivated by a world full of others andthat’s the setting in which we bring the worldinto focus for consciousness.

Perhaps another feature that feeds theappearance of crypto-individualism is theavailability of an idealist or anti-realist read-ing of enacting or achieving presence. It is notin fact my view—Kyselo herself is clear aboutthis—that we make the world, or construct it.The world shows up for us, in perception, andin thought, and for action. But it doesn’tshow up for free. Just as you can’t encounterwhat a text means if you don’t know how toread, so you can’t see what is there to be seenwithout the battery of understandings neces-sary for reaching out and picking it up.

We don’t make the world, just as wedon’t make other people. In fact, the world,and others, are necessary for us to achievecontact with it in three distinct ways. First,our experience of others and the world de-pends on their existence. If they weren’t there,we couldn’t achieve access to them. Second,our possession and exercise of the relevantskills may require the presence and participa-tion of others. Think of the turn-taking dancethat is conversation; you can’t do thatwithout the other. Third, our possession ofperceptual and cognitive skills of access de-

Noë, A. (2015). Beyond Agency - A Reply to Miriam Kyselo.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958571068 3 | 5

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pends on our development in the setting ofpersonal relationships.

Does the commitment of actionism tothese three kinds of dependence of our experi-ence on our engagement with others meet thestandard of offering an account of other peopleas not merely shaping but as constituting ourmental lives? If not, I hope to be told why.

Let me offer a final example to try to cla-rify what is at stake. Take a baseball team.There will be nine players on the field at agiven time during a game: a pitcher andcatcher, three basemen, a shortstop, and thethree outfielders. Notice that there are two dif-ferent ways in which we can individuate theseplayers. We can pick them out by the role thatthey play—by their position, in baseball par-lance—or we can pick them out by the player,that is, by the particular person who is playingthe role. Take the shortstop, for example. Theshortstop is the near outfielder, or the far in-fielder; he is positioned between 2nd and 3rdbases. His job is to field balls hit to him and todeliver the balls to teammates in ways thatwork to his team’s advantage. For our purposesit is important to notice that a shortstop is asocial creature in the sense that a) to be ashortstop is to play a role that can only be spe-cified by naming other positions and sharedgoals and needs, and b) that there is no suchthing as a shortstop outside of the context ofconvention, practice, and history—for that iswhat baseball is: a structure in a temporally ex-tended space of convention and practice. Ashortstop, we might say, is a thoroughly socialkind of thing. It is constituted by social rela-tions.

Notice that this way of thinking aboutwhat it is to be a shortstop takes nothing awayfrom the fact that shortstops are embodied andthat they are in continuous dynamic exchangewith their physical environment. The quality ofa shortstop is usually framed in terms of therange of ground he can cover, the softness of hishands, the strength of his arm, the delicacy andcontrol of his footwork, and finally, his under-standing of what to do in the split-second heatof play. Physical and intellectual skill are allproperties of this essentially social being, the

shortstop. And this is so for all the other play-ers.

Now, the fact that being a shortstop issomething “whose identity is brought forththrough body-mediated social interaction”, aswe could say, borrowing Kyselo’s words (thiscollection, p. 2), doesn’t entail that the flesh-and-blood human being who is playingshortstop is also in the same way identity-de-pendent on his or her social relations. The indi-vidual existence of the man, after all, the actualguy, the living human organism, is presupposedby his entering into the kinds of relationshipsthat can make it the case that he is also ashortstop.

This sort of consideration can be general-ized: just as we can distinguish the player fromthe position he plays, so we can distinguish thehuman being from the person he or she also is.Personhood is enacted, achieved, or performedin ways not so different from the way being abaseball-player is undertaken. A person isdefined by nesting and overlapping roles—daughter, employer, citizen, rebel, lover, failure,and so on. And these roles are genuinely con-stitutive of who or what a person is, of his orher identity. Truly these constitutive featuresthat make a person the person she is are ro-bustly and thoroughly social, in all the ways be-ing a shortstop is social. You can’t be a personon your own, any more than you can be ashortstop on your own. Persons are creatures ofnormative, evaluative spaces. Persons are per-formers. They perform their personhood. Andthey bear the ever-present burden of being eval-uated. That, finally, is the difference betweenmere action and performance. Performance, asdistinct from mere action, happens against thebackground of the possibility of being judged(good dancer, good father, good lover, good stu-dent, etc.).

Personhood is enacted. But what aboutbeing human? Is that enacted as well? Is one’sstatus as a human being, like one’s status as aperson, or a shortstop, something that is accom-plished through one’s body-mediated social in-teractions?

This much is clear. Being a distinct humanbeing is antecedent to entering into the kinds of

Noë, A. (2015). Beyond Agency - A Reply to Miriam Kyselo.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958571068 4 | 5

www.open-mind.net

relationships that constitute one’s being a per-son, or a shortstop. So it can’t be that it is thesame kinds of relations with others that consti-tute one’s personal identity (in my sense) thatconstitute one’s organismic identity as a humanbeing. My question for Kyselo, then, would be:why should we say that human beings, aboveand beyond the persons they enact, are, in therelevant sense, constitutively social? Or betterstill, the question is: what is the relevant senseof “constitutively social”?

Let me be clear that I think it would be amistake to hold that personhood, bound upwith practice, convention, and history, though itis, is merely cultural, and that this culturalstructure is stamped or imposed onto a pre-given biological substrate (the human being).No, each of us is both a human being and aperson and any comprehension of our natureneeds to do justice to both of these. A biologicaltheory of us will be a theory of creatures whoare both persons as well as organisms and willtake seriously the way these loop back anddown and the way they interact.

4 Conclusion

There is much in Kyselo’s excellent response towhich I have said nothing in reply. I am struck,in particular, by her powerful handling of theconcept of fragility. I have tried, in this reply, toshow that actionism, despite appearances ofheroic individualism to the contrary, recognizesthat people spend their lives in worlds that arealways ineliminably social.

References

Kyselo, M. (2015). The fragile nature of the social mind.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.) Open MIND.Frankfurt a. M., GER: MIND Group.

Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

(2012). Varieties of presence. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

(2015). Concept pluralism, direct perception, andthe fragility of presence. In T. Metzinger & J. M.Windt (Eds.) Open MIND. Frankfurt a. M., GER:MIND Group.

Noë, A. (in press). Strange tools: Art and human nature.New York, NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux.

Shockley, K., Richardson, D. C. & Dale, R. (2009). Con-versation and coordinative structures. Topics in Cog-nitive Science, 1 (2), 305-319. 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01021.x

Stanley, J. (2011). Knowing how. New York, NY: OxfordUniversity Press.

Noë, A. (2015). Beyond Agency - A Reply to Miriam Kyselo.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 27(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958571068 5 | 5