From the Transcendental to the Enactive

Varga (2012) argues that the sense of reality disrupted in various psychopathologies, including derealization (DR) and depersonalization (DP), is pre-intentional (or in some sense, the product of a more basic, operative intentionality that is pre-predicative). This moves us away from the more dominant conceptions of delusion and the loss of sense of reality as problems best explained in terms of propositional attitudes, like beliefs, or framework propositions (see, e.g., Campbell 2001; Eilan 2000). Furthermore, Varga suggests a certain triadic structure in which DR/DP affects not just the sense of reality, but also the sense of self and our intersubjective relations with others. Reality, self, and others are tied together into a system where psychotic disruptions reverberate across all these dimensions.

Varga insightfully appeals to Husserl’s phenomenological conception of transcendental or open intersubjectivity as a way to show how our relations with others enter into the co-constitution of reality. One can also appeal to empirical studies to point in this same direction. I would like to pursue this idea, briefly, in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s question: “Now if the transcendental is intersubjectivity, how can the borders of the transcendental and the empirical help becoming indistinct?” And his rather dramatically expressed response: “All of my facticity is reintegrated into subjectivity …. Thus the transcendental descends into history” (Merleau-Ponty 1967, 107). It makes perfect sense to think that whatever one determines to be the case on transcendental grounds, must also be reflected, if not cashed out, in empirical terms open to scientific investigation (see Gallagher 2011).¹

The empirical studies that I have in mind are primarily developmental ones concerning joint attention and secondary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1998; Trevarthen and Hubley 1978), and studies that support the enactive approach to cognition (e.g., Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). It is clear from the developmental studies that starting even before 9 months of age infants, who arguably have no concept of belief, who are pre-linguistic in the standard sense, but who relate to others primarily through embodied (sensory–motor) interactions, begin to gain a basic, pragmatic sense of what counts as real, significant, and salient, only by attending with others to those environmental objects and states of affairs that those others attend to with interest. The meaningful world is carved out of the physical environment in just those practices and interactions with others that constitute secondary intersubjectivity (the empirical counterpart to Husserl’s open intersubjectivity). These intersubjective practices include not only joint attention, but those abilities that infants have for grasping the context-determined intentions of others, and for participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007; Gallagher 2009).

Participatory sense-making involves making sense of the world, a co-constitution of meaning, through active engagement and coordinated interaction with others. This may take place in play situations as well as in work situations; it is basic to action and perception. On the enactive view, we see the world as meaningful in terms of what we can do with things, what we can reach or not reach, what presents as affordances or disaffordances. Gibson’s notion of affordances is ecological, which means it points to the fact that affordances are defined in terms of what we are capable of doing as embodied agents, and what the environment offers. That is, it involves both self and world in their coupled and dynamic relations. This ecological mix, however, necessarily includes others, because we surely learn what things mean, how to handle things, how to deal with things, and how to value things from the actions of others and our own interactions with them. The sense of reality, then, is generated in this, at once, prepredicative, pragmatic, and social milieu.

Importantly, what we see in studies of joint attention, secondary intersubjectivity, and participatory sense-making pertains not just to infants. It continues to characterize our interactions with others and our action-oriented stance toward reality throughout our lifetime, on both pragmatic and emotional levels. For example, in studies of object evaluation in adults, the gaze of the other person...