CONCEPT SUMMARY

Some of the enactive literature uses a distinction between different ways of describing the relationship between an agent and their surroundings. Put baldly, the distinction is between the surroundings as described from the perspective of the agent, and as described more generally, using a more objective notion. Which term gets applied to which concept is not as consistent as we’d like. Unfortunately, the distinction is not often discussed, and thus different authors sometimes use the terms differently (and in some cases the same author seems to use the terms reversed in different publications).

Philosophers have often used the term “world” as a generic catchall term for “all that there is”. It is typically used in order to indicate something about being “out there”, not connected directly with an agent or subject. This is my preferred use of the word within enactive thinking. The world includes all of those things of which I will never be aware and never care about. All of the things that I don’t know and cannot know, but which nevertheless have some existence.

Things get a little complicated because a phrase enactivists often use (which I must confess to loathing) is the claim that agent’s “bring forth a world”, or sometimes more extensively “bring forth a world of significance”. Here, the word is explicitly being used in describing those aspects of reality that are entirely dependent on the perspective of an agent. This swings heavily against the idea of using the word to refer to the agent-independent aspects of reality. I think it unnecessarily complicates things, and though its use has begun to grow on me it was for a very long time my favourite example of enactivist researchers being unhelpfully and unrepentently obtuse and much too enamoured of jargon (I’ve mellowed somewhat because of my greater appreciation of just how difficult it is to talk about both experience and recursive processes, but I still haven’t quite forgiven the adoption of this phrase).

“Environment” which, possibly due to associations with behaviourism, often seems a little less warm and welcoming a term than the richer “world”, I nevertheless prefer to apply to those aspects of the world that are directly a part of the agent’s experience and therefore to be described and best understood with some form of reference to the agent’s perspective. The aetiology of the word is explicitly to do with surroundings, and therefore I think it carries that reference to the agent with it more openly than talk of worlds. Something can only be part of an environment if it is within the specific range of activities of an agent capable of interacting with it. In this sense, the idea of environment (in this more technical usage) is in fact very close to the concept of the Umwelt adopted by embodiment researchers from the philophical and biological work of Jakob Von Uexkull.

Von Uexkull described the worlds of animals in terms of the animals’ capabilities and values, noting that much of what might be considered reality lies well outside of the perception and ken of most creatures (including human beings). For example, We tend not to notice the fact that we are standing on large floating plates of rock adrift on oceans of magma. In the technical use of the terms here, this is something that is part of the world in which we live but not part of our environment.