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LIT-571: Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-456), from the published version posted on De Jaegher's own site. Worth reading as the founding statement of participatory sense-making. A social interaction is defined as regulated coupling between autonomous agents that itself becomes an autonomous organization in the relational domain, without destroying the agents' autonomy; coordinating sense-making in interaction can generate meanings neither individual had. The argument is conceptual, illustrated by everyday cases and by the perceptual-crossing experiments; nothing is measured in the paper.
Tagsembodied-cognition, cognition, social-ontology, phenomenology, complex-systems, agency
SupportsCLAIM-165 — A combined form constituted by mutual entrainment is not thereby a self in the subject sense: two dancers in phase are one coordination, an autonomous process, and still two subjects, CLAIM-172 — Mutual entrainment is a sufficient mark of a combined form, and marks it as one of peers: when each side adjusts the other's timing the pair carries a collective variable neither has alone; one-way drive also makes a combined form, with a hierarchical architecture, CLAIM-175 — A partner-dancing couple, while dancing, is one combined cognitive form on the extended-mind thesis's own terms, more clearly than Otto and his notebook, and merits a name of its own
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-456 — Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-520 — When coordination between two autonomous agents and the continuation of their encounter shape each other, the interaction gains an autonomy of its own, a precarious self-sustaining organization that lasts only while both agents stay autonomous; coordinating movement then coordinates sense-making, so some social understanding, such as recognising a partner, is a property of the interaction's dynamics and not of either individual

Graph View

Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507.

The brief’s citation (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6, 2007) is correct.

Key takeaways

  • The definition. “Social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved.”
  • The interaction can outlast the wishes of its members. Two people mirroring each other’s sidesteps in a corridor are held in the encounter by its own dynamics until some other channel breaks the symmetry.
  • Participatory sense-making. “The coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own”, on a spectrum from orientation (pointing out) to joint construction of meaning (charades).
  • Against the “Rear Window” picture. Social understanding is not, in the first instance, one detached individual working out another’s mind; mirror-neuron explanations re-describe the problem at the neural level.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, in the enactive part of the agency batch. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.

It is tagged cognition first (it is an account of social cognition), then social-ontology, because its central claim is about what a social interaction is: an entity with its own autonomy, not reducible to the behaviour of its members. That is a claim about a social thing, made from cognitive science rather than from collective-intentionality theory. It is tagged agency because the interactors must remain autonomous agents for the interaction to count as social, and coercion that destroys an agent’s autonomy ends the social interaction. It is not tagged self: the closing remark on co-modulation of self-in-interaction and other-in-interaction is a few sentences.

Where it bears on what the record holds:

  • Coordination dynamics (LIT-601, LIT-578). The paper takes coordination, phase attraction and the absolute/relative distinction from Kelso’s Dynamic Patterns (LIT-578, cited with a page, p. 98). The read substitute for Kelso’s theory in this batch, Kelso 2021 (LIT-601), gives the metastable regime of the extended HKB model as the formal account of that relative coordination.
  • Defining Agency (LIT-566). The same group’s definitions of autonomy and sense-making; this paper is their social extension.
  • Gallagher. The paper’s foil among embodied accounts is Gallagher’s work of 2001–2005 on intersubjectivity, which it says recognises the interaction but does not yet integrate “a rich account of the interaction process”. The record holds an earlier Gallagher paper, LIT-453, on the minimal and narrative self; this paper does not cite it.

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