Where scholarship meets technological innovation . . .
Commentary
Enactivist Distributed Cognition, and the Role of
Distributed Social Practices in Social Change
Mason Cash
University of Central Florida, USA
Cash, Mason. 2024. “Enactivist Distributed Cognition and the Role of Distributed Social Practices in Social Change.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 6, no. 1: 7-19. https://doi.org/10.33497/2024.summer.2.
Abstract: I support much of Maiese and Hanna’s (M&H) account of the ways social institutions “mindshape” people’s cognition (values, meanings, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment), and of the ways neoliberal individualism can be resisted and progressive social change can be enacted. But the overall approach can be augmented, I argue, if M&H would embrace an enactivist account of socially distributed and collective cognition, and action, in which cognitive systems include but are not limited to individuals. Complementing M&H’s focus on top-down “repressive” forms of power, with also “ideological” forms of power that are distributed throughout social communities and their discursive practices, symbolic resources, and shared meanings would enable M&H to see not just top-down mindshaping by institutions, but also peer-to-peer mindshaping between members of distributed normative social practices. This analysis also entails that diverse institutions are often composed of many differing communities and practices, such that institutions are not wholly destructive and deforming nor wholly constructive and enabling. It also augments their largely top-down account of social change with the kinds of social change enacted through peer-to-peer interactions between members of different communities, whose iterated interactions over time embody competition (differing distributions of repressive and ideological power) between different normative communities with different practices, especially through heterodox communities of resistance, offering liberatory and “enabling” social practices as alternatives to dominant orthodox “deforming” social practices.
Keywords: distributed cognition, enactivism, social practices, collective agency, relational autonomy
I’m completely on board with the account of social and political philosophy of mind that Maiese and Hanna (2019) present. I’ve defended one like it, but much less fleshed out (Cash 2010, 2013). I particularly admire and applaud their objective of resisting “neoliberal thinking,” with its “tendency to focus exclusively on the individual.” They identify this as an “ideological cognitive bias” that can impede examination of “social institutional factors that cultivate and scaffold particular habits of mind” and of our “our collective agential life inside social institutions” (Maise and Hanna 2019, 163).
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However, I see in M&H’s account and descriptions some individualistic assumptions that I want enjoin them to also let go of to better achieve this objective. In what follows, I suggest ways to augment M&H’s analysis, preserving their central insights about analyses about social structures that mindshape individuals, about power, and about processes of social change, while at the same time allowing for descriptions of structural mindshaping, power, and social change that are even less individualistic and more distributed in normative communities.
EXTENDED VERSUS DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
M&H’s “essential embodiment thesis” sees cognition as “necessarily and completely embodied” in individual human animals, whose cognition is supported and embedded—but not extended—by social and environmental factors (8). Many enactivists (like myself) agree with a version of this thesis, that individual, conscious, “essentially embodied” human animals should play a core role in accounts of cognition.
However, many of us enactivists resist the notion of cognition as extended around individuals, but not by retreating further into internalism and individualism, as M&D do.[1] Rather, we enactivists see cognition and agency as distributed across wider dynamic emergent systems that essentially include—but are not limited to—individual human animals. By “we” enactivists I mean myself, but also people like Shaun Gallager (2020), Hanne De Jaeger and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007), Dan Hutto and Erik Myin (2017), John Sutton (2010), Deborah Tollefson (2015), Michael Wheeler (2020), and Dan Zahavi (2021) and others. For instance, the agent that installed a new garbage disposal in my sink was me plus some tools, an instruction booklet and a YouTube video. On such an enactivist approach, these wider distributed cognitive systems also include the socio-normative factors M&H detail: institutions and social practices with their shared values, norms, meanings, affective framings and bodily habits, that mindshape individuals’ cognition and action. The system that produced an installed garbage disposal also includes social institutions and other people that create, maintain and distribute such tools, instruction books, and YouTube videos. It also includes many social conventions and practices (many of which have become embodied skills and habits), such as the “righty tighty, lefty loosey” convention, and the English language. The system also includes other people: my parents, friends, teachers, colleagues, and bosses who taught me these skills and conventions, and who inducted me into these normative sociolinguistic practices. All these are “essentially” involved in the sense that I could not have done this without them. Credit for the installation might be concentrated on me, the individual who worked with his head under the sink for a while, but some credit is also distributed across this social and technological system that enabled me to do this.
Importantly, embracing such a conception of socially and technologically distributed cognition and action, contradicts almost nothing of M&H’s central argument about social and institutional aspects of cognition, and it also helps undermine the neoliberal individualism that M&H critique. It just requires letting go of the (unnecessary and counterproductive) thesis that human minds are “completely” embodied, and that social and technological factors support and scaffold, but do not extend, human cognition.
An important consequence of this reframing is the possibility of joint or collective cognition and agency. There are some actions that “we” did (rather than “I did that, and they did too”). Examples include:
co-authors (who wrote a book together),
a sports team (who won the game),
NASA (who planned and successfully completed a mission to the ISS).
diverse and distributed feminist and anti-racist communities (who resist and reform gendered and racist systems of oppression).
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M&H come close to recognizing joint cognition and agency when discussing De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s (2007) enactivist “participatory sense making” (67). Meaning is often generated, M&H explain, over the course of social engagement between participants whose bodily responsiveness, desires, and points of view are coordinated and interdependent. Through this coordination “new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own” [M&H, 67, quoting De Jaeger and Di Paolo, 497].
Enactivists like De Jaeger and Di Paolo (2007, 493), however, see this as a form of collective agency, not just coordinated and interdependent individual agency. For instance, a conversation between co-authors, bouncing ideas off one another, augmenting and re-shaping one another’s contributions, they argue, has a degree of “autonomy” that is not reducible to the contributions or affective framings of either participant alone. In such social interactions, the coupling itself “constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced)” (493, emphasis added).
M&H, however, frame such a “coupled system” as individuals “coordinating with” and “mutually modulating” other individuals (64-8). They describe the coupled interaction and the meanings generated as “multiply self-legislated” (68) rather than jointly legislated.[2] For De Jaeger and Di Paolo, in contrast, “participatory sense-making” is distributed across the collective, which itself can have some degree of emergent autonomy.
Enactive accounts like this, I have previously argued (Cash 2010, 2013) should embrace a relational conception of autonomy (also refer to Friedman 1997; Meyers 2005). This rejects a liberal notion of autonomous action that involves being independent of “external” social influences. Instead, it recognizes that autonomous individuals are socialized into normative communities and practices, yet are able (often with others) to critically reflect on and engage with social, technological and especially normative factors; recruiting, endorsing and enhancing some, rejecting and resisting others, to construct an authentic, responsible, autonomous self, able to act autonomously within this social and relational context.
Distributed and collective “enactive” accounts of cognition and action, then, seem very compatible with M&H’s overall description of our shared “social-institutional life,” within “shared normative forms of human life” that are essentially embodied, genuinely intersubjective, and normatively enacted and reinforced, which have their own “specific structure and sociodynamics” (87, emphases in the original).
In addition, if we accept enactive cognition and action in this distributed collective form, we might see reasons to acknowledge even wider collectives like communities and their shared normative practices that have a distributed existence, autonomy, and even agency of their own that is not fully dependent on, or in the control of, any particular individual.
And this brings me to a more important point, about how control and power can operate (via mindshaping individuals) within and between such distributed and collective cognitive systems. I believe this can augment M&H’s account of the nature of social institutions, and the mechanisms of social change.
INSTITUTIONS AND NORMATIVE COMMUNITIES
Rather than defining “institutions,” M&H give a “maximally broad” list of exemplars (4-5). In their lists and descriptions, they present institutions as somewhat formally organized social structures, in which power and structure are mostly imposed from the top-down.[3] Institutions maintain their structure and organization through “mindshaping” individuals; that is, by scaffolding and supporting “our abilities, values, and emerging
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sense of self by helping us to develop habits and skills that we need to navigate our surroundings” (76). This is how individuals come to implicitly endorse and habitually embody the institution’s shared normative forms of life.
M&H’s analysis of more formal top-down institutions can be augmented or complemented by also understanding the kind of low-level peer-to-peer mindshaping, and distributed structures of power and coercion, found in informal communities and their shared normative practices.[4] M&H’s list of institutions and their descriptions does not include more informal peer-to-peer normative communities, within which a lot of “mindshaping” also happens: parenting and sibling relationships, friendships, co-workers, teammates, and church congregations, as well as a host of informal normative communities such as drivers who share local roadways, shoppers at a grocery store, passengers on an airplane together, people attending the same sports event or philosophy conference, and so on.[5] In these informal normative relationships and communities, people’s actions, values, affective framings and embodied habits “mindshape” each other (rather than, or as well as, being imposed from positions of power).
Sally Haslanger (2019, 5-6) makes a distinction that can help here, between oppression or injustice that is repressive (coercively enforced), and oppression and injustice that is ideological.[6] Ideological oppression, she argues, is “embedded in forms of coordination that we are highly motivated to engage in, and engage in fluently; results of such coordinations are often valuable; and the terms of such engagement come to constitute our self-standings and our identities” (6). The “structures” that Haslanger illuminates as playing a strong role in ideological oppression, are not just structures of centralized institutional coercive power, but also sets of interconnected normative practices: “patterns of behavior that enable us to coordinate due to learned skills and locally transmitted information, in response to resources, and whose performances are ‘mutually accountable’ by reference to shared schemas/social meanings” (7).[7]
The distinctions between these two types of oppression, and between institutions and distributed normative communities, map onto the differences between depictions of power in M&H’s and Haslanger’s accounts. M&H’s account focuses primarily on the use of top-down power over others in which those in power impose an organization and structure onto the group.[8] Thus “destructive deforming institutions” involve one person or group oppressing another using coercive power. And designing a constructive enabling institution may require using “local hierarchy” (289) in “deliberate efforts and design” by those in power, towards “realization and promotion of” flexible habits of mind in others, perhaps through “transformative learning.” Their chapter 7 concludes by (290) suggesting that this should not be achieved through authoritarian coercion, but rather by institutions that enable individuals’ creativity, love of work, and “natural desire for making meaningful social connections.” But even there, the organization of such environments seems created and imposed from the top down (albeit through structures that foster “collaborative decision making”).
In contrast, consider the power distributed in social communities and their normative and discursive practices. Haslanger (14) argues—quoting Nancy Fraser’s (1989) interpretation of Foucault (1979)—that this form of power “operates at the lowest extremities of the social body in everyday social practices.” That is, power is distributed throughout social communities and their discursive practices, symbolic resources, and shared meanings; it operates through members of communities sanctioning and reinforcing one another’s actions (and values, meanings, affective framings and self-conceptions).
The shared social realities in which we are “mindshaped” and are constituted as the kinds of subjects we become are not just a matter of top-down institutional coercion (that becomes self-coercion), as M&H explain. It is also a matter of the productive ways that symbolic power is distributed among the socio-normative practices of a community, whose members coerce and mindshape one another.
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Consider, for example, communities in which COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy was prevalent. In The Atlantic, sociologist Brooke Harrington (2021) explains that many people in a conservative Missouri district were afraid of being seen while getting vaccinated and wanted privacy at the vaccination site. Harrington argues that sociology is useful in understanding this phenomenon because vaccine refusal is not an individual problem, but a social one:
In Missouri and other red states, vaccine refusal on partisan grounds has become a defining marker of community affiliation. Acceptance within some circles is contingent on refusal to cooperate with the Biden administration’s public-health campaign. Getting vaccinated is a betrayal of that group norm, and those who get the shot can legitimately fear losing their job or incurring the wrath of their families and other reference groups. (Harrington 2021)
Community sanction among peers is the driving force, and it seems to be relatively out of the control of “power elites” at this stage. For example, even though former president Trump is vaccinated and encourages vaccination, at a public event in December 2021 when Trump shared that he had received the vaccine booster shot, many in the crowd (ostensibly his supporters) booed (Paybarah and McCarthy 2021).
This distributed form of power is implied by many points M&H raise. But their emphasis seems to be primarily on institutions that coercively impose values, meanings, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment on individuals, and on individuals who are mindshaped by such institutions coming to self-impose them. It helps, I think, to explicitly highlight this other distributed form of power and social conditioning in which members of a normative community reinforce, sanction, and influence (that is, mindshape) one another into inhabiting particular shared forms of life.[9]
INSTITUTIONS ARE NOT WHOLLY CREATIVE OR DESTRUCTIVE
M&H seem to commit—rather strongly—to a bifurcation of institutions into two types. They identify eight criteria that are characteristic of “constructive, enabling institutions”; these enable people to meet their “true needs.” Their opposites define “destructive deforming institutions,” in which it is difficult for people to meet their true needs. However, consider again the Missourians afraid that others in their community will see their vaccination as “disloyalty.” Why maintain loyalty to a community when you believe that some of that community’s practices and judgments are not in your best interests? The answer is that most institutions and communities are not wholly constructive or wholly deforming, in satisfying or undermining all eight of M&H’s criteria. As Harrington (2021) points out:
Shifting from an individual to a relational perspective helps us understand why people are seeking vaccination in disguise. They want to save face within the very specific set of social ties that sociologists call “reference groups”—the neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and friendship networks that help people obtain the income, information, companionship, mutual aid, and other resources they need to live. The price of access to those resources is conformity to group norms.
That is, communities whose norms and practices reinforce vaccine refusal are not wholly toxic. People in these communities also get many of their basic needs met within such communities. They get vaccinated in disguise because perceived disloyalty may threaten these benefits and supports.
Many communities and institutions are comprised of a multitude of different, intersecting and overlapping practices, whose members interact in complicated ways. These practices might well be “constructive and
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enabling” in some ways and also “destructive and deforming” in others. They may be populated by some people who endorse the institution’s structures, while others in the community resist and undermine them.
And this brings me to my final point. We can augment M&H’s model of social change, centered around their analysis of institutions and their more centralized power to mindshape individuals, by giving explicit attention also to distributed cognition and action and to the forms of power embedded in low-level peer-to-peer “mindshaping” interactions between members of distributed social communities and normative practices.
SOCIAL CHANGE IS COMPLICATED
M&H depict positive social change, and the development of collective wisdom, as largely a matter of the top-down design of constructive enabling social institutions (chapter 7), or by individuals (scaffolded and assisted by constructive and enabling social institutions) either succumbing to or resisting institutional mindshaping to various degrees.[10] However, I’m suggesting that social change is also—and perhaps more so—a matter of distributed and collective agency: the organic growth and spread of communities and their practices through peer-to-peer interaction.
There is good reason to see societies as constituted by a diverse range of overlapping, intersecting, interacting, normative communities, whose different shared practices (values, affective framings, shared meanings, and embodied habits) are constantly affecting one another through individuals’ interactions.
Social change, then, especially against structures of domination, is often not just a matter of individuals coordinating their resistance with other individuals, but a matter of communities of dominated people, together, creating alternative communities and mindshaping practices. Individuals who resist structures of domination, as Sally Haslanger (2019, 15-20) argues, are usually members of dominated groups who collectively support one another in creating and inhabiting alternative “hidden” heterodox communities of resistance, practices, and values.
These communities create and support forms of mindshaping that resist and provide alternative practices (meanings, values, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment) to those of the dominant ideology. Eventually these subversive practices “mindshape” others outside of the community of resistance, and might become a more dominant ideology.
In fact, a primary means of progressive change against an oppressive orthodoxy is a heterodox community creating (what might initially be “hidden”) meanings and practices that make explicit and more publicly recognized, the arbitrariness and unfairness of the taken-for-granted oppressive orthodox ideology, and its values, judgments, affective framings, and embodied habits. These “hidden” practices and meanings might eventually, after being sculpted through internal interactions, start to play a role in members’ interactions with the wider community, bringing the dominant community’s “hidden” meanings and practices into more “public” view. Note the recent introduction into public discourse of terms like “mansplaining” and “manspreading,” for example.
Much social change, then, happens organically at the periphery, through low-level interactions within a society, between members of different communities with different practices, meanings, values, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment. While members of sub-communities of resistance articulate their heterodox shared practices, and attempt to spread them more widely, members of the dominant community might push back against such practices (such “backlash” takes many forms, including ridiculing or ignoring them, or depicting them as “crazy nonsense” or “uppity,” etc.). Through cross-cultural interactions like this, there is a
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push and pull between communities and practices competing in terms of spread and power. Sometimes the norms of heterodox communities might become orthodoxy themselves.[11]
It is perhaps helpful to think of such interactions, between members of differing communities, as attempts to “mindshape” one another. For example, a co-worker says or does something that they think is socially appropriate; like telling a sexist or racist joke. But they’re corrected by someone with an identity shaped in a heterodox community of resistance, who feels that this behavior is not (or should not be) appropriate. Such interactions, especially when repeated, have the potential to influence the meanings, values, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment of the participants. Repeated such interactions might make deep and long-lasting changes in their practices, community-affiliations, and their identities.
In such interactions, change in the spread of practices across a society, and in individuals’ practices and affiliations, is also dependent on the distribution of low-level power. This power is a matter of there being support among other individuals around an interaction for a particular move in that interaction (e.g., in calling out actions that reinforce structures of domination). When a person witnesses a colleague telling that sexist joke, for example, and feels or expects that enough of the others witnessing it share their practices, such that witnesses will accept and support a correction as more reasonable and appropriate than this offensive joke, they might feel confident enough to make such a correction, believing that they will be supported.[12] The autonomous actions of individuals who engage in acts of resistance, then, is relational autonomy, constructed and distributed within—and, importantly, supported by—communities of resistance and their heterodox practices. (As is the autonomy of those in the dominant community pushing back against such alternative practices.)
Given all this, feminist movements, and the improved justice and reduced oppression they continue to create, should not just be seen as the result of a group of individuals coordinating their individual acts of resistance, nor as powerful individuals designing a non-sexist “constructive and enabling institution” as M&H describe (chapter 7). Rather, the agents of social change are distributed feminist communities themselves. This social change—as with most social change—is an example of collective and distributed cognition and action. It has largely been brought about organically and systematically by the community of resistance that arose in response to structures of repressive and ideological domination. Members of dominated groups (e.g., feminist “consciousness raising” groups) together “mindshaped” one another; creating and inhabiting more constructive and enabling practices (social norms, shared meanings, affective framings, and embodied habits). These practices eventually spread, through members’ mindshaping interactions with others, to the wider community. This model of change happening as a result of “mindshaping” interactions within communities, and between members of different communities, spreading practices of resistance across a society, also applies to the example of “destructive deforming” neoliberal ideology in higher education, that M&H detail in chapter 4.
M&H describe some troubling trends, that seem designed to reshape institutions of higher education, by imposing neoliberal individualist and corporatist practices and values. But universities, like any community or institution, are constituted by diverse and distributed, competing, sub-communities. And many of us who also are part of these institutions, resist this neoliberal ideology, by inhabiting and enacting normative communities whose educational practices are more emancipatory and enabling (organicist, autonomy-enhancing, true-desire promoting, and critical consciousness-priming, etc.). We do this in many ways: in how we conduct classes, design classes, courses and curricula; in how we interact with students; in how we encourage one another to research and teach; in how we conduct ourselves in allegedly “shared governance” committees. M&H describe such educational practices when discussing transformative educational experiences (277 ff.).
This community that values and practices emancipatory and enabling forms of education spans faculty, students and many members of the wider community, and even some university administrators. We have distributed
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ground-level power to resist the ways that such deforming, destructive neoliberal institutions and practices are being imposed (often but not exclusively from the top down). This distributed power, I hope, is not insignificant.
There is a struggle for power in higher education, between different communities and practices. The push and pull of these constructive and deforming communities and practices, in competition, resisting and contradicting and undermining one another, produces a wide variety of educational experiences. And students with those experiences go into the wider community and interact with others, spreading their contrasting values, affective framings, priorities, and experiences into the wider community’s many conversations and interactions about the purpose(s) and value(s) of higher education.
Effective resistance, in part, also depends on this community making explicit the problematic meanings, assumptions, and affective framings of the neo-liberal “destructive deforming” community. Many of us are doing just that. M&H’s Ch 4 is a worthy contribution to this effort. But I’m reluctant to believe that this depiction of neoliberal policies, norms, and practices is the whole story, or that it makes higher education overall a “destructive deforming institution.” Our communities of resistance, for enhancing and emancipatory education (which M&H also describe in chapter 7), are also part of the higher education community. And we have a lot of community support (distributed power) in pushing back against these social forces.
THESE ARE COMPLEMENTARY ACCOUNTS
I hasten to add, in conclusion, that I take this approach to augment and complement M&H’s account of the ways social institutions “mindshape” people’s cognition (values, meanings, affective framings, and habits of bodily comportment), and of the ways neoliberal individualism can be resisted and progressive social change can be enacted. The overall approach here can be furthered by letting go of their individualistic retreat to seeing cognition as “completely” embodied in individuals, and instead embracing enactivist accounts of socially distributed and collective cognition and action (in which cognitive systems include but are not limited to individuals). Seeing communities, not just individuals, as sometimes the locus of cognition and action opens the door to:
seeing mindshaping within and between members of communities and practices, in peer-to-peer interactions between members of distributed normative social practices;
seeing diverse institutions that are not wholly destructive deforming nor wholly constructive and enabling; and
seeing processes of social change through competition (differing distributions of power) between competing normative communities with different practices, and especially between communities of resistance, offering alternative practices to dominant ideologies.
This also enables us to better understand how to help bring about progressive social change, in improving justice and reducing oppression. In addition to top-down design and reform of institutions, we can also help distributed normative communities of resistance to spread their practices:
by making explicit and public the unfairness and arbitrariness of practices that were once taken for granted;
by better understanding the way distributed forms of productive power can be employed;
by employing such power (when we think we have it) to support one another in challenging unfair orthodox practices; and
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by explicitly committing to give such help, so that others can trust in our support when making challenges (such commitments might come in the form of explicit institutional policies, as well as more distributed norms).
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Notes
[1] It seems that much of M&H’s resistance to “extended” cognition is for “metaphysical” reasons (39) that I have trouble fully understanding or endorsing. I believe it’s also somewhat unnecessary, and counterproductive to their larger project of resisting neoliberal individualism. Similarly, in response to an anonymous reviewer, I also resist the metaphysical claim that mind and body begin with individuals, necessarily. From a developmental perspective, individuals are shaped by the pre-existing social practices they are inducted into as they grow (while autonomous individuals also help shape those social practices over time). Also, the affective forces and the power that “mindshapes" individuals are also not essentially constraints or limits on otherwise free individuals; they can also operate through enabling and supporting “mindshaping” forces like parental love and encouragement, and an infant's innate trust of caregivers, etc. (not just fear of sanction).
[2] In addition, when M&H discuss intersubjectivity, they argue that we need “a deeper and richer account of how participatory sense-making and genuine collaboration emerge, insofar as they essentially depend on bodily attunement and the mutual modulation of subjects’ affective framings.” However, they still frame this as a form of coordinated interaction of individuals, in which “each person’s expressions, behaviors, and desires modulate those of the other person” (85).
[3] M&H also depict “collective stupidity” and “collective sociopathy” as “imposed, top down, by those in power” (76), that is, by powerful elites who manipulate the collective’s structures and norms, often through coercive authoritarian power (104). They concede, however, that these structures and norms come to be internalized by many individuals, such that we become “self-coercing” (113).
[4] M&H (76) depict participatory sense making as a more “authentically collaborative” contrast with more coercive and directed ways institutions can operate and impose collective stupidity and collective sociopathy.
[5] With the exception of “families” which might be informal peer to peer communities, or top-down hierarchically organized institutions, perhaps depending on the parenting style.
[6] Of course, most cases of oppression are both repressive and ideological, as Haslanger rightly points out.
[7] M&H are right to point out that the shared schemas and social meanings of the kind that Haslanger illuminates often operate by shared affective framings and embodied habits (not just “information” and “meanings”).
[8] Although elements of ideological oppression are present in M&H’s account (particularly their account of mindshaping), they are often framed around the role of top-down institutions that mindshape individuals who come to internalize the institution’s (possibly oppressive) norms, making some aspects of this ideological dimension less clear.
[9] In addition, the original notion of “mindshaping” (e.g., Mameli 2001; McGeer 2015; Zawidzki 2008, 2013) that M&H draw upon also focuses on the way elders induct young people into their community’s practices, and the ways peers reinforce and normalize such practices (without any central or top-down “elites” imposing or coercing them).
[10] Michelle Maiese (2022) gives a very promising argument along these lines, in part an enactivist response to Haslanger’s argument above, entitled “Mindshaping, Enactivism, and Ideological Oppression.” Maiese
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concludes that “cultural or social practices can be understood as a nexus where individual agency is both enabled and constrained by social factors” (352). However, Maiese adds, “it is possible for people embedded in social institutions to alter their behavioral patterns and cultivate new habits of mind, and for this to have not only a direct effect on their actions, but also a salient rippling effect on other agents” (352). Thus, individual cognition and agency is embedded within and interacts with social practices. M&H make a similar argument, describing constructive enabling social institutions in somewhat individual-focused ways, as institutions that enable people to “self-realize, connect with others in a mutually aiding way, liberate ourselves, and be mentally healthy, authentic, and deeply happy” (71). In discussing progressive social change, M&H (254) describe individual minded subjects having the capacity to reinforce or to undermine and defy particular social practices.
[11] For example, it could be argued that feminism and anti-racism, which began as heterodox sub-communities of resistance against sexist and racist orthodox norms and practices, are becoming a dominant orthodoxy in some communities (though not without backlash).
[12] As Maria Lugones (1987) argues, power differences may make it difficult to feel free enough to correct others when “traveling” to more orthodox “hostile” worlds in which one does not feel “at home.” (3) As Lugones puts it: “I am particularly interested here in those many cases in which White/Anglo women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst. The more independent I am, the more independent I’m left to be.” (7)
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______. 2013. “Cognition without Borders: ‘Third Wave’ Socially Distributed Cognition and Relational Autonomy.” Cognitive Systems Research 25-26: 61-71. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.03.007.
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Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and Interaction Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Mason Cash © 2024
Author email: Mason.Cash[at]ucf[dot]edu
