Sinnbildung und Symbolische Funktionen : eine Diskussion des Enaktivismus Ausgehend von Ernst Cas­sirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen

In recent years Participatory Sense-Making Enactivism has gained increasingprominence within the field of philosophy of mind. This approachto cognition articulates a broad conception of cognitive activity, taking274 abstractsinto account acts of meaning-formation that are embedded in sensorimotorprocesses and delineating a relational model of cognition that seeks toaddress the connection between cognition and culture. In this paper, I aimto offer a comparison between enactivism and Ernst Cassirer's symbolictheory of cognition. It will be shown that, despite similar theoretical aspirations,the two approaches yield quite different conceptions of cognition.

The key issue lies in the way enactivism tends to attribute meaning to anyform of sensorimotor coupling scheme. Starting from Cassirer's discussionof the phenomenon of expressive movements (Ausdrucksbewegung) Iwill attempt to develop a possible critique of contemporary sense-makingenactivism. I will suggests that the participatory sense-making frameworklacks a genuine semiotic toolkit for addressing human expressive phenomena.As a result, it risks flattening cognitive processes into an overly broadyet poorly defined conception of sense-making, which fails to grasp thecomplexity of cognitive activities such as the expression of emotions, gesturalcommunication, and the expressivity of natural language. [Publisher's text]

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