Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson argue that the enactive approach understands cognition as inseparable from the living, self-individuating body. Their central claim is that embodiment cannot be reduced to the body’s causal contribution to mental processing, nor to bodily formats for internal representation. Instead, the body must be understood as an autonomous system: a precarious, operationally closed network that generates and maintains its own identity through continuous interaction with its environment. Cognition, on this view, is not primarily representation, computation, or abstract problem-solving, but sense-making: the adaptive regulation of the organism’s relations with the world according to what sustains or threatens its viability. The diagram on page 70 illustrates operational closure through a network of mutually enabling processes, showing how autonomy is not isolation but organised dependence. The example of bacterial chemotaxis further clarifies the thesis: bacteria do not merely respond mechanically to chemical gradients, because their behaviour is linked to metabolism, viability, and self-maintenance. Di Paolo and Thompson also extend enactivism to social cognition through participatory sense-making, where interaction itself can become partly autonomous and shape the meaning generated by participants. Their conclusion is that the body is crucial for cognition in a constitutive, not merely causal, sense. To be cognitive is to be an adaptive, precarious, sense-making body embedded in a world of relations.
URBANISM MEETS ART