Enacting Practices: Perception, Expertise and Enlanguaged Affordances

ABSTRACTThe paper thematizes basic content-free cognition in human social practices. It explores the enlanguaged dimension of skilled practical doings and expertise by taking the minimal case of concept-based perception as its starting point. Having made a case for considering such activity as free of mental content, I argue in favor of the abolishment of the distinction between truth-telling and social consensus, thus questioning the assumption held by proponents of Radical Enactivism, namely that truth and accuracy conditions are restricted to content-involving activity. Instead, I claim, even content-free practical activity can be evaluated on the basis of accuracy conditions which ultimately tie with agents’ practical understandings and the normative aspects of the practice. With this as my backdrop, I explore how expertise arises in the interplay of enlanguaged affordances, concept-involving perception and the normative accuracy conditions that constrain a particular practice.KEYWORDS: Expertisecontent-free cognitionEnactivismpractices Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Concrete concepts such as ‘cat’, ‘house’ and ‘cucumber’ differ fundamentally from abstract concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘language’, ‘human rights’, ‘beauty’, ‘politics’, etc. which are all devoid of concrete sensory referents (cf. Paivio Citation1986).2. The fact that Heidegger’s work resonates with anti-representationalist positions is well-known (see, Clark and Toribio Citation1994, 406).3. Indeed, there are also non-basic as-structures and this relates to the distinction between the pre-predicative and predicative. For as Engelland (Citation2020) argues, ‘The statement, “There’s a bird in the store!” makes explicit the part-whole relation resident in the experience of bird and of store. Predication (the apophantic is of S is p) remains founded on pre-predicative explication (the hermeneutic as of taking S as p)’ (10) Relatedly, Heidegger points out that ‘the “as” does not first show up in the statement, but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is there as something to be stated’ (Heidegger Citation2010, 145). So, a statement such as ‘I see this thing as a hammer’ contains to the very least as-structures on two levels: first, there is the pre-predicative, hermeneutic experience of the thing as a hammer which motivates the statement in the first place and, then, the thematization of this ‘as’ in the statement. In fact, we could go even further and argue that in the context of the statement, ‘this thing’ is taken as or understood as a Subject while ‘a hammer’ is taken as a predicate. This suggests that there are different as-structures in play whenever we are articulating statements based on our experiencing of things as somethings.4. A simulator is defined as: ‘the imitative representation of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another’ (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simulation). While an appeal to ‘representation’ can be misleading in the current context, I prefer the term ‘performance’ instead. Professional training practices (such as flight simulators, medical simulations, war simulations etc.) that replace and enhance actual working practices are all examples of praxis simulators.5. Needless to say, it doesn’t follow that the salesperson is actually lying. Indeed, the customer’s suspicion may be entirely ungrounded and simply caused by their lack of knowledge about cars, bad experiences from buying used cars in the past or the general negative reputation of used car salespeople.6. See Gahrn-Andersen (Citation2021b) for an example of the fact that expertise may entail the construal of as-structures different from those available to non-experts. The example is that of a leakage-detection worker in a utility company who indexically associates the melting of snow on a street with leaking heating pipes thus allowing him to conceptually perceive the melding of snow as a ‘possible leakage’. So, whereas most people would simply see a plot of melted snow, the professional sees a leakage thanks to his expertise.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Velux Foundations under [Grant 38917].Notes on contributorsRasmus Gahrn-AndersenRasmus Gahrn-Andersen is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Language (University of Southern Denmark). He is currently researching human socio-practical activity from an interdisciplinary perspective. More specifically, he explores phenomena such as concept and non-concept involving perception, basic and distributed cognition, social organizing, human-technology entanglements and how linguistic competencies and skills enable human practical behavior.