Rigid and fluid interactions with institutions

In two recent papers, Shaun Gallagher asks the question of how we interact with institutions. To answer it, he proposes to expand Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind hypothesis into the societal realm. He introduces the idea of the socially extended mind, to reflect the fact that social institutions can help us to perform cognitive tasks that we would not be able to do without them.Drawing on work by Carol Gilligan, I argue that the socially extended mind view is limited to addressing patriarchal, rule-based, hierarchical institutions and interactions, and unable to grasp democratic, fluid and horizontal aspects of society. Gallagher is sensitive to a similar worry and suggests a combination of the socially extended mind and enactive ideas. At first sight, it might seem as if enaction would be the ideal candidate to address the democratic aspects of society, and so the two would be good bed fellows. But I argue that this is unlikely, due to the incompatibilities between enaction and the extended mind. I claim instead that the enactive approach to intersubjectivity—participatory sense-making—can capture both patriarchic and democratic aspects of society. Patriarchy and democracy can be seen as lying on the spectrum of participation, which ranges from orientational sense-making to joint sense-making. Enaction investigates the relations along the whole spectrum and how they play out in actual social interactions, also with institutions.