Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Synthese.

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty's distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty's views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language.

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this Philosophy is an idea (in the Kantian sense of a limit idea ) that we cannot totalize. Philosophy remains on the horizon of our thought as the limit of possible operations and is only validated in an open-ended historical process. Thus, philosophy is not the reaffirmation of ancient philosophical entities (e.g., eternal truths and the like), but rather the elaboration of an integral philosophy that is compatible with all research in the human sciences.( Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 320) | INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF NATURALIZING PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CARTESIAN REDUCTIONBringing together the philosophy of lived experience with the empirical sciences of life and mind is one of the pressing issues for contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind in the search for a gapless theory of the mind.A proposal much discussed in this connection in recent years has been the effort to naturalize phenomenology by reconciling the first-person descriptions of conscious experience developed in the phenomenological tradition with more recent advances in the cognitive sciences. This project is generally discussed as one of rendering continuous the epistemological, methodological, or ontological dimensions of phenomenology and the empirical sciences (e.g., Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy, 1999;Ramstead, 2015). The unspoken assumption here is that these areas and styles of inquiry are initially discontinuous. My objective in this paper is to show that there is an alternative way of conceiving this problematic, one that points towards original continuity rather than discontinuity, and to explore consequences such an approach might have for contemporary debates surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology and the status of phenomenology as a distinctively transcendental philosophical program. This alternative approach to the understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and the natural sciences can be found in Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and other works. However, in order to contextualize this alternative position, in this introductory section, I will present the standard view that phenomenology and the empirical sciences are originallyand perhaps essentially-discontinuous.Let us refer to this way of framing the possibility (or impossibility) of a naturalized phenomenology as the Discontinuity Thesis. Its earliest statement in the history of phenomenology can be found in Husserl's early work.Contrasting sciences of essence with sciences of fact, Husserl places phenomenology among the former, while empirical psychology ranks among the latter. In his most dramatic statement of the Discontinuity Thesis, Ideas I's Cartesian version of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl "brackets" the findings of the empirical sciences along with the external world. The natural scienc...

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, nonrepresentationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can "scale up" to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned.Keywords Horizons . Phenomenology of language . 4e cognitive science . Scaling-up problem . Affordances A name is a certain kind of tool meant for teaching and for the disentangling of being. -Plato 1

This paper provides a critical discussion of the views of Merleau-Ponty and contemporary enactivism concerning the phenomenological dimension of the continuity between life and mind. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s views are at odds with those of enactivists. Merleau-Ponty only applied phenomenological descriptions to the life-worlds of sentient animals with sensorimotor systems, contrary to those enactivists who apply them to all organisms. I argue that we should follow Merleau-Ponty on this point, as the use of phenomenological concepts to describe the “experience” of creatures with no phenomenal consciousness has generated confusion about the role of phenomenology in enactivism and prompted some enactivists to ignore or turn away from phenomenology. Further, Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the stark distinction between the vital order of animals and the human order to a greater degree than many phenomenologically inspired enactivists. I discuss his view in connection with recent research in developmental and comparative psychology. Despite the striking convergence of Merleau-Ponty’s visionary thought with the most recent findings, I argue that he somewhat overstates the difference between human experience and cognition, and that of our closest animal kin. I outline a developmental-phenomenological account of how the child enters the human order in the first years of life, thereby further mitigating the stark difference between orders. This results in a modified Merleau-Pontian version of the phenomenological dimension of life-mind continuity which I recommend to enactivism.