Adaptive Behavior

Special Issue

Adaptive Behavior
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–5
Blurring Ontological Boundaries: The © The Author(s) 2022

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Engagement DOI: 10.1177/10597123221098002
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Nicolás Alessandroni1  and Lambros Malafouris2 

Abstract
The target article provides valuable reflections regarding the study of cognition-in-the-world and proposes a methodology
that could help researchers unravel the structure and temporal unfolding of lived experience. In this commentary, we
discuss the authors’ commitment to the enactive notion of sense-making as the activity of an autonomous system that
brings forth a meaningful world to maintain its self-constituted identity. From Material Engagement Theory, we hold that
defending such a notion leads to unnecessary ontological asymmetries that obscure the fundamental role of materiality for
cognition. On the one hand, we argue that the relationship of close intertwinement and co-constitution that unites
organism and environment makes it untenable to characterise cognition as being driven by individuals. In our view,
cognition arises from the dynamic encounter between brains, bodies and culture. On the other hand, we suggest that
organism and environment should not be seen as separate ontological categories that come to interact with each other but
as two terms of a transactional process of continuous becoming. Consistently, we propose to consider meaning as
emerging from the in-between space that material engagement creates rather than from the activity of an organism.

Keywords
enactivism, materiality, material engagement theory

In the target article, Poizat et al. propose the foundations of a
theoretical and methodological framework for studying
cognition-in-the-world. They start from a distributed per-
spective that conceives cognition as a relational
phenomenon – as the emergent product of the encounter
between brain, body and world, in and through practice.
This definition is broadly congruent with contemporary
perspectives of cognition (e.g. ecological, embodied, em-
bedded, enactive and extended perspectives) that question
orthodox representationalist stances. Insofar as the course-
of-experience framework could contribute to the theoretical
development of current perspectives of cognition and the
carrying out of empirical studies, the authors’ effort is to be
commended.
Nevertheless, we would like to draw attention to the fact
that two competing hypotheses about cognition coexist in
the text: one transactional and the other enactivist. Ac-
cording to the first of these, mainly sketched at the be-
ginning of the article, ‘cognitive phenomena are outcomes
emerging from the orchestration of elements of distributed
cultural-cognitive systems, embodied and embedded in
practice (...) Practice is (...) the thinking processes them-
selves’ (Poizat et al., introduction). From such a perspective,
the authors argue that no unit of analysis other than practice
as a whole would be sensible for studying cognition. There
is a strong hypothesis, then, that studying cognition is
tantamount to studying the characteristics of the confluence
of brain, body and world, these being elements that cannot
be ontologically distinguished from one another. Transac-
tionally speaking, cognition is the continuous process by
which brain, body and world co-constitute each other,
giving rise to particular socio-material dynamics. The
second understanding of cognition in the text is based on a
less strong hypothesis: cognition is the way in which an
organism (i.e. an autonomous system) in interaction with its
environment (i.e. structurally coupled to the environment)
brings forth or enacts a meaningful world for itself. In this
1
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
2
Hertford College/Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, OX, UK
Corresponding author:
Lambros Malafouris, Hertford College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1
3BW, UK; Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont
St, Oxford OX1 2PG, UK.
Email: lambros.malafouris@arch.ox.ac.uk
2 Adaptive Behavior 0(0)
definition, which is evidently based on enactivism, the
organism is differentiated from its environment and
asymmetrical to it.
The transactional and enactivist hypotheses differ in
the relative importance they assign to the organism. Thus, in
the transactional hypothesis, the organism is only one of the
terms that participates in the process of cognitive becoming
and contributes to the transactional relation in a way that is
symmetrical to how other human and non-human agents
(e.g. other people or things) do. In the enactivist hypothesis,
anchored in the notion of autopoiesis, the organism is a self-
organising system that defines the dynamics of the structural
coupling with its environment according to the specific
goals it generates. In other words, for enactivism, sense-
making requires the activity of the organism as an agent
(e.g. Di Paolo, 2016).
We will not dwell here on the similarities and differences
between the ways of understanding the organism–
environment relationship in enactive perspectives and
other theories, such as ecological psychology. First, because
there are currently heated debates on this issue, with people
arguing for the convergence or complementarity of these
perspectives and others opposing this possibility (see, for
instance, Heft, 2020; Heras-Escribano, 2021; McKinney,
2020; Popova & Ra˛ czaszek-Leonardi, 2020; Ryan &
Gallagher, 2020; Travieso et al., 2020). Second, because
it would be more productive to analyse why the authors of
the target article needed to resort to the enactive definition of
cognition as an organism-driven sense-making process and
what potentially inconvenient consequences follow from
this. The ensuing analysis draws primarily on the premises
of Material Engagement Theory (henceforth MET;
Malafouris, 2004, 2013; 2019a, 2020; 2021a; 2021b), to
which the authors of the target article refer in their text.
The need to adopt an ‘individual-oriented approach’
(Poizat et al., introduction) arises, in the target article, in
opposition to socio-cultural perspectives that conceive of
culture as an abstract set of socially organised activities.
According to the authors, these perspectives approach
practices globally, thus losing sight of the concrete aspects
at play. Following Poizat et al., the solution is to consider
socially organised activities as well as ‘individual cognitive
constructs’ and the first-person lived experience. We agree
that perspectives that understand culture as a set of values,
social representations or symbolic meanings tend to de-
scribe practices in an abstract manner and often end up
offering top-down explanations (i.e. social values or
meanings determine behavioural performance). We are also
concerned with the need to provide a more concrete ex-
planation of culture, focusing on what people do when they
engage in socio-material practices (e.g. practice-based and
sensorimotor accounts of culture, see Bourdieu, 1977;
Ingold, 1996/2001; Soliman & Glenberg, 2014; Van Dijk &
Rietveld, 2017). However, we believe that the emphasis on
the individual (i) does not adequately address the lack of
concreteness and (ii) provides an ill-fitting description of
practices.
The main reason is that socio-material practices are
distributed systems that bring together a coalition of human
and non-human agents that co-determine and co-constitute
each other (Malafouris, 2008a, 2013, 2018), establishing
push-and-pull relationships that bring about new modes of
acting and thinking (Ransom, 2019). More precisely, Ma-
lafouris argues that in real-life situations, perceiving,
thinking, doing and making are co-defined so that they are
inseparable from each other (Malafouris, 2019a). Thus,
while focusing on individual experience might provide
researchers with specific data about subjects’ lived expe-
riences, it would also detract from the description of the
transactional nature of the brain–body–world meeting that
the authors are interested in unravelling, as stated in the
introduction of the target article. From the perspective of
MET, cognition is situated in the relational space that re-
unites organism and environment during material engage-
ment (i.e. in the action itself) (Malafouris, 2004; 2021b). In
other words, for MET, the influence of materiality on
cognition far exceeds external scaffolding: as materiality
envelops our everyday thinking and experience, it mediates
and constitutes our ways of being and developing in the
world (Malafouris, 2008b).
Accordingly, we believe that a concrete description of
cognition as called for by the authors in their text could only
be achieved by analysing the structural and dynamic fea-
tures of the brain–body–environment network as it is ar-
ticulated in the practices themselves. In a recent case study,
for example, Aston (2020) explored the relationship be-
tween Cycladic marble sculpting and the development of
the social organisation at the sites of Dhaskalio and Kavos
on the island of Keros, concluding that the semiotics of
value that organised the intersubjective exchanges emerged
through the making and using of Cycladic figurines. For
instance, the author hypothesises that material engagement
with marble figurines brought forth new ways of directing
attention, perceiving the body, and identifying and differ-
entiating self and other (p. 595) (see also Aston, 2021, for an
analysis of how automobiles transform the flows of energy-
matter across different timescales). Similarly, through ob-
servations in a nursery school, Alessandroni (2021a)
described the pragmatic benefits that children gain when
they begin to use objects (e.g. soothers, cups and bibs)
according to their cultural function. For example, when
children begin to materially engage with objects in ca-
nonical ways (e.g. using a cup for drinking water), they
become able to extend functional behaviours to new ex-
emplars of classes (i.e. they can also drink water from cups
they have not used in advance), align their action with the
requirements of school activities more effectively, offer
objects to other children for them to use canonically and
Alessandroni and Malafouris
play with others’ intentions with and through materiality.
Interestingly, the development of canonical uses in nursery
school follows a trajectory distinct from that of other types
of uses and is effectively promoted by myriad communi-
cative strategies that adults (i.e. teachers) deploy when
interacting (see Alessandroni, 2021b, for an empirical study
in this regard). Finally, in a recent article, Malafouris
(2019b) proposed a situated model for understanding the
causal efficacy of materiality on mental health. Specifically,
he argued that the diminishing capacities for memory, in-
teraction and communication that characterise people who
have dementia are not only the result of neurological factors
but also of radical changes in material ecologies that take
place under situations such as the transition from home to
care home. This is because interacting in a familiar af-
fordance space such as the home environment (which may
be disrupted in cases of dementia) contributes to the con-
struction of self-identity and a sense of stability. In line with
this observation, Malafouris proposes further studying how
people with dementia think with and through things (rather
than about things). For example, the author notes that
objects embody memories thanks to their form and the
history of uses that people have performed with them,
making them powerful tools to elicit the re-enactment of
certain forms of material engagement. This has significant
practical consequences. In the author’s words, ‘things
provide a durable network of material signification, trans-
posable dispositions and bodily habits which can be har-
nessed to enhance cognitive abilities or compensate
for memory loss when biological memory is damaged’
(p. 198). All these studies investigate socio-material
practices by emphasising the transactional nature of the
brain–body–world encounter rather than privileging indi-
vidual experience.
Another drawback of assuming the enactive hypothesis
involves bearing an ontological differentiation between the
organism whose activity guides the sense-making process
and the environment, with which the former is structurally
coupled. While enactivism clearly distances itself from the
intellectualist tradition according to which skilled action
follows the contemplation of propositions in the mind (for a
discussion, see Ryle, 1949), it maintains an ontological
distinction between agent and tool. As Paolucci (2021)
pointed out, ‘one of the main theses of enactivism is that
the living organism, in order to survive and build its internal
autonomy, creates a distinction between itself and the en-
vironment in which it is embedded’ (p. 10). This assumption
may create the mistaken impression that the existence of an
agent is relatively independent of the existence of materi-
ality. However, this is not the case. In the cognitive ecol-
ogies we live in, mental processes, social processes,
material processes and bodies are intimately intertwined
3
(Hutchins, 2010). Moreover, this occurs from the very
beginning of life: the first interactions between adults and
babies do not happen in a vacuum but in and through a
material world that adults actively try to bring to children
through communicative strategies (e.g. showing and giving
gestures, demonstrations of object uses and bodily adjust-
ments) (Alessandroni et al., 2021a). By virtue of this, the
agent could neither pre-exist nor be independent of mate-
riality but acquires its character as such in and through the
material engagement it sustains with things (see Malafouris,
2019a).
From this perspective, MET argues that cognition is not a
property of the individual but an emergent result of the
brain–body–environment system. Cognition is thing-ing,
namely, thinking and feeling with and through things
(Malafouris, 2014; 2019a, 2020; 2021b). Thus, if cognitive
processes such as intentionality, meaning-making, memory
or conceptual thinking were located somewhere, that place
would be the transactional space that organism and envi-
ronment form during material engagement. Accordingly, we
disagree with the suggestion that practices become mean-
ingful to an actor (Poizat et al., section ‘Identifying signs,
their components, and their local dynamics’). Practices
become meaningful in and for the extended cognitive
system that the organism, others and things come to form
during material engagement. In sum, even if enactivism
assumes that a fluid and dynamic link between an organism
and its environment may be established, it does not concur
with the more substantial anti-localisationist thesis advo-
cated by MET, which we believe best describes the nature of
situated cognition.
All in all, our commentary invites reflection on the
continuing need to consider the individual as the centre of
cognition and the potential utility of blurring the ontological
boundaries between organism and environment for the
study of socio-material practices. As Heft (2020) stated,
‘enaction theory while recognising the tight interdepen-
dencies within the organismic system seems to underplay
the interdependencies of an organism-environment system’
(p. 11). By contrast, in MET, cognition is not just world-
involving: the world actively participates in shaping how
cognition (literally) takes place, on a par with the organism
and other organisms, with no clear ontological boundaries
between them. Adhering to the more robust transactional
hypothesis, MET argues that the dynamics of the distributed
system that brings together organisms and their environ-
ment (whether it be material or social) cannot be reduced to
the properties of any of its constituent parts. We believe that
a discussion of the issues raised here could enrich the
proposal put forward by the authors in the target article and
collaborate in unravelling the constitutive character of
materiality for cognition.
4 Adaptive Behavior 0(0)
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with re-
spect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, au-
thorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Nicolás Alessandroni  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6595-0969
Lambros Malafouris  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2140-4998
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