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F/acts Ways of Enactive Worldmaking

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Knowing is an activity through which agents and world produce themselves. This is often expressed by the enactive claim that agents bring forth a world. I analyse this idea for different modes of agent–environment engagement: interactional, transactional, and constitutional. Something is produced in each case. Bringing forth a world is not only an epistemic but an ontological claim. Acts in their fine structure result from a process of fact production, or f/acts. F/acts co-emerge with their 'preconditions', e.g.intentions, affordances, across the subject/object divide. F/acts define their inner temporality and affectivity, comprising both event and experience. A plurality of worlds is admitted in this enactive view, without entailing antirealism. We cannot bring forth just any world. World resistance organizes action and experience. I touch on the implications for objectivity and free will and discuss the primordiality of activity, community, and relationality. From a notion of groundlessness in early enactive work, I suggest that a participatory universe is better conceived as a meshwork of groundless grounds.

Document Type: Research Article

Affiliations: Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Spain; IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country, Spain; Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Publication date: December 1, 2023

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