Episode 6: Hanne De Jaegher and the Experience of Interacting

In this conversation with cognitive scientist and philosopher Hanne De Jaegher, we explore interruption in the context of participatory sense making – how we understand the world and ourselves is affected by inter-individual coordination. Participatory sense-making relies on the capacity to flexibly engage with your social partner from moment to moment. It involves emotion, knowledge, mood, physiology, background, concepts, language, norms, and, crucially, the dynamics of the interaction process modulates the sense-making that takes place. How we navigate and participate in these “spaces between” may be our most sophisticated form of knowing: love, a never-ending balancing act. We touch on implications for scientific objectivity, neurodiversity, and dementia. And how this sense-making framework is interrupting cognitive theory, moving us from thinking about self-in-isolation to self-in-connection. From individualism to love, really. In this framework, interpersonal communication and connection can be seen as a series of interruptions, as we perceive, engage, learn, adjust, and through experience develop our sense of self-in-relation. To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak. You can find more about Hanne on her webpage at www.hannedejaegher.net, including links to papers and videos. If you’d like to dive right into enactive cognitive theory, a good place to start is her 2007 paper with E Di Paolo, Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and her 2021 paper Loving and knowing. Reflections for an engaged epistemology published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.