Abstracts

Nonsense as a theoretical challenge for natural cognition

Massimiliano Cappuccio

In line with other phenomenologically informed approaches to the cognitive sciences, the enactive theory of cognition claims that cognition fundamentally is sense-making, and that sense-making is founded on the embodied experience of the “perceived world”. Our experience of the natural world is the outcome of an intersubjectively coordinated modulation of the sense-making possibilities of a group of individual organisms: social beings make sense of their shared worlds by reciprocally adjusting their joint possibilities of perception and action in a participatory way. Even though fundamentally correct, this approach seems to overlook that genuinely nonsensical experiences are constitutive, not just residual, of the way we objectify the natural world and collectively make sense of it as a public content of shared experience. In fact, nonsense plays an indispensable role in various key forms of communication (e.g., humor, interrogation, negation, etc.), and discloses the realm of symbolic signification -- allowing the possibility to represent absent, absurd, and abstract contents. This is a problem for the standard enactive theory of cognition as sense-making: for, if sense-making is just the possibility to adjust to contextual circumstances, as claimed by enactive theory, then what adjustments could possibly make sense of the circumstances characterized by a lack of possible adjustments?

The question, in the first place, is how nonsense is possible as such and, in particular, how it is possible as a negative articulation of the world of natural cognition: as a situation that doesn’t have a sense and that, nonetheless, is sensed and recognized exactly for this lack. When enactive theory tries to answer it, it faces a dilemma: on the one hand, if nonsense is just one of the possibilities of sense-making, then how can we acknowledge nonsense as such? On the other hand, if nonsense is entirely heterogeneous to sense making, then how can we sense the presence of nonsense at all? Claiming either the continuity or the irreducibility between sense and nonsense lead to an equivalent impossibility to understand how the very process of making sense of nonsense occurs in participatory scenarios. I will try to solve this dilemma arguing that nonsense does not emerge as a second-order sense-making capability, but as a moment of ekstatic self-alienation within a fundamental dialectics between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I will briefly examine some typologies of participatory experience (artistic, delusional, non-declarative...) that border with and circumscribe more ordinary forms of natural cognition.