Social Enactive Theory of Perception

The social dimension of human life shapes or constitutes what perception is for us, that is, how we perceptually relate to the world. This book offers a unified study, in the enactivist tradition, of perception and its connection to sociality. Alejandro Arango looks for perception in the middle of things and finds that perception is at home in perceptual practices, socially structured ways of relating to the perceptible world. These practices are attuned to different dimensions of human life, such as the cultural worlds of customs that mark our everyday lives, like food or dress, aesthetic experience, interpersonal relations, and even social interactions that can be labeled welcoming and accepting, or racist and xenophobic. The book argues that although the perceiver is situated in relation to the world in many ways that influence perception, this does not entail a radical subjectivism. Rather, it shows that the world appears to perceivers in aspects, and that they can perceive the same world even if that same world appears differently to them. The framework of perceptual practices that helps enrich the notion of perceptual situatedness can also be applied to our perception of others. The book argues that we understand others in part, but fundamentally, through perception. Bringing social philosophy together with philosophy of mind and taking the next step in enactivist philosophy, this theory accounts for the social aspects of everyday experience. With influences from Wittgensteinian pragmatism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy of perception, as well as engagement with social psychology, social cognition studies, and work in neuroscience, the book synthesizes different layers at work in perception, with a particular focus on non-visual senses. It explains the role of perception in the economy of social identities and thus links the individual with the social in a constitutive way.