Mind & Life Podcast

Hanne De Jaegher – Making Sense Together

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November 30, 2023

View or download a transcript of this episode

In this episode, Wendy speaks with philosopher and cognitive scientist Hanne De Jaegher. Hanne was influenced by Francisco Varela’s ideas from an early age, and has been working to extend enactive theories of mind into social contexts. This conversation covers many topics, including:

Hanne De Jaegher, PhD
  • roots in Varela’s work and an early interest in thinking;
  • sense-making and embodiment as foundational to cognition;
  • how our habits and models fit (or don’t) with our experience;
  • participatory sense-making and the primacy of interaction;
  • how interpersonal dynamics can have a life of their own;
  • loving and knowing, letting others be;
  • over- vs. underdetermining (how our projections of others shape interactions);
  • emotional capacity and dementia;
  • understanding autistic people from their own side;
  • the need for people in dominant positions to listen;
  • the importance of silence in dialogue;
  • problems with the way social media platforms discourage interaction;
  • interactions within one person;
  • synthesis and breakdown;
  • tension between self and interdependence (creating boundaries);
  • and applying these ideas to our relationship with nature.

Hanne De Jaegher, PhD, is a philosopher and cognitive scientist, researcher, writer, and teacher. She is fascinated by how we think, work, and play (basically live and love) together. A leading thinker of the enactive approach to cognition, she developed the theory of participatory sense-making, which is widely applied and tested across academic and practical disciplines, from neuroscience to the arts. With Ezequiel Di Paolo and Elena Cuffari, she co-authored Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language (MIT Press, 2018). Hanne’s works aids in improving how people understand each other across differences such as neurodiversity and autism, increasing people’s trust and confidence in their own and others’ ways of interacting, and generally penetrating interactive complexity. Ultimately, Hanne’s work turns around the age-old question of how loving and knowing relate. She sees them as both existential, dialectical relations full of tensions that are never resolved, but enriched through seeking conceptual and experiential clarity, and interpersonal engagement. 

Resources

Personal website
PRISMAmethod – embodied intersubjectivity research