Embodied Cognition of Value

Computational approaches to the mind – like empirical psychology and cognitive science generally – often assume a disjunction between facts and values. On this traditional, “Humean” account, facts are arrangements in the world that multiple people can perceive; facts are objective in that they are “out there” in the publicly shared world. For example, if it is a fact that this window is one meter wide, then multiple people will get the same answer when they measure the window, and this fact obtains whether or not anyone ever recognizes it. By contrast, values on this account are not properties in the publicly shared world, but are understood instead as subjective and personal. For example, someone might make the value judgment that this is a good window or that this is a pretty window. On this account, the perceiving subject might assume that their personal value judgments as if they correspond to properties of things in the world, but values exist only in the mind. If no one mentally made a particular value judgement, then the value would not exist.

This fact/value disjunction has an enormous influence on the academic study of religion. Religious communities teach certain sets of values, and their members typically do not take their values as merely subjective. They understand their values as revealed or discovered, as grounded somehow in the nature of things, and not as personal or projected. This disagreement about the objectivity of values leads those who separate facts and values to treat religious experiences as illusory and to interpret the claim that certain values are grounded in reality as simply a tactic in the discursive construction of authority.

In this paper, I argue that the shift to 4E cognition helps to undermine the Humean and computational dualism of facts and values. I draw primarily on two contributions to 4E cognition. The first is the concept of affordances originally developed by James J. Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 1979). The second is the enactive approach originally developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1992; revised ed., 2017).

Gibson complained that earlier approaches to perception had treated a human or nonhuman animal’s sensory reception as passive. Inspired by the embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that prioritized engaged and prereflective modes of conscious awareness, Gibson argued that the perceiving animal would typically be engaged in some goal-directed activity, and it would direct its sensory attention, in the first place, to whatever might help that activity. Gibson speaks in this context of the animal’s perception of “affordances,” that is, value-laden opportunities in their environment. Gibson primarily spoke of affordances perceived in the physical world – e.g., the fallen log that affords a seat for the tired hiker – but subsequent thinkers have taken his idea and developed examples of social, legal, economic, and cultural affordances. In Skillful Coping (Oxford UP, 2016), Hubert Dreyfus used examples of driving a car and playing chess to analyze the levels of skill that one can have in the perception of affordances, ranging from novice, to competent, to expert. For our purposes, however, the crucial point is that whether an affordance is physical or cultural, it is a value-laden opportunity that the embodied animal can discover in the world. Multiple people will get the same answer when they investigate it, and this value obtains whether or not anyone ever recognizes it. Gibson opens the door to a realist account of values.

The concept of affordances contradicts Hume’s fact/value fork, and there are many who find the concept problematic. When Gibson wrote, however, the idea of 4E cognition had not been developed in much detail. The plausibility of his concept of affordances would have benefitted, I will argue, in particular from an enactive approach that treats cognition as a dynamic system that arises from the interactions between an animal and its environment. The term “enactive” signals the recognition that some aspects of the world – such as the rainbow effects in mist and colors in general – only exist given the interactions between the environment and the particular structure of the perceiver. I want to apply this insight to the concept of affordances. As the previous paragraph argued, the claim is that value-laden opportunities exist in the environment of living organisms. Such affordances strike us as unusual or implausible, I suspect, because, unlike physical facts, the existence of affordances presupposes a goal-directed living organism with its particular physical make-up. The log affords sitting only for a human animal whose knees bend backwards and not, for instance, a deer. The sun affords photosynthetic energy only for plants with chlorophyll. It follows that if there were no living organisms in the universe, then affordances would exist only in potentia, which is to say that values in the world would only potentially. On this account, the realization of values in the universe depends on the existence of life. Nevertheless, on this enactive account, it remains true that affordances do not exist in the mind. They do not depend for their existence on being perceived, conceptualized, or discussed. Given the existence of the living organisms with its bodily structure and interests, the value-laden opportunity is a reality there in the world.

The heart of this paper is the enactive account of value described above, but I want to close with an observation about the implications of this idea for the academic study of religions. It is not uncommon to see religious practices such as prayers, meditation, fasting, pilgrimage, rites of passage, and so on treated as regimens for training participants in perception. As the saying goes, religious practices are modes of subject formation. However, if religious practices are regimens for training perception of affordances, then they may be helping the participant move from novice to competent to expert at recognizing real good and bad in the world.