Phenomenological

maintenance of autonomous agents.

Ximena A. Gonzlez-Grandn
Instituto de Filosofa y Ciencias de la Complejidad (IFICC)
Facultad de Medicina-UNAM

In many mainstream discussions in the philosophy of mind, the phenomenon of
normativity is conceived as a property from propositional attitudes, especially belief and
desire. The most common proposal from normativism, is that belief is normative, subject
to a norm of truth or to normative standards or principles (Boghossian 2008; Littlejohn
2012). In this view, normativity is ascribed from the third-person perspective. But, from a
phenomenological and enactive point of view, normativity could be conceived as a firstperson phenomenon, an element of living experience ascribed to conscious process, that
is present in agents personal and perceptual experience as directed in the relevant sense.
From the point of view of the maintenance of human agent autonomous system, the
system-environment coupling results in the accomplishment of a norm (what is good or
bad for the system) that is specified by its biological organization and by its interaction
with a physical and social environment (Umwelt). The interaction is not arbitrary but
makes sense for the human agent itself, depending on her ontogenetic development
period and on her particular cultural context. So, agents act according to some goals or
norms, providing a sort of reference condition for maintaining conditions and an
interactive regulation that can produce failure or success according to them (Barandiaran
et al, 2012). A basic example of phenomenological normative, that avoids a
methodological physicalism and third-person perspective, is given by the biological an
cultural coupling of agent`s experience when causing or generating a particular voluntary
action directed towards a goal that becomes inevitably meaningful and distinguish
between adequate from inadequate. A primitive way of normative sense-making happens
when a newborn, a self-maintaining agent, follows the norm to maintain and enhance her
autonomy in the course of interactions, her pre-reflective experience (as feeling hungry) it
is about having a way of differentiating the possible environments with which she
interacts, and choose among the appropriate internal functions (sucking, breathing) that it
will use in a given interaction (Bickhard, 2009; Gallagher, 2012). Instead, an enculturated
way of normative sense-making happens in more developed stages in human ontogeny
when imitation, communication and socialization promote norms internalization. The
social agents sense-making take part in social conventions and material culture. This is
not just that a human agent has the capacity for linguistic articulation or conceptual
reflection but that this agent is reliably participating and maintaining a necesary
communal custom. The correct or incorrect meaning between the interaction with
conspecifics is no longer biologically constrained, rather is contextually and conventionally
constrained and intelligible just by an enculturated group member (Froese et al, 2012,
2014), what is correct or incorrect depends on contextual and enculturated norms.
In this workshop participation, I want to distinguish between this two kinds of
phenomenological normativity, so I propose that we use the labels phenomenal

normativitity in primitive sense-making and phenomenal normativitity in enculturated

sense-making. The purpose is to show how phenomenological normative has an active rol
in the maintenance of human being autonomy in continuous development and physical
and social interaction, in a pre-reflective and reflective manner.