Enacting Possible Worlds: Making Sense of (Human) Nature

Contemporary approaches to understanding mathematical modelling typically assume a strict separation and subsequent mediation between applications embedded in a real (material) world and mathematical models embedded within an ideal (mental) world. Such views are burdened with traditional epistemological problems of reconciling potentially irreconcilable ontological differences wrought by Cartesian dualism. Enactivism, however, recognises that as embodied beings within the world, we to some extent also embody the world within ourselves. The standard “pragmatic” approach to unfolding this crucial enactivist notion of “double-embodiment” is to adopt a “realist” ontology with regard to being in the world, and an “idealist” ontology with regard to the world in us. Ironically this pragmatic approach to enactivism appears to embrace the very Cartesian problematic it set out to reject. In contrast, the enactivist approach proposed here rejects both realism and idealism: i.e., both ontological poles of Cartesian dualism. Drawing instead on Merleau-Ponty's metaphysical notion of “flesh” as an ontological primitive, it is a view rooted in a definitively non-Cartesian ontological monism that takes the traditionally conceived objective “real” world we are in and the subjective “ideal” world within us to be manifestations of the same world. Accordingly, an enactivist approach to double-embodiment more closely aligned with this non-Cartesian ontological monism is presented that draws an epistemological distinction between our “outer experience” of being in the world and our “inner experience” of the world being in us. Two interrelated characteristics, spacetime and imagination, serve to maintain this epistemological distinction between outer experience and inner experience, and to provide groundwork for an enactivist epistemology that can account for knowledge of particular objects, and general concepts and propositions. Overall, a crucial aspect of this more “radical” approach to enactivism is that whatever principles are at play in generating and organising the world, those very same principles are at play in generating and organising ourselves and vice versa. Educational implications are discussed.