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Ezequiel Di Paolo (b. 1970)

Di Paolo is one of the leading developers of the enactive approach to cognition — the view, founded by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, that the mind is not a representation of a pre-given world but the sense-making activity of an autonomous, living, embodied agent in dynamic coupling with its environment. He did not found the tradition; he deepened it, in three directions that have become reference points. He argued that the self-production of life (autopoiesis) is not by itself enough to ground meaning, and added adaptivity. With Hanne De Jaegher he developed participatory sense-making, the claim that social understanding is generated in the interaction between agents rather than inside either of their heads. And with De Jaegher and Elena Cuffari he extended the same continuum up into language, the linguistic body.

Ezequiel Di Paolo is an Argentine cognitive scientist and philosopher. (His birth year is usually given as 1970 and his birthplace as Buenos Aires, though he does not record either in his own curriculum vitae.) He came to the study of mind from the physical sciences — studies in physics and mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires, then a master’s in nuclear engineering at the Instituto Balseiro — before a doctorate at the University of Sussex (1999) in the evolutionary-and-adaptive-systems tradition, on the dynamics of social coordination. Sussex, with its evolutionary-robotics and artificial-life group, was where his approach formed: cognition modelled as a brain–body–environment coupled dynamical system rather than as computation over representations. He taught there for a decade and remains a visiting professor, and since 2010 has been an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society at the University of the Basque Country, in San Sebastián.

The enactive approach

The enactive approach was founded in The Embodied Mind (1991) by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, building on the earlier theory of autopoiesis developed by Maturana and Varela. Its core thesis is anti-representational: cognition is not the mirroring of an external world by an inner model but the enactment of a world by an agent through its history of activity — the sense-making of a living being coupled to its surroundings. Di Paolo belongs to the generation that took this founding and built it out, and he is identified specifically with its autopoietic, life–mind-continuity strand, alongside Thompson — as distinct from the sensorimotor enactivism of O’Regan and Noë and the radical enactivism of Hutto and Myin, which rejects mental content more aggressively. His own work is best read as three extensions of the founding idea: down into the conditions of life, across into the social, and up into language.

Key concepts

Autonomy and sense-making. Di Paolo takes from Varela the idea of autonomy as operational closure — a precarious, self-producing network of processes that must keep producing itself or disintegrate. That precariousness is doing real work: it is what gives the system an intrinsic either/or stake, a perspective from which things in the world come to matter. Sense-making is the establishing of that natural perspective — the way encounters become meaningful for the organism, relative to the norm set by its own continued self-production. Cognition, on this account, is the agent’s regulation of its coupling with the environment according to its own viability.

Adaptivity. His central theoretical addition, set out in “Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency” (2005). Autopoiesis alone, he argued, cannot ground sense-making, because it admits no degrees: a system is producing itself or it is not, and “organisms live as long as they don’t die.” A bare either/or cannot generate the graded valence — better and worse, attraction and repulsion — that meaning requires; on conservation alone, balancing on a cliff edge and falling off it are equally “alive” until the ground is reached. What is missing is adaptivity: the capacity of a system to monitor and regulate itself with respect to the boundaries of its own viability, to register that it is approaching the edge and act to recede from it, rather than merely persisting until it fails. Adaptivity is graded, and it is what makes stress, fatigue, dysfunction, and recovery intelligible — all of them states of a system that is still alive. Sense-making, on his thesis, needs both: autopoiesis for the self-distinct centre with a stake, adaptivity for the graded appreciation of how things stand relative to it. He pairs this with a distinction between mere behaviour — passively undergoing a coupling — and agency, the active regulation of coupling for the sake of one’s own continued viability.

Participatory sense-making. His most influential contribution, developed with Hanne De Jaegher (“Participatory Sense-Making,” 2007), and the concept that places him at the joint of coupling. Social understanding, on this account, is not primarily a matter of what goes on inside an individual head — not the inferring of hidden mental states (theory-theory) nor the offline modelling of the other by running one’s own mind (simulation theory). Meaning is generated and transformed in the interaction itself: in the real-time coordination of two or more embodied, autonomous agents. The decisive move is that the interaction process can take on its own autonomy — an emergent, operationally closed organisation in the domain of relational dynamics, not reducible to either participant. Their image, after Goffman, is of a conversation as a little social system with a life of its own; their canonical illustration is two people who, trying to pass in a narrow corridor, keep mirroring each other’s sidesteps — the interaction sustaining itself against each one’s intention to stop. The constitutive constraint is that this interactional autonomy must not destroy the agents’ own autonomy, or the other collapses into a mere object and the encounter stops being social; the interaction can enlarge or shrink the scope of an agent’s sense-making without abolishing it. This is engagement between agents as the coordination of sense-making rather than the transmission of content — shared meaning that neither party held alone, arising in the between.

Linguistic bodies. With Cuffari and De Jaegher, in Linguistic Bodies (2018), Di Paolo carried the enactive account up into language — a fully embodied and fully social treatment that posits no mental representations. Language is not an add-on to cognition but “a new way of being embodied”; a person is a linguistic body among other linguistic bodies. The book argues a continuity thesis — from biological organisation, through sensorimotor engagement, through participatory sense-making, to linguistic agency, as a graded progression rather than a leap — and pursues it by an explicitly dialectical method, building each form of agency out of the one before without reducing language away. It is openly a “scaling-up” project: a step-by-step bridge from basic minds to specifically human ones.

Sensorimotor agency. In Sensorimotor Life (2017, with Buhrmann and Barandiaran) he develops a non-representational theory of perception and action, reworking the sensorimotor-contingency theory of O’Regan and Noë in a world-involving, dynamical key, and recasting agency as organised networks of habits and sensorimotor schemes — building, among other things, on a dynamical reinterpretation of Piaget’s equilibration.

Lineage and influences

The decisive inheritance is from Varela — autopoiesis and the enactive approach itself — with Maturana behind it as autopoiesis’s co-author, and Evan Thompson alongside him as a fellow developer of the life–mind-continuity strand. The philosophical depth of the adaptivity account comes from Hans Jonas’s philosophy of biology, and in particular his notion of needful freedom — the organism precarious and in need, yet free to act on that need — which is the dialectic Di Paolo formalises. From Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology comes the emphasis on embodiment; from von Uexküll, the Umwelt, the animal’s own meaningful world. His method descends from the dynamical-systems tradition in cognitive science and the Sussex school of evolutionary robotics, where cognition is studied through minimal models of agents coupled to their worlds. And his closest and most sustained collaboration is with Hanne De Jaegher, co-author of participatory sense-making; Linguistic Bodies adds explicit debts to Hegel and Simondon for its dialectical and individuative method.

Disputes and context

The enactive approach is itself a standing challenge to the computational and representational theory of mind, and Di Paolo is among its active defenders — arguing, for instance, against the attempt to fold enactivism into the predictive-processing and free-energy framework, on the grounds that the two rest on incompatible foundations. Within enactivism he sits in the autopoietic strand, and the differences between it and the sensorimotor and radical strands are live.

Two disputes bear directly on his own contributions. The first is the scaling-up objection — the charge that enactivism handles basic, sensorimotor cognition but cannot reach abstract thought and language without smuggling representation back in; Linguistic Bodies is his explicit answer, and it is a proposal under debate rather than a settled result, its dialectical method now itself contested. The second concerns the strong reading of participatory sense-making: the claim that social interaction can constitute social cognition, not merely enable or scaffold it. Pressed in “Can social interaction constitute social cognition?” (2010, with De Jaegher and Gallagher), this constitutive claim has drawn sustained criticism, to which the enactivists have replied that they never denied a role for individual mechanisms. The debate is open, and the influence of the idea — across social cognition, psychiatry, autism research, education, and beyond — has been large.

Open edges

As a working researcher Di Paolo’s account is not a closed system but a programme with its fronts still active, and he is candid about which they are. The scaling-up problem — whether the enactive continuum can be carried all the way to human thought and language without a representational remainder — remains the central open question, and Linguistic Bodies is a step into it, not a closing of it. The constitutive claim of participatory sense-making is still contested, as is the dialectical method the language work rests on. Whether the enactive approach can or should be reconciled with predictive processing is unresolved, and Di Paolo’s own position there is a minority one he continues to argue. And participatory sense-making is being extended into new domains faster than any of those extensions has consolidated. The work is offered, in his hands, as an ongoing research programme rather than a finished theory.

Key works

See also: Enactivism · Varela · Maturana · Autopoiesis · Phenomenology