Blurring ontological boundaries: The transactional nature of material engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The target article provides valuable reflections regarding the study of cognition-in-the-world and proposes a methodology that could help researchers unravel the structure and temporal unfolding of lived experience. In this commentary, we discuss the authors' commitment to the enactive notion of sense-making as the activity of an autonomous system that brings forth a meaningful world to maintain its self-constituted identity. From Material Engagement Theory, we hold that defending such a notion leads to unnecessary ontological asymmetries that obscure the fundamental role of materiality for cognition. On the one hand, we argue that the relationship of close intertwinement and co-constitution that unites organism and environment makes it untenable to characterise cognition as being driven by individuals. In our view, cognition arises from the dynamic encounter between brains, bodies and culture. On the other hand, we suggest that organism and environment should not be seen as separate ontological categories that come to interact with each other but as two terms of a transactional process of continuous becoming. Consistently, we propose to consider meaning as emerging from the in-between space that material engagement creates rather than from the activity of an organism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".