Spaces of meaning: an enactive account of bodily space

While Enactive Cognitive Science (ECS) continues to be increasingly prevalent, spatiality is a notably absent or understudied topic within it. This absence is especially puzzling when considering how deeply interconnected spatiality is with celebrated themes of ECS, such as embodiment, intersubjectivity, affectivity, temporality and environmental coupling generally, all of which feature a spatial register. Indeed, ECS regularly employs the biosemiotic-spatial term ‘Umwelt’ yet rarely thematises its structure as such. Compounding this is that one of the most flourishing research areas in cognitive neuroscience of spatiality, that of peripersonal space, had strong philosophical ties from the beginning. Soon after the discovery of peripersonal neurons, the concept's key developers noted the compatibility between PPS and phenomenological accounts of bodily space (Rizzolatti et al., 1997). Although notable exceptions exist in research articles (e.g., De Preester, 2012; Jackson, 2014; Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2010), this striking compatibility has not yet received doctoral-length or monographic attention. Simultaneously, PPS scholarship remains plagued with conceptual and definitional issues (Bufacchi & Iannetti, 2018) that can benefit from interdisciplinary re-evaluation. To address these lacunae, I combine the resources of cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology and semiotics to explicate bodily space from an embodied-enactive standpoint. Firstly, I develop a theoretical account of lived space, utilising phenomenology and semiotics, especially Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, von Uexküll and Peirce. Using this account of ‘lived space’ as a theoretical baseline, I interpret several empirical studies through this conceptual lens, dividing the literature into accounts of spatial interactions with both ‘Objects’ and ‘Others’. This culminates in an interdisciplinary, enactive model of bodily space, where I propose that human beings engage their spatial surroundings not as a geometric grid or abstract volume, but as a qualitatively-structured space of meaning. Simultaneously, I showcase how this model contributes to its antecedent philosophical disciplines and toward a more comprehensive definition of peripersonal space.