Glossary

Adaptivity: A system’s capacity to regulate its states and its relation to the environment, with the result that if state trajectories approach the limit of viability they change with a tendency to avoid crossing this limit. Adaptive regulation may succeed or fail and introduces an intrinsic temporality (direction and granularity) in autonomous systems.
Agent: A self-individuating, autonomous system capable of asymmetrically regulating its coupling with the environment following intrinsic norms. Often synonymous with sense-maker and behaving system.
Associated milieu: A tightly coupled set of environmental conditions that enable the ongoing self-individuation of an autonomous system and in turn are affected by said system in a history of codefining alterations.
Autonomy: The property that describes a far-from-equilibrium, precarious, operationally closed system in any domain. Autonomous systems are self-individuating and depend on their associated milieu, which nevertheless does not fully determine its states.
Autopoiesis: An autonomous system in the domain of processes of molecular transformations and interactions. An autopoietic system is defined as a network of biochemical processes organized in such a way that the operation of these processes sustains and regenerates the network of relations and forms a self-distinguishing topological unity in space. Example: a living cell.
Concretization: The operation of actualizing and expanding internal relations within a system as well as external relations with its milieu. Analogously, the operation of enriching an idea by expanding and elaborating its internal relations and its relations to other ideas. The opposite of abstraction.
Coordination: The nonaccidental correlation between the behaviors of two or more systems that are in sustained coupling, or have been coupled in the past, or have been coupled to another, common, system.
Coregulation: The regulation needed for acts performed by more than one agent. Coregulation is the organizing of individual sensorimotor coordination patterns into a jointly enacted sensorimotor scheme. It involves not only affecting or enabling the conditions for individual regulation, but mutual influences in the enactment of sensorimotor coordination patterns, implying moments of passivity and acceptance of the influence of other agents.
Coupling: A dynamical system is coupled to another one when the laws describing the changes of state in the first are dependent on parameters and conditions that change as a function of the state of the other.
Dialogue: A form of social interaction characterized by interpersonal recognition and the sustained use of asymmetric regulatory roles by different participants.
Entanglement: When coupled dynamical systems sustain patterns of coordination, mutual constraining, and/or codependence across a range of timescales and orders of magnitude. Entangled systems cannot be approximated as nearly decomposable.
Environment: A system’s environment is the set of all processes to which the system is coupled—that is, processes that affect the system and/or are affected by it.
Excitable medium: A dynamical system where local perturbations propagate nonlinearly from one part to the next (between spatial neighbors or linked parts), diffusing, enduring, and potentially becoming amplified (e.g., biological tissue, neural populations).
Habits: Sensorimotor schemes whose bodily and environmental support is structurally unstable and relies on repeated enactments of the scheme to continue to enable such enactments.
Incarnation: The manifestation of foreign linguistic agencies in the act of reporting utterances. The dialectical counterpart of incorporation.
Incorporation: In general, when processes once external to a system become constitutive of the system. In sensorimotor terms, the equilibration of a new set of sensorimotor schemes constituting a new skill. Applied to linguistic bodies, the appropriation of utterances, stances, styles, etc., through acts of reporting.
Individuation: The operation by which a set of ongoing processes is organized as a distinct, concrete system or structure by flows of energy from states of high potentiality to states of low potentiality.
Mastery: Used to refer to the capabilities, sensitivities, and embodied understanding associated with an action or perception skill. Technically, mastery is both the accumulated organization of mutually equilibrated sensorimotor schemes and the capacity of the agent to keep equilibrating in the face of changing environmental and bodily conditions. Mastery is a property of the whole situated body.
Modulation: Changes induced on the parameters and constraints governing the dynamics of a system or a coupling between systems.
Normativity: In the context of autonomous systems, we talk about intrinsic normativity as emerging from the adaptive evaluation of events and conditions with respect to their consequences for the ongoing viability of the system. Applied to living organisms, some vital norms specify the conditions that guide adaptive regulation (others may not be accessible to the organism). Norms may also be externally imposed on the system. The objectifying powers of linguistic bodies establish a set of ideal relations subject to norms of correctness (e.g., truth, felicity) by bringing the domains of community practice, shared interactive know-how, and sensorimotor organization into relations of coherence.
Operational closure: A system’s property specifying that among the conditions enabling the operation of any constituent process in the system there will always be one or more processes that also belong to the system. And, in addition, every process in the system enables at least one other constituent process, thus forming a closed network of enabling relations. There are no processes that are not enabled by other processes in the system. External processes can also enable the constituent processes, but such processes are not part of the operationally closed network as they are not themselves enabled by the system’s constituent processes.
Partial act: The contribution to a social act enacted by an individual agent, usually to be coupled in parallel or in sequence with the partial acts of other agents.
Participatory sense-making: Sense-making in the context of a social interaction as it is affected by coordination patterns, breakdowns, and recoveries undergone during social encounters. Participatory sense-making is how people understand each other and how they understand and act on the world together.
Portable act: In the context of participatory sense-making, a regulatory act with strong embedded projective normative conditions, leaving little ambiguity regarding the partial acts needed to complete a social act.
Precariousness: A property of nonlinearly fluctuating material relations in far-from-equilibrium systems by which no single aspect of an isolated constituent process of the system is long-term stable at the same timescale as that of the whole system. This includes any putative functional properties. Precarious circumstances in an operationally closed system are those in which its isolated constituent processes will tend to run down or extinguish in the absence of the organization of the system in an otherwise equivalent physical situation.
Regulation: A modulation according to norms.
Regulatory act: In the context of participatory sense-making, a partial act used in order to modulate, select, project, reject, or encourage other particular partial acts within a shared repertoire.
Self-individuation: The condition of ongoing self-production and self-distinction in a system that actively sustains its own organization under precarious conditions by constantly engaging metastable sources of active matter and energy.
Sense-making: The active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. The basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring.
Sensorimotor agency: An autonomous system in the domain of structural and functional relations between sensorimotor schemes that asymmetrically engages its own environment and with each act reaffirms its identity as a sensorimotor agent.
Sensorimotor schemes: Organized, task-related sequences of sensorimotor coordination patterns, following either intrinsic or external norms. They necessitate the enabling support of bodily and environmental processes.
Social act: An act whose normative conditions of satisfaction require the participation of more than one agent. For instance, the act of giving/accepting an object or the act of shaking hands.
Social interaction: The regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved.
Social self-control: Regulatory acts in which an agent uses socially normative partial acts reflexively to induce a displaced form of self-regulation. It may involve any social partial act, such as gestures, but when involving utterances, social self-control takes the shape of an ongoing flow of self-directed talk, inducing a displaced attitude toward one’s own body by reflexively directing dialogic interpersonal recognition skills and attitudes to oneself.
Transduction: An operation by which an activity propagates locally, producing changes from point to neighboring point in a given domain (physical, biological, mental, social, etc.) that moves from a global state rich in potentialities to a lower-energy condition. Example: the process of crystal formation in a saturated liquid medium. Transduction is a key notion in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation.
Utterance: A dialogic act, enacted asymmetrically through the actions of a mutually recognized producer and an audience. Utterances occur in various modalities and are composed of several regulatory acts that operate recursively on parts of the utterance in relation to its pragmatic and expressive aspects, as well as on how the utterance affects the interpersonal relations between the participants in a dialogue. Utterances may become braided to other utterances via reporting and resonances of all kinds.
Viability: The condition of autonomy in a self-individuating system is precarious and defines a domain of viability in the space of the system’s states and its relation to its milieu. States and relations within the viability set are those in which the system remains autonomous.
Virtual action/image: Regulation of the relations between an initiated or enacted sensorimotor scheme and its structural and functional links (e.g., priming, inhibition) to other, nonactualized schemes. For linguistic bodies, these may be thematized as images, sensorimotor tendencies, etc., as a result of engaging in utterance flows or with enactive symbols.
Virtual field: The set of concrete dynamic traces and tendencies surrounding a given situation or event as well as neighboring potentialities that have not been actualized.
World-involving / In-the-head explanations: In world-involving accounts the explanatory role of the world exceeds that of being a source of information to be processed by the agent. Cognitive activity is co-constituted by agent and world. By contrast, in-the-head explanations take cognition as sufficiently constituted by processes internal to the agent (whether actually instantiated in the head or not). The world in such explanations plays only contextual, causal, or informational roles but not constitutive ones.