Enactive Fallibilism
Description
Erik Haines:
"Two ideas I have been developing — Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism — help me make sense of the relationship between symbolic mediation, behavioral change, development, and social structure.
By Integral Facticity I mean that human beings always begin within conditions they did not choose: bodies, languages, histories, relationships, institutions, economic circumstances, inherited traditions, and social positions. There is no view from nowhere from which these conditions can be suspended while we determine the correct form of life.
At the same time, no single mode of explanation exhausts them.
This matters particularly for the distinction I have been drawing between psychoanalysis and contextual behavioral science. Lacan can disclose something important about symbolic constitution without thereby giving us an adequate account of behavioral change. RFT can explain how verbal relations transform psychological functions without thereby explaining the political institutions through which those relations are socially reinforced. Structural critique can expose economic and institutional constraints without telling us what a particular person can do differently when those constraints become psychologically embodied.
These are not competing descriptions from which one winner must be selected. They disclose different aspects of a situation that remains psychological, behavioral, cultural, embodied, and institutional at once.
Wilber’s integral framework remains useful to me for precisely this reason. Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up name different dimensions of development that cannot simply be reduced to one scale. Contemplative awareness is not the same thing as moral development; psychological integration is not political transformation; sophisticated interpretation does not guarantee behavioral flexibility; behavioral flexibility does not guarantee ethical maturity.
Development also never occurs outside facticity. We grow from somewhere, through languages and institutions we inherited, in bodies with possibilities and limits, under historical conditions we did not select. Development can transform those conditions without ever beginning outside them.
Enactive Fallibilism describes the methodological attitude that follows.
Peircean fallibilism begins from the recognition that our claims remain revisable. Enactivism adds that knowing develops through embodied engagement rather than from the detached standpoint of a disembodied observer. We discover something about our frameworks by living through them.
This is another place where I depart from the interpretive recursion that can characterize psychoanalytic theory. A framework cannot protect itself indefinitely by generating another interpretation of whatever contradicts it. At some point consequences matter. Evidence matters. Other people’s accounts matter. What happens when the framework is enacted matters.
The body matters too, but not because bodily experience provides an infallible verdict. Suffering matters. Exhaustion matters. Fear, breakdown, pleasure, attachment, conflict, cooperation, and physiological consequences all provide evidence that theories of human flourishing cannot simply explain away.
But bodily experience still requires interpretation. Pain can accompany growth as well as injury. Comfort can sustain domination. Immediate relief does not prove that a practice is good, any more than suffering automatically falsifies every structure in which it appears.
Enactive Fallibilism therefore requires a more demanding movement between framework and practice. We enact interpretations, discover what they make possible, encounter what they obscure or damage, and revise them in light of consequences, new evidence, other perspectives, and conditions they did not initially know how to accommodate.
No tradition receives immunity from that process: psychoanalysis, contextual behavioral science, Marxism, integral theory, religious tradition, subjective experience, or a framework I am constructing myself.
This gives a different answer to Schoendorff’s concern that we cannot stand outside language and determine which verbal system is finally correct. We do not need such a position. We need ways of living and inquiring through which our interpretations can be changed.
It also gives a different answer to Tutt’s concern about adaptation. The relevant question is not simply whether a person becomes more functional within an existing environment. The environment must also remain available for criticism and transformation. Sometimes behavior has to change. Sometimes institutions have to change. Often each changes through engagement with the other.
Psychological flexibility becomes politically significant when it helps make that reciprocal transformation possible."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/the-language-parasite-and-the-symbolic)