enaction

English

Etymology

From enact +‎ -ion.

Noun

enaction (usually uncountable, plural enactions)

1. The process of enacting something.
   • 1973, Oliver Sacks, Awakenings:

     a wide spectrum of tics and compulsive movements […] which were enactions of sudden urges.

   • 1991, Takuya Katayama, Support for the Software Process, page 151:

     Two important threads of this work are to design a representation formalism for describing software process models and to develop new mechanisms to support the enaction of instantiated software process models.

2. (philosophy, cognitive science, computer science) The interpretation of consciousness or understanding as a process of meaningfully engaging and interacting with the world in a hierarchy of actions that produce reactions.
   • 2005, Ralph D. Ellis, Natika Newton, Consciousness & Emotion: Agency, conscious choice, and selective perception:

     An appreciation of the power of enaction in our understandings of the mind will throw into relief the question of motivations and goals.

   • 2017, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, Xabier E. Barandiaran, Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal, page 76:

     The processes that underlie the organization and honing of these skills operate over a wide range of timescales, which include the enaction of a particular perceptual act at one end and the lifetime development of perception-action capabilities at the other.

   • 2018, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language:

     The first mention of enaction as a history of couplings that bring forth a world referred to the activity of "sensorimotor networks". (Varela et al. 1991)

   • 2019, Mariusz Kozak, Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, page 54:

     Third, drawing on enaction and embodiment gives us the means for considering actions taken in response to musical sounds as sufficient for cognition, and thus constitutive of listeners' musical understanding.

Derived terms

• reenaction
• preenaction

Related terms

• enactivism

Translations

Translations

• Spanish: enacción f

Anagrams

• actineon, cat-o'-nine, cat-o-nine, octennia