Abstract

This chapter argues that describing sense-making as an act of living beings that add a surplus of significance to the physical environment is conceptually obscure, overly abstract, and misdescribes cognitive and biological phenomena. It proposes instead a definition of sense-making based on processes of norm development. From this standpoint, sense-making involves reconfiguring, throughout bodily interactions, the ever-present normative frameworks that link an agent to its environment. In support of this view, I show how some enactivist descriptions of adaptivity and chemotaxis in Escherichia coli bacteria and, more evidently, in the enactivist interpretation of Piaget’s theory of equilibration already portray sense-making as norm development. However, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is thus far our better guide to understanding sense-making as norm development.