Enacting the Distance and the Possibilities. A Tribute to John Stewart

This article, in homage to John Stewart, aims at proposing a new approach to the perception of the position of an object at a distance, which implies giving an ontological status to the possible positions in the distal space.

After having recalled the difficulty of explaining the perception of exteriority within the framework of enactive approaches, we will proceed in two steps. In the first stage, we will present the attempts to explain distal perception in terms of individual sensorimotor invariants. This seems to us to pose the problem well but fails to solve it. Then, in a second step, we will propose a new way to account for spatial perception, a way that does not deny the initial intuitions of the enactive autopoietic approaches, but that radically changes the conception of cognition by considering, as early as the perceptual stage, the necessity of taking into account interindividual interactions. The protocol of an original experimental study will allow us to characterize this new approach to account, without leaving the domain of coupling, for the perceptual experience of objects at a distance, in exteriority in a space of possibilities. For this we will have to analyze the limits of the perceptual crossing, that is to say the moment when the perceptual reciprocity between different subjects starts to disappear.