Hybrid Participatory Sense-Making in Human–Robot Social Interaction: An Enactive Account of Hybrid Relational Organization

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Social robots increasingly participate in forms of coordination with humans despite fundamental differences in the organization of their respective activities. This organizational heterogeneity poses a specific challenge to enactive approaches to social cognition, particularly Participatory Sense-Making (PSM), whose canonical architecture involves coordination among autonomous sense-makers and the possible emergence of interactional autonomy. Building on current debates concerning the application of PSM to human–machine interaction, this paper takes a complementary, unexplored direction. It asks, with specific reference to social robots, what becomes of this architecture when not all participants can be assumed to instantiate autonomy and sense-making. Rather than making the cognitive status of the artificial participant a prerequisite for analysing human–robot interaction, we return to Varela’s foundations of enaction—specifically, his theory of autonomous organization—to explore the organization that heterogeneous coordination itself may acquire. We introduce two concepts. The first is Hybrid Conversational Unit (HCU), designating the possible emergence of autonomous relational organization through recurrent coordination between human and robotic participants. The second is Hybrid Participatory Sense-Making (HPSM), designating the participatory transformation of human sense-making through such an organization. Their distinction supports our central proposal: being a sense-maker and participating in the organization of sense-making need not coincide. Together, HCU and HPSM ground a conversational approach to hybrid participation that shifts inquiry from the isolated properties of artificial systems to the relational organizations in which their capacities participate, opening a comparative and design-oriented research program concerned with the sustainability of emerging hybrid social ecologies. This preprint corresponds to the conference-paper version of the work. A substantially extended journal article developing the broader theoretical framework is currently in preparation.