Sense-making (enactivism)

Sense-making in the enactive tradition is the process by which an autonomous system establishes significance and relevance through its ongoing engagement with the environment. Unlike the information-processing view, which treats meaning as pre-given and extracted by the organism, the enactive view holds that meaning is generated by the system's own activity — specifically, by its efforts to maintain and adapt its organizational identity.

Sense-making is inherently relational and value-laden: what counts as meaningful is determined by what matters to the system's continued existence. This connects sense-making to autopoiesis and the maintenance of biological identity. The concept has been extended to social contexts through participatory sense-making, where meaning emerges from interaction rather than individual cognition alone.

Sense-making is not a cognitive luxury added to survival; it is the very form that survival takes in cognitively complex organisms.