An enactive account of placebo effects.

Placebos are typically seen as ineffective treatments because they lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the condition being treated, yet they can produce substantial therapeutic effects. This puzzle arises from the relationship between culturally meaningful entities like treatments, our intentional attitudes such as beliefs about healing, and bodily placebo responses. An enactive conception of cognition, which views an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and meaningful environmental properties as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system, accommodates and demystifies placebo effects by explaining the interrelations between mind, body, and world.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities (such as treatments or therapies), our intentional relationship to the environment (such as implicit or explicit beliefs about a treatment's healing powers) and bodily effects (placebo responses). How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue that an 'enactive' conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects.