Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...) Kuhnian sense—there is no internal crisis in cognitivism. Nor does it provide inherently better explanations of cognition as some have claimed. Second, we consider the soft sell of enactivism: enactivism provides a more attractive, parsimonious, or clear-eyed lens on cognition. This move proves to boil down to a misunderstanding of how theories are selected in science. Instead we lend support to a broader and more desirable way to conceive of enactivism, the recent proposal that enactivism is a philosophy of nature. We explain how a philosophy of nature does more than support a single research paradigm by integrating scientific questions into a cohesive picture. (shrink)

A weak version of the life-mind continuity thesis entails that every living system also has a basic mind (with a non-representational form of intentionality). The strong version entails that the same concepts that are sufficient to explain basic minds (with non-representational states) are also central to understanding non-basic minds (with representational states). We argue that recent work on the free energy principle supports the following claims with respect to the life-mind continuity thesis: (i) there is a strong continuity between life (...) and mind; (ii) all living systems can be described as if they had representational states; (iii) the ’as-if representationality’ entailed by the free energy principle is central to understanding both basic forms of intentionality and intentionality in non-basic minds. In addition to this, we argue that the free energy principle also renders realism about computation and representation compatible with a strong life-mind continuity thesis (although the free energy principle does not entail computational and representational realism). In particular, we show how representationality proper can be grounded in ’as-if representationality’. (shrink)

This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13(3), 2014), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised of the things that they can successfully manipulate. We review this attempt, and argue that (...) whilst Zahidi rightly urges enactivists towards ‘internal realism’, he cannot sustain a non-negotiable aspect of realism that is crucial for scientific progress – the claim that multiple subjects inhabit the same world. We explore Peirce’s pragmatism as an alternative solution, foregrounding his distinction between existence and reality, and his inquiry-based account of cognition. These theoretical innovations, we argue, fruitfully generalize Zahidi’s manipulation-based enactivist realism to a richer, inquiry-based enactivist realism. We explore how this realism’s pan-species monism about truth encourages and supports the investigation of non-human animal cognition, and conclude by considering some implications of our discussion for long-standing realism debates within pragmatism. (shrink)

With Jan Degenaar and Kevin O’Regan’s (D&O) critique of (what they call) ‘autopoietic enactivism’ as point of departure, this article seeks to revisit, refine, and develop phenomenology’s significance for the enactive view. Arguing that D&O’s ‘sensorimotor theory’ fails to do justice to perceptual meaning, the article unfolds by (1) connecting this meaning to the notion of enaction as a meaningful co-definition of perceiver and perceived, (2) recounting phenomenological reasons for conceiving of the perceiving subject as a living body, and (3) (...) showing how the phenomenological perspective does a better job at fulfilling D&O’s requirement for grounding notions of mentality in ‘outer’ criteria than they do. The picture that thus emerges is one of perceptual meaning as an integration of lived, living, and behavioral aspects – a structure of behavior that cannot be captured by appeal to sensorimotor capacities alone but that is adequately illuminated by the enactive notion of adaptive autonomy. (shrink)

Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing. In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have considered the body as peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive science view this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature of the (...) dependence of cognition on the body is quite unexpected, and suggests new ways of conceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitive processing. Embodied cognitive science encompasses a loose-knit family of research programs in the cognitive sciences that often share a commitment to critiquing and even replacing traditional approaches to cognition and cognitive processing. Empirical research on embodied cognition has exploded in the past 10 years. As the bibliography for this article attests, the various bodies of work that will be discussed represent a serious alternative to the investigation of cognitive phenomena. Relatively recent work on the embodiment of cognition provides much food for thought for empirically-informed philosophers of mind. This is in part because of the rich range of phenomena that embodied cognitive science has studied. But it is also in part because those phenomena are often thought to challenge dominant views of the mind, such as the computational and representational theories of mind, at the heart of traditional cognitive science. And they have sometimes been taken to undermine standard positions in the philosophy of mind, such as the idea that the mind is identical to, or even realized in, the brain. (shrink)

This article discusses Hans Jonas’ argument for teleology in living organisms, in light of recently raised concerns over enactivism’s “Jonasian turn.” Drawing on textual resources rarely discussed in contemporary enactivist literature on Jonas’ philosophy, we reconstruct five core ideas of his thinking: 1) That natural science’s rejection of teleology is methodological rather than ontological, and thus not a proof of its non-existence; 2) that denial of the reality of teleology amounts to a performative self-contradiction; 3) that the fact of evolution (...) makes it implausible that only humans actualize purpose; 4) that the concept of metabolism delimits and gestures towards beings performing purposive activity; and 5) that concrete encounters with living organisms are indispensable for the judgment that they are purposive. Lastly, we draw attention to how Jonas’ understanding of teleology and inwardness in nonhuman life in terms of degrees of identity with human life poses a problem for his view. In this way, we hope to clarify what Jonas, as an important source of inspiration for the enactivist project, is proposing. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend a novel, multidimensional account of representational unification, which we distinguish from integration. The dimensions of unity are simplicity, generality and scope, non-monstrosity, and systematization. In our account, unification is a graded property. The account is used to investigate the issue of how research traditions contribute to representational unification, focusing on embodied cognition in cognitive science. Embodied cognition contributes to unification even if it fails to offer a grand unification of cognitive science. The study of this (...) failure shows that unification, contrary to what defenders of mechanistic explanation claim, is an important mechanistic virtue of research traditions. (shrink)

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment (which is sometimes labeled “basic” cognition) depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between (...) basic and higher cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between basic and higher cognition. In this (...) paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a non-representational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. (shrink)

It is common in the cognitive and computational sciences to regard virtual reality (VR) as composed of illusory experiences, given its immersive character. In this paper, we adopt an ecological-enactive perspective on cognition (Sect. 3) to evaluate the nature of VR and one’s engagement with it. Based on a post-cognitivist conception of illusion, we reject the commonly held assumption that virtual reality experiences (VREs) are illusory (Sect. 4). Our positive take on this issue is that VR devices, like other technological (...) devices, can be embodied during use, which is why they can be the source of experiences (Sect. 5). We then propose a new concept to interpret VREs, namely, _allusion_, which means that the subject acts _as if_ the virtual experiences are real (Sect. 6). This kind of engagement has a volitional aspect, which is evident in the onboarding of VR devices and which allows us to distinguish VREs from other experiences. We conclude that, even though we have experiences that afford certain interactions in VR, the strong continuity between cognitive and biological processes is not sustained therein. This characterizes a difference of kind—given the current state of technology—between VREs and fully fledged cognitive states, which nevertheless allows for constrained experimentation in cognitive science. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.

The aim of the article is to outline several valuable elements of Mead’s pragmatist theory of perception in action developed in his The Philosophy of the Act, in order to strengthen the pragmatist legacy of the enactivist approach. In particular, Mead’s theory of perception in action turns out to be a forerunner of sensorimotor enactivist theory. Unlike the latter, however, Mead explicitly refers to imagery as an essential capacity for agency. Nonetheless, the article argues that the ways in which Mead (...) refers to this capacity do not necessarily place it in opposition to enactivist non-representationalism. On the contrary, as a synthetic process of re-presenting of present and past sensorimotor elements, imagery can be seen as the hallmark of a pragmatically inspired sensorimotor enactivist approach that bypasses the opposition between representationalists and non-representationalists. (shrink)

This paper makes a comparison between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy. Enactivism is a recent development in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that generally defines cognition in terms of a subject’s natural interactions with the physical environment. In recent years, enactivists have been focusing on social and ethical relations by introducing the concept of participatory sensemaking, according to which ethical know-how spontaneously emerges out of natural relations of participation and communication, that is, through the exchange of knowledge. This paper will (...) argue first that, although participatory sensemaking is a valuable concept in that it offers a practical and realistic way of understanding ethics, it nevertheless downplays the significance of otherness for understanding ethics. I will argue that Levinas’ work demonstrates in turn that otherness is significant for ethics in that we cannot completely anticipate others through participation or know-how. We cannot live the other’s experiences or suffering, which makes ethical relation so difficult and serious (e.g. care for a terminally ill person always falls short to a certain extent). I will argue next that enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy nevertheless do not exclude each other insofar they share a similar concept of subjectivity as a quality of naturally interacting with the external world to gain knowledge (Levinas speaks of dwelling). Finally, I will argue that enactivism’s notion of participatory sensemaking also offers something which Levinas’ insufficiently defines, namely a concept of social justice, based on equality and participation, that emerges out of natural relations. (shrink)

Enactivism does not have its primary philosophical roots in pragmatism: phenomenology (from Husserl to Jonas) is its first source of inspiration (with the exception of Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism). That does not exclude the benefits of pragmatist readings of enactivism, and of enactivist readings of pragmatism. After having sketched those readings, this paper focuses on the philosophical concept of intentionality. I show that whereas enactivists endorse the idea that intentionality is a base-level property of cognition, pragmatism offer(ed) us some (...) reasons not to proceed this way. It is therefore doubtful to hold that pragmatists and enactivists would converge in the defence of a common, non-representational conception of intentionality. (shrink)

Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas like (...) emergence and downward causation, are congruent with enactivism. Attention to enactivist ideas, moreover, may serve as a heuristic for mechanistic investigations of cognition. Nevertheless, I show how enactivism and approaches that prioritise mechanistic modelling may diverge in starting assumptions about the nature of cognitive phenomena, such as where the constitutive boundaries of cognition lie. (shrink)

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive (...) access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point. (shrink)

Quite a few cognitive scientists are working toward a naturalization of phenomenology. Looking more closely at the relevant literature, however, the ‘naturalizing phenomenology’ proposals show the presence of different conceptions, assumptions, and formalisms, further differentiated by different philosophical and/or scientific concerns. This paper shows that the original Husserlian stance is deeper, clearer and more advanced than most supposed contemporary improvements. The recent achievements of experimental phenomenology show how to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology without destroying the guiding assumptions of phenomenology. The requirements grounding (...) the scientific explanation of subjective experience are discussed, such as the nature of the stimuli, their variables, and their manipulation by properly phenomenological methods. (shrink)

Several strands of contemporary cognitive science and its philosophy have emerged in recent decades that emphasize the role of action in cognition, resting their explanations on the embodiment of cognitive agents, and their embedding in richly structured environments. Despite their growing influence, many foundational questions remain unresolved or underexplored for this cluster of proposals, especially questions of how they can be extended beyond straightforwardly visuomotor cognitive capacities, and what constraints the commitment of embodiment places on the ontology of explanations. This (...) special issue aims to contribute to these foundational debates by drawing on important precursors to embodied cognition in mid-twentieth century gestalt psychology, its immediate successor ecological psychology, and their dialectical counterpart, phenomenology. Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists wrestled with many of the same foundational questions that still haunt us today, in a manner that seems refreshing in hindsight, and poised to contribute constructively to contemporary debate. Looking back on this history reveals deep commonalities across competing embodied approaches, exposing fundamental tensions that remain unresolved, but also paving the way to a more ecumenical and conciliatory embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new approach to the study of Paleolithic minds. It is developed on the basis of the phenomenological concept of intentionality: the mind's central characteristic of being about or directed at something. In phenomenology, the world is considered not qua fact, but qua appearance, as a correlate of the mind's intentional activity. Both world-appearance and the mind's directedness are further considered from a first-person viewpoint, and in a scaffolding fashion, with more complex acts disclosing new types of (...) objects or aspects of them. This paper develops a framework for applying intentional analysis to minds of the past. This way, the subjective “world-having” of past subjects can be systematically reconstructed in a manner consistent with the empirical data available. This discloses a new field of inquiry that thus far has not been clearly grasped, even though the questions belonging to it are everywhere recognized as being of the greatest importance to the discipline. The intentional analysis of the scaffolding of acts and what they disclose can help to clarify essential concepts in cognitive archaeological debates, and to better understand the evolution of the hominin mind. (shrink)

This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of theHegel Bulletinentirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to (...) the nature of biological organization, the role of teleology in biological explanation, and the relation between life and cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically reconstruct the development of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and “radical embodied cognitive science” out of Berlin-School Gestalt theory. I first lay out the basic principles of Gestalt theory and then identify two ways of revising that theory: one route, followed by enactivism and ecological psychology, borrows Gestaltist resources to defend a pragmatic ontology. I argue, however, that Merleau-Ponty never endorses this kind of ontology. Instead, I track his second route toward an ontology of “flesh.” I show how (...) Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for this ontology depend upon criticisms of Gestalt Psychology to which radical embodied cognitive science remains vulnerable, and show that it leads him to a romantic philosophy of nature. (shrink)

This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism, and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we call for (...) a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world. (shrink)

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the (...) theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its “alerting capacity” and “corporality”, respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system. (shrink)

What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative (...) approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is provided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covariations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequences on the explanation of basic (...) sensorimotor abilities. To support this claim, I show that the perception of visual affordances is not segregated from higher forms of cognition; rather, it is modulated by the agent’s ability to recognize the semantic identity of the visual target. Accordingly, since the semantic recognition of an object involves a way of representing it under a certain description, it can be inferred that the perception of visual affordances cannot be accounted for without considering the intensional properties of cognition. This poses an explanatory issue for Radical Enactivism. (shrink)

Culture has traditionally been considered as a set of knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, norms, and morals, acquired by a human being as a member of a group. Some anthropologists interpret this as a set of abstract representations, such as information or knowledge, while others interpret it as behavioral control mechanisms. These views assume that the contents of a particular culture must be processed by the minds of individuals, either in a direct way or by resorting to learned mental structures in (...) processes of symbolic socialization. Some critics suggest a problem with these perspectives since they do not provide a convincing explanation of the enculturation process beyond metaphorical images of transfer or internalization of symbolic cultural contents through linguistic transmission. The new embodied theories of cognition, especially enactivism, could give new ideas about what enculturation processes are like, through the concept of participatory sense-making in material culture environments. In this essay, we discuss how an enactive vision of culture could be, and what advantages it would have, as well as the challenges and weaknesses in explaining the culture and its learning processes. (shrink)

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with (...) the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced and reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to its production and reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge. (shrink)

Radical enactivists claim that cognition is split in two distinct kinds, which can be differentiated by how they relate to mental content. In their view, basic cognitive activities involve no mental content whatsoever, whereas linguistically scaffolded, non-basic, cognitive activities constitutively involve the manipulation of mental contents. Here, I evaluate how this dichotomy applies to imagination, arguing that the sensory images involved in basic acts of imaginations qualify as vehicles of content, contrary to what radical enactivists claim. To argue so, I (...) leverage what has appropriately been dubbed a “compare to prototype” argument. Hence, I will first identify, within the enactivist literature, the general functional profile of a vehicle of content complying with the austere standard of contentfulness radical enactivists adhere to. Provided such a profile, I will show, relying on a mixture of reasoning and empirical evidence, that basic sensory images satisfy it, and thus that they can rightfully be identified as vehicles of content. This, I claim, provides a sufficient reason to identify the sensory images involved in basic acts of imagination as vehicles of content, thereby denying that basic imagination does not involve mental content. (shrink)

When it comes to the body, the professional pedagogical field shows a paradoxical attitude: With regard to sense-oriented school subjects, educational policies tend to underline a close relatedness of body and mind. However, where learning is primarily connected with mental activities and intellectual engagement, the body is rarely assigned an integral role. Discussing the grounding ideologies of this paradox, I will consult phenomenological and enactivist perspectives in order to develop an approach to embodied learning which takes into account both sense-oriented (...) as well as intellectual domains. I will argue that considering the interdependence of body and mind including their situatedness does not only benefit the cultivation of the body and the senses, but also opens up further perspectives for intellectual engagement. (shrink)

What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to (...) generate a sense of the conceptual space in which this research is going on. I focus on the concepts of sense-making, Umwelts, affordances, cultural niches, epistemic actions, environmental scaffolding, and mental institutions. Despite differences in focus and detail these influences share an underlying world-view; that cognition is relational and world-involving. This way of thinking has clear resonances with dominant approaches in non-Western philosophy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to generate in the reader a sense of this shared extended-enactive world-view in order to open up a space for communication between approaches. (shrink)

Embodied cognition is an interpretative—or hermeneutical—cognition inherent in motor-sensory perception intrinsically informed by biological and sociocultural memory, a cognition embedded in the organism as well as the socio-cultural environment interacting with it (Ward et al. TOPOI 36:365–375, 2017), of which technologies are a part. Yet, smart machines are advancing on human abilities to perceive and interpret concerning the accuracy, quantity, and quality of the data processed. Machines process and categorize images, perform classification tasks, they calculate and perform pattern analysis, all (...) machine learning processes are task-specific. Machine learning processes resemble human interpretative processes; however, these are two very different ways of “dealing with something,” although both can be said to be hermeneutical, one enactive, the other material; the first is a meaning-generating interpretative process, the second a statistics-based information output. The information extracted from all the data fed into the computer is the end-product of machine learning, whereas human interpretative enactments are continuous and necessary for any application of the information output. (shrink)

Enactivism does not have its primary philosophical roots in pragmatism: phenomenology (from Husserl to Jonas) is its first source of inspiration (with the exception of Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism). That does not exclude the benefits of pragmatist readings of enactivism, and of enactivist readings of pragmatism. After having sketched those readings, this paper focuses on the philosophical concept of intentionality. I show that whereas enactivists endorse the idea that intentionality is a base-level property of cognition, pragmatism offer(ed) us some (...) reasons not to proceed this way. It is therefore doubtful to hold that pragmatists and enactivists would converge in the defence of a common, non-representational conception of intentionality. (shrink)

In recent years, work in cognitive science on human subjectivity as 4E has found a significant precedent in, connection with and enrichment from phenomenological understandings of the human person. Correspondingly, both disciplines have shed light on the nature of intersubjectivity in a complementary way. In this paper I highlight an underexplored aspect of phenomenological and 4E understandings of intersubjectivity, namely that these approaches make space for the possibility of properly intersubjective interactions with more than one other person at once. This (...) insight is important, I argue, because the philosophy of intersubjectivity has tended to focus on the self-other dyad as the primary unit of intersubjectivity from which all other forms of intersubjectivity can be extrapolated. Against this, I will argue that multi-person intersubjectivity is possible because of, and not in spite of, the nature and structure of individual subjectivity itself. We find our intersubjective capacity has the possibility of simultaneous engagement with multiple others built in ‘all the way through’, in virtue of being 4E. Despite the emphasis on subjectivity as embodied and worlded in the phenomenological tradition, we find that this ‘dyadic paradigm’ has been prevalent in some of the work of the classic phenomenologists. In this paper I look at the accounts of intersubjectivity offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. I outline how – in different ways, with different emphases and to different extents – both Sartre and Levinas embody something of this dyadic paradigm. This, in turn, I argue, highlights an incongruity in each of their accounts on the issue of the other’s existence in the world as 4E. This tension is most stark in Sartre’s case. I will argue that his account of the-other-as-subject explicitly fails to appreciate the other’s subjectivity as 4E. His definitionally dyadic account of ‘the look’ is indicative of this. In Levinas’ case, the issue is more subtle, as he explicitly acknowledges ‘the face’ of the other in materially worlded and embodied terms. Nevertheless, I will argue, Levinas’ account of intersubjectivity, including his account of ‘the Third’, also indicates a version of a dyadic paradigm which runs counter to the logic of a fully 4E appreciation of intersubjectivity. I will argue that minimally there is tension or ambiguity in Levinas’ account on this issue. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent _performs_ interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too (...) severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6). (shrink)

Volume 33, Issue 8, November 2020, Page 1096-1120.

This paper provides evidence for a radically enactive, embodied account of remembering. By looking closely at highly context-dependent instances of memorizing and recalling dance material, I aim at shedding light on the workings of memory. Challenging the view that cognition fundamentally entails contentful mental representation, the examples I discuss attest the existence of non-representational instances of memory, accommodating episodic memory. That being so, this paper also makes room for content-involving forms of remembering. As a result, it supports the duplex vision (...) of mentality advanced by the REC framework. Building on research on the enactive imagination, I suggest that contentless forms of remembering act below content-involving forms. In addition, contentless and contentful forms of remembering a movement are revealed as the product of culturally scaffolded engagements with others and the environment, in which direct perception and mirroring play a fundamental role. It is argued that many of the practices of remembering a movement are best explained as enactments or re-enactments of such direct ecological perceptions. In the process, the dance studio proves to be a paradigm of the extensive mind. This paper is also intended as an invitation to the REC framework to extend the family and explicitly embrace research on sociocultural practices as an equal partner, including dance studies. Given the fundamental role that sociocultural practices play in REC’s understanding of cognition, it is only natural that further radicalization goes along those lines. (shrink)

Technological artefacts have, in recent years, invited increasingly intimate ways of interaction. But surprisingly little attention has been devoted to how such interactions, like with wearable devices or household robots, shape our minds, cognitive capacities, and moral character. In this thesis, I develop an embodied, enactive account of mind--technology interaction that takes the reciprocal influence of artefacts on minds seriously. First, I examine how recent developments in philosophy of technology can inform the phenomenology of mind--technology interaction as seen through an (...) enactivist lens. Second, I show how an enactive account of remembering can improve operationalizations of the memory palace mnemonic through virtual reality devices. Third, I draw on virtue ethics to argue that an enactivist approach allows us to better grasp the morally shaping aspects of artefacts by looking at social robots. Fourth, I fend off an underlying metaphysical concern about enactivism by arguing that an embodied, enactive account is compatible with the multiple realization of cognitive processes. This principle is often seen as a crucial test favouring accounts such as extended functionalism over enactivism and I argue that some forms of enactivism pass this test as well. Finally, I conclude by considering what the future relationship between enactivism and functionalism may have in store for the study of mind--technology interaction. (shrink)

In questo lavoro distinguo tra due versioni della tesi del carattere incarnato della mente: “debole” e “forte”. Secondo la versione debole, il possesso di stati mentali presuppone l’esistenza di un corpo che si muove ed agisce nell’ambiente, ossia un corpo funzionale. Secondo la versione forte, invece, il possesso di stati mentali presuppone l’esistenza di un corpo non solo funzionale ma anche senziente, ossia: il corpo come sede della sensibilità o coscienza fenomenica. Sostengo che alcuni approcci all’interno della “scienza cognitiva incarnata” (...) implicano la forma debole di embodiment : la robotica di Brooks, l’enattivismo sensomotorio di Noë e O’Regan e l’enattivismo radicale di Hutto e Myin. In contrapposizione a queste prospettive, e basandomi sull’analisi fenomenologica della corporeità vivente e vissuta, difendo la forma forte di embodiment, secondo cui la mente si fonda essenzialmente sul corpo funzionale e senziente. Parole chiave: Fenomenologia; Embodiment; Coscienza fenomenica; Enattivismo; Qualità sensibili -/- Abstract (english) -/- Functional body and sentient body. The strong view on the embodied mind in phenomenology: In this paper, I draw a distinction between weak and strong versions of the “embodiment thesis”. The weak version claims that mental states are grounded in a body that moves and acts in the environment, i.e., a functional body. The strong version claims that mental states are grounded in a body that is not only functional but also sentient, i.e., a body that is the locus of sensibility or phenomenal consciousness. I argue that some approaches within the “new embodied cognitive science” – Brooks’ robotics, Noë’s and O’Regan’s sensorimotor enactivism, Hutto’s and Myin’s radical enactivism – imply a weak version of the embodiment thesis. In contrast, by drawing on a phenomenological analysis of living and lived corporeality, I argue for the strong version, which claims that the mind is essentially grounded in the functional and sentient body. Keywords: Phenomenology; Embodiment; Phenomenal Consciousness; Enactivism; Sensible Qualities. (shrink)

The genesis of time is explained in the spirit of constructivism combined with the activity approach to cognition. The cardinal temporal categories of present, past, and fu- ture are discussed in terms of action-thoughts understood as elementary units of activity whose structure is determined by linguistic semiosis. Husserl’s tripartite model of the phenomenology of time (prime perception, retention, protention) is applied to the ana- lysis of the subject’s experience of his actions. It is demonstrated that, while our lived present is (...) composed of the actually performed actions, our past and future are construc- ted by reflexive action-thoughts in the cognitive domain of language. It is emphasized that the construction of a temporal sequence that unites what is and what already or still is not, is possible only in linguistic semiosis. The analogy with Husserl’s tripartite structure of the time-consciousness flow helps elucidate the triad ‘present-past-future’ as an instance of the epistemological trap of language: ‘past’ and ‘future’ are mental const- ructs that belong to the present just as any other act of thinking. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

Radical enactivism supports radical embodied cognition (REC), which is the idea that basic or fundamental cognition (perception and action) does not need to be understood in representational, contentful terms. REC departs from the idea that the mind can be naturalized through biological functions, but rejects the idea that mental content, which is understood as having a representational nature, can be naturalized. For REC, the natural origins of content (or NOC) is a program based on the following hypothesis: first, we depart (...) from basic cognitive processes that are target-based and guided by an Ur-intentionality or directedness toward the world, and then sociality enters in the picture when language appears into the scene, allowing for establishing full-blown semantic content in which that content is about worldly states of affairs. Here, we are going to focus on the phenomenon of directedness since there are blind spots in this picture: as many authors claim, REC takes Ur-intentionality as the starting point, but there is simply no explanation to date of how this directedness or Ur-intentionality is established. Therefore, how could we account for Ur-intentionality? How does this kind of intentionality emerge? We believe that we can answer this question if we invoke the best scientific evidence from ecological perceptual learning especially in regard to the role of the environment and the information for perceiving affordances in our learning processes. This allows us to offer an answer to the question of how the most basic form of cognition (Ur-intentionality or directedness) emerges in nature. (shrink)

According to constructive empiricists, accepting a scientific theory involves belief only that it is true of the observable world, where observability is defined in terms of what is detectable by the unaided senses. On this view, scientific instruments are machines that generate new observable data, but this data need not be interpreted as providing access to a realm of phenomena beyond what is revealed by the senses. A recent challenge to the constructive empiricist account of instruments appeals to the extended (...) mind thesis, according to which cognitive processes are sometimes constituted not just by brain activity, but can extend into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. If this is right, scientific instruments may, in the right circumstances, literally become part of our perceptual processes. In this article, I examine this extended perception argument, and I find that it fails for the vast majority of scientific instruments. Even if the extended mind thesis is accepted, the constructive empiricist can draw a line between observables and unobservables that makes very few concessions to the realist. (shrink)

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...) The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

In this paper, we use the recent appearance of LLMs and GPT-equipped robotics to raise questions about the nature of semantic meaning and how this relates to issues concerning artificially-conscious machines. To do so, we explore how a phenomenology constructed out of the association of qualia (defined as somatically-experienced sense data) and situated within a 4e enactivist program gives rise to intentional behavior. We argue that a robot without such a phenomenology is semantically empty and, thus, cannot be conscious in (...) any way resembling human consciousness. Finally, we use this platform to address and supplement widely-discussed concerns regarding the dangers of attempting to produce artificially-conscious machines. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of phenomenology in the understanding of the cognitive processes of coupling/decoupling, defending the Wittgensteinian idea that phenomenology can play a crucial role as a description of immediate (social) experience. We argue that epistemic feelings can provide a phenomenological description of the development of a subject's everyday experience, tracking the transition from the processes of coupling/decoupling and recoupling with the world. In particular, the feeling of familiarity, whose key features can be considered the core of epistemic (...) feelings, signals a novelty in the flow of experience that makes sense and is worthy of remarking on or even articulating. By describing the primary features and sources of the feeling of familiarity, we highlight a conceptual tension related to its sources, which could be based on processing both fluency and discrepancy. We proposed a solution to the conceptual tension by introducing two levels of the feeling of familiarity: epistemic and experiential. (shrink)

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. (...) I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present. (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) and embodied cognition (EC) have emerged as two influential approaches within cognitive science in recent years. Not only have PP and EC been heralded as “revolutions” and “paradigm shifts” but they have motivated a number of new and interesting areas of research. This has prompted some to wonder how compatible the two views might be. This paper looks to weigh in on the issue of PP-EC compatibility. After outlining two recent proposals, I argue that further clarity can (...) be achieved on the issue by considering a model of scientific progress. Specifically, I suggest that Larry Laudan’s “problem solving model” can provide important insights into a number of outstanding challenges that face existing accounts of PP-EC compatibility. I conclude by outlining additional implications of the problem solving model for PP and EC more generally. (shrink)