Ecological∼Enactivism Through the Lens of Japanese Philosophy.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2020 Jonathan Mckinney 12 citations
The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science, despite sharing roots in psychology and phenomenology, have historically held conflicting views. Early enactivists valued ecological psychology but insisted on keeping the approaches distinct, critiquing that ecological psychology undermined agent autonomy. Conversely, ecological psychologists focused on the organism-environment system, sometimes dismissing enactivism. Both schools now use dynamic systems theory, leading some scholars to propose an ecological-enactive synthesis. This paper argues that such a synthesis risks losing valuable aspects of each approach, analogous to hasty comparisons in early East-West comparative philosophy. Instead, the relationship is best understood as one of complementarity, a concept explored through Japanese Philosophy to illuminate both agent-environment and ecological-enactive complementarities.