Over the past 25 years, embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained scientific legitimacy worldwide, including in Mexico, which offers a fertile environment for their development. This editorial introduction argues that concerns about incoherence among these perspectives are misplaced; instead, 4EC should be viewed as an emerging pluralistic research tradition with shared commitments. The tradition has grown in Mexico due to the country's distinctive historical, scientific, and philosophical development. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the promising potential of heterogeneous explanations within this tradition.
The authors argue that the conventional reductionist dichotomy between health and disease overlooks the causal role of embodied self-awareness and affect. Proposing an enactive, phenomenological, and ecological perspective, they contend that interoceptive processes, when prioritized, allow the agent to play an active role in their experience of health or illness. They distinguish two ways interoceptive processes relate to embodied self-awareness: sensitivity (self-affective) and affective-laden perception. Using examples of menstruation and endometriosis in cis-women, they illustrate how this framework enables a naturalized, non-reductive, and relational approach to the gradient of affective bodily experiences, aiming to enhance autonomy and self-regulation in therapeutic settings.