Adaptive Behavior
July 30, 2026
Russell Meyer, Marilyn Stendera, J. Russell
Enactivism, as a radical framework for understanding cognition based on the flexible dynamics of living systems, developed in the late 20th century in response to problems faced by the prevailing model of cognitivism. It aimed to be all-encompassing, accounting for the different ontological levels that cognition is instantiated on, but despite its ambition enactivism did not achieve the...
Adaptive Behavior
May 31, 2026
Mark-Oliver Casper
This article confronts a core challenge within 4E research: the “motley crew argument.” According to this argument, the scientific credibility of 4E research is diminished because the range of factors considered constitutive of a cognitive phenomenon encompasses neural, morphological, and environmental structures. The claim is that the sheer number, flexibility, and interchangeability of the...
Adaptive Behavior
May 20, 2026
Dave Ward
‘Enactivism’ is usually taken to be an umbrella term encompassing any approach that emphasises the importance of recurrent loops of sensorimotor activity to adequate philosophical and scientific understandings of how minds fit into the natural world. Under this umbrella different variants can then be distinguished. I argue that this is a distortive and unhelpful understanding insofar as it...
Adaptive Behavior
April 18, 2026
Ignacio Cea
The pre-reflective experience of being a body is a fundamental component of consciousness and selfhood. A leading account from the perspective of active inference is Seth and Tsakiris’ (2018, see also Seth, 2021, 2024) proposal that this experience arises from instrumental interoceptive inference (III), namely the nervous system’s interoceptive predictions about the sensory consequences of...
Adaptive Behavior
April 9, 2026
Kathryn Nave
To some, purposiveness is the core of the enactive approach. Others, however, view the notion of purposes as a pre-scientific crutch – one that will eventually be replaced by mathematical analyses of the kind of dynamical systems that we are. Yet advances in cognitive neuroscience have not vanquished the problem of purpose, only driven it underground. Rather than explicitly confronting this...
Adaptive Behavior
March 9, 2026
Matthew Crippen
Despite historical shifts, “science” has consistently meant epistemic authority, perhaps leading enactivists to cast their work accordingly. Yet enactivism sits uneasily with Popperian falsifiability, Kuhnian paradigm shifts, Hempel’s standards, and other philosophy of science benchmarks, but does better under Lakatos. Lakatos’s model holds that progressive science preserves a hardcore of...
Adaptive Behavior
December 9, 2025
Jack Reynolds, Jan Baedke
Enactivism has recently faced criticism for either leaning too heavily on philosophical speculation without clear scientific grounding, or relying on quite old empirical work in cognitive science, especially concerning sensorimotor actions. While one can push back against such charges, in this paper we take a different approach. We will use metabolic and microbiome research as a case study to...
Adaptive Behavior
July 19, 2024
Johannes Wagemann
A core issue of embodiment is the question of how phenomenal and agentive consciousness relates to external forms of behavior. Instead of biasing the question in terms of the “hard problem” as to why and how consciousness arises from brain processes (D. Chalmers), it is suggested to ask for psychophysical correlations in a metaphysically neutral way. This, however, demands (1) to explore both...
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2023
Mario Villalobos, Ronnie Videla
1 citation
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) is a growing, open and pluralistic research tradition that offers new philosophical and scientific avenues to study the mind. Both its origins and current expansive movement are theoretically and geographically diverse. Chile, the mother country of the influential biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, represents one of its...
Adaptive Behavior
May 20, 2022
Simon Høffding
3 citations
The Course-of-Experience presents an interesting method for working with others’ experience, drawing on Micro-phenomenology (MP), Enactivism, and Peircean semiotics. It addresses possible applications to cognitive science, answering to a call about how to reliably integrate phenomenological data and experimental methods. I applaud the ambitious framework presented in the target paper, and hope...
Adaptive Behavior
June 10, 2021
Giovanni Rolla, Jeferson Huffermann
20 citations
We advance a critical examination of two recent branches of the enactivist research program, namely, Radically Enactive Cognition and Linguistic Bodies. We argue that, although these approaches may look like diverging views within the wider enactivist program, when appraised in a conciliatory spirit, they can be interpreted as developing converging ideas. We examine how the notion of know-how...
Adaptive Behavior
June 10, 2021
Ismael Palacios-García, Francisco J Parada
15 citations
All life on earth is intrinsically linked. At the very foundation of every evolutionary interaction are microorganisms, integral components in the composition of both organisms and ecosystems. The available data and this perspective on the order of life challenge the traditional conception of monogenetic biological individuals, suggesting living beings are actually composite multi-species...
Adaptive Behavior
August 1, 2020
Maxwell Jd Ramstead, Michael D Kirchhoff, Karl Friston
387 citations
The aim of this article is to clarify how best to interpret some of the central constructs that underwrite the free-energy principle (FEP) - and its corollary, active inference - in theoretical neuroscience and biology: namely, the role that generative models and variational densities play in this theory. We argue that these constructs have been systematically misrepresented in the literature,...
Adaptive Behavior
May 4, 2020
Mirko Farina
92 citations
This article is intended as a response to Goldinger et al. and to all those, an increasing minority in the sciences, who still belittle the contribution of embodied cognition to our understanding of human cognitive behaviour. In this article (section 1), I introduce the notion of embodiment and explain its dimensions and reach. I review (section 2) a range of embodied cognition theories and...
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2020
Amanda Corris, Anthony Chemero
Villalobos and Razeto-Barry suggest that extended enactivist interpretations of the autopoietic theory do not adequately address the bodily dimensions of living beings. In reply, we suggest that the extended enactivist view provides a richer account of living beings than a theory confined to autopoiesis, and therefore should not be supplanted by a modified autopoietic theory.
Adaptive Behavior
April 1, 2019
Alejandro Arango
In his comment, McGann argues that in my “From Sensorimotor Dependencies to Perceptual Practices: Making Enactivism Social,” I have overlooked a group of enactivist theories that can be grouped under the participatory sense-making label. In this reply, I explain that the omission is due to the fact that such theories are not accounts of perception. It is argued that, unlike participatory...
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2019
Alejandro Arango
8 citations
Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action–perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of...
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2019
Laura Milena Segovia Nieto, Andrés Fernando Ramírez Velandia
Discussions about intersubjectivity can be traced back to philosophical discussions of the 19th century. In recent years, disciplines such as neuroscience, social cognition, and phenomenology have discussed “empathy” in terms of the ability for human connection. More recently, researchers are discussing the definition of empathy, especially the relationship between empathy and the motivation to...
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2019
German Bula
Baruch Spinoza is often cited as a forerunner of current ideas in neuroscience and neurobiology and is seen as an early champion of embodied cognition. This article aims to specify in what way Spinoza’s ideas are useful to current research on the mind-body problem. Rather than seeking coincidences here and there between Spinoza’s positions and current findings, the article proposes that Spinoza...
Adaptive Behavior
December 13, 2018
Maria Clara Garavito, Jorge Dávila-gonzález
1 citation
How is it possible, even as a literary conceit, to feel one’s free will beating in one’s blood? The immediacy and spontaneity with which this idea is posited in a literary context contrasts with the subtle and painstaking work through which one may understand how bodily feelings, in a given weather and context, may tell us something about ourselves and our possibilities for action in a given...
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2018
Ximena Gonzalez-Grandón, Tom Froese
25 citations
Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 25 years in the international arena. They have encouraged new ways to understand the mind. Mexico has not been an exception; rather, it has the potential to provide a fertile ground for the development of 4EC perspectives, as shown by the variety of contributions in this...
Adaptive Behavior
April 4, 2018
Tom Froese, Iwin Leenen, Tomáš Páleníček
8 citations
After a hiatus of several decades, there has been a resurgence of studies into the therapeutic potential of serotonergic psychedelics. When administered in controlled settings, they have been reported to induce a wide variety of long-lasting positive psychological changes. However, the mechanisms by which psychedelics impart these long-lasting benefits remain poorly understood. Here, we...
Adaptive Behavior
April 1, 2016
Paulo De Jesus
32 citations
Autopoietic enactivism (AE) is a relatively young but increasingly influential approach within embodied cognitive science, which aims to offer a viable alternative framework to mainstream cognitivism. Similarly, in biology, the nascent field of biosemiotics has steadily been developing an increasingly influential alternative framework to mainstream biology. Despite sharing common objectives and...
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2014
Victor Loughlin
7 citations
REC or radical enactive (or embodied) cognition involves the claim that certain forms of mentality do not involve informational content and are instead to be equated with temporally and spatially extended physical interactions between an agent and the environment. REC also claims however that other forms of mentality do involve informational content and are scaffolded by socially and...
Adaptive Behavior
June 1, 2013
David Silverman
7 citations
O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must...