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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
Cognitivism, a framework strongly shaped by developments in computer and communication sciences, has dominated the study of cognition since the 1960s. From the 1990s onward, however, alternative frameworks have gained prominence. Among these, anti-cognitivism designates approaches that deliberately reject cognitivist assumptions, with some examples found in Radical Embodied Cognition, Radical...
In A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, Walter Veit sets out a Darwinian framework for understanding consciousness. He distinguishes various dimensions of consciousness, explores their distribution in different species, and traces their roots to an ancient system of hedonic valence, which evolved to solve complex problems of action selection in early animals. This approach...
In this article, I demonstrate the value of the pathological complexity thesis for comparative consciousness research. I discuss how Ristau’s piping plover research illuminates links between life-history complexity and intentionality. How Sinha’s bonnet macaque studies demonstrate how social drivers of pathological complexity predict self-awareness and mindreading capacities. And how Ross’s...
In this article, I defend and expand my evolutionary account of consciousness developed in A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness against four critical replies. I respond to de Weerd’s challenge to the evolutionary bottom-up approach, clarifying what it entails. I address Sachs’s discussion of autopoiesis and enactivism, distinguishing my naturalistic framework from these...
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...
What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness , I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even...
This essay functions as the introduction to a two-part special issue on Walter Veit’s recent monograph A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness published with Routledge in 2023. Veit introduces the purpose of this special issue and offers a summary of the first batch of commentaries.
Veit (2023) provides a framework for modelling and empirically investigating varieties of consciousness as a Darwinian phenomenon, based on abduction from life histories of animals. The alleged ‘hard problem’ is exposed as an artefact of ignoring mechanisms by which increasingly complex varieties of consciousness evolved under selection pressure over evolutionary time. I illustrate Veit’s...
In his book “A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness,” Walter Veit attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for the science of animal consciousness, especially focusing on hedonic evaluation. While he highlights an important aspect of phenomenal consciousness, several conceptual issues warrant further examination. The first one is the role of evaluation. Veit argues that...
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...
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...
Cognitive dynamics are multimodal, and they need to integrate real-time feedback to be adaptive and appropriate. However, cognition research still relies on mostly unimodal paradigms using simple motor tasks in laboratory-based static situations. This paper addresses this limitation by presenting the Mobile Brain/Body Imaging approach based on the Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive...
Immersive learning environments in education provide a set of rich and diverse learning affordances (possibilities). Cognition in such environments can be considered as embodied, enacted, embedded, and extended (the 4Es of cognition). During such cognitive happenings, we assume and live as valid everything we experience. Yet in this enactive structural coupling between individuals and their...
Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological theories tend not to target intuitive causal engagement that is done in daily life. To fill this gap, we propose an Ecological-Enactive (E-E) affordance-based account of situated causal engagement, that is, causal judgments and perceptions. We develop this account to improve our understanding of...
The notion of atmosphere has taken prominence in contemporary architecture discourse, in which it is used mainly to denote the affective characteristic of inhabitable spaces. In this paper, we employ the ecological-enactive approach to cognition to explain how atmospheres are perceived and created. According to that approach, cognitive systems actively explore meaningful possibilities for...
Enactive approaches to cognitive science as well as contemporary accounts from neuroscience have argued that we need to reconceptualize the role of temporality and affectivity in minds. Far from being limited to special faculties, such as emotional mental states and timekeeping, these accounts argue that time and affect both constitute fundamental aspects of minds and cognition. If this is...
Adaptive BehaviorApril 4, 2023Samira Tavassoli, Morgan Montoya, Ken Ishihara1 citation
What gives a scientific framework a place among laypeople? Can cognitive science change human livelihood? How can cognitive science research extend beyond the bounds of its own field to change academia and society? These are precisely the kinds of questions the 2022 Workshop on “Challenges in 4E Cognition and the Opportunities They Present” sought to address. The workshop gathered an...
The Course-of-Experience Framework (CEF) represents a promising path forward for embodied and enactive approaches to cognitive science. It aims to provide a comprehensive explanation of representation-hungry activities by grounding cognition in practice. Practice is not merely something that we do as a means to an end, but is constitutive of cognition. Puzzlingly, however, the CEF begins to...
A recent opinion article suggested that the target article, “The holobiont mind: A bridge between 4E cognition and the microbiome”, wished to generate a “new theory of mind”. Furthermore, it contained ideas that were “unnecessary”, “not justified”, and “not innovative at all”. Furthermore the commentators consider that “the ideas of radical enactivism can properly accommodate this research”....