What Is Enactivism?
Adaptive Behavior May 20, 2026 DOI: 10.1177/10597123261450094 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Embodied cognition Reciprocity cultural anthropology Experiential learning Natural archaeology Natural kind Philosophy of science Epistemology Cognitive science Term time |
| Key points | Argues that the enactive approach's commitments to life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding set it apart from other embodied cognition variants and make it distinctively timely and valuable. |
Abstract
‘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 ignores three central commitments of the enactive approach as originally set out in Varela, Thompson & Rosch’s The Embodied Mind. These commitments to life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding set the enactive approach apart from other variants of embodied cognition in science and philosophy, and do so in ways that make it distinctively timely and valuable.
Citations in the library
Cites 9
- Radicalizing Enactivism The MIT Press eBooks December 14, 2012
- Evolving Enactivism The MIT Press eBooks May 19, 2017
- Active inference, enactivism and the hermeneutics of social cognition. Synthese 2018
- Rethinking Nature: Phenomenology and a Non-reductionist Cognitive Science Australasian Philosophical Review April 3, 2018
- Putting down the revolt: Enactivism as a philosophy of nature. Frontiers in Psychology October 21, 2022
and 4 more in the library