Beyond Control: Finding the Purpose of Enactive Cognitive Science
Adaptive Behavior April 9, 2026 DOI: 10.1177/10597123261435796 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that purposiveness remains central to enactive cognitive science and that contemporary cognitive scientists implicitly rely on their own aims, which are essential for distinguishing relevance from irrelevance. Proposes that a thermodynamically-grounded account of purposive agency, informed by organicist critique, is needed rather than relying solely on dynamical formalisms. |
Abstract
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 problem, in attempting to uncover the true aims of a target system, contemporary cognitive scientists implicitly rely upon their own aims in informing the construction of experimental procedures, measurements, and models. Such aims are essential for making choices of relevance vs irrelevance or signal vs noise, by means of which essential principles are abstracted from a disorderly biological substrate. Pragmatism is all the rage – why should cognitive science buck the trend? Well, precisely because the targets of cognitive science are the very purposive agents upon which the pragmatist stance depends. The promise of enactive cognitive science is an account of this purposiveness – yet such a project cannot rely solely on dynamical formalisms that are inadequate to the task. Instead, it depends upon the organicist critique of these abstractions and proposal for a thermodynamically-grounded account of the purposive agency that underpins them.