The Greek word mētis (μῆτις) traditionally refers to a particular form of wily intelligence associated with the arts of deception (dolos) and the knowledge of tricks (kerdē), subterfuges, and traps. Mētis evokes innovative and ground-breaking solutions, based on the capability to understand, anticipate, and possibly violate the others’ expectations. Most importantly, mētis presupposes practical wisdom, or prudence (phrόnesis), a dispositional quality that underpins all the virtues that deserve to be cultivated by sportspersons and that is pivotal to perfect sportspersons’ moral (...) character. Not only is prudence required to apply mētis profitably for winning a game, but it is also indispensable to perform consistently with the game’s norms—cognizant of sport values. This analysis of mētis is key to illuminate the embodied dimension of tactical and moral reasoning in contemporary sport practice. In this paper, we first argue that the strategic effectiveness of mētis proves that not only sensorimotor control but also higher forms of intelligence, like strategic reasoning, are embodied and inform skilful performance; second, we argue that relying on mētis is necessary not only to interpret the rules of the game in one’s own favor but also to respect the shared values that these rules uphold in the sport practice. (shrink)

1 Context The idea for the current issue of Philosophia Scientiæ emerged from discussions which took place in the Manchester Ethnomethodology Reading Group. This reading group has its origins in Wes Sharrock’s weekly discussion groups, which have taken place in Manchester (UK) since the early 1970s. As the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the reading group moved online, facilitated by Phil Hutchinson and Alex Holder. Being an online reading group opened up participation to people b...

Our paper is concerned with theories of direct perception in ecological psychology that first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Ecological psychology continues to be influential among philosophers and cognitive scientists today who defend a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approach to the scientific study of cognition. Ecological psychologists have experimentally investigated how animals are able to directly perceive their surrounding environment and what it affords to them. We pursue questions about direct perception through a discussion of (...) the ecological psychologist’s concept of affordances. In recent years, psychologists and philosophers have begun to mark out two explanatory roles for the affordance concept. In one role, affordances are cast as belonging to a shared, publicly available environment, and existing independent of the experience of any perceiving and acting animal. In a second role, affordances are described in phenomenological terms, in relation to an experiencing animal that has its own peculiar needs, interests and personal history. Our aim in this paper is to argue for a single phenomenological or experiential understanding of the affordance concept. We make our argument, first of all, based on William James’ concept of pure experience developed in his later, radical empiricist writings. James thought of pure experience as having a field structure that is organized by the selective interest and needs of the perceiver. We will argue however that James did not emphasize sufficiently the social and intersubjective character of the field of experience. Drawing on the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, we will argue that psychological factors like individual needs and attention must be thought of as already confronted with a social reality. On the phenomenological reading of affordances we develop, direct perception of affordances is understood as taking place within an intersubjective world structured by human social and cultural life. (shrink)

I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mind-independent objects to which the subject is perceptually related, mediated by the subject's practical understanding of their sensorimotor relation to those properties. This position conjoins two existing strategies for explaining the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: accounts appealing to perceivers’ limited, non-inferential access to the details of their sensory relation to the environment, and the relationalist conception of phenomenal properties. Bringing these two positions together by emphasizing (...) their sensorimotor common ground allows each one to respond to damaging objections using the resources of the other. The resulting ‘sensorimotor relationalism’ about conscious vision provides a promising schema for explaining phenomenal properties of perceptual states, replacing ‘Hard’ questions with tractable ones about the perceptual relation and its sensorimotor underpinnings. (shrink)

The ecological approach to object pretend play, developed from the ecological perspective, suggests an action- and affordance based perspective to account for pretend object play. Theoretical, as well as empirical reasons, support the view that children in pretense incorporate objects into their play in a resourceful and functionally appropriate way based on the perception of affordances. Therefore, in pretense children are not distorting reality but rather, they are perceiving and acting upon action possibilities. In this paper, we argue for the (...) viability of an ecological theoretical framework to pretend object play which has been traditionally understood as a representational and metarepresentational ability. We discuss the origins and basic assumptions of the ecological approach to pretense. We layout details by presenting a qualitative analysis of a pretend play episode and discuss the results of an experimental study inspired by the ecological assumptions. We discuss pretend object play in the context of ecological work on tool use. We address the relationship between the enactive and the ecological approaches to pretend play, pointing out similarities as well as differences. We conclude that ecological and enactive approaches have shown that it is possible to challenge accepted interpretations and seek explanatory frameworks that could move the field in new directions. (shrink)

We propose a new conceptualization of pain by incorporating advancements made by phenomenologists and cognitive scientists. The biomedical understanding of pain is problematic as it inaccurately endorses a linear relationship between noxious stimuli and pain, and is often dualist or reductionist. From a Cartesian dualist perspective, pain occurs in an immaterial mind. From a reductionist perspective, pain is often considered to be “in the brain.” The biopsychosocial conceptualization of pain has been adopted to combat these problematic views. However, when considering (...) pain research advancements, paired with the work of phenomenologists’ and cognitive scientists’ advanced understanding of perception, the biopsychosocial model is inadequate in many ways. The boundaries between the biological, psychological, and social are artificial, and the model is often applied in a fragmented manner. The model has a limited theoretical foundation, resulting in the perpetuation of dualistic and reductionist beliefs. A new framework may serve to better understand and treat pain. In this paper, we conceptualize pain as a 5E process, arguing that it is: Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Emotive, and Extended. This perspective is applied using back pain as an exemplar and we explore potential clinical applications. With enactivism at the core of this approach, pain does not reside in a mysterious immaterial mind, nor is it an entity to be found in the blood, brain, or other bodily tissues. Instead, pain is a relational and emergent process of sense-making through a lived body that is inseparable from the world that we shape and that shapes us. (shrink)

Predictive processing theories are increasingly popular in philosophy of mind; such process theories often gain support from the Free Energy Principle —a normative principle for adaptive self-organized systems. Yet there is a current and much discussed debate about conflicting philosophical interpretations of FEP, e.g., representational versus non-representational. Here we argue that these different interpretations depend on implicit assumptions about what qualifies as representational. We deploy the Free Energy Principle instrumentally to distinguish four main notions of representation, which focus on organizational, (...) structural, content-related and functional aspects, respectively. The various ways that these different aspects matter in arriving at representational or non-representational interpretations of the Free Energy Principle are discussed. We also discuss how the Free Energy Principle may be seen as a unified view where terms that traditionally belong to different ontologies—e.g., notions of model and expectation versus notions of autopoiesis and synchronization—can be harmonized. However, rather than attempting to settle the representationalist versus non-representationalist debate and reveal something about what representations are simpliciter, this paper demonstrates how the Free Energy Principle may be used to reveal something about those partaking in the debate; namely, what our hidden assumptions about what representations are—assumptions that act as sometimes antithetical starting points in this persistent philosophical debate. (shrink)

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with (...) recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency. (shrink)

The term exaptation, describing the phenomenon that an existing trait or tool proves to be of new adaptive value in a new context, is flourishing in recent literature from cultural evolution and cognitive archaeology. Yet there also exists an older literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which studied more or less systematically the phenomenon of “change of function” in culture and tool use. Michel Foucault and Ludwig Noiré, who devoted themselves to the history of social institutions and material tools, (...) respectively, occupy an important place among them. This article offers a brief overview of this literature and attempts to show that it provided ideas that remain relevant to current approaches to cognitive archaeology, in particular regarding attempts to understand the impact of technological evolution on the human mind. (shrink)

It is common in the cognitive and computational sciences to regard virtual reality (VR) as composed of illusory experiences, given its immersive character. In this paper, we adopt an ecological-enactive perspective on cognition (Sect. 3) to evaluate the nature of VR and one’s engagement with it. Based on a post-cognitivist conception of illusion, we reject the commonly held assumption that virtual reality experiences (VREs) are illusory (Sect. 4). Our positive take on this issue is that VR devices, like other technological (...) devices, can be embodied during use, which is why they can be the source of experiences (Sect. 5). We then propose a new concept to interpret VREs, namely, _allusion_, which means that the subject acts _as if_ the virtual experiences are real (Sect. 6). This kind of engagement has a volitional aspect, which is evident in the onboarding of VR devices and which allows us to distinguish VREs from other experiences. We conclude that, even though we have experiences that afford certain interactions in VR, the strong continuity between cognitive and biological processes is not sustained therein. This characterizes a difference of kind—given the current state of technology—between VREs and fully fledged cognitive states, which nevertheless allows for constrained experimentation in cognitive science. (shrink)

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive (...) access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point. (shrink)

Recently the CJEU decision in the case of ‘Ewa Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Limited’ has raised the issue of the transcultural/trans-territorial signification of hate speech and hate crimes. Taking a cue from this decision and the related semiotic/legal implications, the paper proposes an analysis of the semio/pragmatic conditions for the production of performativity inherent in hate speech across different cultural universes of discourse. Given that web-based digital communication is global—at least, potentially—regardless of any spatial/political compartmentalization, it crosses different semio-cultural circuits. (...) This trans-spatiality implies transcultural crossings that can multiply and even transfigure the semantic implications of the original signifier and the related prognoses of ‘semantic effectiveness.’ Cultural boundaries therefore may function as a kind of ‘horizon of events’ for hate speech and, more inclusively, all linguistic acts and their legal signification/classification. The question then arises regarding whether and to what extent the performativity of hate speech is able to withstand the variation of cultural boundary conditions. Insofar as cultures are universes of experience, the issue to be investigated broadens, and ends up invoking the question of whether or not the production of performativity implicitly presupposes and tacitly epitomizes the semio-pragmatic implications/consequences (or, in Peircean terms, ‘bearings’) coextensive with cultural universes of experience. Were this the case, it would seem to call into question the very possibility of ‘making things only with words,’ or more explicitly, the alleged meaning of ‘linguistic acts.’. (shrink)

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

In this conceptual analysis contribution to the special issue on radical embodied cognition, we discuss how embodied cognition can exist with and without representations. We explore this concept through the lens of judgment and decision making in sports (JDMS). Embodied cognition has featured in many investigations of human behavior, but no single approach has emerged. Indeed, the very definitions of the concepts “embodiment” and “cognition” lack consensus, and consequently the degree of “radicalism” is not universally defined, either. In this paper (...) we address JDMS not from a rigid theoretical perspective, but from two embodied cognition approaches: one that assumes there is mediation between the athlete and the environment through mental representation, and another that assumes direct contact between the athlete and the environment and thus no need for mental representation. Importantly, our aim was not to arrive at a theoretical consensus or set up a competition between approaches, but rather to provide a legitimate scientific discussion about how to explain empirical results in JDMS from contrasting perspectives within embodied cognition. For this, we first outline the definitions and constructs of embodied cognition in JDMS. Second, we detail the theory underlying the mental representation and direct contact approaches. Third, we comment on two published research papers on JDMS, one selected by each of us: (1) Correia et al. (2012) and (2) Pizzera (2012). Fourth, following the interpretation of the empirical findings of these papers, we present a discussion on the commonalities and divergences of these two perspectives and the consequences of using one or the other approach in the study of JDMS. (shrink)

This paper considers some foundational concepts in ecological psychology and in enactivism., and traces their developments from their historical roots to current preoccupations. Important differences stem, we claim, from dissimilarities in how embodied experience has been understood by the ancestors, founders and followers of ecological psychology and enactivism, respectively. Rather than pointing to differences in domains of interest for the respective approaches, and restating possible divisions of labor between them in research in the cognitive and psychological sciences, we call for (...) a deeper analysis of the role of embodiment in agency that we also undertake. Awareness of the differences that exist in the respective frameworks and their consequences, we argue, may lead to overcoming some current divisions of labor and responsibility, and contribute to a more comprehensive and complementary way of dealing with a broader range of theoretical and practical concerns. While providing some examples of domains, such as social cognition and art reception, in which we can observe the relative usefulness and potential integration of the theoretical and methodological resources from the two approaches, we demonstrate that such deeper synergy is not only possible but also beginning to emerge. Such complementarity, as we envisage, conceives of ecological psychology that allows felt experience as a crucial dynamical element in the explanations and models that it produces, and of an enactive approach that takes into consideration the ubiquitous presence of rich directly perceived relations among variables arising from enactments in the social and physical world. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the intentionality at play in skilled performance is not only inherently normative but also inherently affective. We take a radically embodied approach to the mind in which we conceive of cognitive agents as sensorimotor systems moved to maintain their biological and sociocultural identity, whose perception is direct and occurs in terms of affordances. Within this framework, we define skilled performance as the enactment of action and perception patterns in which the agent is intentionally oriented (...) towards specific features in the environment. We propose that skillful intentionality is guided by normative constraints involving the material and social conditions of the agent but is ultimately determined by the intrinsic purpose of maintaining the agent’s identity, and skilled intentionality is inherently affective because it is a specific occurrence arising from a general sense of care to maintain one’s identity which is realized by orienting oneself towards the right aspects of the environment in the right way. Skilled performance thus requires agents to establish a normative and affective intentionality towards aspects of their material environment. We show that, since sociocultural practices shape human identities, sociocultural practices play a crucial role in shaping human intentionality of skilled performance both in their normative and affective dimensions. Maintaining a human identity, we argue, amounts to routinely carrying out activities that form a historical pattern which is shared with and recognized by others. (shrink)

Baggs and Chemero (2018) propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the “environment.” In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the “meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual.” The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat “the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species.” By making this (...) distinction, these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed by Di Paolo et al. (2017) and the skilled intentionality framework as developed by Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) and Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit). (shrink)

The phenomenology of atmospheres is recently gaining attention in debates on situated affectivity. Atmospheres are defined as holistic affective qualities of situations that integrate disparate affective forces into an identifiable and unitary gestalt. They point to a blurred, pathic, relational, and pre-individual form of experience which has been described in terms of ecological affordances. Despite its relevance in diverse areas of research such as architecture, phenomenological psychiatry and aesthetics, a thorough analysis of the phenomena of affective atmospheres from an enactive-ecological (...) perspective is missing in the literature. This article aims at clarifying how and to what extent affective atmospheres can be accommodated into ecological-enactive understandings of the environment in terms of affordances. To do so, I review four perspectives on ecological affordances – the gibsonian account, the relational account, affective affordances, and the Skill Intentionality Framework (SIF) – and contrast them with the ontological and epistemológical principles that ground the phenomenology of atmospheres. I argue that only the field perspective developed in SIF is compatible with the phenomenology of atmospheres. From this perspective, affective atmospheres can be understood as phenomenological counterparts of context sensitivity, that is, as the holistic and pathic background feelings that make certain affordances more salient than others. As a conclusion, the analysis in this article shows the potential of the phenomenology of atmospheres to enrich the ecological-enactive cognition framework. It also highlights the opportunity to construct a situated understanding of affectivity that is informed by phenomenological perspectives. (shrink)

There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. Psychology: the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution interface, as tactile sensations of the proximal interface are transformed into vision-like experience of a distal object. Biology: the “projection” that brings forth an animal’s Umwelt, as impressions on its (...) body’s sensory surfaces are reconfigured into perception of an external object. This similarity between the effects of scientific practice and interface-use on the one hand, and of sensorimotor interaction on the other, becomes intelligible once we accept that skillful engagement with instruments and interfaces constitutes a socio-material augmentation of our basic perceptual capacity. This enactive interpretation stands in contrast to anti-realism about science associated with constructivist interpretations of these three phenomena, which are motivated by viewing them as the internal mental construction of the experienced object. Instead, it favors a participatory realism: the sensorimotor basis of perceptual experience loops not only through our body, but also through the external world. This allows us to conceive of object experience in relational terms, i.e., as one or more subjects directly engaging with the world. Consequently, we can appreciate scientific observation in its full complexity: it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like tool-use and perceiving more generally—is irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864-1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist (...) terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research. (shrink)

Some philosophers search for the mark of the cognitive: a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions identifying all instances of cognition. They claim that the mark of the cognitive is needed to steer the development of cognitive science on the right path. Here, I argue that, at least at present, it cannot be provided. First (§2), I identify some of the factors motivating the search for a mark of the cognitive, each yielding a desideratum the mark is supposed (...) to satisfy (§2.1). I then (§2.2) highlight a number of tensions in the literature on the mark of the cognitive, suggesting they’re best resolved by distinguishing two distinct programs. The first program (§3) is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive capturing our everyday notion of cognition. I argue that such a program is bound to fail for a number of reasons: it is not clear whether such an everyday notion exists; and even if it existed, it would not be able to spell out individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for cognition; and even if it were able to spell them out, these conditions won’t satisfy the desiderata a mark of the cognitive should satisfy. The second program is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive spelling out a genuine scientific kind. But the current state of fragmentation of cognitive science, and the fact that it is splintered in a myriad of different research traditions, prevent us from identifying such a kind. And we have no reason to think that these various research traditions will converge, allowing us to identify a single mark. Or so, at least, I will argue in (§4). I then conclude the paper (§5) deflecting an intuitive objection, and exploring some of the consequences of the thesis I have defended. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

In recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper conceptualizes differences between acute and chronic pain, as well as the dynamic process of (...) pain chronification, in terms of changes in the field of affordances. This is, in terms of the possibilities for action perceived by subjects in pain. As such, we aim to do justice to the lived experience of patients as well as the dynamic role of behavioral learning, neural reorganization, and socio-cultural practices in the generation and maintenance of pain. Second, we aim to show in which manners such an enactive approach may contribute to a comprehensive understanding of pain that avoids conceptual and methodological issues of reductionist and fragmented approaches. It proves particularly beneficial as a heuristic in pain therapy addressing the heterogenous yet dynamically intertwined aspects that may contribute to pain and its chronification. (shrink)

This paper provides evidence for a radically enactive, embodied account of remembering. By looking closely at highly context-dependent instances of memorizing and recalling dance material, I aim at shedding light on the workings of memory. Challenging the view that cognition fundamentally entails contentful mental representation, the examples I discuss attest the existence of non-representational instances of memory, accommodating episodic memory. That being so, this paper also makes room for content-involving forms of remembering. As a result, it supports the duplex vision (...) of mentality advanced by the REC framework. Building on research on the enactive imagination, I suggest that contentless forms of remembering act below content-involving forms. In addition, contentless and contentful forms of remembering a movement are revealed as the product of culturally scaffolded engagements with others and the environment, in which direct perception and mirroring play a fundamental role. It is argued that many of the practices of remembering a movement are best explained as enactments or re-enactments of such direct ecological perceptions. In the process, the dance studio proves to be a paradigm of the extensive mind. This paper is also intended as an invitation to the REC framework to extend the family and explicitly embrace research on sociocultural practices as an equal partner, including dance studies. Given the fundamental role that sociocultural practices play in REC’s understanding of cognition, it is only natural that further radicalization goes along those lines. (shrink)

This article tests the waters concerning a possible integration of Gurwitsch’s theory of consciousness into 4E research. More specifically, it is suggested that radical embodied approaches can bene...

Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing. In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have considered the body as peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive science view this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature of the (...) dependence of cognition on the body is quite unexpected, and suggests new ways of conceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitive processing. Embodied cognitive science encompasses a loose-knit family of research programs in the cognitive sciences that often share a commitment to critiquing and even replacing traditional approaches to cognition and cognitive processing. Empirical research on embodied cognition has exploded in the past 10 years. As the bibliography for this article attests, the various bodies of work that will be discussed represent a serious alternative to the investigation of cognitive phenomena. Relatively recent work on the embodiment of cognition provides much food for thought for empirically-informed philosophers of mind. This is in part because of the rich range of phenomena that embodied cognitive science has studied. But it is also in part because those phenomena are often thought to challenge dominant views of the mind, such as the computational and representational theories of mind, at the heart of traditional cognitive science. And they have sometimes been taken to undermine standard positions in the philosophy of mind, such as the idea that the mind is identical to, or even realized in, the brain. (shrink)