Enactive cognition Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Behavioural Science
- by Miriam Kyselo
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- Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Enactivism, Cognitive Sciences

A linguagem não precisa ser vista como um problema para enativistas radicais. A objeção do escopo usualmente apresentada para criticar explicações enativistas só representa um problema, se tivermos uma visão referencialista e representacionalista da natureza da linguagem. Apresentamos uma hipótese nor- mativa para a grande questão do problema difícil do conteúdo, a saber, a respeito de como práticas linguísti- cas se desenvolvem de mentes sem conteúdo. Nós portamos conteúdo representacional quando dominamos relações inferenciais e dominamos relações inferenciais quando dominamos relações normativas, especial- mente quando somos introduzidos em quadros de autorizações e proibições. Inspirados no anti- intelectualismo do segundo Wittgenstein e no inferencialismo de Brandom, apresentamos a hipótese que a linguagem emerge da ação inferencialmente articulada a partir de elementos normativos e não da manipulação em estados mentais internos de conteúdos fixados pela referência a coisas externas.

- by Marcos Silva and +1
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- Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Naturalism

Evolutionarily and ontogenetically, cognition primarily comes from interactions that are to be understood as epistemic actions of a situated-embodied observer. Only gradually do cognitive simulations (as mental rehearsals) and abstract reflections become possible. The beginning, however, is formed by processes of enactive cognition. These actions already control affective feedback, which can be interpreted as the simplest case of an aesthetic experiences (e.g. when playing or dancing without music). Efficiency (the economy of biological resources) and effectiveness (the possible prediction of action effects) are positively reinforced. Analogously, if the sign is negative, this leads to negative aesthetic experiences. In terms of embodied cognition, these perceptual judgements occur in diverse granularities and massively in parallel: Aesthetic experience is primarily not a judgement about an external object, but about the quality of the cognitive modelling processes themselves as embodied cognition (forward modelling and inverse modelling as the basis for anticipation/forecasting): Aesthetic experience becomes recognisable as an evolutionary learning amplifier that can control conscious as well as unconscious processes through affective feedback.

- by Klaus Schwarzfischer
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- Cognitive Science, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Embodied Cognition

Solution Focused (SF) practitioners have traditionally been encouraged to be suspicious of explanations. While this is completely justifiable in terms of explanations of clients' circumstances, it is less useful when it comes to our own work and how we discuss it with others. This chapter presents an innovative proposal that our work can be explained as 'stretching the world of the client'. Recent moves towards seeing SF in terms of building descriptions (rather than actions) clearly support this stance, which also fits well with the latest work on 'SFBT 2.0'. Taking an enactive view of the client's world as an Umwelt, the combination of individual and all their interaction possibilities, helps us to see long-standing aspects of SF work in new ways. This position offers new and exploitable possibilities for practice development and research.

"In this paper we attempt to advance the enactive discourse on perception by highlighting the role of bodily affects as prenoetic constraints on perceptual experience. Enactivists argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies (as in Noë 2004) are important contributions to the enactive account. Yet this is an incomplete story since sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. Before directly addressing the issue of affect in perception, we explain our peculiar, low-level conception of affect as a form of world-involving intentionality that modulates (minimally) bodily behavior without necessarily possessing informational value of any kind. We then address the deficiency concerning affect in enactive accounts of perception by examining some exemplary forms of bodily affect that constrain perception. We show that bodily affect significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our contact with the world in our perceptually operative attentive outlook, in a kind of perceptual interest or investment, and in social perception."

- by Matt Bower and +1
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- Emotion, Philosophy of Mind, Embodied Cognition, Phenomenology
- by Deirdre Barrett
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- Creative Writing, Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, Social Theory

Redactioneel
Onze focusauteur Fred Keijzer schrijft: ‘Achter de klaarblijkelijke vanzelfsprekendheid dat
dieren, en daarmee mensen, de beschikking hebben over complexe zintuigen, hersenen en
effectoren, en daarmee als actor kunnen functioneren in onze alledaagse wereld, schuilt een
hele wereld die juist niet vanzelfsprekend is.’
Wat voor wereld kan Keijzer bedoelen? We weten toch inmiddels wel dat ons brein
een door natuurlijke selectie en leerprocessen gevormd en geprogrammeerd
informatieverwerkend systeem is dat ons in staat stelt tot adaptief gedrag? En beginnen we dat
systeem niet al aardig in kaart te brengen, al valt er ongetwijfeld nog veel te ontdekken? Wat
kan hier, na zo’n halve eeuw cognitiewetenschap en de recentere zegetocht van de
neurowetenschappen, nog aan ‘niet vanzelfsprekends’ achter schuilen?
Maar we zouden weleens op een verkeerde straathoek naar de verkeerde portemonnee
aan het zoeken kunnen zijn, terwijl we intussen geen flauw benul hebben van de processen die
werkelijk aan de basis van onze mentale vermogens liggen. Binnen de cognitieve
neurowetenschap wordt bijvoorbeeld aangenomen dat cognitie zich in het brein afspeelt, en
dat wat dat brein doet primair informatieverwerking is. Maar stel nu eens dat deze aannamen
niet kloppen?
Onze focusauteur betoogt hier dat we, willen we ooit echt iets over actorschap, mind
of intelligentie leren, ons denken over cognitie over een geheel andere boeg moeten gooien.
Ten eerste, zegt hij, ligt cognitie wel aan de basis van mind, maar moeten we ons bij het
bestuderen ervan niet laten leiden door onze nogal feilbare intuïties over precies die mind. Ten
tweede is cognitie volgens hem niet primair informatieverwerking door een brein – we weten
überhaupt niet zo goed wat een brein allemaal wel en niet doet –, maar eerder ‘de manier
waarop levende organismen hun interacties met de omgeving organiseren.’ Hij noemt dat
cobolisme. Dat moeten we eerst bestuderen, om te beginnen bij planten en microben, om pas
in een later stadium iets zinnigs te kunnen zeggen over de intelligentie van onze eigen soort.
Maar dan belanden we in een vreemde en grillige wereld, waar onze vertrouwde
computationele modellen van cognitie niet veel waard zijn: inderdaad een ‘hele wereld die
juist niet vanzelfsprekend is’.
Onze focusauteur gaat in discussie met maar liefst acht commentatoren. Daarbij heeft
dit nummer een primeur: voor de eerste maal publiceren we een Engelstalige tekst, iets wat
we – onder bepaalde voorwaarden – vaker willen gaan doen.
Wim de Muijnck

- by Corijn van Mazijk and +6
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- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Biology
- by Richard Menary
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- Cognitive Science, Neuropsychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution
- by Julia Jansen
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- Philosophy of Mind, Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Phenomenology

We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our embodied experiences of space. It is an abstraction, involving a de-temporalization of space that falsifies our experience. From the phenomenological-enactivist perspective, space is not already there, neutrally constituted in its objective extension; rather, it is enacted, put in place relative to action affordances that are both corporeal and intercorporeal. Moreover, these action affordances are permeated by an intrinsic temporality, so that the experience of space is fully temporal because it is fully embodied. Space, as the experienced phenomenon of a delimited embodied enact-ment, is also hermeneutically situated so that meaning emerges for the embodied agent just because of its dynamical relations to a set of physical and social affordances. Bergson (1988) famously argued against the spatialization of time (durée). Spatialization should be considered a falsification since it pictures succession and durée as a simultaneous or instantaneous or durationless totality. On this view, the assumed contrast between space and time is just this: that space is there (present) all at once, and time is not. We pursue an inversion of Bergson's argument in this chapter, namely that this understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, the objective product of a geometrization, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our

- by Sergio F Martínez Muñoz and +1
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- Enactive cognition
- by Deirdre Barrett
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- Creative Writing, Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology

This chapter offers a critical review of the scientific research on choking effect. Elaborating on Baumeister’s model, the chapter describes various levels and forms of self-consciousness (perceptual, emotional, motivational, psychological), and explores how they causally link to the disruption of sensorimotor skills in expert athletes. We propose to construe choking from the theoretical perspective of embodied cognition theory, as this approach can effectively account for all the particular ways in which self-consciousness influences how the performer perceives and handles pressure.
The first part of the chapter reviews the experiments and the models suggesting that choking is engendered by perceptual and motoric self-consciousness (i.e., the condition in which the athlete over-scrutinizes certain aspects of her/his own actions, explicitly controlling her/his movement in the attempt to improve the performance output). The second part explores a different aspect of self-consciousness, linked to how the psychological, motivational, and emotional backdrop of the athlete’s experience under pressure influences self-presentation and self-esteem – an influence that can negatively affect performance through the mediation of disruptive personal narratives and social constructions of identity.

- by Massimiliano L Cappuccio and +1
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- Development Studies, Anxiety Disorders, Expertise, Performance Studies

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only.

- by Hanne De Jaegher and +1
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- Embodied Cognition, Social Cognition, Social Interaction, Embodiment

We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding (associated with internal Bayesian models and prediction error minimization), predictive processing (associated with radical con-nectionism and 'simple' embodiment) and predictive engagement (associated with enactivist approaches to cognition). We examine the concept of active inference under each model and then ask how this concept informs discussions of social cognition. In this context we consider Frith and Friston's proposal for a neural hermeneutics, and we explore the alternative model of enactivist hermeneutics.

- by Shaun Gallagher
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- Enactivism, Predictive coding, Enactive cognition, Free Energy

Digitization of large numbers of codices has opened new research potential for manuscript versions of medieval literature. At the same time, advances in philosophy of mind, evolutionary anthropology, and ecological cognition offer tools that promise to expand our understanding of the manuscript matrix in shaping the works they represent. The manuscript page, in short, has been recognized as a dynamic space of cognition, and thereby liberated from the false analogy that likened it to the (passive) printed page. The codex folio may now be appreciated as a relational domain, a space of production where the object itself partners with human agents to produce a unique version of the literary artifact. This article explores key examples of new cognitive theories to demonstrate innovative research protocols using digitized manuscripts.

Defining the scope of sport psychology requires an updated understanding of the relationship between “body” and “mind” within the framework of cognitive science.
Embodied cognition theory offers a new approach to this relationship, one that rejects the assumptions of classical cognitivism and emphasizes the idea that mental functions are shaped by the material and temporal details of their bodily implementation. This theory resonates deeply with influential doctrines in developmental psychology and ecological psychology that paved the way to the foundation of sport psychology. The strong theoretical link between ecological approach and embodied mind theory is testified by the preeminence of Gibson’s notion of affordance in many of the chapters included in this collection. Sport psychology research has always dwelled on the themes, the notions, and the models of embodied cognition theory. Embodied cognition, in turn, has often found the most striking confirmations of its theoretical claims in the psychological accounts of sport performance and athletic skill. Due to the communal theoretical root of these two disciplines, an explicit integration of their respective philosophies would allow them to share a mutually beneficial experience of scientific investigation and critical reflection while affirming their irreducible specificity and their distinctive backgrounds.

- by Massimiliano L Cappuccio and +1
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- Martin Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Neurophenomenology, Theatre of the Absurd
- by Elizaveta Solomonova
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- Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Neurophenomenology, Dreams

Mind sciences have undergone a decidedly "embodied" or "enactive" turn in the past two decades. In its original conception, put forward by Varela et al., this radical shift of perspective was depicted as a continuation of a research program founded by Merleau-Ponty, and was said to encompass two levels. On a theoretical level it consisted of a move away from the cerebrocentric, information-processing, and representational models of mind and cognition towards the corporeal, enactive, and world-involving models. On a (meta)epistemological and (meta)methodological level it argued for the need to expand the methodological array of mind sciences to include the disciplined study of lived experience, and it laid the foundations for a fruitful exchange between scientific and phenomenological investigations. However, the progressive popularization of the enactive-embodied narrative has made us witness the narrowing of its far-reaching scope, whereby changes on the theoretical level are being extricated from their broader philosophical framework and wedded to more traditional epistemologies and methodologies. In this paper I try to shed some critical light on some of these developments, focusing particularly on two neglected themes of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology that are highly relevant for contemporary enactive/embodied approaches: the unsurpasability of lived experience (cf. 'behaviorist fork') and the need to radically rethink the nature and dynamics of our reflective inquiries (cf. 'radical reflection').

- by Sebastjan Vörös
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- Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This is a survey of some of the dominant ideas about 'the body' in the phenomenological literature. To appear in : D. De Santis, B. Hopkins, and C. Majolino (Eds.): Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy... more

- by Maxime Doyon and +1
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- Philosophy of Mind, Feminist Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Embodied Cognition

Gustav Fechner, the German experimental psychologist, coined the term psychophysics in 1860, publishing the first mathematical equation to model human consciousness. Fechner assumed that any future approaches to consciousness would include mathematical and physical underpinnings. In 1995, the cognitive scientist and philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase "the hard problem" as being that of connecting consciousness with some physical substrate. According to Chalmers, "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery." As Chalmers points out, unfortunately, the modern scientific community has not yet produced a model of consciousness supported by mathematics and physics, thus no progress in Fecher's "psychophysics."
However there is growing interest among the scientific community in string theory, the only branch of mathematical geometry that has successfully explained recent discoveries in high energy particle physics. The mathematical proof of string theory requires the existence of a ten dimensional universe. But in trying to map consciousness, science continues to limit its data search within time and the three spatial dimensions, ignoring six of string theory's ten dimensions Perhaps because mainstream science tacitly limits itself to four of the ten dimensions, progress has come to a dead end. Accordingly, the most widely accepted theory among neurophysiologists is that consciousness is somehow a "byproduct" of the electrical sparking of neurons, an accidental epiphenomenon of the activities of nerve-filled wet meat.
This paper considers data beyond the four dimensional constraints of the scientific establishment. It is my contention that many recorded accounts of philosophers, mystics, and shamans can and should be considered as data. My thesis is that these accounts express experience and observation within one or more of the additional dimensions predicted by string theory. Any advance in understanding consciousness must take into account not only the language and domains of mathematics, particle physics, and neurobiology, but also the experiential domains of philosophers and mystics. It is in regarding data from these multiple domains of inquiry that a new model of consciousness will emerge. In this paper I hypothesize a psychophysics of consciousness, woven of strands from mathematics, mysticism, and physics, as well as contemplative participatory practice, to address and solve "the hard problem."

- by Shelli Joye
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- Comparative Religion, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Psychophysics

This article surveys and synthesizes dynamic systems models of development from biology, neuroscience, and psychology in order to propose an integrated account of growth, learning, and behavior. Key to this account is the concept of self-differentiation or symmetry-breaking. I argue that development can be understood as a cascade of symmetry-breaking events brought about by the ongoing interactions of multiple, nested, nonlinear dynamic systems whose self-organizing behaviors gradually alter their own anatomical conditions.

- by Noah Moss Brender
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- Genetics, Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Science

This qualitative study explores inner and outer experience in the context of dramatic arts, and specifically in actor education. The author defines experience as the richness of now. It is everything that we bring to each moment, and everything that each moment brings to us. The dy- namic space between inner and outer experience is found to be the place where thinking and feel- ing create our sense of be-ing. Movement between inner and outer helps determine the success of a dramatic experience. Literature from the disciplines of cognitive studies, dramatic arts, educa- tion, philosophy, psychology, and neurophysiology is examined alongside interviews with dra- matic arts teacher-practitioners. These findings are considered in light of the author’s own expe- riences as a dramatic arts student, teacher, and participant. A conceptual model of cognition as an active and embodied phenomenon emerges. Building on models of “embodied cognition” (Lakoff and Johnson) and “enactive cognition” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch), the author con- ceives of human thinking and being as “enacting cognition”. Enacting cognition is the dynamic synthesis of objective knowledge and personal understanding. It is the experience of be-ing.

- by Amy Cadman
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- Drama In Education, Embodied Cognition, Drama, Experiential Learning (Active Learning)

The problem of intrinsic teleology is that of generating a scientific explanation of purposive (goal-directed) behavior in nature. It is far from clear, however, how purposive behavior could possibly arise in a purely causal universe. The popular approach within the biological and cognitive sciences is reductive in that it explains purposiveness in non-purposive terms. This thesis finds the reductive approach unsatisfying and offers a philosophical argument for a non-reductive alternative, delivered across six chapters. Chapter I introduces the problem of teleology and argues that the way in which the problem ought to be addressed is philosophically. Chapter II offers additional insight into the nature of the problem by situating it in a discussion of its historical context: it traces the beginnings of the reduction of teleology in the writings of René Descartes and locates the problem of teleology in its modern framing in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Chapter III explicates and critiques neo-Darwinism and cognitivism—two modern inheritors of Kantian philosophy—which act to jointly ground the reductive approach to teleology. Upon clearing the way for a non-reductive alternative, Chapter IV introduces the “enactive approach” to cognitive science and argues that it is able to leverage a non-reductive position with respect to teleology. Accordingly, Chapter V constitutes the theory-building element of this thesis and shows how exactly enactivism can act to leverage such a non-reductive position. Finally, Chapter VI summarizes the findings of this thesis and discusses some general applications for future research in cognitive science and psychopathology.

- by Garri Hovhannisyan
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

Preliminary version of a manuscript destined for the SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology (new 2023 version)

- by Erik Myin and +1
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- Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Ecological Psychology

From his earliest work forward, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop a new ontology of nature that would avoid the antinomies of realism and idealism by showing that nature has its own endogenous sense which is prior to reflection. The key to this new ontology was the concept of form, which he appropriated from Gestalt psychology. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to give a positive characterization of the phenomenon of form which would clarify its ontological status. Evan Thompson has recently taken up Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach to cognitive science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic systems theory and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However, Thompson does not quite succeed in resolving the ambiguities in Merleau-Ponty’s account of form. This article builds on an indication from Thompson in order to propose a new account of form as asymmetry, and of the genesis of form in nature as symmetry-breaking. These concepts help us to escape the antinomies of Modern thought by showing how nature is the autoproduction of a sense which can only be known by an embodied perceiver.

- by Noah Moss Brender
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- Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Perception

Underlying the recent focus on embodied and interactive aspects of social understanding are several intuitions about what roles the body, interaction processes, and interpersonal experience play. In this paper, we introduce a systematic, hands-on method for investigating the experience of interacting and its role in intersubjectivity. Special about this method is that it starts from the idea that researchers of social understanding are themselves one of the best tools for their own investigations. The method provides ways for researchers to calibrate and to trust themselves as sophisticated instruments to help generate novel insights into human interactive experience. We present the basics of the method, and two empirical studies. The first is a video-study on autism, which shows greater refinement in the way people with autism embody their social interactions than previously thought. The second is a study of thinking in live interactions, which provides insight into the common feeling that too much thinking can hamper interaction, and into how this kind of interactional awkwardness might be unblocked.

- by Hanne De Jaegher and +1
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- Research Methodology, Autism, Qualitative methodology, Autism Spectrum Disorders

> Context • The scientific landscape of cognitive science is today influenced, as are other areas of science, by the open science movement, which is seen, for instance, in the recently launched Open MIND project. > Problem • More than 25 years ago Varela introduced the idea of opening up cognitive science. He called for a radical transformation of values , training and ways to conduct cognitive science. Yet, his radical proposal has been neglected in the discussions in cognitive science. > Method • I describe Varela's proposal by revisiting his philosophical arguments, his embodied and enactive view of cognition, and the methods he proposed as an alternative, namely the neurophenomenological and the second-person method. > Results • I show how cognitive scientists neglect Varela's proposal, because as scientists we are part of a scientific tradition and community that has not developed a research practice that enables us to integrate his proposal. I discuss different attempts to integrate the proposal into the research practice of cognitive science using the phenomenological interview, and argue for an even more radical approach. > Implications • If we, as cogni-tive scientists, do not develop " how " we do cognitive science and change the scientific community we are embedded in, we will not be able to open up cognitive science and fully address the experiential, embodied and enactive aspects of cognition. Varela's radical proposal for how to do so is therefore as important today as ever. > Key words • Cognitive science, embodying the mind, enaction, phenomenological interview, intersubjective validation.

- by Kristian Martiny
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- Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Science, Embodied Cognition, Embodiment
- by Luisa Damiano
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- Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Enaction

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning (and while explaining them, they often imagine computers at work). But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged-or even engaging-epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren's (2002) idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower's being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other.

- by Hanne De Jaegher
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- Cognitive Science, Epistemology, Dementia, Cognition

The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transition from subpersonal computations to personal experience. In this paper we suggest an alternative direction towards explaining the sense of agency by braiding three theoretical strands: a world-involving, dynamical interpretation of the sensorimotor approach, an enactive description of sensorimotor agency as contrasted with organic agency in general, and a dynamical theory of equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes. On this new account, the sense of oneself as the author of one’s own actions corresponds to what we experience during the ongoing adventure of establishing, losing, and re-establishing meaningful interactions with the world. The meaningful relation between agent and world is given by the precarious constitution of sensorimotor agency as a self-asserting network of schemes and dispositions. Acts are owned as they adaptively assert the constitution of the agent. Thus, awareness for different aspects of agency experience, such as the initiation of action, the effort exerted in controlling it, or the achievement of the desired effect, can be accounted for by processes involved in maintaining the sensorimotor organization that enables these interactions with the world. We discuss these processes in detail from a non-representational, dynamical perspective and show how they cohere with the personal experience of agency.

- by Thomas Buhrmann and +1
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- Philosophy of Agency, Embodiment, Phenomenology, Enactivism

Storytelling has successfully been used in language teaching at all levels of proficiency. This paper commences with suggestions of the kinds of tales that can be employed in the classroom, story selection criteria, practical tips, techniques as well as other recommendations illustrated with concrete tried and tested examples, and the numerous advantages of such activities.
Subsequently we consider the dualistic Cartesian approach that has characterised much of even twentieth-century thought: in this ‘traditional’ view, going back to Descartes, cognition has been seen as manipulation of symbolic, mental representations, with the brain conceived of as an input-output processor running abstract, generalised computational programs which enable us to process incoming data into a perception and interpretation of the outside world. Language, too, has for a long time been viewed as a system operating largely independently from the body (articulatory-perceptual organs notwithstanding).
A rich and diverse inventory of heterogeneous evidence against such a view is finally presented, addressing the issue of the link between cognition, language, body, and environment. The paper ends with implications for language instruction that enhances acquisition and retention thanks to storytelling which invites learner to actively use their body in the process, or at least observe the teacher doing so, thus activating their mirror neurons.

- by Michał B. Paradowski
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- Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Action, Gesture Studies, Gesture

Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation , relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author's findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.

- by Mark Reybrouck
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- Embodied Cognition, Extended Cognition, Enactive cognition, Musical Sense-Making
- by Ezequiel Di Paolo
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- Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Enactivism

This paper addresses the issue of “being together,” and more specifically the issue of “being together in time.” We provide with an integrative framework that is inspired by phenomenology, the enactive approach and dynamical systems theories. To do so, we first define embodiment as a living and lived phenomenon that emerges from agent- world coupling. We then show that embodiment is essentially dynamical and therefore we describe experiential, behavioral and brain dynamics. Both lived temporality and the temporality of the living appear to be complex, multiscale phenomena. Next we discuss embodied dynamics in the context of interpersonal interactions, and briefly review the empirical literature on between-persons temporal coordination. Overall, we propose that being together in time emerges from the relational dynamics of embodied interactions and their flexible co-regulation.

This article ventures to explore the conceptual space where humanistic psychology and enactive cognitive science meet so as to lay out the practical and philosophical foundations for a "humanistic cognitive science"—an emerging interdisciplinary program that augments the insights of enactivism with those of humanistic psychology in order to further ground and enrich the latter’s overall explanatory potential. The structure of this article is organized into 4 sections. In the first section, I explicate the utility of and need for a humanistic cognitive science by proposing 5 arguments. In the second section, I provide a historical-philosophical overview of the emerging confluence of humanism and cognitive science and trace it to the rise of the enactive approach within embodied cognitive science. In the third section, I review the centrality of the problem of normativity to psychological science and identify it as an adequate point of entry for humanistic cognitive science; for circumventing this problem requires direct theoretical contact with the current enactive literature on the very notion of normativity. In the fourth section, I synthesize such a criterion and argue that it meets the minimal requirements for a naturalistic theory of normativity in psychology. Before concluding, I highlight some of the key implications of this article for humanistic psychology and psychopathology.

- by Garri Hovhannisyan
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- Cognitive Science, Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Embodied Mind and Cognition

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl's phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called 'immanent association'.

- by Corijn van Mazijk
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- Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science

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.

- by Nara M Figueiredo and +1
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- Evolution, Social construction, Enactivism, Natural Drift

Remembering in everyday life is deeply embedded in complex, circumstance-dependent webs of significance and social practice. This paper compares a 'distributed cognitive ecologies' framework for studying remembering as public practice with Wittgenstein’s remarks on remembering, especially as interpreted in a prominent recent tradition of 'radical' Wittgensteinian enactivism. I argue that even in subtle recent reinterpretations of Wittgenstein, the kinds of engagement with science on show are too heavily weighted towards a critical mode. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy offers rich resources for live topics and debates of intense cross-disciplinary interest. But this has been obscured by the dominance of polemic in the field, leading in some quarters to unfortunate indifference to and ignorance of Wittgenstein. I argue for an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on memory and remembering which supports a strongly integrative, cooperative version of engagement between philosophy and the sciences. Philosophy and the sciences of memory – the social sciences as well as the cognitive sciences – can operate together in complementary projects within common frameworks. I focus on 'radical' forms of Wittgensteinian enactivism because much of what these philosophers say about remembering is interesting and reasonable. Where they go astray is partly in their in their claims about what psychologists and cognitive scientists do and believe, and partly in their choice of criticisms, or their sense of which issues matter most. I argue that the issues about mental representation and content on which these enactivists focus are quite distinct from the issues about individualism which lie at the heart of the major revisionary movements in contemporary cognitive theory in which both enactivism and the distributed cognitive ecologies framework have arisen. After going back to work through the key critical themes of Wittgenstein’s remarks on memory, I then survey the recent history and contemporary landscape of the sciences of memory. Here, in clearing the ground for a direct evaluation of Wittgensteinian enactivism and the distributed cognitive ecologies framework, I set both against truly opposing views in classical cognitivism and reductionist neuroscience, but I complicate the enactivists’ critical assessment of the broader psychology and cognitive science of memory. Both because they focus so exclusively on problems about representation, and because they mischaracterize some of the ‘mainstream’ views under attack, Wittgensteinian enactivists maintain an unnecessarily divisive attitude towards the sciences of memory in general, and as a result tend to overemphasise the revolutionary novelty of their critiques. I argue instead that on many key theoretical points, both Wittgensteinian and enactivist accounts of memory are compatible with large swathes of mainstream work in philosophy and cognitive science. But once we focus more productively on questions about individualism rather than exclusively on problems of content, Wittgensteinian themes can indeed usefully redirect, temper, or illumine certain residual and significant challenges in the interdisciplinary study of memory. As yet, though, as I argue in the concluding section, Wittgensteinian enactivists still set unnecessary limits to constructive theory-development.

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’ of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

- by Bert Timmermans
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- Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Language and Social Interaction, Autism

This article proposes the convergence between enactivism, an anthropological view of social life, and a philosophy of ethic of care. The main conceptual proposal is the extension of the notion of concern, present in the enactive philosophy, into the domain of social participation. The proposal introduces the notion that care in social life corresponds to a richer version of the basic living concern of the organism. In the enactive philosophy of the organism, concern appears as a link between the dynamical precariousness of the living system and the emerging properties of lived experience. Social participation , informed by an anthropology of social practice, is characterised as a multi-scale process of construction and maintenance of group and multi-individual identities. This article presents a caring practice perspective in order to capture the richness of life's concern in social life. In this way, it stretches the life and mind continuity towards social dynamics. The construction and maintenance of group and individual identities in social life is a process that requires a form of concern that is best defined as care. The proposal characterises caring practices as both explicitly ethical and implicitly ecologically emerging. Finally, this article points towards an envisioned enactive anthropology of caring that unpacks the dynamics and phenomenology of social life.

- by Juan M Loaiza
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- Feminist Theory, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Autonomy, Enactivism