Excerpt: In principle, one might expect each of the papers in this section, “What is Cognition?,” to present some 4E answer to what cognition is. Perhaps this would be a definition of “cognition,” or a theory of what cognition is, or a conceptual framework that articulates what the concept of cognition is. Nevertheless, in the chapters in this section, as in the 4E literature more generally, the question of what cognition is does not come to the forefront. Moreover, even when the question is taken seriously, the answers do not seem to be worked out in much detail.

I outline five criteria for an enactive account of intersubjectivity. First, it should do justice to social interaction processes and to subjectivity in its experiential, bodily, existential, and historico-sociocultural complexity. Second, an integrative intersubjectivity framework should connect physiological, neural, interactional, linguistic, and societal aspects and levels of explanation. This requires concepts and methodologies that span several different disciplines. Third, it should encourage applications and dialogue with experts in other sectors, such as teachers and therapists. Fourth, it should recognize the values that underlie it, so it can serve critical awareness of how it influences and is influenced by societal institutions and norms. Finally, because its subject matter is the ways in which people understand and deal with each other, it should be prepared to deal with ethical questions and dimensions. Then, I investigate how the state of the art in enactive intersubjectivity research fares in the face of these criteria.

Key words: social interaction, subjectivity, experience, connection, interacting, autonomy, sense-making, participatory sense-making, social understanding, constitutive factor

Excerpt: E is the letter, if not the word, in todays sciences of the mind. E-approaches to the mind – those that focus on embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, and ecological aspects of mind – are now a staple and familiar feature of the cognitive science landscape. Many productive scientific research programs are trying to understand the significance of E-factors for the full range of cognitive phenomena, with new proposals about perceiving, imagining, remembering, decision-making, reasoning, and language appearing apace (Wilson and Foglia 2016). Some hold that these developments mark the arrival of a new paradigm for thinking about mind and cognition, one radically different from cognitive science as we know it (e.g., Thompson 2007; Chemero 2009; Di Paolo 2009; Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Others maintain that accommodating E-factors, while important, requires either only very modest twists or, at most, some crucial but still limited revisions to the framework of otherwise business-as-usual cognitive science (Goldman 2012, 2014; Gallese 2014; Clark 2008; Wheeler 2010). By conservative lights, radicals vastly exaggerate the theoretical significance of the so-called E-turn. Moderates hold that whatever changes are required will fall short of reconceiving cognition. Who is right? Are we, in fact, witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking? ||

Excerpt: 4E cognitive science is a broad church housing a number of theoretical perspectives that to varying degrees conflict with each other (Shapiro 2010). In this chapter I will argue that the debates within 4E cognitive science surrounding extended cognition boil down to competing ontological conceptions of cognitive processes. The embedded theory (henceforth EMT) and the family of extended theories of cognition (henceforth EXT) disagree about what it is for a state or process to count as cognitive. EMT holds that cognitive processes are deeply dependent on bodily interactions with the environment in ways that more traditionally minded cognitive scientists might find surprising. The strong dependence of some cognitive processes on bodily engagements with the world notwithstanding, EMT claims that cognitive processes are nevertheless wholly realized by systems and mechanisms located inside of the brain. Thus advocates of EMT continue to interpret the concept of cognition along more or less traditional lines (Adams and Aizawa 2008; Rupert 2009). That is to say, they think of cognitive processes as being constituted by computational, rule-based operations carried out on internal representational structures that carry information about the world.

EX: Although the concept of 4E cognition1 brings these different approaches together under one heading and conceives of them as coherently opposed to the internalist, brain-centered views of cognitivism, there are continuing disagreements about a variety of issues within and among these embodied approaches. Is cognition embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive? The issues that continue to be debated concern the very nature of embodiment, the precise way that brain, body, and environment are coupled or integrated in cognition, and how much we can generalize from the observation of embodiment in one type of cognitive performance to others. Furthermore, there are questions about the role of representations and what it means to say that cognition is “constituted” by bodily and environmental processes.

Excerpt: The topic of this Oxford handbook is “4E cognition”: cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. However, one important “E” is missing: an E for ecological. enactive, and extended. However, one important “E” is missing: an E for ecological. In this chapter we will sketch an ecologicalenactive approach to cognition that presents a framework for bringing together the embodied/ enactive program (Chemero 2009; Thompson 2007) with the ecological program originally developed by James Gibson, in which affordances are central (e.g., Gibson 1979). We call this framework the skilled intentionality framework.