In recent years, a growing number of thinkers have begun to challenge the long-held view that the mind is neurally realized. One strand of critique comes from work on extended cognition, a second comes from research on embodied cognition, and a third comes from enactivism. I argue that theorists who embrace the claim that the mind is fully embodied and enactive cannot consistently also embrace the extended mind thesis. This is because once one takes seriously the central tenets of enactivism, it becomes implausible to suppose that life, affectivity, and sense-making can extend. According to enactivism, the entities that enact a world of meaning are autonomous, embodied agents with a concerned point of view. Such agents are spatially situated, differentiated from the environment, and intentionally directed towards things that lie at a distance. While the extended mind thesis blurs the distinction between organism and environment, the central tenets of enactivism emphasize differentiations between the two. In addition, enactivism emphasizes that minded organisms are enduring subjects of action and experience, and thus it is implausible to suppose that they transform into a new form of life whenever they become intimately coupled to some new element in their environment. The proponent of enactivism and embodied cognition should acknowledge that life and affectivity are relational and environmentally embedded, but resist the further claim that these phenomena are extended.

Philosophical interest in situated cognition has been focused most intensely on the claim that human cognitive processes extend from the brain into the tools humans use. As we see it, this radical hypothesis is sustained by two kinds of mistakes, confusing coupling relations with constitutive relations and an inattention to the mark of the cognitive. Here we wish to draw attention to these mistakes and show just how pervasive they are. That is, for all that the radical philosophers have said, the mind is still in the head.

Psychopathology classification is at a conceptual crossroads. It is becoming increasingly accepted that the flaws of the DSM relate to its struggles to pick out “real” entities as opposed to clusters of symptoms. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) was formulated in response to this failure, and attempts to address the concerns confronting the DSM by shifting to a causal and continuous model of psychopathology. Noting key criticisms of neurocentricism and problems with conceptual validity leveled at the RDoC, we argue that they stem from its grounding in the metaphysical position of eliminative materialism, or at least material-reductionism. We propose that 3e cognition (viewing the mind as embodied, embedded, and enactive) offers a superior alternative to eliminative materialism. A 3e-informed framework of mental disorder is sketched out and its advantages as a basis for classifying and conceptualizing mental disorders are considered.

Key words: classification, embodiment, enactivism, psychopathology

This chapter proposes a radically enactive account of remembering that casts it as creative, dynamic, and wide-reaching. It paints a picture of remembering that no longer conceives of it as involving passive recollections – always occurring wholly and solely inside heads. Integrating empirical findings from various sources, the chapter puts pressure on familiar cognitivist visions of remembering. Pivotally, it is argued that we achieve a stronger and more elegant account of remembering by abandoning the widely held assumption that it is rooted in the retrieval of stored information or content in order to represent past events. We demonstrate how a radically enactive account of the roots of remembering can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature while, at same time, accommodating experientially rich forms of episodic memory.

This chapter presents two rival paradigms in immunology, a field where the theme “Sense and Non-sense” has particular relevance. According to classical immunology, the immune system can potentially perceive everything; and it triggers the destruction of everything that it actually perceives. Consequently, in order to avoid self-destruction, this sort of immune system perceives everything except its own body. The alternative paradigm is based on autopoiesis: What we see – Is not what we see But what we are. This chapter presents computer simulations based on a mathematical model of an idiotypic network, which involves morphogenesis in shape-space. The choice between these two paradigms involves value-judgments; this reflexively poses the theme of sense-making at a higher-level of abstraction.

Whether a person is pretending, or not, is a function of their beliefs and intentions. This poses a challenge to 4E accounts of pretense, which typically seek to exclude such cognitive states from their explanations of psychological phenomena. Resulting tensions are explored within three recent accounts of imagination and pretense offered by theorists working in the 4E tradition. A path forward is then charted, through considering ways in which explanations can invoke beliefs and intentions while remaining true to 4E precepts. To make real progress in explaining pretense, 4E theorists will need to grow comfortable with the idea that two agents whose outward behaviors and environments are, in the short term, the same, may be guided by quite different beliefs and intentions, in virtue of which only one is pretending. In this way, the scientific project of explaining pretense remains inseparable from the more general project of determining which beliefs and intentions are appropriate to ascribe to which kinds of entities, given which kinds of behaviors.

Key words: pretense, pretend, embodied cognition, ecological psychology, belief, intention, imagination

Psychologism is defined as “the doctrine that the laws of mathematics and logic can be reduced to or depend on the laws governing thinking” (Moran & Cohen, 2012 266). And for Husserl, the laws of logic include the laws of meaning: “logic evidently is the science of meanings as such [Wissenschaft von Bedeutungen als solchen]” (Husserl (1975) 98/2001 225). I argue that, since it is sufficient for a theory to be psychologistic if the empiricistic theory of abstraction is employed, it follows that neural networks are psychologistic insofar as they use this theory of abstraction, which I demonstrate is the case (Husserl (1975) 191/2001 120). It’s sufficient for psychologism because, according to Husserl, the theory in question reduces one’s phenomenological ability to intend types (or universals) to one’s past history of intending tokens (or particulars), usually amalgamated in some fashion (classically via associations; recently via autoencoders) (ibid; Kelleher, 2019). Similarly dynamical systems theory entails psychologism. For dynamical systems theory ties content to the temporal evolution of a system, which, according to Husserl, violates the fact that intentionality toward validities and objectivities does not pertain to “particular temporal experience[s]” (Husserl (1975) 194/2001 121). It follows that neither the species (neural networks), nor the genus (dynamical systems), can avoid psychologism and intend objects “in specie” (ibid). After critiquing these two approaches, I proceed to give an account based on the essentialist school of cognitive psychology of how we may intend objects “in specie” while avoiding the empiricistic theory of abstraction (Keil, 1989, Carey, 2009, Marcus & Davis, 2019). Such an account preserves the type-token distinction without psychologistic reduction to the temporal evolution of a dynamical system (Hinzen, 2006). This opens the way toward a truly unifying account of Husserlian phenomenology in league with cognitive science that avoids Yoshimi’s (2016) and neurophenomenology’s psychologistic foundation (herein demonstrated) and builds upon Sokolowski’s (2003) syntactic account of Husserlian phenomenology.

Key words: abstraction, neural networks, dynamical systems theory, husserl, psychologism, phenomenal features, empiricism

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.

Key words: enactivism, evolution, niche construction, social construction, natural drift.

Excerpt: Consciousness itself is a problem that cannot be solved by explaining it away. Consciousness is in need of a functional explanation for why it exists in the first place. Neurophenomenology, as a science of experience grounded in phenomenological philosophy, is uniquely equipped to handle this very problem that neuroscience alone seems incapable of contending with. To this extent, neurophenomenology represents, today, the most well-developed philosophy for a humanistic neuroscience.