Manuel Heras-Escribano (PhD Universidad de Granada, 2015) works in the philosophy of cognitive sciences from an embodied and situated perspective, and also in theories of perceptual content. He combines this research with a recent interest in American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey and William James.
Heras-Escribano M. (2016) Embracing the Environment: Ecological Answers for Enactive Problems. Constructivist Foundations 11(2): 309–312. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/2568
Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: This commentary highlights some controversial aspects of enactivism and ecological psychology, specifically the notions of subjectivity and ecological information. I argue that, instead of choosing between them, both theories could complement each other at different levels of analysis in a single research framework for explaining cognition from a situated perspective.
Heras-Escribano M. (2019) Pragmatism, enactivism, and ecological psychology: Towards a unified approach to post-cognitivism. Synthese Online First. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/5716
This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one (the neural dynamics of the sensorimotor contingencies and the emergence of enactive agency) and the personal one (the dynamics that emerges from the organism-environment interaction in ecological terms). If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology.
Heras-Escribano M., Noble J. & De Pinedo M. (2015) Enactivism, action and normativity: A Wittgensteinian analysis. Adaptive Behavior 23(1): 20–33. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/5652
In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism.