The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the “coupling-constitution fallacy.” In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.

Key words: evolutionary robotics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, dynamical approach, extended mind hypothesis

The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001; Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz 2002). The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: (i) first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; (ii) the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and (iii) there is an ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data.

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.

Key words: 4e cognition, dynamical approach, agency, sense-making, regional identities, self, mind-body dualism

I assess the relevance of John Dewey’s well-known article, “The reflex arc concept in psychology”, for a historical revision of the emergence of the recent embodied approach in the cognitive sciences. In particular, I try to identify its specific contribution in the shift from Dewey’s conceptual analysis to the way in which, during recent years, certain research programs have developed their methodological profile and put it to work in experimental and modeling practices. My hypothesis is that, under a certain interpretation, Dewey’s article plays the role of the main intellectual precursor in the development of embodied cognitive science and, specifically, the related dynamical approach. Relevance: The article assesses the historical roots of the recent group of research programs in “embodied cognitive science,” with particular attention to the underlying shift in methodological profile. Among the conglomerate of programs that can be included within the general denomination of embodied cognitive science, the article focuses on the dynamical approach, which stands out, on the one hand, for its radical character vis-à-vis classical approaches and, on the other hand, for its characteristic brand of cognitive-scientific approach.