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

This special issue is focused on how perceptual learning is understood from a post-cognitivist approach to cognition. The process of perceptual learning is key in our cognitive life and development: we can learn to discriminate environmental aspects and hence adapt ourselves to it, using our resources intelligently. Perceptual learning, according to the classic cognitivist view, is based on the enrichment of passively received stimuli, a linear operation on sensations that results in a representation of the original information. This representation can be useful for other processes that generate an output, like a motor command, for example. On the contrary, alternative approaches to perceptual learning, different from the one depicted in the classic cognitivist theory, share the ideas that perception and action are intrinsically tied and that cognitive processes rely on embodiment and situatedness. These approaches usually claim that mental representations are not useful concepts, at least when portraying a process of perceptual learning. Approaches within post-cognitivism are not a unified theory, but a diversity of perspectives that need to establish a dialogue among their different methodologies. In particular, this special issue is focused on ecological psychology and enactivism as key traditions within the post-cognitivist constellation.

Key words: post-cognitivism, ecological psychology, enactivism, perceptual learning, embodied cognition

Embodied approaches to cognitive science frequently describe the mind as “world-involving,” indicating complementary and interdependent relationships between an agent and its environment. The precise nature of the environment is frequently left ill-described, however, and provides a challenge for such approaches, particularly, it is noted here, for the enactive approach which emphasizes this complementarity in quite radical terms. This paper argues that enactivists should work to find common cause with a dynamic form of ecological psychology, a theoretical perspective that provides the most explicit theory of the psychological environment currently extant. In doing so, the intersubjective, cultural nature of the ecology of human psychology is explored, with the challenges this poses for both enactivist and ecological approaches outlined. The theory of behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) is used to present a framework for resolving some of these challenges. Drawing these various strands together an outline of a radical embodied account of intersubjectivity and social activity is presented.

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Fultot, Nie, and Carello are correct that enactive researchers should be more aware of the research literature on ecological psychology, but their charge of mental construction is off-target. Enactivism and ecological psychology are compatible frameworks with different, complementary, emphases.

Excerpt: The 30 papers that make up this Research Topic address a wide range of questions concerning ecological psychology, enactive cognitive science, and their shared domain of scientific interest. The topics broached bring to the fore a number of key points of contact between ecological and enactive thinking, and provide varying evaluations for the possibility of some kind of reconciliation, complementarity, or alignment of the two. Some authors highlight divergence, conflict, or even distinct foundations, which motivate a pessimistic prognosis on integration, noting differing views on the relationship between the agent and the world, or sometimes even the basic scientific approach. Others appear more optimistic that these are perhaps two perspectives on the same avenue of scientific advancement. Even in this latter case, however, it is clear that the differences between the two are not simply ones of appearance, but potential points of theoretical dissonance that will require real theoretical or empirical work if they are to be reconciled. In this collection of papers we see a number of potential diagnoses of differences, ranging from different starting points in examination of the agent-world relationship, to different commitments to “realism” about the world, or the role of other agents in our account of human cognition, where specific gears of ecological and enactive theories touch one another and either grind hopelessly or engage with some degree of success.

The notion of affordance has been introduced by Gibson (1977, 1979) as the feature of an object or the environment that allows the observer to perform an action, a set of “environmental supports for an organism’s intentional activities” (Reybrouck 2005) Studied under very different perspectives, this concept has become a crucial issue not only for the ecological psychology, but also for cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence studies, and philosophy of mind. This variety of approaches has widened the already ambiguous definition originally provided by Gibson, contributing to the development of different standpoints in open contrast with each other (see Zipoli Caiani 2011) During the last two decades, moreover, many researchers tried to extend the notion also to musical experience, aiming to draw a coherent theory of musical affordances (e.g. Clarke 2005; Nussbaum 2007; Krueger 2011a; 2011b) In this paper, we will argue for a particular concept of musical affordances, that is, as we see it, one narrower and less ambiguous in scope and more closely related to its original. Taking the discovery of canonical neurons as our starting point, we will (i) introduce the general notion of affordance, (ii) discuss some significant contributions in this area of research, mostly focusing on musical affordances and (iii) propose a motor-based interpretation of musical affordances.

Key words: musical affordances, canonical neurons, motor intentionality, musical understanding, embodied music cognition.

Ecological and sensorimotor theories of perception build on the notion of action-dependent invariants as the basic structures underlying perceptual capacities. In this paper we contrast the assumptions these theories make on the nature of perceptual information modulated by action. By focusing on the question, how movement specifies perceptual information, we show that ecological and sensorimotor theories endorse substantially different views about the role of action in perception. In particular we argue that ecological invariants are characterized with reference to transformations produced in the sensory array by movement: such invariants are transformation-specific but do not imply motor-specificity. In contrast, sensorimotor theories assume that perceptual invariants are intrinsically tied to specific movements. We show that this difference leads to different empirical predictions and we submit that the distinction between motor equivalence and motor-specificity needs further clarification in order to provide a more constrained account of action/perception relations.

Key words: Action, perception, self-motion, invariants, sensorimotor theories, ecological psychology, enaction

In this paper, I critically reconstruct the development of Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and “radical embodied cognitive science” out of Berlin-School Gestalt theory. I first lay out the basic principles of Gestalt theory and then identify two ways of revising that theory: one route, followed by enactivism and ecological psychology, borrows Gestaltist resources to defend a pragmatic ontology. I argue, however, that MerleauPonty never endorses this kind of ontology. Instead, I track his second route toward an ontology of “flesh.” I show how Merleau-Ponty’s arguments for this ontology depend upon criticisms of Gestalt Psychology to which radical embodied cognitive science remains vulnerable, and show that it leads him to a romantic philosophy of nature.

Key words: merleau-ponty, phenomenology, gestalt psychology, cognitive science, enactivism, ecological psychology.

In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that perception is something we do. I will argue that understanding perceiving as a bodily doing allows for a strong non-dualistic position on the relation between experience and objective physical events, one which provides insight into why such relation seems problematic while at the same time providing means to relieve the tension. Next I will show how the claim that perception is something we do does not stand in opposition to, and is not refuted by, the fact that we often have perceptual experience without moving. In arguing that cases of motionless perception and perception-like experience are still doings it will be pointed out that the same interactive regularities which are engaged in in active perception still apply to them. Explaining how past interactive regularities can influence current perception or perception-like experience in a way which remains true to the idea that perception is a doing, so I will argue, can be done by invoking the past – the past itself, however, not its representation. The resulting historical, non-representational sensorimotor approach can join forces with Gibsonian ecological psychology – provided that such is also understood along lines that don’t invoke externalist remnants of contents.

This article aims to explore the scope of a Situated and Embodied Social Psychology (ESP). At first sight, social cognition seems embodied cognition par excellence. Social cognition is first and foremost a supra-individual, interactive, and dynamic process (Semin & Smith, 2013). Radical approaches in Situated/Embodied Cognitive Science (Enactivism) claim that social cognition consists in an emergent pattern of interaction between a continuously coupled organism and the (social) environment; it rejects representationalist accounts of cognition (Hutto & Myin, 2013). However, mainstream ESP (Barsalou, 1999, 2008) still takes a rather representation-friendly approach that construes embodiment in terms of specific bodily formatted representations used (activated) in social cognition. We argue that mainstream ESP suffers from vestiges of theoretical solipsism, which may be resolved by going beyond internalistic spirit that haunts mainstream ESP today.

Key words: ecological psychology, enactivism, perceptual symbol systems, situated embodied cognitive science, social psychology