The paper discusses the concept of the cognitive niche and distinguishes the latter from the metabolic niche. By using these posits I unpack certain ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, especially for its original formulation proposed by Varela, Thompson and Rosh. Drawing on the ontology of location, boundaries, and parthood, I argue that enacting the world can be seen as the process of cognitive niche construction. Moreover, it turns out that enactivism – as seen through the lens of the conceptual framework proposed in the paper – considers cognition as a kind of connection between the subject and the world. This post is pointed to as the key idea laid down in enactivism.

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment: environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its “intrinsicality” does not boil down to being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we call shared enaction of an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher.

Key words: Environmental ethics, enactivism, intrinsic values, enaction, value

Optimising the 4E (embodied–embedded–extended–enactive) revolution in cognitive science arguably requires the rejection of two guiding commitments made by orthodox thinking in the field, namely that the material realisers of cognitive states and processes are located entirely inside the head (internalism), and that intelligent thought and action are to be explained in terms of the building and manipulation of content-bearing representations (representationalism). In other words, the full- strength 4E revolution would be secured only by a position that delivered externalism plus antirepresentationalism. I argue that one view in 4E space – extended functionalism – is appropriately poised to deliver externalism but not antirepresentationalism. By contrast, in the case of a competing 4E view – radical enactivism – even if that view can deliver antirepresentationalism, its pivotal notion of extensiveness falls short of establishing externalism. These conclusions are justified via an examination of, and by responding critically to, certain key arguments offered in support of their view (and against extended functionalism) by the radical enactivists.

Key words: enactivism, extended cognition, extensive cognition, representation, vehicle externalism.

We deal with the general question of how culture affects cognition by looking at numerical cognition. After presenting radical enactivism, according to which contentful cognition arises only with the emergence of truth telling practices, we confront recent research about the origins of numerical cognition. We contest readings of some of the empirical data, according to which numerical cognition predates culture. We argue that REC-friendly interpretations of the data are not only possible but preferable, as they avoid the staunch theoretical problems which plague cognitivist readings.

Open peer commentary on the article “Enacting Enaction: A Dialectic Between Knowing and Being” by Sebastjan Vörös & Michel Bitbol. Upshot: In this commentary, though I agree with most of Vörös and Bitbol’s statements about Varela’s work, I ask the authors both for a clarification regarding their concept of dialectic and whether their understanding of this concept should lead us to accept their view according to which no further attempt to “find a theoretical fix […] to solve the mind-body problem” is needed (§26.

Within artificial intelligence (AI) and machine consciousness research, social cognition as a whole is often ignored. When it is addressed, it is often thought of as one application of more traditional forms of cognition. However, while theoretical approaches to AI have been fairly stagnant in recent years, social cognition research has progressed in productive new ways, specifically through enactive approaches. Using participatory sense-making (PSM) as an approach, we rethink conceptions of autonomy and openness in AI and enactivism, shifting the focus away from living systems to allow incorporation of artificial systems into social forms of sense-making. PSM provides an entire level of analysis through an overlooked autonomous system produced via social interaction that can be both measured and modeled in order to instantiate and examine more robust artificial cognitive systems.

Key words: autonomy, participatory sense-making, enactivism, social cognition, machine consciousness.

In information visualisation, zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) were developed in order to navigate in a big information space. They have an infinite space and allow the manipulation of infinite pans and zooms but the main drawback is the risk of getting lost in the information space. Understanding how a human being perceived the scale changes and how he is living this “zoomable” experience will help to avoid the user disorientation when he manipulate this kind of interfaces. While basing on ecological and enactive theories, we will try to bring some elements of responses in order to understand the navigation in ZUI.

Upshot: Chemero provides a modern re-interpretation of Gibson’s ecological psychology and his affordance concept that is more coherent than the original and in line with antirepresentationalist, dynamical theories in embodied cognitive science. He argues for a radical embodied cognitive science, in which ecological and enactive approaches join forces against the more watered-down, mainstream embodied cognitive science that still maintains traditional commitments to representationalism and computationalism. He also defends a special version of realism, entity realism, which many constructivists might not find entirely convincing, but which is nevertheless more or less compatible with enactive theories of embodied cognition.

Enactivism maintains that the mind is not produced and localized inside the head but is distributed along and through brain-body-environment interactions. This idea of an intrinsic relationship between the agent and the world derives from the classical phenomenological investigations of the body (Merleau-Ponty in particular). This paper discusses similarities and differences between enactivism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is not usually considered as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between phenomenological investigations and enactivism (or 4E theories in general). After a preliminary analysis of the three principal varieties of enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic and radical), I will present Sartre’s account of the body, addressing some key points that can be related to the current enactivist positions: perception-action unity, anti-representationalism, anti-internalism, organism-environment interaction, and sense-making cognition. Despite some basic similarities, enactivism and Sartre’s phenomenology move in different directions as to how these concepts are developed. Nevertheless, I will suggest that Sartre’s phenomenology is useful to the enactivist approaches to provide a broader and more complete analysis of consciousness and cognition, by developing a pluralist account of corporeality, enriching the investigation of the organism-environment coupling through an existentialist perspective, and reincluding the concept of subjectivity without the hypostatisation of an I-subject detached from body and world.

Key words: enactivism, sartre, world, action, perception