Recognition of the importance of autopoiesis to biological systems was crucial in building an alternative to the classic view of cognitive science. However, concepts like structural coupling and autonomy are not strong enough to throw light on language and human problem solving. The argument is presented though a case study where a person solves a problem and, in so doing relies on non-local aspects of the ecology as well as his observer’s mental domain. Like Anthony Chemero we make links with ecological psychology to emphasize how embodiment draws on cultural resources as people concert thinking, action and perception. We trace this to human interactivity or sense-saturated coordination that renders possible language and human forms of cognition: it links human sense-making to historical experience. People play roles with natural and cultural artifacts as they act, animate groups and live through relationships drawing on language that is, at once, artificial and natural. Thus, while constrained by wordings, interactivity is able to fine-tune what we do with action-perception loops. Neither language nor human problem solving reduce to biological sense-making.

Key words: enactivism, ecological psychology, distributed cognition, distributed language, problem solving, sense-making, interactivity, organism–environment system

The theory of the organism-environment system starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment, and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Although for practical purposes we do separate organism and environment, this common-sense starting point leads in psychological theory to problems which cannot be solved. Therefore, separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects of organization of this system. Therefore, mental activity cannot be separated from the nervous system, but the nervous system is only one part of the organism-environment system. This problem will be dealt with in detail in the second part of the article.

Key words: human behavior, mental activity, descriptive property, mental phenomenon

The relation between mental processes and brain activity is studied from the point of view of the theory of the organism-environment system. It is argued that the systemic point of view leads to a new kind of definition of the primary tasks of neurophysiology and to a new understanding of the traditional neurophysiological concepts. Neurophysiology is restored to its place as a part of biology: its task is the study of neurons as living units, not as computer chips. Neurons are living units which are organised as metabolic systems in connection with other neurons; they are not units which would carry out some psychological functions or maintain states which are typical only of the whole organism-environment system. Psychological processes, on the other hand, are processes always comprising the whole organism-environment system.

Key words: behavioral result, pineal gland, mental activity, mental function, systemic point

The present article is an attempt to give – in the frame of the theory of the organism-environment system (Järvilehto, 1998a) – a new interpretation to the role of efferent influences on receptor activity and to the functions of senses in the formation of knowledge. It is argued, on the basis of experimental evidence and theoretical consider-ations, that the senses are not transmitters of environmental information, but create a direct connection between the organism and the environment, which makes the development of a dynamic living system, the organism-environment system, possible. In this connection process, the efferent influences on receptor activity are of particular significance because, with their help, the receptors may be adjusted in relation to the parts of the environment that are most important in achieving behavioral results. Perception is the process of joining of new parts of the environment to the organism-environment system; thus, the formation of knowledge by perception is based on reorganization (widening and differentiation) of the organism-environment system, and not on transmission of information from the environment. With the help of the efferent influences on receptors, each organism creates its own peculiar world that is simultaneously subjective and objective. The present considerations have far-reaching influences as well on experimental work in neurophysiology and psychology of perception as on philosophical considerations of knowledge formation.

Key words: efferent, epistemology, influences, knowledge, movement, perception, receptors, senses, systems approach.

In this programmatic paper we explain why a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience is needed. We argue for such a claim based on problems that have arisen in cognitive neuroscience for the project of localizing function to specific brain structures. The problems come from research concerned with functional and structural connectivity that strongly suggests that the function a brain region serves is dynamic, and changes over time. We argue that in order to determine the function of a specific brain area, neuroscientists need to zoom out and look at the larger organism-environment system. We therefore argue that instead of looking to cognitive psychology for an analysis of psychological functions, cognitive neuroscience should look to an ecological dynamical psychology. A second aim of our paper is to develop an account of embodied cognition based on the inseparability of cognitive and emotional processing in the brain. We argue that emotions are best understood in terms of action readiness (Frijda, 1986, 2007) in the context of the organism’s ongoing skillful engagement with the environment (Rietveld, 2008; Bruineberg and Rietveld, 2014; Kiverstein and Rietveld, 2015, forthcoming). States of action readiness involve the whole living body of the organism, and are elicited by possibilities for action in the environment that matter to the organism. Since emotion and cognition are inseparable processes in the brain it follows that what is true of emotion is also true of cognition. Cognitive processes are likewise processes taking place in the whole living body of an organism as it engages with relevant possibilities for action.

Key words: Emotion cognition interactions, psychological constructionism, salience network, embodied cognition, affordances, dynamical systems theory

As a functional feature of our species, language, it is argued, cannot be understood outside the domain of biological organization. The established view of language as a tool used for communication has little to offer towards a better understanding of the nature and function of language, making it external to human biology and accounting for the language–mind dichotomy entrenched in philosophy of language and mainstream cognitive science. By contrast, biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary paradigm for the study of life as semiosis, attempts to overcome this epistemological inconsistency by positing the biological nature of signs. At the same time, the theoretical framework of biosemiotics is marked by a conceptual tension between the physicalist accounts of symbol often used in biosemiotics and the Peircean notion of symbol as a kind of sign in the semiotic hierarchy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic reference; this hierarchy is essential in understanding linguistic semiosis as a major evolutionary transition rather than a cultural invention. The firmly established belief that, evolutionarily, sapience precedes language impedes our understanding of language as human life in semiosis; such an understanding becomes possible with a systems approach to the study of our species. As situationally driven embodied interactional behavior, languaging is constitutive of the human organism-environment system as a unity. Linguistic semiosis – the development of the ability to orient others and self in their consensual domain to what is not perceptually present – is a biological adaptation that allows humans to be able to better live in their habitat and sets them apart from the rest of the living world as linguistic organisms capable of operating on first-order abstractions in co-ordinations of interactional behavior. It is hypothesized that the emergence of language was the pivoting point in the evolution of the human brain, laying the basis for abstract thought as neuronal processes that lead to the establishment of second-order consensuality and languaging as behavior in a second-order consensual domain: cognition as a biological function met language as a biological adaptation, and the ontogenesis of Homo sapiens began.

Key words: language, languaging, biosemiotics, sign, symbol, mind, evolution

Constructivism refers to the idea that individuals actively create meaning by structuring and restructuring experience through self-regulated mental activity. Recently, this position has been criticized from the standpoints of diametrically opposed theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, nativists maintain that basic mental structures are inherited rather than constructed by individuals; on the other hand, sociocultural psychologists argue that meaning is a product of social and cultural activity. The present article presents an epigenetic systems approach to human development. This view conceptualizes individual action and meaning as the emergent products of coactions among multiple levels of a hierarchically organized organism-environment system. The epigenetic view provides a framework for analyzing the role of biogenetic and sociocultural processes in human development, but in a way that maintains the idea that the person functions as an active constructor in the process of development.