In this article we analyze the methodological commitments of a radical embodied cognition (REC) approach to social interaction and social cognition, specifically with respect to the explanatory framework it adopts. According to many representatives of REC, such as enactivists and the proponents of dynamical and ecological psychology, sociality is to be explained by (1) focusing on the social unit rather than the individuals that comprise it and (2) establishing the regularities that hold on this level rather than modeling the sub-personal mechanisms that could be said to underlie social phenomena. We point out that, despite explicit commitment, such a view implies an implicit rejection of the mechanistic explanation framework widely adopted in traditional cognitive science (TCS), which, in our view, hinders comparability between REC and these approaches. We further argue that such a position is unnecessary and that enactive mechanistic explanation of sociality is both possible and desirable. We examine three distinct objections from REC against mechanistic explanation, which we dub the decomposability, causality and extended cognition worries. In each case we show that these complaints can be alleviated by either appreciation of the full scope of the mechanistic account or adjustments on both mechanistic and REC sides of the debate.

Key words: enactivism, mechanistic explanation, social cognition

Open peer commentary on the article “Decentering the Brain: Embodied Cognition and the Critique of Neurocentrism and Narrow-Minded Philosophy of Mind” by Shaun Gallagher. Abstract: Simulation theory and theory theory are interaction accounts of theory of mind that have been neurocentrically characterized. A hybrid of these theories approximates the interaction theory of social cognition, and can be described in an indexical-symbolic processing framework.

Excerpt: In principle, one might expect each of the papers in this section, “What is Cognition?,” to present some 4E answer to what cognition is. Perhaps this would be a definition of “cognition,” or a theory of what cognition is, or a conceptual framework that articulates what the concept of cognition is. Nevertheless, in the chapters in this section, as in the 4E literature more generally, the question of what cognition is does not come to the forefront. Moreover, even when the question is taken seriously, the answers do not seem to be worked out in much detail.

Predictive processing (PP) approaches to the mind are increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. This surge of interest is accompanied by a proliferation of philosophical arguments, which seek to either extend or oppose various aspects of the emerging framework. In particular, the question of how to position predictive processing with respect to enactive and embodied cognition has become a topic of intense debate. While these arguments are certainly of valuable scientific and philosophical merit, they risk underestimating the variety of approaches gathered under the predictive label. Here, we first present a basic review of neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical approaches to PP, to illustrate how these range from solidly cognitivist applications – with a firm commitment to modular, internalistic mental representation – to more moderate views emphasizing the importance of ‘body-representations’, and finally to those which fit comfortably with radically enactive, embodied, and dynamic theories of mind. Any nascent predictive processing theory (e.g., of attention or consciousness) must take into account this continuum of views, and associated theoretical commitments. As a final point, we illustrate how the Free Energy Principle (FEP) attempts to dissolve tension between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition, by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal ‘representations’ arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus furnishes empirically productive process theories (e.g., predictive processing) by which to guide discovery through the formal modelling of the embodied mind.

Key words: Predictive processing, embodied cognition, interoception, active inference, connectionism, computationalism, enactivism.

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action–perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions (SDPs), which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, and music. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and intermodal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of SDP: attentional focus, aspects’ salience, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.

Key words: enactivism, perception, practices, culture, intersubjectivity, pragmatism

While structured as an autobiography, this memoir exemplifies ways in which classic contributions to cybernetics (e.g., by Wiener, McCulloch & Pitts, and von Neumann) have fed into a diversity of current research areas, including the mathematical theory of systems and computation, artificial intelligence and robotics, computational neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive science. The challenges of brain theory receive special emphasis. Action-oriented perception and schema theory complement neural network modeling in analyzing cerebral cortex, cerebellum, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. Comparative studies of frog, rat, monkey, ape and human not only deepen insights into the human brain but also ground an EvoDevoSocio view of “how the brain got language.” The rapprochement between neuroscience and architecture provides a recent challenge. The essay also assesses some of the social and theological implications of this broad perspective.

Key words: action-oriented perception, ape, architecture, artificial intelligence, automata theory, basal ganglia, brain theory, cerebellum, cerebral cortex, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, cybernetics, frog, hippocampus, human, language evolution, li

Open peer commentary on the article “Decentering the Brain: Embodied Cognition and the Critique of Neurocentrism and Narrow-Minded Philosophy of Mind” by Shaun Gallagher. Abstract: I intend to explore some of the implications of Gallagher’s target article. Retracing the circulation of concepts such as “embodied,” “embedded,” “extended,” etc. in social epidemiology, feminist science and epigenetics, I advocate for studying E-approaches from an epistemological, historical and political viewpoint in order to critically assess the transformations of knowledge that we are currently witnessing.

Excerpt: Die hier vorgelegte Studie befasst sich mit dem Problem des Begriffsrealismus und seiner Relevanz für die linguistische Terminologieforschung. Dies heute bisweilen ein wenig stiefmütterlich behandelte Teilgebiet der Sprachwissenschaft – es wird für gewöhnlich unter die Fachsprachenforschung rubriziert – verdient in Zeiten, da jene Disziplin sowohl ihren Gegenstand als auch die sie kennzeichnenden Prozeduren der Theoriebildung in einen ideen- und kulturgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang einzurücken sucht und zudem das Bedürfnis verspürt, sich in aktuelle Debatten um die Voraussetzungen menschlicher Erkenntnis und das Wesen des Erkannten einzuschalten, wie jüngst wieder Gabriel mit seinem Paradigma des Neuen Realismus sie angestoßen hat, verstärktes Interesse: Mag sie auch nicht von vornherein als eine solche angelegt sein, so kann man der Begriffslehre gleichwohl Merkmale einer transdisziplinären Metawissenschaft attestieren, insofern sie eine Vorstellung oder zumindest eine Ahnung davon gibt, wie sich das formale Inventar, insbesondere aber die Lexik von Fachsprachen – nota bene auch der linguistischen – systematisch und analytisch stringent an ideologisch-weltanschauliche und institutionelle Kontextfaktoren rückkoppeln lässt. Zum Zweiten hat sich die linguistische Analyse von Termini bei der Bestimmung von deren gnoseologischer Funktion dem Antagonismus zwischen konstruktivistischen und (neo-)realistischen Positionen exponiert, wie er derzeit den akademischen Diskurs durchzieht und in dem der antike Universalienstreit wieder aufzuleben scheint. Auch wenn sie die Frontlinie bloß selten deutlich konturiert, so darf man doch von ihr einige Winke erwarten, wie man einen Ausgleich zwischen den gegensätzlichen Haltungen erzielen und damit ihrer wechselseitigen Bedingtheit, die für ihre jeweilige Ausformung strukturelle Bedeutung besitzt, Rechnung tragen könnte. Die Begriffswissenschaft darf so mit Blick auf die durch Polarisierung charakterisierte Diskussion, wie sie heute geführt wird und die doch einer langen, niemals abgerissenen Tradition entspringt, als eine Art Korrektiv ante rem gelten. Inwieweit und unter welchen Gesichtspunkten eine solche Einschätzung gerechtfertigt ist, sollen die nachfolgenden Überlegungen

Upshot: The authors offer a theory of agency that is general enough to apply to whole organisms and single cells, and meaningful enough to highlight problems that embodied cognition theory has overlooked. The authors insist that the interesting thing about minds is what goes on in between activities; this leaves unclear what a specifically enactivist empirical program could look like. But the book can be read as a contribution to a broader project of instituting a full-blown post-cognitivist science of the mind.

Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin by describing the habitat of the species, and use this to explain how action possibilities are constrained for individual actors. Enactivists, meanwhile, pursue an epistemic strategy: start by characterizing the exploratory, self-regulating behavior of the individual organism, and use this to understand how that organism brings forth its animal-specific umwelt. Both types of explanation are necessary: the ontological strategy explains how structure in the environment constrains how the world can appear to an individual, while the epistemic strategy explains how the world can appear differently to different members of the same species, relative to their skills, abilities, and histories. Making the distinction between species habitat and animal-specific umwelt allows us to understand the environment in realist terms while acknowledging that individual living organisms are phenomenal beings.