Publication 5660

Excerpt: E is the letter, if not the word, in todays sciences of the mind. E-approaches to the mind – those that focus on embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, and ecological aspects of mind – are now a staple and familiar feature of the cognitive science landscape. Many productive scientific research programs are trying to understand the significance of E-factors for the full range of cognitive phenomena, with new proposals about perceiving, imagining, remembering, decision-making, reasoning, and language appearing apace (Wilson and Foglia 2016). Some hold that these developments mark the arrival of a new paradigm for thinking about mind and cognition, one radically different from cognitive science as we know it (e.g., Thompson 2007; Chemero 2009; Di Paolo 2009; Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Others maintain that accommodating E-factors, while important, requires either only very modest twists or, at most, some crucial but still limited revisions to the framework of otherwise business-as-usual cognitive science (Goldman 2012, 2014; Gallese 2014; Clark 2008; Wheeler 2010). By conservative lights, radicals vastly exaggerate the theoretical significance of the so-called E-turn. Moderates hold that whatever changes are required will fall short of reconceiving cognition. Who is right? Are we, in fact, witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking? ||