What Is Enactivism?
Adaptive Behavior May 20, 2026 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1177/10597123261450094 via OpenAlex
Summary
Enactivism is often treated as a broad umbrella for any view stressing sensorimotor loops in understanding mind, but this misrepresents the original enactive approach from Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's 'The Embodied Mind'. That approach has three core commitments: continuity between life and mind, the primacy of lived experience, and a reciprocal relationship between science and self-understanding. These commitments distinguish enactivism from other embodied cognition theories and give it special contemporary relevance.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The enactive approach is defined by three commitments—life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and reciprocity between science and self-understanding—that set it apart from other embodied cognition theories. |
Abstract
‘Enactivism’ is usually taken to be an umbrella term encompassing any approach that emphasises the importance of recurrent loops of sensorimotor activity to adequate philosophical and scientific understandings of how minds fit into the natural world. Under this umbrella different variants can then be distinguished. I argue that this is a distortive and unhelpful understanding insofar as it ignores three central commitments of the enactive approach as originally set out in Varela, Thompson & Rosch’s The Embodied Mind. These commitments to life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding set the enactive approach apart from other variants of embodied cognition in science and philosophy, and do so in ways that make it distinctively timely and valuable.