Enactivism: Embodied cognition, sense-making, and nursing.
Nursing inquiry October 1, 2024 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1111/nin.12672 via PubMed
Summary
Enactivism, a branch of embodied cognition theory, views cognition as a distributed sense-making process involving brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. This paper introduces enactivist theory and argues for its relevance to nursing, particularly mental health nursing, by offering an integrated framework that includes physiological, psychological, and subjective perceptual factors. The authors discuss the main tenets of enactivism and their potential to enrich nursing knowledge.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Enactivism offers an integrated framework for human sense-making that can enhance nursing knowledge, especially in mental health nursing. |
Abstract
Enactivism is a branch of embodied cognition theory that argues for a highly distributed model of cognition as a sense-making process involving brain, body, environment, and subjective experience. It is a theoretical framework with potential value for nursing since it offers an integrated framework for human sense-making that includes physiological and psychological factors as well as the primary experience of subjective perceptions. This paper presents an introduction to the background and main tenets of enactivist theory. These are discussed in relation to nursing, and mental health nursing to argue for the relevance of enactivism in nursing knowledge.