Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2020 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01319 via PubMed
Summary
Agency can be explained without invoking mental representations by combining ecological psychology and enactivism. Enactivism describes how acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, influencing which affordances an organism tends to act upon. Ecological psychology studies how perceptual information actualizes those schemes and habits without mediating representations or computations. The paper concludes by exploring how socio-cultural norms shape human agency through this integrated framework.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | A radical embodied account of agency can be developed by combining ecological psychology's focus on perceptual information with enactivism's focus on sensorimotor schemes and habits. |
Abstract
Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.