Enactivism Meets Mechanism: Tensions & Congruities in Cognitive Science

Summary

This paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, which focus on identifying organized components like neural mechanisms, are compatible with enactivism, a theory that emphasizes cognition as emerging from dynamic agent-environment interactions. The author contends that mechanistic models are not inherently narrow or reductive and can accommodate concepts like emergence and downward causation. Enactivist ideas may even guide mechanistic investigations. However, the two approaches diverge in their starting assumptions, particularly regarding where the constitutive boundaries of cognition lie.

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Abstract

Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas like emergence and downward causation, are congruent with enactivism. Attention to enactivist ideas, moreover, may serve as a heuristic for mechanistic investigations of cognition. Nevertheless, I show how enactivism and approaches that prioritise mechanistic modelling may diverge in starting assumptions about the nature of cognitive phenomena, such as where the constitutive boundaries of cognition lie.

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