Ecological psychology and enactivism, despite sharing roots in embodied cognition, have diverged in how they understand embodied experience. This paper argues that recognizing these differences can lead to a more integrated approach to agency, social cognition, and art reception. The authors propose a synergy where ecological psychology incorporates felt experience as a dynamic element in its models, while enactivism accounts for directly perceived relations arising from enactments in the social and physical world. Such complementarity is not only possible but already emerging, potentially overcoming current divisions of responsibility in cognitive science.
Ecological psychology, enactivism, and interactivism have the potential to transform perspectives on cognition and action by restoring their relevance to humans as persons. However, neither the mainstream information-processing approach nor the dynamics-oriented perspective explains how human language and symbolic thought arise from continuous agent-environment interaction. Treating dynamical and computational hypotheses as mutually exclusive leads to reductionism that hinders this challenge. Complementary descriptions, as proposed by Michael Polanyi and Howard Pattee, are needed to understand that cognizing systems are governed by both physical laws and emergent historical constraints. Some proposed solutions may ease the tension between these approaches and improve understanding of their interrelation.