Placebos are typically seen as ineffective treatments because they lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the condition being treated, yet they can produce substantial therapeutic effects. This puzzle arises from the relationship between culturally meaningful entities like treatments, our intentional attitudes such as beliefs about healing, and bodily placebo responses. An enactive conception of cognition, which views an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and meaningful environmental properties as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system, accommodates and demystifies placebo effects by explaining the interrelations between mind, body, and world.
Enactivism is often treated as a broad category that includes any approach stressing sensorimotor activity for understanding mind in nature. The author argues this view is distorting because it overlooks three core commitments from Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's original work: life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding. These commitments distinguish the enactive approach from other embodied cognition variants and make it especially timely and valuable.
Accounts of embodied cognition often treat rational capacities as a separate layer added on top of sensorimotor skills, a view called 'additivism.' This paper argues instead for a 'transformative' conception of rationality, where acquiring the ability to give and ask for reasons fundamentally changes the normative structure of unreflective embodied engagements with the environment. Drawing on Matthew Boyle's contrast between additive and transformative views, the author contends that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is already emerging, integrating insights from embodied cognition with research on cultural and developmental contexts to show how immersion in culture makes the meanings we are attuned to communicable and negotiable.