A pragmatic reading reconciles the apparent conflict between ecological psychology's realism and enactivism's constructivism by showing that constructivism need not be subjectivist. The slime mold Physarum polycephalum illustrates this: it builds chemical barriers from its own slime trails, then avoids them during foraging, coordinating around self-created affordance-bearing geographies that nonetheless exist independently. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values external to the perceiver; agent-enacted values have the same status and do not imply subjectivism. The debate centers on whether emphasis falls on inner constitution or environmental structure. Considering loops involving environment, brain, visceral systems, and gut bacteria reveals mutual internal-external synchronization that can invert values without subjectivism, showing enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value.
Predictive processing (PP) accounts often characterize mental illness as maladaptive and epistemically distorting due to mismatches between brain-generated top-down models and bottom-up sensory inputs, but this review identifies exceptions. Hypervigilance in trauma survivors with PTSD or depression may sustain desirable gaps between anticipated problems and actual harms. Depressive slowdowns can be adaptive when physiological problems make activity strenuous. PP researchers introduce tacit normative assumptions, such as stipulating thresholds for predictive model specificity in autism and ADHD, and presupposing Western concepts of self as neurocognitive ideals in schizophrenia interpretations. PP accounts of prediction error can tacitly invoke veridical representation despite claims that cognition evolved for action, not truth-seeking. Greater attention to these exceptions and cultural variability may strengthen the framework's capacity to understand and treat psychiatric conditions.
Enactivism, a theory of cognition, struggles to meet standard philosophy-of-science criteria such as Popperian falsifiability or Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but aligns better with Lakatos's model, which protects a hardcore of principles by fiat. However, enactivism fails Lakatos's requirement for testing that generates anomalies and yields novel predictions, sometimes ignoring anomalies or engaging in what William James calls halfway empiricism—maintaining positions despite evidence. James anticipates Feyerabend's pluralism and his claim that scientific ideals rarely match actual practices. From this perspective, enactivism might count as a science, but only with diluted epistemic authority. James and Feyerabend suggest that logical consistency matters in simple cases, but it is not obvious that the complexities of mind are explicable by a single, internally consistent theory.