Mind After Uexküll: A Foray Into the Worlds of Ecological Psychologists and Enactivists.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2020 Tim Elmo Feiten 46 citations
A unified framework combining ecological psychology and enactivism could challenge the cognitivist paradigm, but a conceptual tension arises from ecological psychology's realism versus enactivism's constructivist view that organisms enact their own worlds. The biologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt, describing how an organism's sensory physiology shapes its experience, has been proposed as a bridge. However, critics argue Umwelt is steeped in representationalism, incompatible with radical embodied cognition. This paper distinguishes two uses of Umwelt—one emphasizing subjective experience, aligned with Uexküll's philosophical project, and another used in cognitive science debates—and shows how this distinction matters for reconciling ecological and enactive approaches, while providing critical background on Uexküll's compositional theory of meaning.