Non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological-enactivism, have difficulty explaining long-term planning without invoking mental representations. Recent ecological-enactivist proposals attempt to account for such high-level capacities, but they overlook the role of long-term intentions in action coordination and perception. Drawing on enactive theories of language, the authors argue for a non-representational conception of intentions: rather than being actual cognitive entities, intentions are taken up as a practice through linguistically scaffolded attitudes. They introduce the skill of distal engagement to explain how present actions are coordinated toward distant goals without relying on representations.
Enactivists claim their approach will replace cognitivism as the dominant paradigm in cognitive science. This paper examines their arguments and finds them unconvincing. The 'hard sell'—that enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap in cognitivism—fails because cognitivism faces no internal crisis, and enactivism does not offer inherently better explanations. The 'soft sell'—that enactivism provides a more attractive or parsimonious lens—rests on a misunderstanding of how scientific theories are selected. Instead, the authors support viewing enactivism as a philosophy of nature, which integrates scientific questions into a cohesive picture rather than supporting a single research paradigm.