Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia. Electronic address: awj949@uowmail.edu.com.
2 papers in the library · 41 citations · publishing 2019-2023
Disability may be better understood through an ecological functional model that focuses on how individual functionality intersects with contributions to group and collective functioning, offering an alternative to both social-relational and medical models. Enactivist relational models of disability, while challenging the orthodox medical model, remain problematically committed to an individualist methodology, facing both theoretical and practical issues in intervention strategies. For a genuinely relational approach, enactivists should adopt a neurodiversity paradigm and the ecological functional model proposed by Robert Chapman.
The paper argues against the cognitivist view that social cognition is realized solely inside the head. It develops an enactive account in which embodied, face-to-face interaction plays a constitutive, not merely causal, role in social understanding. The authors first explain how diachronic embodied engagement can constitute social cognition. They then refute the causal-constitutive fallacy objection by showing that the constitution–causation distinction does not map onto an internal–external divide. A second objection—the poverty of the interactional stimulus argument—claims that anticipation requires an internal model or tacit theory. The paper dissolves this by proposing that anticipatory processes can be orchestrated and maintained by sensorimotor couplings between interacting individuals.