Several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed—are only partially relevant because cognitive science has already moved beyond them toward integrated mechanistic explanations that include internal submechanisms, interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and the environment. These wide perspectives function as research heuristics for building such explanations. The argument draws on developments in the study of mindreading and debates on emotions, showing that cognitive neuroscience has undergone a silent mechanistic revolution, turning from binary oppositions toward integration with the broader field.
Embodied cognitive science often describes the mind as “world-involving,” yet the nature of the environment remains poorly specified. This paper argues that enactivists should ally with a dynamic form of ecological psychology, which offers the most explicit theory of the psychological environment. It explores the intersubjective, cultural character of human psychology and the challenges this poses for both enactivist and ecological approaches. The theory of behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) is presented as a framework to address these challenges, yielding an outline of a radical embodied account of intersubjectivity and social activity.