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.
Radical enactive (or embodied) cognition (REC) holds that some mental activities do not involve informational content but are instead physical interactions between an agent and the environment, while other mental activities do involve content scaffolded by social and linguistic practices. This raises a cognitive gap question: how do non-contentful behaviors give rise to contentful ones? The paper argues that if REC endorses claims by the later Wittgenstein, it can deny that there is any synchronous gap in intelligent behavior.