Social phenomena as a challenge to the scaling-up problem
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences April 1, 2026 Enrico Petracca 4 citations
The scaling-up problem challenges radical embodied cognition (REC) to explain supposedly complex, representation-hungry phenomena. This paper argues that sorting cognitive phenomena by inherent complexity or representation-hunger is untenable, using social phenomena as a test case. Two opposing views—that sociality is the most representation-hungry (Clark & Toribio) or a non-representational resource (radical enactivists)—show the difficulty of placing sociality in a representational hierarchy. Examining dual-process models in social psychology reveals a distinction between task complexity and cognitive requirements, undermining the essentialism behind representation-hunger. Radical enactivism's encounter with social theory offers a non-representational account of institutions. The paper concludes that either the scaling-up problem is invalid in its hierarchical form, or REC has already scaled up to social phenomena.