4E’s Are Too Many Why Enactive World-Making Does Not Need The Extended Mind Thesis
JoLMA December 9, 2020 Alfonsina Scarinzi
The 4E approach to cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) replaces the idea that the mind mirrors the world with an active process of world-making, rejecting mental representation and distributing cognition across body, brain, and environment. Critics note that extended cognition is not enactive and that embodied cognition lacks a definition of body, raising doubts about whether a postcognitivist approach to experience requires 4E's. This contribution argues it does not, instead discussing the enactive body as a moving sense-making system informed by phenomenology and pragmatism, and its role in constituting the distinctive quality of an experience.