Adaptive Behavior
May 4, 2020
Mirko Farina
92 citations
Embodied cognition is a fruitful research program that explains many aspects of human cognitive behavior, contrary to critics who dismiss it as empty philosophy. The article introduces the concept of embodiment, reviews theories and principles, and highlights three empirical domains where an embodied perspective has driven novel insights about mind and cognition. It also discusses recent applications in contemporary psychology, arguing that these interventions provide additional evidence against claims that embodied cognition lacks empirical content. The author concludes that embodied cognition adequately explains many aspects of human cognitive behavior and can move the field forward.
Adaptive Behavior
April 1, 2016
Paulo De Jesus
32 citations
Autopoietic enactivism (AE) and biosemiotics are two alternative frameworks in cognitive science and biology, respectively, that share theoretical overlap but have had little exchange. This paper proposes a novel synthesis called biosemiotic enactivism, which aims to clarify and strengthen key AE concepts by drawing from both fields. The main goals are to propose a new conception of cognition to advance AE's theoretical development and to introduce biosemiotic ideas to the enactive community to stimulate cross-field debate.
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2018
Ximena Gonzalez-Grandón, Tom Froese
25 citations
Over the past 25 years, embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained scientific legitimacy worldwide, including in Mexico, which offers a fertile environment for their development. This editorial introduction argues that concerns about incoherence among these perspectives are misplaced; instead, 4EC should be viewed as an emerging pluralistic research tradition with shared commitments. The tradition has grown in Mexico due to the country's distinctive historical, scientific, and philosophical development. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the promising potential of heterogeneous explanations within this tradition.
Adaptive Behavior
June 10, 2021
Giovanni Rolla, Jeferson Huffermann
20 citations
Two branches of the enactivist research program—Radically Enactive Cognition and Linguistic Bodies—converge on the idea that the normativity of human cognitive capacities rests on shared know-how. Radical enactivism emphasizes the diachronic dimension of shared know-how, while linguistic bodies emphasize the synchronic one. Because know-how is normative, it implies basic content: the content of successful ongoing interactions between agent(s) and environment. Basic content does not involve accuracy conditions or representational content, thus avoiding the Hard Problem of Content. This account aligns with the claim that participatory sense-making in linguistic exchanges is continuous with biological organization and sensorimotor engagements.
Adaptive Behavior
June 10, 2021
I. Palacios-García, Francisco J. Parada
15 citations
Life on earth is fundamentally interconnected, with microorganisms forming the base of evolutionary interactions. This challenges the traditional view of individuals as single-genetic entities, suggesting instead that living beings are composite multi-species complexes called holobionts. The article introduces the concept of the holobiont mind, a biogenic view of cognition compatible with the 4E approach and holobiont theory. It proposes that mind emerges from the multi-genomic morphology of a composite animal-agent in constant interaction with its ecological niche. Recent evidence on the brain–gut–microbiome axis and the Microbiome of the Built Environment is reviewed to link the Holobiont Mind with the 4E approach to cognition, opening new research avenues with direct impact on health and disease.
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2019
Alejandro Arango
8 citations
Enactivism, a theory that links perception to action, needs a richer concept of action to fully explain human perception. The standard enactive notion of sensorimotor dependencies fails to account for socially dependent perceptions (SDPs), which are crucial to how perception functions in daily life. This article argues that the central enactive concept should be perceptual practices, inspired by Wittgenstein. Perceptual practices are culturally structured, normatively rich techniques for engaging with meaningful sensory material, such as food, dance, dress, and music. This notion explains three key features of SDP: attentional focus, the salience of aspects, and modal-specific harmony-like relations.
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2014
Victor Loughlin
7 citations
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.
Adaptive Behavior
June 1, 2013
David Silverman
7 citations
Perceptual experience depends not just on internal brain representations but on active bodily exploration of the environment, according to the sensorimotor approach. A challenge to this view is explaining how we experience temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be captured by reference to sensory changes from possible movements. This paper argues that emphasizing the temporally extended, interactive nature of perception—more than the original account does—can meet this challenge. It further contends that an extensionalist account of temporal experience, which treats duration as directly perceived, can help make sense of object experience as inherently temporal.
Adaptive Behavior
May 20, 2022
Simon Høffding
3 citations
This commentary applauds the Course-of-Experience method for integrating micro-phenomenology, enactivism, and Peircean semiotics to study lived experience, but raises three concerns: how it compares to similar methods, why Peircean semiotics is essential, and whether it inherits problematic assumptions about pre-reflective experience from micro-phenomenology.
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2023
Mario Villalobos, Ronnie Videla
1 citation
4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) is a diverse research tradition that offers new ways to study the mind. Chile, home of biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, is both a root and a current site of growth for this tradition. This editorial introduction focuses on Varela's enactive approach and its relation to Maturana's autopoietic theory, discussing how their theoretical and historical horizons shaped their philosophical views on cognition. It also introduces seven articles in the special issue, highlighting their contributions in methodology, practical applications, theoretical extensions, and conceptual reflection.
Adaptive Behavior
December 13, 2018
Maria Clara Garavito, Jorge Dávila-gonzález
1 citation
A special issue on 4E Cognition research in Colombia presents seven articles and two opinion pieces that explore how cognition is embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. The collection has two parts: conceptual proposals and applications to pathologies and situations. German Bula draws on Spinoza's ontology to derive hermeneutic keys for understanding mind and body reciprocally. Juan Loaiza proposes a convergence between enactivism, anthropology, and ethics of care, linking concern and social participation to autopoiesis. Alejandro Arango critiques enactivist perception theory for neglecting social practices, arguing that perception depends on cultural networks. Maria Clara Garavito examines incorporating others into extended cognition discussions.
Adaptive Behavior
May 31, 2026
Mark-Oliver Casper
A core challenge to 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognition research is the “motley crew argument,” which claims that including neural, bodily, and environmental factors as parts of cognitive processes makes such phenomena too variable and flexible to study scientifically. This paper counters that argument by presenting four established methodological approaches that can handle this complexity. These methods provide a practical way to empirically investigate situated cognitive phenomena, connecting philosophical theory with empirical testing and thereby defending the scientific credibility of 4E research.
Adaptive Behavior
May 20, 2026
Dave Ward
Enactivism is often treated as a broad category that includes any approach stressing sensorimotor activity for understanding mind in nature. The author argues this view is distorting because it overlooks three core commitments from Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's original work: life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding. These commitments distinguish the enactive approach from other embodied cognition variants and make it especially timely and valuable.
Adaptive Behavior
March 9, 2026
Matthew Crippen
Enactivism, a theory of cognition, struggles to meet standard philosophy-of-science criteria such as Popperian falsifiability or Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but aligns better with Lakatos's model, which protects a hardcore of principles by fiat. However, enactivism fails Lakatos's requirement for testing that generates anomalies and yields novel predictions, sometimes ignoring anomalies or engaging in what William James calls halfway empiricism—maintaining positions despite evidence. James anticipates Feyerabend's pluralism and his claim that scientific ideals rarely match actual practices. From this perspective, enactivism might count as a science, but only with diluted epistemic authority. James and Feyerabend suggest that logical consistency matters in simple cases, but it is not obvious that the complexities of mind are explicable by a single, internally consistent theory.
Adaptive Behavior
December 9, 2025
Jack Reynolds, Jan Baedke
Enactivism, a theory that emphasizes the role of the organism's actions in shaping its cognition, has been criticized for relying on outdated science or philosophical speculation. This paper uses recent findings from metabolism and microbiome research to argue that enactivism must update its core concepts. The evidence shows that biological processes like metabolism and interactions between hosts and their microbes are characterized by heteronomy and symbiosis, challenging enactivist ideas of self-production and autonomy. Additionally, this research suggests enactivism should not entirely reject reductionist explanations but instead develop a philosophy of science that integrates them. The authors conclude that enactivism needs to moderate its commitments to autopoietic theory to remain viable.
Adaptive Behavior
July 19, 2024
Johannes Wagemann
Consciousness and behavior are linked, but instead of focusing on the 'hard problem' of how consciousness arises from the brain, a metaphysically neutral approach is proposed. This requires studying both mental and physical sides with equal depth and using a neutral tool to formalize them. First-person studies reveal that subtle mental activities, including negative feelings in ambiguous situations and inner agentive qualia, correlate with sensory-neural processing and synchronized brain oscillations. Transclassical Logic is introduced as a three-valued framework to integrate mental, psychophysical, and physical aspects, including embodied cognition. This rebalances first-person and third-person perspectives, offering new experimental hypotheses for neurophenomenology.
Adaptive Behavior
April 1, 2019
Alejandro Arango
The author responds to a comment by McGann, who claimed that a previous article overlooked a group of enactivist theories called participatory sense-making. The author explains the omission because those theories are not accounts of perception. Unlike participatory sense-making, the original article focuses not on the perceptual aspects of social things, but on the social aspects that constitute perception in general. The reply concludes by underscoring the central argument: that the appropriate concept to make enactivism about perception social is that of "perceptual practices," a notion of perception based on social practices.