The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Albert Newen, Shaun Gallagher, Leon De Bruin
129 citations
The 4E approach to cognition—embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended—challenges traditional views by asking whether these features merely influence mental phenomena or actually constitute them. The authors argue that the standard metaphysical understanding of constitution (X is necessary for P in all possible worlds) is no longer tenable. They also emphasize that the role of mental representations is a separate question from that of the 4E features. This introduction sets the stage for a multi-section exploration of how these features reshape thinking about the mind, outlining the importance of each section for the ongoing debate.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Erik Rietveld, Damiaan Denys, Maarten Van Westen
104 citations
This chapter introduces the skilled intentionality framework, a philosophical approach that adds an ecological dimension to 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended). Building on James Gibson's ecological psychology, the framework centers on affordances—opportunities for action in the environment. Skilled intentionality is defined as the selective, simultaneous engagement with multiple affordances in a concrete situation. The framework integrates insights from philosophy, ecological psychology, emotion psychology, and neurodynamics to explain how the situated and affective embodied mind works, particularly in skilled action.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Ezequiel Di Paolo
55 citations
Enactivism proposes an alternative to functionalism in embodied cognition by focusing on how organic, sensorimotor, and social bodies are individuated through their material precariousness. This chapter analyzes the concepts of autonomy, agency, and sense-making from a dialectical examination of autopoiesis. The requirements for an organism to simultaneously self-produce and self-distinguish involve contradictory potentialities and tendencies. Overcoming this dialectic leads to a more concrete concept of self-individuation as an open, unfinished process extended over time—the enactive concept of agency. Even the simplest life-forms are always already self-individuating as behaving agents that enact a world.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Joel Krueger
49 citations
Direct social perception (DSP) holds that people can directly perceive others' mental states—emotions, desires, intentions—through their expressive, goal-directed behavior, challenging the idea that mental states are hidden inside the head. This chapter traces DSP's roots in phenomenologists like Husserl, Scheler, and Merleau-Ponty, and draws on 4E cognition and empirical work suggesting that embodied expressions (facial expressions, gestures) may partly constitute emotions themselves. The author defends DSP against objections, arguing that social cognition does not require inference or simulation to access others' minds.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
January 15, 2018
M. Hoffmann, R. Pfeifer
32 citations
A large body of evidence shows that embodiment—an agent's physical setup, including shape, materials, sensors, and actuators—is essential for cognition, so models of cognition must be embodied. Robots offer a powerful tool because their embodiment and control programs can be systematically varied, unlike in empirical sciences. This paper presents a robotic, bottom-up, developmental approach with three stages: low-level behaviors like walking and reflexes, learning regularities in sensorimotor spaces, and human-like cognition. Robotic research deepens understanding of cognition, and robots benefit from human-like cognition to become more autonomous, robust, resilient, and safe.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Jakob Hohwy
26 citations
Prediction is central to understanding perception and cognition, formalized in theoretical neuroscience as probabilistic inference. This framework unifies perception, action, attention, and learning as aspects of predictive processing in the brain. The chapter explains how predictive processing is inferential and representational, then explores its relation to enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended cognition (4E cognition). Although initially seeming too representational and inferential to fit 4E approaches, predictive processing actually encompasses many phenomena central to 4E cognition while remaining both inferential and representational.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Louise Barrett
22 citations
4E cognition provides a biologically grounded alternative to classic cognitivism, arguing that bodies evolved before brains and that cognition must be understood as the ability of organisms to coordinate and control action in a dynamic environment. The chapter introduces minimal criteria for cognition from a biogenic approach, links the origins of cognition to sensorimotor coordination via the skin-brain thesis (early nervous systems enabled coordinated contractions across myoepithelia), and discusses how radical enactivism offers a view of evolutionary continuity that resists anthropocentric tendencies in traditional cognitivism.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Shaun Gallagher
20 citations
After reviewing disagreements about embodied cognition (EC) as a research field, the author distinguishes weak EC, which focuses on brain-based body-related representations, from strong EC, which treats the extraneural body and environment as more central to cognition. Weak EC relies on the neural reuse hypothesis, but the author argues that properly understanding neural reuse actually supports a stronger conception of EC. In this view, extraneural factors—including the body and physical, social, and cultural environments—play essential roles in evolutionary and developmental time frames by constraining how neural reuse works.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Lambros Malafouris
20 citations
Human intelligence and its evolution are deeply tied to the material objects people create. Archaeology and anthropology suggest that human cognitive and social life is not simply embedded in a world of things but is genuinely mediated and often constituted by them. The specific details of this process are not well understood and require cross-disciplinary study. This chapter argues for adding a strong material culture dimension to research in 4E (embodied-embedded-extended-enactive) cognition. Material engagement theory (MET) is proposed as a framework to bridge the analytical gap between 4E cognition and material culture. The concept of "thing-ing" highlights modes of cognitive life instantiated in thinking and feeling with, through, and about things.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Hanne De Jaegher
17 citations
An enactive account of intersubjectivity should meet five criteria: it must address both social interaction and subjective experience in its full bodily, existential, and sociocultural complexity; it should integrate physiological, neural, interactional, linguistic, and societal levels of explanation using cross-disciplinary concepts and methods; it ought to encourage practical applications and dialogue with teachers and therapists; it must recognize its own underlying values to foster critical awareness of its influence on and by societal institutions and norms; and, because it concerns how people understand and deal with each other, it should engage with ethical questions. The paper then evaluates current enactive intersubjectivity research against these criteria.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
15 citations
Radical versions of enactive, embodied, and ecological approaches to cognition, which seek to replace rather than complement traditional cognitivist accounts, may offer a genuine conceptual revolution. This chapter evaluates the major options proposed by E-theorists, rating each by radicality. It reviews the hard problem of content and argues that adopting a radical approach is one of the most attractive ways to address it, opening up a positive research program worth exploring.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Dan Zahavi, John Michael
12 citations
The current debate on empathy suffers from a diversity of definitions and no consensus. This paper does not aim to resolve these disputes but instead explores the potential of applying embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded (4E) approaches to empathy research. These approaches integrate insights from phenomenology and cognitive sciences, highlighting the role of reciprocity, intentional alignment, embodied simulation, and the second-person perspective. They also challenge the widespread assumption that empathy amounts to affective matching or mirroring.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Giovanna Colombetti
11 citations
The enactive approach to mind and cognition implies that cognition is inherently affective and that cognitive appraisal is embodied rather than purely brain-based. It favors a dynamical systems framework over other conceptual models to explain the variability of emotional episodes across individuals and populations, while still recognizing evolution's role in shaping their physiological and behavioral aspects. The approach also holds that the material vehicles of affective episodes need not be limited to biological processes inside the organism; extraorganismic processes can be part of the physical realizers of affectivity and be phenomenologically incorporated into affective experiences.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Amy Cook
9 citations
The arts and humanities physically change how we think, not just metaphorically. This chapter surveys work at the intersection of cognitive science, theater, and literature, describing a theatrical experience that challenged traditional theories of cognition. If thinking is "world-making" rather than processing stimuli into meaning, then literary and art scholarship must adapt. If thinking involves using environmental objects to modify our extended ecosystem, then interacting with art can be aesthetic, poetic, and autopoetic. Contemporary art, literature, and performance may offer a new language—and a richer perspective on old language—for 4E cognition.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Tom Froese
6 citations
Enactivists argue that genuine intersubjectivity is possible: people can directly participate in each other's experience. Theory of mind approaches to social cognition have improved by incorporating neuroscience and phenomenology, but they still rely on two flawed assumptions: a cognitive unconscious that explains social understanding through subpersonal representational mechanisms, and methodological individualism that limits explanations to processes inside the individual. The enactive approach overcomes these constraints by integrating personal-level phenomenology with multi-scale dynamics within and between subjects, supported by formal and empirical research on social interaction.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
September 13, 2018
T. Tollefsen, Rick Dale
6 citations
Interest in joint action—activities where two or more people coordinate to achieve a common goal—has grown across psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and philosophy. This chapter reviews recent philosophical and empirical work, highlighting embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive perspectives that challenge traditional accounts. The authors argue for an ecumenical approach, integrating high-level and low-level explanations from multiple disciplines. They conclude that no single theory can fully capture joint action's complexity; instead, researchers should seek a tapestry of complementary explanatory tools.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Frédérique De Vignemont
5 citations
The chapter examines whether bodily awareness, like cognition, can extend beyond the biological body. It considers a weak version of the extended body hypothesis, where tool embodiment shows that the sense of body is malleable but limited—people do not genuinely feel sensations in tools. A stronger version claims bodily awareness is not even bounded by the apparent body, as sensations can be experienced in peripersonal space. However, the author argues that even in such cases, the apparent boundaries of skull and skin remain significant, suggesting that bodily awareness has constraints that cognition may not share.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Michael Kirchhoff
5 citations
Predictive processing, a theory of brain function, can be reconciled with embodied cognition, which emphasizes the role of the body and environment in shaping thought. Embodied cognition typically includes four theses: that the body constitutes cognition, that cognition does not require internal representations, that cognition and emotion are inseparable, and that cognition is shaped by cultural and environmental factors. Predictive processing, often described in terms of inference and internal models, initially seems to conflict with these ideas. However, this tension can be resolved, and it is possible to accept predictive processing while endorsing all four embodied cognition theses.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Kai Vogeley
5 citations
Cognitive science theories either highlight internal mental representations or emphasize a person's interaction with their environment. The latter, known as 4E cognition (extended, embodied, enactive, embedded), includes socially embedded cognition, which proposes the dyad of two interaction partners as the fundamental unit of analysis. This communication-centered approach is relevant for understanding psychopathological norm deviations. Although a rich tradition reconstructs different syndromes as communication disorders, this perspective has not been fully acknowledged. The chapter presents these core ideas to stimulate discussion that could substantially influence research in psychopathology and psychiatry.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Leon De Bruin
2 citations
The chapter examines empirical findings on false-belief understanding, which have been central to debates about social cognition. Proponents of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) challenge the traditional mindreading view that social cognition primarily involves inferring others' mental states to predict behavior. The author critiques both the philosophical interpretation and experimental designs of false-belief studies from a 4E perspective, then proposes an alternative interpretation inspired by predictive processing. This alternative is assessed for compatibility with core 4E insights, suggesting that social cognition may be more about dynamic interaction than mental state attribution.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Andreas Roepstorff, Tobias Starzak
Taking an evolutionary perspective on 4E cognition—embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended—reveals how cultural and biological evolution shape cognition beyond individual brains. Four papers analyze cognition across historical and evolutionary timescales, embedding its dynamics in groups and species. While abstract representations remain important, focusing too narrowly on representational cognition overlooks the basic mechanisms that support and drive cognition. To grasp these mechanisms, one must understand not only how cognitive processes are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, but also how they are shaped, transmitted, and diversified through group formation.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Mark Johnson
Meaning is not primarily linguistic but arises from sensory, motor, and affective processes rooted in the body and brain. This article surveys embodied structures of meaning-making—such as body-part projections, perceptual concepts, image schemas, emotions, body-based grammatical constructions, and conceptual metaphors—as understood through simulation semantics, embodied construction grammar, and neural theory of language. It argues that the four Es of cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) should be supplemented with three more: emotional, evolutionary, and exaptative.