JoLMA
December 9, 2020
Mia Burnett, Shaun Gallagher
17 citations
A review of 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) approaches to art and aesthetic experience argues that extended mind analyses focusing on tool use overlook important aspects. To account for the wide range of aesthetic experiences across diverse artistic genres, four or more E's are needed. The authors develop an enactive, affordance-based approach to understanding art and aesthetic experience, while acknowledging both the potential and limitations of any single framework. They conclude that no unified set of principles can make sense of all art everywhere.
JoLMA
December 9, 2020
Anna Boncompagni
2 citations
Enactivist theories hold that cognition emerges from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. A key challenge is explaining normativity—how standards of correctness arise—without reducing it to mere biology. This article reviews several proposed solutions, such as agent-environment dynamics and participatory sense-making, and argues that gestures of appreciation or disapproval in aesthetic contexts provide clear examples of enacted normativity. The author suggests that ideas from Wittgenstein and Dewey can be fruitfully developed within an enactive framework to address this challenge.
JoLMA
December 9, 2020
Carlos Vara Sánchez
1 citation
Rhythmic interactions between oscillators in the body, brain, and environment are increasingly recognized as fundamental to cognition, though their mechanisms remain unclear. This article argues that an enactive notion of rhythm as open entrainment can help explain how these oscillators function as nested dynamic constraints. Through neuronal and non-neuronal interactions, they tie together different domains—body, brain, and environment—while preserving each domain's specific functions. This framework offers a way to think about the constitutive role of rhythmic processes in cognition without reducing one domain to another.
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.