Enactivism Meets Mechanism: Tensions & Congruities in Cognitive Science

Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Minds and machines (Dordrecht) 2023-03, Vol.33 (1), p.153-184
Main Author: Lee, Jonny
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence
Cognition
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive science
Computer Science
Economics
Game Theory
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Science
Social and Behav. Sciences
Theory of Computation
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Summary:Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary to the enactivist ethos. Despite appearances, this paper argues that mechanistic explanations of cognition, being neither narrow nor reductive, and compatible with plausible iterations of ideas like emergence and downward causation, are congruent with enactivism. Attention to enactivist ideas, moreover, may serve as a heuristic for mechanistic investigations of cognition. Nevertheless, I show how enactivism and approaches that prioritise mechanistic modelling may diverge in starting assumptions about the nature of cognitive phenomena, such as where the constitutive boundaries of cognition lie.
ISSN:0924-6495
1572-8641
DOI:10.1007/s11023-022-09618-6