Concept
Enactivism
Overview
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through interaction between an acting organism and its environment, with historical roots in Buddhism, phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
The term 'enactivism' is close in meaning to 'enaction', defined as "the manner in which a subject of perception creatively matches its actions to the requirements of its situation". The introduction of the term enaction in this context is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991), who proposed the name to "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs". This was further developed by Thompson and others, to place emphasis upon the idea that experience of the world is a result of mutual interaction between the sensorimotor capacities of the organism and its environment. However, some writers maintain that there remains a need for some degree of the mediating function of representation in this new approach to the science of the mind.
The initial emphasis of enactivism upon sensorimotor skills has been criticized as "cognitively marginal", but it has been extended to apply to higher level cognitive activities, such as social interactions. "In the enactive view,... knowledge is constructed: it is constructed by an agent through its sensorimotor interactions with its environment, co-constructed between and within living species through their meaningful interaction with each other. In its most abstract form, knowledge is co-constructed between human individuals in socio-linguistic interactions...Science is a particular form of social knowledge construction...[that] allows us to perceive and predict events beyond our immediate cognitive grasp...and also to construct further, even more powerful scientific knowledge."
Enactivism is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition, and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Herbart is the best historical representative of this type of theory. He denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The mind is simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in reaction to the various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively different reactions are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every presentation once called into being persists; it may be driven below the…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Enactivism is; the author is tied to Enactivism in the knowledge graph.
If activity were directly exhibited it would result in certain experiences, contacts with the environment. It would succeed by making environing objects, things and persons, co-partners in its forward movement; or else it would run against obstacles and be troubled, possibly defeated. These experiences of contact with objects and their qualities give meaning, character, to an otherwise fluid, unconscious activity…
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
The author is tied to Enactivism in the knowledge graph.
All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use familiar terms. The activity is, for example, attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either aimless or directed. If directed it shows tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
Close in meaning to Enactivism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Enactivism
Related ideas
- Eleanor Rosch
- Cognition
- John Dewey
- Karl Popper
- Mind–body dualism
- Intentionality
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Organism
- Social constructivism
- Niklas Luhmann
- Evan Thompson
- Explanatory gap
- Connectionism
- Autopoiesis
- Self-reference
- Semiotics
- Phenomenalism
- Embodied cognition
- Constructivism (philosophy of science)
- Complex system
- Computational theory of mind
- Praxis (process)
- Social cognition
- Free will
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
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