Abstract
Enactivist approaches claim that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. An ongoing challenge for these approaches is the problem of accounting for normativity while avoiding overly reductionist outcomes. This article examines a few proposed solutions, including agent-environment dynamics, participatory sense-making, radical enactivism, the skilful intentionality framework, and enactivist cultural psychology. It argues that good examples of enacted normativity are gestures of appreciation/disapproval performed in the aesthetic domain. Both Wittgenstein and Dewey explore this issue and their ideas could be productively worked upon in an enactive account.
Highlights
Embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended approaches to cognition (4E Cognition approaches) aim to account for the mind in a naturalistic framework, privileging an anti-dualist and often anti-representationalist perspective that takes the mind to be an aspect or a part of an organism – a body – and the organism to be crucially entrenched in an environment
Aesthetic gestures are an example of this spontaneous normativity: they are embodied, enactive, and they show that normativity is in everyday life (Frega 2015), rather than being a set of rules that somewhat stay above our heads and that we sometimes consult, pick up and apply
The issue of normativity proves tricky for enactivist approaches
Summary
Enactive, embedded, and extended approaches to cognition (4E Cognition approaches) aim to account for the mind in a naturalistic framework, privileging an anti-dualist and often anti-representationalist perspective that takes the mind to be an aspect or a part of an organism – a body – and the organism to be crucially entrenched in an environment. Perspectives focused on sense-making are wrong, according to radical enactivists, in talking of meaning at the level of the organisms’ adaptivity to the environment It is only at a later stage and, as it happens, only in the human lineage, that special forms of sociocultural practices emerge. While avoiding the vocabulary of meaning for basic minds, Hutto and Myin face another problem: they tend to posit a big divide between low-level and high-level cognition (Dreon 2019a) Their recent book (2017) is explicitly aimed at somewhat bridging this gap, the insistence on basic cognition (including human basic cognition) being non-representational and contentless risks overlooking how deeply even basic activities like perception itself and spontaneous reactions, in the human context, are imbued with culture and normativity. The intrinsically normative and evaluative aspect of the human form of life comes to the fore
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