Enactive Cognition Research Articles

Building human-like communicative intelligence: A grounded perspective

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems excel at diverse tasks, from image classification to strategy games, even outperforming humans in many of these domains. After making astounding progress in language learning in the recent decade, AI systems, however, seem to approach the ceiling that does not reflect important aspects of human communicative capacities. Unlike human learners, communicative AI systems often fail to systematically generalize to new data, suffer from sample inefficiency, fail to capture common-sense semantic knowledge, and do not translate to real-world communicative situations. Cognitive Science offers several insights on how AI could move forward from this point. This paper aims to: (1) suggest that the dominant cognitively-inspired AI directions, based on nativist and symbolic paradigms, lack necessary substantiation and concreteness to guide progress in modern AI, and (2) articulate an alternative, “grounded”, perspective on AI advancement, inspired by Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive Cognition (4E) research. I review results on 4E research lines in Cognitive Science to distinguish the main aspects of naturalistic learning conditions that play causal roles for human language development. I then use this analysis to propose a list of concrete, implementable components for building “grounded” linguistic intelligence. These components include embodying machines in a perception–action cycle, equipping agents with active exploration mechanisms so they can build their own curriculum, allowing agents to gradually develop motor abilities to promote piecemeal language development, and endowing the agents with adaptive feedback from their physical and social environment. I hope that these ideas can direct AI research towards building machines that develop human-like language abilities through their experiences with the world.

Improvisational Dance as Enactive Cognition: What Do Novice Dancers Teach Us about Embodied Cognition in Dance?

ABSTRACT We demonstrate the ways an improvisational dance workshop provided the opportunity for university students to be autonomous actors and engage in embodied sense-making through dance—two key parts of the conceptualization of enactive cognition. As part of a Design-Based Research project, we use Interaction Analysis to present examples of using autonomy in dance learning in a public art museum. We describe the interactions of one pair of novice dancers engaging in two designed dance activities, and how their improvisational dancing highlights the ways in which dance is a tool for sense-making. This research explores dance as both the content and context for learning, deepening the conceptualization of 4E cognition in dance education.

Grocery Shopping Has Become Complicated. Managing Dual-tasks in a Supermarket for Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease

The executive functions neuropsychological assessment with paper and pencil tests is particularly sensitive to the lack of ecological validity. If the purpose of the clinician is not to get a merely theoretical measure, but to assess the deficit impact on patient’s life, the classical tests for executive functions are not very informative. A more ecological measure could be provided by the direct observation of the patient in his daily life, but this practice is largely cost-demanding and difficult to implement. Moreover by assuming an enactive cognition approach, the role of interaction between the embodied behaviors and the affordances provided in the coupling with the environment in which the agent’s activity is placed remains unrevealed from classical neuropsychological tests. Recently, the introduction of virtual reality simulations in clinical neuropsychology seems to provide peculiar opportunities for the evaluation of the ecological impact of disease in neurological patients, while introducing new inputs for the research on embodied cognition and enactive knowledge acquisition. This contribution aims in analyzing how a virtual reality dual-task test, set in the scene of a supermarket, can be used to assess executive functions in adult/elderly population and in patients with Alzheimer disease. The results show that the test has convergent validity, compared to the Mini Mental State Evaluation and Tower of London tests and discriminant validity in identifying the degenerative disease, compared to healthy subjects matched for age, sex and education.

행화적 인지로 고찰한 배우 훈련의 대안적 방향

본 연구는 ‘행화적 인지(enactive cognition)’를 연기의 과정(The process of acting)에 적용하여 기존의 배우훈련이 놓치고 있는 부분을 규명하고 새롭게 강조되어야 할 배우 훈련의 방향을 제시하는데 목적을 둔다. 행화적 인지란 뇌와 몸과 환경 사이의 전일적이고도 역동적인 상호작용을 우리의 인지과정으로 정 의하는 인지과학의 한 분야이다. 기존의 연구에서 연기 과정을 정당화하는 근거로 사용된 체화된 인지신 경과학은 연기의 과정에서 표현(행동)의 전 단계를 형성하는 인지, 즉 감정과 느낌, 생각, 상상의 형성 메 커니즘을 설명하기 위해 심적 표상(mental representation)과 거울 뉴런에 의한 시뮬레이션(simulation)의 개념을 적용해왔다. 하지만 이러한 개념은 환경과의 상호작용 속에서 이뤄지는 연기자의 능동적이고 역 동적인 인지의 가능성을 제한함으로써 일정부분 한계를 보였다. 이에 본 연구는 나와 상대방 그리고 주 위 환경과의 역동적인 관계를 충분히 설명할 수 있는 대안으로 행화적 인지에 주목한다. 우선 행화적 인 지의 주요 원리와 특성을 4가지 카테고리, ‘움직이는 몸에 기반을 둔 비표상적 지각’, ‘환경과의 역동적으 로 상호작용하는 인지’, ‘체화된 기술을 통한 지각의 확장’, ‘내러티브적 상상력과 상호주관성을 통한 공 감’으로 분석한다. 그리고 이러한 주요 원리와 특성을 연기에 적용함으로써, 기존의 배우 훈련에서 상대 적으로 덜 부각되었던 ‘움직이는 몸을 통한 지각의 확장’, ‘환경과의 역동적인 교류를 통한 배우훈련’, ‘텍 스트의 해석이 아닌 창발적인 지각을 만들어내는 배우훈련’이라는 새로운 방향성을 제시한다. 이에 대한 본격적인 논의를 위해 본고는 먼저, 인지과학에서 행화적 인지 이론이 대두된 양상을 시간 순으로 살펴 보고, 인지신경과학의 관점에서 바라본 연기 과정의 쟁점과 한계를 규명한 뒤, 이를 행화적 인지를 통해 다시 고찰한다. 이를 통해 기존의 배우 훈련에서 상대적으로 덜 부각되었던 ‘움직이는 몸을 통한 지각의 확장’과 ‘환경과의 역동적인 교류’를 강조하는 배우 훈련의 중요성을 확인하고, 텍스트의 해석이 아닌 ‘창발적인 지각을 만들어내는’ 배우 훈련으로의 대안적 방향성을 제시하고자 한다.

Enactive cognition and physical education – a natural coupling

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue for the adoption of enactive cognition (which includes emotional and social components) as a basis for understanding the nature of learning in, through and about movement in physical education. Enactivists argue that the process of learning is not one of developing an internal intellectualist understanding of the world or simply learning to adapt to and exploit affordances that exist in a detached external world, but rather a process of meaningfully enacting a world as consciously engaged individuals. For enactivists the world for all individuals is a self-centred world, it is not pre-existing, as the world does not exist as a single entity. In the enactive process, we create our world and ourselves simultaneously. Although our self-centred world is experienced through our biological embodiment within a physical surrounding, it is also embued with emotional and social couplings that impact differently on different individuals. One has to feel and experience one’s emotional and social world through the enactive process. Our PE classes are physically enactive learning contexts that inherently involve embodied learning experiences. For this reason, this article aims to highlight the synergies, or natural coupling, between enactive theorising and school physical education.

Epistemic affordances in gestalt perception as well as in emotional facial expressions and gestures

Summary Methodological problems often arise when a special case is confused with the general principle. So you will find affordances only for ‚artifacts’ if you restrict the analysis to ‚artifacts’. The general principle, however, is an ‚invitation character’, which triggers an action. Consequently, an action-theoretical approach known as ‚pragmatic turn’ in cognitive science is recommended. According to this approach, the human being is not a passive-receptive being but actively produces those action effects that open up the world to us (through ‚active inferences’). This ‚ideomotor approach’ focuses on the so-called ‚epistemic actions’, which guide our perception as conscious and unconscious cognitions. Due to ‚embodied cognition’ the own body is assigned an indispensable role. The action theoretical approach of ‚enactive cognition’ enables that every form can be consistently processualized. Thus, each ‚Gestalt’ is understood as the process result of interlocking cognitions of ‚forward modelling’ (which produces anticipations and enables prognoses) and ‚inverse modelling’ (which makes hypotheses about genesis and causality). As can be shown, these cognitions are fed by previous experiences of real interaction, which later changes into a mental trial treatment, which is highly automated and can therefore take place unconsciously. It is now central that every object may have such affordances that call for instrumental or epistemic action. In the simplest case, it is the body and the facial expressions of our counterpart that can be understood as a question and provoke an answer/reaction. Thus, emotion is not only to be understood as expression/output according to the scheme ‚input-processing-output’, but acts itself as a provocative act/input. Consequently, artifacts are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for affordances. Rather, they exist in all areas of cognition—from Enactive Cognition to Social Cognition.

Competition and Cognition: Theorizing an Autopoietic Pedagogy of Performance within Competitive Dance

ABSTRACT Acknowledging criticisms of the values supported by competitive dance, this article seeks to develop and advocate a pedagogical reframing of the event in terms of situated learning and mediated learning experience. Making sense of the competitive experience with the contributions of 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition theory, understandings of the potentially transformative phenomena of performative impulse and performative affect are advanced. Employing theoretical frameworks from 4E cognition including autopoiesis, affective scaffolding, skilled intentionality, and meshed architecture, competitive dance is presented as a site of situated cognition that enhances the intensity, and therefore the transformative potential, of performative affect. Examples of reframed situated and mediated learning experiences are presented to explicate the theoretical underpinnings of a pedagogy of performance developed for the competitive context with applications extending beyond it.

Converging enactivisms: radical enactivism meets linguistic bodies

We advance a critical examination of two recent branches of the enactivist research program, namely, Radically Enactive Cognition and Linguistic Bodies. We argue that, although these approaches may look like diverging views within the wider enactivist program, when appraised in a conciliatory spirit, they can be interpreted as developing converging ideas. We examine how the notion of know-how figures in them to show an important point of convergence, namely, that the normativity of human cognitive capacities rests on shared know-how. Radical enactivism emphasizes the diachronic dimension of shared know-how, and linguistic bodies emphasize the synchronic one. Given that know-how is a normative notion, it is subject to success conditions. We then argue it implies basic content, which is the content of the successful ongoing interactions between agent(s) and environment. Basic content does not imply accuracy conditions and representational content, so it evades Hutto and Myin’s Hard Problem of Content. Moreover, this account is amenable to the central claim by Di Paolo et al. that the participatory sense-making relations at play in linguistic exchanges are explained in continuity with explanations of biological organization and sensorimotor engagements.

CHARITY ORGANIZATIONS ADOPTING VIRTUAL REALITY MODALITY: THEORIZATION AND VALIDATION

ABSTRACT Communicators of charity organizations have begun to adopt virtual reality modality to draw in more donors in recent years. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical exploration and empirical verification on the avenues that may optimize the function of virtual reality modality for communication conducted by charity organizations. To fill this gap, the current study proposes and validates a framework based on integrative extension of theories pertaining to enactive cognition, media affordances, and personal norm. As the research result suggests, the five immersive affordance attributes of vividness, authenticity, coherence, interactivity, and controllability are primary facilitators of empathy and personal norm activation in the virtual reality context. The type of virtual reality modality, which provides immersive affordance attributes to exercise the transformative change effect, serves to elicit charitable donation intention through evocation of empathy and personal norm activation as the two key mediators. More noteworthy, the positive impact of empathy on charitable donation intention significantly increases due to the partial mediating effect of personal norm activation. Overall, the research result contributes to enhancing the effectiveness of communication conducted by charity organizations.

The enactive computational basis of cognition and the explanatory cognitive basis for computing

The computational theory of cognition, or computationalism, holds that cognition is a form of computation. Two issues related to this view are comprised by the goal of this paper: A) Computing systems are traditionally seen as representational systems, but functional and enactive approaches support non-representational theories; B) Recently, a sociocultural theory against computationalism was proposed with the aim of ontologically reducing computing to cognition. We defend, however, that cognition and computation are in action, thus cognition is just a form of computing and that cognition is the explanatory basis for computation. We state that: 1. Representational theories of computing recurring to intentional content run into metaphysical problems. 2. Functional non-representational theories do not incur this metaphysical problem when describing computing in terms of the abstract machine. 3. Functional theories are consistent with enactive in describing computing machines not in a strictly functional way, but especially in terms of their organization. 4. Enactive cognition is consistent with the computationalism in describing Turing machines as functionally and organizationally closed systems. 5. The cognitive explanatory basis for computing improves the computational theory of cognition. When developed in the human linguistic domain, computer science is seen as a product of human socionatural normative practices, however, cognition is just an explanatory, not ontological, basis for computing. The paper concludes by supporting that computation is in action, that cognition is just one form of computing in the world and the explanatory basis for computation.

The emerging approaches in the study of cognition: A review

Introduction: In recent decades, different views among cognitive researchers on how cognition is formed in animals, especially humans have been emerged. Cognition and cognitive processes involve many mental processes such as attention, knowledge formation, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and calculation, problem solving and decision making, perception and language production. Aim: Investigation and comparison of emerging approaches in the study of cognition. Method: Review of literature. Results: New approaches to cognition such as the concepts of embodied and embedded cognition, grounded cognition, enactive cognition, and situated cognition have been compared with each other and with computational cognition as well. The findings show that the boundary between the types of new approaches in the study of cognition is so narrow that they are sometimes not even easily distinguishable from each other. Furthermore, all emerging approaches in the study of cognition are very different from the computational approach in the study of cognition. Conclusion: The new approach to cognitive science describes cognition with a variety of attributes, most of which indicate that the new approach in the cognitive science has moved away from a purely amodal, computational approach and has opened the door to experience and the environment.

Sound, silence, resonance, and embodiment: choreographic synaesthesia

This article explores the potential of a new conceptualisation of dance spectatorship informed by theories of embodied and enactive cognition. The approach adopted here incorporates the bodily experience and the intellectual processing of information that the dance spectator goes through. This perspective enables a discussion on the intersection of referential elements, spectator’s knowledge and background, and formal properties of the work into the experience that provide a holistic view of the work of dance and its effects through the concept of synaesthesia. Meaning moves, sounds feel, images taste and smell. In order to build this understanding, this particular study makes use of an enquiry into experience and body-environment relationships to approach the multi-modal experience of watching dance. I explore the idea of cross-sensory embodied experience as the base for dance spectatorship. I propose that synaesthesia will be useful in modelling spectatorial experience of dance. Further to this, I contend that although maybe not fully consciously, it is possible that the creative agents—the choreographer-director in this case—already have an understanding of this potential. Through this they manipulate elements within their works until they experience something akin to cross-sensory engagement in themselves. This perspective hence also allows new forms of analysis and understandings of creative work in performance. Through this approach, the article discusses a combination of apparently separate elements and senses in performance, with focus on sound, silence, and resonance through the notion of synaesthesia. Discussion is illustrated and exemplified though analysis of choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works (2015), which not only expresses ideas, emotions, and sensations through the medium of dance, but demonstrates an understanding of dance as cross-sensory potentiality, able not only to deal with deep thematic elements, but also remain viscerally engaging. Embodied cognition, then, is proposed as the best framework to discuss the spectatorial experience of such work.

Sketching enactive interactions

The continuous development of interactive technologies and the greater understanding of body importance in cognitive processes has driven HCI research, specifically on interaction design, to solve the user’s relationship with a multitude of beyond desktop devices. This has opened new challenges for having processes, methods and tools to achieve appropriate user experiences. Insofar as new devices and systems involve the body and social aspects of the human being, the consideration of paradigms, theories and support models that exceed the selection of navigation nodes and the appropriate visual organization of widgets and screens becomes more relevant. The interaction design must take care not only to get the product built properly but also to build the right product. This thesis is at the crossroads of three themes: the design of interactive systems that combine a foot in the digital and one in the physical, the theories of embodied and enactive cognition and the creative practices supported by sketching, in particular the processes of generation, evaluation and communication of interaction design ideas. This work includes contributions of different character. An in-depth study of the theories on embodied and enactive cognition, the design of interaction with digital devices and sketching as a basic tool of creative design is carried out. Based on this analysis of the existing literature and with a characterization of the enactive practice of enactive interactions based on ethnomethodological studies, a framework is proposed to conceptually organize this practice and a support tool for that activity conceived as a creative composition. The contributions are discussed, and possible lines of future work are considered.

Tecendo relações entre sentido e não-sentido na cognição enativa

Neste artigo, discutimos a definição de não-sentido e sua relação com a produção de sentido na teoria enativa da cognição. Tomamos como ponto de partida a publicação “Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making: Making Sense of Non-Sense”, organizada por Massimiliano Cappuccio e Tom Froese, por ser uma obra pioneira em relação ao tema. A importância da produção de sentido para a relação entre percepção e ação é abordada a partir de diferentes aspectos. Discutimos as proposições centrais das teorias da autopoiese e da enação, a partir das quais são produzidas três formas de compreender o não-sentido segundo uma perspectiva enativa. Nessas três abordagens, os autores contemporâneos sugerem que o não-sentido se constitui como elemento intermediário ou mediador em processos de produção de sentido. Por fim, discutimos a relação entre não-sentido e sentido, sugerindo uma articulação entre os domínios sensório-motor e linguístico a partir de uma definição não antagônica de saber-sobre e saber-fazer.

Enactive Cognition and the Other: Enactivism and Levinas Meet Halfway

This paper makes a comparison between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy. Enactivism is a recent development in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that generally defines cognition in terms of a subject’s natural interactions with the physical environment. In recent years, enactivists have been focusing on social and ethical relations by introducing the concept of participatory sensemaking, according to which ethical know-how spontaneously emerges out of natural relations of participation and communication, that is, through the exchange of knowledge. This paper will argue first that, although participatory sensemaking is a valuable concept in that it offers a practical and realistic way of understanding ethics, it nevertheless downplays the significance of otherness for understanding ethics. I will argue that Levinas’ work demonstrates in turn that otherness is significant for ethics in that we cannot completely anticipate others through participation or know-how. We cannot live the other’s experiences or suffering, which makes ethical relation so difficult and serious (e.g. care for a terminally ill person always falls short to a certain extent). I will argue next that enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy nevertheless do not exclude each other insofar they share a similar concept of subjectivity as a quality of naturally interacting with the external world to gain knowledge (Levinas speaks of dwelling). Finally, I will argue that enactivism’s notion of participatory sensemaking also offers something which Levinas’ insufficiently defines, namely a concept of social justice, based on equality and participation, that emerges out of natural relations.

Beyond the Individual Body

AbstractSince the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the application of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers’ participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for film and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and define a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here.

Understanding the Meaningfulness of Vocal and Instrumental Music Teachers' Hand Gestures Through the Teacher Behavior and Gesture Framework

This article considers the usefulness of the recently proposed ‘Teacher Behaviour and Gesture (TBG) framework’ for understanding the meaningfulness of teachers’ hand gestures from an Enactive Cognition perspective (wherein cognition is fundamentally considered as embodied, embedded, enactive and extended). The framework is based on the main premise that gestures are part of an integral musical communicational process, fully integrated with speech and/or music-making and contextualised within specific teaching behaviours. By considering teachers’ teaching behaviours, it is possible to realise teachers’ pedagogical intentions. This, in turn, enables deeper understandings on teachers’ gestures from the points of view of meaning, function and purpose. Application of the TBG framework across instrumental and vocal music pedagogical contexts (one-to-one, small and large teaching groups) will bring relevant insights on developing practical scaffolding approaches, with direct implications on the quality of teaching and learning, for the benefit of both teachers and students.

生成认知：理论基础与实践走向

<p id="C2">There are different theoretical views in the embodied cognition camp, and there is sometimes even conflict among them. Enactive cognition is a new version of recently developed embodied cognition approaches. It claims that the explanation of human cognitive processes across the board should not make any appeal to internal representational or computational states. According to the traditional computation-representation theory of mind, cognitive processes are mechanistically realized in computational processes of building, storing and manipulating detached and abstract internal representations. This cognitivist paradigm has dominated mainstream cognitive psychology for decades. The key assumptions that characterize this representation- centered theory of mind are including that cognition might be understood as computation over mental representations, and that models of cognition should take into account only the inner states of a cognitive individual. But recently this framework has been challenged and criticized. Out of this challenge and criticism emerged the beginnings to an enactive cognition paradigm. The enactive approach to cognitive science proposed a new set of theoretical assumptions for understanding what cognition is and how it works that aims to break the tight conceptual connection between cognition and representation. It takes as its starting point that cognition must not be understood as a capacity for getting an internal representation of a corresponding external reality, which in turn would provide a foundation for supporting thinking, learning, and problem solving. Instead, cognitive processes are deeply entangled in action. Cognition is thus best understood as “enactive”; that is, as a form of practice itself. From the point view of enactive cognition, cognition comes from bodily action and serves bodily action, that is, cognition is embodied action. The key postulate of enactive Cognition is action-related and action-oriented, with the capacity to generate environmental structure by action. Cognition is thus best understood as “enactive”; that is, as embedded action it comes from bodily action and serves bodily action. At the same time, advocates of enactivism state that despite the emphasis on the function of the organism’s action of the mind, the model cannot be equated with behaviorism; action, in contrast to behavior, is purposeful and has a cognitive component. Key aspects of enactive cognition are: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that allow action to be perceptually guided. There are three enactive theories in cognitive science. Autopoietic enactivism emphasizes the deep continuity between life and mind; sensorimotor enactivism focuses on analyzing perceptual consciousness in terms of sensorimotor contingency, and radical enactivism focuses on rejecting representationalism in favour of explanatory strategies that emphasize patterns of embodied interaction. These perspectives on enactive cognition are more informed by phenomenology and pragmatism than were earlier versions of embodied cognition. Therefore, we can say that phenomenology and pragmatism constitute the theoretical origin of enactive cognition. The enactive cognition view is not only theoretically viable, but also supported by substantial experimental evidence demonstrating that cognitive processes can be reinterpreted using this new conceptual framework. The theoretical premises of enactive cognition open up new prospects for improving theoretical research and the practical application of cognitive science in the future.

Revaluing the behaviorist ghost in enactivism and embodied cognition

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have (e.g. Block, J Philos 102:259–272, 2005; Jacob, Rev Philos Psychol 2(3):519–540, 2011; O’Brien and Opie, Philos 43:723–729, 2015), we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (in Philos Stud 176(3):839–8512019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible.

Reconceiving rationality: situating rationality into radically enactive cognition

Rational beliefs and actions are typically evaluated against certain benchmarks, e.g., those of classical logic or probability theory. Rationality therefore is traditionally taken to involve some sort of reasoning, which in turn implies contentful cognition. Radically Enactive (and Embodied) views of Cognition (REC), on the other hand, claim that not all cognition is contentful. In order to show that rationality does not need to lie outside of REC’s scope of radicalizing cognition, I develop a Radically Enactive notion of Rationality (RER), according to which rationality is embodied, situated and contentless. For RER, an organism acts rationally insofar as it sustains a proficient interaction with its environment, which in turn requires the coordination of cognitive abilities in accordance with environmental constraints. Rationality is thus distinguished from reasoning, for reasoning is understood as a capacity to coordinate representational cognitive abilities.