Enaction

by Stewart, John; Gapenne, Olivier; Di Paolo, Ezequiel A.

• ISBN13: 9780262014601
• ISBN10: 0262014602
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-24
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind(MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enactsthe world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enactionoffers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Veronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Nunez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Foundational Issues in Enaction as a Paradigm for Cognitive Science: From the Origin of Life to Consciousness and Writing	p. 1
Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play	p. 33
Life and Exteriority: The Problem of Metabolism	p. 89
Development through Sensorimotor Coordination	p. 123
Enaction, Sense-Making, and Emotion	p. 145
Thinking in Movement: Further Analyses and Validations	p. 165
Kinesthesia and the Construction of Perceptual Objects	p. 183
Directive Minds: How Dynamics Shapes Cognition	p. 219
Neurodynamics and Phenomenology in Mutual Enlightenment: The Example of the Epileptic Aura	p. 245
Language and Enaction	p. 267
Enacting Infinity: Bringing Transfinite Cardinals into Being	p. 307
The Ontological Constitution of Cognition and the Epistemological Constitution of Cognitive Science: Phenomenology, Enaction, and Technology	p. 335
Embodiment or Envatment?: Reflections on the Bodily Basis of Consciousness	p. 361
Toward a Phenomenological Psychology of the Conscious	p. 387
Enaction, Imagination, and Insight	p. 425
List of Contributors	p. 451
Index	p. 453
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