Enaction ─ Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitivescience. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical,first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulatedby Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991), breaksfrom CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition asgrounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and itsenvironment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the worldconstitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers arange of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitivescience.

Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others addressspecific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology,neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimonyto the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-personlived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing frameworkapplicable 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 cognitivescience.

Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti,Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, VeroniqueHavelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Nunez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, MaxineSheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson

John Stewart is a Scientific Consultant and Olivier Gapenne is Assistant Professor at the University of Technology of Compiegne, France. Ezequiel A. Di Paolo is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Spain.