Philos Stud (2019) 176:803–806

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-01230-8

Precis: Enactivist Interventions

Shaun Gallagher1,2

Published online: 1 January 2019

Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2019

In Enactivist Interventions I begin by asking, ‘‘Is cognition in the head or in the

world, or in some mix of brainy and worldly processes?’’ (Gallagher 2017, 1). The
answer that I develop is that cognition involves an integration of brainy and worldly
processes. Each chapter aims to address an important topic or set of concepts that
contributes to contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and cognitive
science.
In the introduction I start by clarifying the positions that I am criticizing—not
just classic cognitivism, but also the more recently developed view that Alsmith and
de Vignemont (2012) call ‘weak’ embodied cognition. This is the idea that
cognition is embodied only in the sense that it involves body-formatted represen-
tations in the brain. I also introduce the position that I am defending—enactivism. In
the other chapters I attempt to explain what I take to be the central principles of
enactivism. I list seven of them (a list that is not meant to be exhaustive or
completely systematic). First, cognition is not simply a brain event. It emerges from
processes distributed across brain-body-environment. Second, the world (meaning,
intentionality) is not pre-given but is enacted by cognition, action, and social
interaction. Third, our understanding of cognitive processes has to be in view of
their role in worldly contexts where they acquire meaning rather than as a
representational mapping or replicated internal model of the world. Fourth,
enactivist approaches have strong links to dynamical systems theory, and they
emphasize the relevance of dynamical coupling and coordination across brain–
body-environment. Fifth, cognitive systems are extended, intersubjective, and
socially situated, but the concept of extension is not equivalent to the functionalist

& Shaun Gallagher

[email protected]
1
University of Memphis, Memphis, USA
2
Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

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extended mind. Sixth, higher-order cognitive functions, such as deliberation,

reflective thinking, and imagination, are exercises of skillful know-how and are
closely coupled with situated and embodied actions. And seventh, such complex
cognitive functions are grounded not only in sensorimotor coordination, but also in
affective and autonomic aspects of the full body.
I provide a broad historical background (showing how enactivism is influenced or
prefigured by pragmatism and phenomenology) and I situate it in the contemporary
context of embodied cognition. Enactivism as one of a number of approaches to
embodied cognition emphasizes agency and social interaction. In such action-
oriented contexts one central question is how to think of intentionality. This is
where enactivism capitalizes on both its phenomenological and pragmatic roots and
shows how to move away from neo-Cartesian and neo-behaviorist conceptions of
intentionality. In this regard a neopragmatist view of intentionality works best to
capture the contextualized, action-oriented nature of cognition. I argue that on this
conception of intentionality the opposition between enactivism and extended mind
approaches can be resolved in a way that deflects the major internalist criticisms
concerning the contrast between causality and constitution, and the ‘‘mark of the
mental’’ understood, for example, as intrinsic or non-derived intentionality.
Enactive intentionality is not conceived in terms of representation, but in terms
of action-oriented responses to worldly events and to other agents. As non-derived
intentionality, I argue, it is not equivalent to internal representational processes, but
to what phenomenologists call operative or bodily intentionality.
The issue of representation is a central one that delineates classic cognitivist, and
even more progressive accounts of distributed or extended cognition from enactivist
approaches. In a chapter that focuses on the question of whether we require the
concept of representation in an account of action, I argue that if we start with
standard definitions of representation in philosophy of mind, then perception and
action-related processes are non-representational. I consider various concepts of
action-oriented representations (found in Clark 1997; Wheeler 2005; Rowlands
2006, 2012, and others) and attempt to show why these processes do not fit the
definition of representation.
How, then, does the brain work if it is not generating internal mental
representations of the world? I contrast predictive processing accounts, which take
perception to be an inferential process, with the enactivist view that the brain, as
part of the body–environment system (not only regulating body, but regulated by the
body and its affective processes), is, as Jesse Prinz puts it, ‘set up to be set off ’
(2004, 55). Set up by evolution and developmental processes, and by prior
experience and plastic changes; set off in dynamical response patterns by the agent’s
worldly engagements. On this view the brain works as an integral part of the
organism which responds dynamically to environmental changes. If, in predictive
processing accounts, the notion of ‘active inference’ comes closest to this enactivist
view, I suggest, we need to think of that process as one where the embodied agent
actively engages in the world rather than as one where an inference-making brain
generates action simply for purposes of predicting or sampling an unknown
environment.

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With respect to action I argue that there is a philosophically significant difference

between concepts of free will and motor control. This is a difference that gets
obscured both in neuroscientific experiments (such as the Libet experiments) and in
standard philosophical discussions that conceive of free will in terms of mental
causation where mental states are understood to cause bodily movement. Rather
than getting snagged on this standard account of free will which focuses the issue on
bodily movement rather than action in the world, it may be better to talk about
autonomy. Here it is better to conceive of autonomy as relational, rather than as a
pre-established character of human nature. In this respect an agent’s degree of
autonomy can be understood in terms of the quality and quantity of affordances
available to her, and is best conceived on a narrative timescale involving intention
formation and action in social contexts, instead of in terms of the elementary
timescale (milliseconds) of neuronal processes.
Although enactivism has often been framed as a theory of sensory-motor
contingencies (e.g., O’Regan and Noë 2001), I argue that this is an overly narrow
conception even when it comes to perception. Here, like a number of recent
enactivist accounts of affect (e.g., Colombetti 2013), I emphasize the role played by
very basic bodily affects (including phenomena such as hunger and fatigue, as well
as moods and emotions). Perception, and cognition more generally, are shaped by
affect, so that in perceiving action possibilities we are not only governed by the ‘‘I
can’’ of sensory-motor contingencies (i.e., seeing things in terms of what we can do
with them or how we can act in regard to them), but also by feelings of whether I
even want to, or have enough energy to do something or act in some way. In this
regard, we should not think of affect as merely a matter of bodily processes
(although that’s an important part of the story), we should think of affect as socially
situated and as modulated by our intersubjective relations.
In these considerations about affect and intersubjectivity, my aim is to flesh out a
richer conception of embodied cognition. In this regard I also point to some
evolutionary considerations about upright posture and a concept of embodied
rationality. The notion that we engage with the world and with others in an
affordance-based fashion is closely tied to our bodily form.
A lot of enactivist analysis is focused on perception and action and what Hutto
and Myin (2013) call ‘basic minds’. One frequent criticism is that enactivism can’t
account for the more complex cognitive processes of memory, imagination,
counterfactual thinking or reflective problem solving. In the final chapter of
Enactivist Interventions I take up this problem, which is sometimes called the
problem of ‘scaling up’. The question is whether an enactivist approach can explain
such complex cognitive processes. To gain some traction on this issue I rehearse the
recent debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell concerning the nature of
the mind. I suggest that we can split the difference between Dreyfus (who
emphasizes embodied skills and coping) and McDowell (who focuses on concepts
and the space of reasons). I argue that reflection and conceptually rich cognitive
operations involve a specialized affordance space that is nonetheless continuous
with embodied coping. Something like this is suggested by Ryle’s analysis of
imagination in terms of pretense, as well as by Sartre’s suggestion that imagination
is grounded on embodied processes. Finally, I consider an account of mathematical

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reasoning rooted in approaches that consider the importance of gesture, bodily

performances, everyday pragmatic dealings with the world, and specific types of
cultural practices. On such analyses, it’s rare that we do the math in our heads; the
more common practice is to do it by way of skillful engagements with the world in
ways that allow us to treat conceptual systems as systems of affordances for solving
problems. Although I cannot claim to have given anything near a complete or
perhaps even convincing enactivist account of these more complex forms of
cognition, my hope is that by building on the work of a number of other theorists
I’ve provided some suggestive sketches that indicate the direction that a fuller
enactivist account might take.

References

Alsmith, A. J. T., & de Vignemont, F. (2012). Embodying the mind and representing the body. Review of
Philosophy and Psychology, 3(1), 1–13.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Colombetti, G. (2013). The feeling body: Affective science meets the enactive mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutto, D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–973.
Prinz, J. (2004). Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rowlands, M. (2006). Body language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rowlands, M. (2012). Representing without representations. AVANT, 3(1), 133–144.
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world: The next step. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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