Enactivism
Explanation
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published in 1991 The Embodied Mind, a book that opened the enactivist approach in cognitive sciences. Its central thesis is that cognition is not the passive representation of a pre-given world, but "enaction": the process by which an organism brings forth a meaningful world through its dynamic coupling with the environment.
Enactivism breaks with two classical assumptions: first, that there is an objective external world independent of the organism (representational realism); second, that the brain constructs mental representations that mirror that world (computational cognitivism). For enactivism, organism and environment co-determine each other: the organism brings to presence a world according to its perceptual-motor capacities, and that world feeds back to the organism modifying it.
The metaphor is biological. A bat, a human and a bee do not perceive the same world: each one brings forth its own Umwelt (to use Uexküll's term) according to its sensors and effectors. The bat's world is structured by ultrasound and nocturnal movement; the human's by visible light and manual manipulation; the bee's by ultraviolet and pheromone memory. None captures "the world"; each enacts a world.
For consciousness specifically, enactivism holds that subjective experience emerges from the organism's sensorimotor coupling with the environment, not from internal computational operations on representations. Consciousness would be a property of life, not a separable process, and would be present in some form in every autopoietic system (capable of self-producing and maintaining its organization).
Enactivism rests on prior philosophies (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, pragmatism) and on theoretical biology (Maturana and Varela with their theory of autopoiesis). Its connection with Eastern contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism, is explicit: Varela was a Buddhist practitioner and saw in the science-dharma dialogue a fertile line of investigation. This bridge inspired the Mind & Life Institute's research programme with the Dalai Lama.
Critiques point out that enactivism may be accused of vagueness (what exactly is enacting a world?), of denying the genuine role of internal representations (which seem useful to explain planning and memory), and of making integration with more reductionist neurosciences difficult. Despite this, it remains one of the liveliest schools in cognitive science, especially in its autopoietic (Thompson), sensorimotor (Noë) and radical (Hutto and Myin) versions.
Strengths
- Integrates phenomenology, biology and cognitive sciences.
- Deep dialogue with contemplative traditions.
- Effective critique of classical representational cognitivism.
- Inspiration for neurophenomenology and animal consciousness.
Main critiques
- Accused of excessive holism, hard to operationalize.
- Insufficient clarity on how the leap to reflective consciousness occurs.
- Risk of relativism if all knowledge is enaction.
- Partially overlaps with embodied and situated cognition.