What Is Enactivism?

Abstract

‘Enactivism’ is usually taken to be an umbrella term encompassing any approach that emphasises the importance of recurrent loops of sensorimotor activity to adequate philosophical and scientific understandings of how minds fit into the natural world. Under this umbrella different variants can then be distinguished. I argue that this is a distortive and unhelpful understanding insofar as it ignores three central commitments of the enactive approach as originally set out in Varela, Thompson & Rosch’s The Embodied Mind. These commitments to life/mind continuity, experiential primacy, and the reciprocity between science and self-understanding set the enactive approach apart from other variants of embodied cognition in science and philosophy, and do so in ways that make it distinctively timely and valuable.