Making sense of doing science: on some pragmatic motifs guiding the enactive approach to science

Abstract

In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the article, I will discuss to what extent enactivism can be seen as a philosophy of nature, and by comparing it with Sellars’s interpretation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humans in the world, I will focus on the view of nature that enactivism defends. In the second part, I will compare the enactive approach with Dewey’s conception of the organism-environment interaction by focusing on the underlying similarities between their views of evolution and their way of seeing science as the most sophisticated expression of an organism’s sense-making.