enactivism

Enactivism, or enactive cognition, is a theoretical framework in cognitive science and philosophy of mind that holds that cognitive processes arise through an organism's active engagement with its environment. Rather than modeling cognition as internal manipulation of representations, enactivism posits that organisms sense, act, and adapt in ways that bring forth a meaningful world. Central to the view is sense-making: living systems autonomously generate meaning through their interactions with the world, shaping both their behavior and their experiential world. Cognition is thus constitutive of organism-environment coupling, and perception and action are inseparable.

Origin and key concepts: Enactivism grows from the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on autopoiesis and structural coupling. It was developed in philosophy and cognitive science by Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991) and has since spawned numerous variants. The framework is often associated with 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted, and (sometimes) extended. It emphasizes autonomy and the idea that cognizing agents bring forth a world that is dynamically co-constructed with their activity, rather than passively representing a pre-given environment. It draws on phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty, and emphasizes the inseparability of perception, action, and emotion, and the role of social interaction in sense-making.

Reception and scope: Enactivism has influenced cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence as an alternative to representational theories. Debates focus on the status of mental content, the methodological grounding for sense-making, and the extent of embodiment or extended cognition. Radical enactivism, as advocated by some proponents like Hutto and Myin, questions mental content and negates representationalism more strongly. Overall, enactivism seeks to integrate mind, body, and world through active, adaptive engagement rather than internal computation alone.