Abstract
Since its origins in the mid-Twentieth Century, Cognitive Science has almost exclusively operated within the philosophical frames provided by Cartesian Representationalism. In recent years, alternative, phenomenological and pragmatist, frames have served as a resource for the emergence of non-representational approaches to mind and cognition. These have been gathered under the label ‘4E cognition’, indicating their Embodied, Extended, Enacted and Embedded nature. This chapter examines one version of 4E cognition, which builds upon Ecological Psychology, and argues that it fails to pass the Evaluation Test: it cannot account for the central role of normativity and evaluation in our responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld, while failing to provide an argument for the exclusion of evaluative and normative aspects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
It should also be noted that I don’t believe that Aristotelian monistic predilections were or can be satisfied by a return to the substance of Aristotle’s own account. He initiates this tradition, or at least he is one of the early towering figures in Western monism, but his own arguments are too metaphysical to be satisfactory. The Aristotelian monist tradition needs completing by drawing upon Wittgensteinian and Ethnomethodological insights, in my view. But that, as they say, is for another time.
References
Barrett, L. (2011). Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Barrett, L. (2018). Picturing Primates and Looking at Monkeys: Why 21st Century Primatology Needs Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 41(2), 1–27.
Baz, A. (2012). When Words are Called For. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brooks, R. A. (1999). Cambrian Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chemero, A. (2003). An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181–195.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012601730-4/50004-4
Costall, A. (1995). Socializing Affordances. Theory & Psychology, 5(4), 467–481.
Costall, A. (2003). Book Review of Heft, Harry—Ecological Psychology in Context. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 39(3), 320–322.
Costall, A. (2017). 1966 and All That: James Gibson and Bottom-Down Theory. Ecological Psychology, 29(3), 221–230.
Di Paolo, E. (2003). Organismically-Inspired Robotics: Homeostatic Adaptation and Teleology Beyond the Closed Sensorimotor Loop. In K. Murase, & T. Asakura (Eds.), Dynamical Systems Approach to Embodiment and Sociality. Adelaide: Advanced Knowledge International. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250397907_Organismicallyinspired_robotics_homeostatic_adaptation_and_teleology_beyond_the_closed_sensorimotor_loop
Ebersole, F. B. (2002). Meaning and Saying: Essays in the Philosophy of Language (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Xlibris.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: The Psychology Press.
Glotzbach, P. A., & Heft, H. (1982). Ecological and Phenomenological Contributions to the Psychology of Perception. Nous, 16(1), 108–121.
Heft, H. (1988). The Development of Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Perception. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 8(4), 325–334.
Heft, H. (1989). Affordances and the Body—An Intentional Analysis of Gibson Ecological Approach to Visual-Perception. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19(1), 1–30.
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hertzberg, L. (2001). The Sense is Where You Find It (Complete Version). In T. G. McCarthy & S. C. Stidd (Eds.), Wittgenstein in America (pp. 90–103). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/filosofi/Staff/lhertzbe/Text/The_Sense_Is_Where_You_Find_It.pdf
Hufendiek, R. (2016). Embodied Emotions: A Naturalist Approach to a Normative Phenomenon. London: Routledge.
Hutto, D. D. (2013). Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian Point of View. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(3), 281–302.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kenny, A. (1989). The Metaphysics of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Menary, R. (2010). Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 459–463.
Nussbaum, M. C., & Putnam, H. (1992). Changing Aristotle’s Mind. In M. C. Nussbaum & A. Oksenberg Rorty (Eds.), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (pp. 27–56). New York: Oxford University Press.
Prinz, J. J. (2003). Emotion, Psychosemantics, and Embodied Appraisals. Philosophy and the Emotions: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 52, 69–86.
Putnam, H. (1992). Responses. In Hill, Christopher (Ed.), The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam. Philosophical Topics, 20(1), 347–408.
Reed, E. S. (1996). Encountering the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rowlands, M. (2002). Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again. Chesham: Acumen.
Rowlands, M. (2010). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shargel, D., & Prinz, J. J. (2018). An Enactivist Theory of Emotional Content. In N. Hichem & F. Teroni (Eds.), The Ontology of Emotions (pp. 110–129). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. (Eds.). (2010). Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Travis, C. (1989). The Uses of Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Travis, C. (2008). Occasion-Sensitivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Dijk, L., Withagen, R., & Bongers, R. M. (2015). Information without Content: A Gibsonian Reply to Enactivists Worries. Cognition, 134, 210–214.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, Ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hutchinson, P. (2019). The Missing ‘E’: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Ecological Psychology and the Place of Ethics in Our Responsiveness to the Lifeworld. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18491-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18492-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)