Anthony Chemero

Many commentators on Clark’s writings on predictive processing have wondered how well the predictive processing model actually fits with embodied and extended cognition. The former seems to imply that cognition is secluded from the environment, while the latter implies that cognition is in and of the environment. This chapter argues that a reconciliation with embodied and extended cognition is possible but requires that predictive processing proponents reject environmental seclusion. To do so means adopting ecological information in place of the Shannon information most typically invoked by proponents of predictive processing, and giving many of the other semantic-sounding terms they use (e.g., “prediction,” “model,” “representation”) deflationary understandings.

In this paper, we argue that radical embodied cognitive science implies an ethics of responsibility that prioritizes what we refer to as taking collective responsibility. By taking responsibility, we mean that the ethical concept of responsibility ought to be more fundamentally understood in terms of the knowledge-how of the first-person capacity to respond to a situation rather than the knowledge-that of a third-person judgment that an agent ought to respond to a situation. By tak- ing collective responsibility, we mean that all individual human response-taking (or, response-ability) is, to some extent, a collective endeavor. Consequently, we argue that radical embodied cognitive science has a similarly radical consequence for how we ought to think about the ethics of responsibility. To demonstrate, we consider social harms associated with use of social media as a case study to demonstrate what we mean by taking collective responsibility. In short, identify- ing who or what to hold responsible for social media harms obfuscates the more critical quest

In a target article that appeared in this journal, Thomas Stoffregen 2000 questions the possibility of ecological event perception research. This paper describes an experiments performed to examine the perception of the disappearance of gap-crossing affordances, a variety of event as defined by Chemero 2000. We found that subjects reliably perceive both gap-crossing affordances and the disappearance of gap-crossing affordances. Our findings provide empirical evidence in favor of understanding events as changes in the layout of affordances, shoring up event perception research in ecological psychology.

The ideas of continental philosopher Martin Heidegger have been influential in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, despite the fact that there has been no effort to analyze these ideas empirically. The experiments reported here are designed to lend empirical support to Heidegger’s phenomenology and more specifically his description of the transition between ready-to-hand and unready-to-hand modes in interactions with tools. In experiment 1, we found that a smoothly coping cognitive system exhibits 1/fβ type positively correlated noise and that its correlated character is reduced when the system is perturbed. This indicates that the participant and tool constitute a self-assembled, extended device during smooth coping and this device is disrupted by the perturbation. In experiment 2, we examine the re-organization of awareness that occurs when a smoothly coping, self-assembled, extended cognitive system is perturbed. We found that the disruption is accompanied by a change in attention which interferes with participants’ performance on a simultaneous cognitive task. Together these experiments show that a smoothly coping participant-tool system can be temporarily disrupted and that this disruption causes a change in the participant’s awareness. Since these two events follow as predictions from Heidegger’s work, our study offers evidence for the hypothesized transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand.

Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion ‘affordance’. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of ‘affordance’. In contrast, Gibsonian understandings are shown to treat animal-environment systems as unified complex systems and to be compatible with direct perception. We discuss the fruitful connections between Gibsonian affordances and dynamical systems explanation in the behavioral sciences and point to prior fruitful application of Gibsonian affordances in robotics. We conclude that it is unnecessary to re-imagine affordances as representations in order to make them useful for researchers in robotics.

The world shows some degree of invariance, and we perceive this invariance despite a lot of variation generated locally by our movements, changes in illumination, and the way in which our sense organs react to stimulation. Generally, philosophy and psychology each explain our perception of invariance through the notion of ‘perceptual constancy’. According to the traditional definition, perceptual constancies are capacities to perceive the objective (i.e., perceiver- and context-independent) local properties of external objects despite variation in the stimulation of sensory organs. In this paper, we argue that the traditional understanding of perceptual constancy should be expanded to include a broader range of phenomena connected to the perception of invariance. Our argument starts from an odd activity: pole balancing. Balancing a pole-shaped object (e.g., a broomstick) on the palm of your hand in order to maintain it in an upright position requires (multimodal) perception and continuous tracking (within a certain range) of a particular kind of global invariant feature in the world. By examining this activity and its connection to the notion of perceptual constancy as it is traditionally understood, we propose an alternative account with the goal of clarifying the relationship between the alleged mechanisms underlying constancy and the philosophical implications of the phenomenon.

A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology.

Embodied cognition is a well-established and increasingly influential branch of the cognitive, neural, and psychological sciences. Unlike embodied cognition, extended cognition is not as well-established or influential. Our goal is to defend the idea that if cognition is truly embodied, then it is embodied in systems, and if it is embodied in systems, then it extends beyond animal boundaries. In order to demonstrate this, we situate the idea of extended cognitive systems in a historical context. Then, we present a theoretical and methodological framework for investigating extended cognitive systems. Finally, we discuss some potential experimental work that could adjudicate the existence of extended cognitive systems.

We argue that the idea of embodiment and the strategies for carrying out embodied approaches are some of the most prevalent and interdisciplinary legacies of early modern science. The idea of embodiment is simple: to explain the behavior of bodies, we must understand them as unified wholes in their environments. Embodied approaches eschew explanations in terms of qualitative descriptions of the intrinsic properties of bodies and promote explanation in terms of the interaction between bodies. This idea can be found in Kepler's optics, Descartes' physics, and Newton's physico-mathematics. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson, 1966) is the culmination of this centuries-long embodiment movement which can be traced back to the 17th century.

Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin by describing the habitat of the species, and use this to explain how action possibilities are constrained for individual actors. Enactivists, meanwhile, pursue an epistemic strategy: start by characterizing the exploratory, self-regulating behavior of the individual organism, and use this to understand how that organism brings forth its animal-specific umwelt. Both types of explanation are necessary: the ontological strategy explains how structure in the environment constrains how the world can appear to an individual, while the epistemic strategy explains how the world can appear differently to different members of the same species, relative to their skills, abilities, and histories. Making the distinction between species habitat and animal-specific umwelt allows us to understand the environment in realist terms while acknowledging that individual living organisms are phenomenal beings.

As with much contemporary philosophical and scientific research, the predominant metaphysics of situatedness is monism, particularly, physicalism. Here, we claim that while monism is the proper metaphysical thesis, empirically-supported theories of situated phenomena require ontological pluralism as well. We defend this position via the example of bird flocks, which are situated systems that exhibit ontologically plural features, namely, component dominance and interaction dominance. The description of these features will illustrate that understanding these phenomena requires a coevolution of conceptual and methodological development. Specifically, ontological features are partially identified and evaluated by way of the analyses applied to them. Both descriptive and normative lessons are drawn. Descriptively, research on bird flocks demonstrate that natural phenomena may not be readily cast via a monistic ontology (e.g., component dominant), even at the same scale of investigation. The normative consequence is that while research on situated systems need not reject metaphysical monism, it ought to begin from a pluralistic position concerning ontology.

This paper examines two twenty-first-century developments in the enactive approach in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. The first is the surging interest in Hans Jonas, which begins with Weber and Varela's 'Life After Kant' (2002) and continues up to the present. The second is the 'social turn' that the enactive approach has taken, especially after De Jaegher and Di Paolo's (2007) work on participatory sense-making. We look at these two developments through the lens of the problem of other minds. We argue that they are incompatible due to a residual solipsism in Jonasian phenomenology. Ultimately, this leaves enactive theory with a choice between embracing Jonas or embracing the social turn in enactive theory. We recommend replacing Jonasian influences with those from the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We argue that enactivism can evade the problem of other minds using Merleau-Ponty's discussion of 'flesh' and 'expression'.

This paper addresses a potential contradiction between the two primary philosophical traditions that inform Gibsonian ecological psychology: the phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. These two traditions exhibit potentially contradictory intuitions about the epistemic role of direct perception. This epistemic role of direct perception was famously problematized by Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given (1956; 1997), and we draw on it here to serve as a test case for the Gibsonian synthesis of phenomenology and pragmatism. While ecological psychology’s emphasis on the firstperson perspective of organisms shares in the legacy of the phenomenological tradition, it also tends to assume direct experience as a given, something basic and foundational to knowledge. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is generally suspicious of experience as a foundational given. We argue that Gibson’s successful synthesis of these two traditions is also what makes his theory of affordances less susceptible to the myth of the given than some phenomenological approaches to perception. Namely, on the Gibsonian account of perception is always part of an action-perception cycle that takes place in and through embodied action and therefore no one act of perception functions as an epistemic given.

This paper reviews the recent history of a subset of research in dynamical cognitive science, in particular that subset that allies itself with the sciences of complexity and casts cognitive systems as interaction dominant, noncomputational, and nonmodular. I look at this history in the light of C.S. Peirce's understanding of scientific reasoning as progressing from abduction to deduction to induction. In particular, I examine the development of a controversy concerning the use of the interaction dominance of human cognitive systems as an explanation of the ubiquitous 1/f noise, multifractality, and complexity matching in human behavior.

Every few years Andy Clark writes a book designed to help philosophers of mind get up to speed with the most recent developments in cognitive science. In his first two such books, Microcognition (1989) and Associative Engines (1993), Clark introduced the then-cutting-edge field of connectionist networks. In his newest one, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997), he once again provides a concise, readable introduction to the state of the art. This time, though, Clark has moved beyond (but not abandoned) connectionism for what he calls 'embodied, active cognition,' in which the primary focus of study is not the inner workings of the rational thinker, but rather the way the autonomous, embodied agent interacts with its environment.

In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of this is how during the design process architects can let themselves be guided by the future behavior of visitors to an exhibit they are planning. The main question is what the sociomaterial environment and the skilled agent are like, such that they can relate to each other in these ways. We argue that this requires an account of the regularities in the environment. Introducing the notion of general ecological information, we will give an account of these regularities in terms of constraints, information and the form of life or ecological niche. In the first part of the paper, we will introduce the skilled intentionality framework as conceptualizing a special case of an animal’s informational coupling with the environment namely skilled action. We will show how skilled agents can pick up on the regularities in the environment and let their behavior be guided by the practices in the form of life. This conceptual framework is important for radical embodied and enactive cognitive science, because it allows these increasingly influential paradigms to extend their reach to forms of ‘higher’ cognition such as long-term planning and imagination.

Ecological psychology (see Gibson, 1979) is generally thought of as comprising two main claims. The first is that perception is direct insofar as it is not the result of information added to sensory representations. The second is that perception is comprised of affordances (at least most of the time) or opportunities for action that exist in the environment. Barrett explores the possibility of giving an objective account of perceiving religious meaning and value by means of ecological psychology. The attempt to utilize ecological psychology to account for values is not without precedent, however. Jayawickreme and Chemero (2008), for instance, used the ecological concept of ‘‘affordance’’ to sketch an account of both virtues and morally relevant situations. Surprisingly, Barrett never mentions this central ecological concept, choosing instead to focus solely on the directness of perception. We believe that this constricts his ecological account of religious value. While we agree with Barrett that the cognitive science of religion treats presence as an insider’s experience, such that religious experience is a ‘‘black box’’ phenomenon, intractable, and mysterious, and that ecological theory might provide an account of values, we are not convinced by his particular attempt at an ecological account of religious meaning.

There are many different kinds of model and scientists do all kind of things with them. This diversity of model type and model use is a good thing for science. Indeed, it is crucial especially for the biological and cognitive sciences, which have to solve many different problems at many different scales, ranging from the most concrete of the structural details of a DNA molecule to the most abstract and generic principles of self-organization in networks. Getting a grip (or more likely many separate grips) on this range of topics calls for a teeming forest of techniques, including many different modeling techniques. Barbara Webb’s target article strikes us as a proposal for clear-cutting the forest. We think clear-cutting here would be as good for science as it is for non-metaphorical forests. Our argument for this is primarily a recitation of a few of the ways that diversity has been useful. Recently, looking at the actual practice of artificial life modelers, one of us distinguished four uses of simulation models classified in terms of the position the models take up between theory and data (see Figure 1). The classification is not exhaustive, and the barriers between kinds are not absolute. Rather, the purpose of the taxonomy is to open up the view for an epistemic ecology of modeling practices. First, and closest to the empirical domain, there are mechanistic models, in which there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between variables in the model and observables in the target system and its environment. Webb’s..

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864-1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research.

Understanding everyday behavior relies heavily upon understanding our ability to improvise, how we are able to continuously anticipate and adapt in order to coordinate with our environment and others. Here we consider the ability of musicians to improvise, where they must spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers in order to produce novel musical expressions. Investigations of this behavior have traditionally focused on describing the organization of cognitive structures. The focus, here, however, is on the ability of the time-evolving patterns of inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of complex dynamical systems to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. We demonstrate this approach through the application of cross wavelet spectral analysis, which isolates the strength and patterning of the behavioral coordination that occurs between improvising musicians across a range of nested time-scales. Revealing the sophistication of the previously unexplored dynamics of movement coordination between improvising musicians is an important step towards understanding how creative musical expressions emerge from the spontaneous coordination of multiple musical bodies.

The inconsistent relation between word frequency and free recall performance and the non-monotonic relation found between the two cannot all be explained by current theories. We propose a theoretical framework that can explain all extant results. Based on an ecological psychology analysis of the free recall situation in terms of environmental and informational resources available to the participants, we propose that because participants’ cognitive system has been shaped by their native language, free recall performance is best understood as the end result of relational properties that preexist the experimental situation and of the way the words from the experimental list interact with those. In addition to this, we borrow from predictive coding theory the idea that the brain constantly predicts “what is coming next” so that it is mainly prediction errors that will propagate information forward. Our ecological psychology analysis indicates there will be “prediction errors” because the word frequency distribution in an experimental word list is inevitably different from the particular Zipf’s law distribution of the words in the language that shaped participants’ brains. We further propose the particular distributional discrepancies inherent to a given word list will trigger, as a function of the words that are included in the list, their order, and of the words that are absent from the list, a surprisal signal in the brain, something that is isomorphic to the concept of Bayesian surprise. The precise moment when Bayesian surprise is triggered will determine to what word of the list that Bayesian surprise will be associated with, and the word the Bayesian surprise will be associated with will benefit from it and become more memorable as a direct function of the magnitude of the surprisal. Two experiments are presented that show a proxy of Bayesian surprise explains the free recall performance and that no effect of word frequency is found above and beyond the effect of that proxy variable. We then discuss how our view can account for all data extant in the literature on the effect of word frequency on free recall.

Typically, we think of the brain as responsible for cognition. But the brain is, importantly, embedded in a body—a body that moves around and interacts with features of the environment. What role, then, does the body play in cognition? Some philosophers would argue that it has no significant role in determining how we think about cognitive processing. But others argue that the body is fundamental to cognition, because the body is deeply involved with cognitive processes such as acting and perceiving. Embodied and enactive cognition are theories that emphasize the importance of the body in understanding cognition. This chapter discusses how some philosophers and cognitive scientists have investigated bodily involvement in cognition. We begin in Section 1 by providing an overview of the historical developments that influenced enactive and embodied cognitive science, namely, phenomenology, ecological psychology, and the phenomenological critique of artificial intelligence. We show how these developments were advanced by the introduction of dynamical systems theorizing in psychology and situatedness in robotics. Embodied, extended cognition and enactivism are then introduced as theories that emerge from this discussion. In Section 2, we consider some key debates in embodiment and enactivism, including those over the role of representations and the status of dynamical modeling. We end in Section 3 by highlighting some of the innovative research developments that have come out of an embodied approach to cognition, with a focus on insights regarding social cognition.