Enaction

<b>A comprehensive presentation of an approach that proposes a new account of cognition at levels from the cellular to the social.</b><p>This book presents the framework for a new comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm enaction offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). <i>Enaction</i> first articulated by Varela Thompson and Rosch in <i>The Embodied Mind</i> (MIT Press 1991) breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. <i>Enaction</i> offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science.</p><p>Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research including artificial intelligence developmental psychology neuroscience language phenomenology and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science.</p><p><b>Contributors<br></b>Renaud Barbaras Didier Bottineau Giovanna Colombetti Diego Cosmelli Hanne De Jaegher Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel Olivier Gapenne Véronique Havelange Edwin Hutchins Michel Le Van Quyen Rafael E. Núñez Marieke Rohde Benny Shanon Maxine Sheets-Johnstone Adam Sheya Linda B. Smith John Stewart Evan Thompson</p>