Ecological-enactive scientific cognition: modeling and material engagement
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Ecological-enactive scientific cognition: modeling and material engagement Giovanni Rolla 1
& Felipe
Novaes 2
Accepted: 17 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Ecological-enactive approaches to cognition aim to explain cognition in terms of the dynamic coupling between agent and environment. Accordingly, cognition of one’s immediate environment (which is sometimes labeled “basic” cognition) depends on enaction and the picking up of affordances. However, ecological-enactive views supposedly fail to account for what is sometimes called “higher” cognition, i.e., cognition about potentially absent targets, which therefore can only be explained by postulating representational content. This challenge levelled against ecological-enactive approaches highlights a putative explanatory gap between basic and higher cognition. In this paper, we examine scientific cognition—a paradigmatic case of higher cognition—and argue that it shares fundamental features with basic cognition, for enaction and affordance selection are central to the scientific enterprise. Our argument focuses on modeling, and on how models promote scientific understanding. We base our argument on a nonrepresentational account of scientific understanding and on the material engagement theory, for models are hereby conceived as material objects designed for scientific engagements. Having done so, we conclude that the explanatory gap is significantly less threatening to the ecological-enactive approach than it might appear. Keywords Enactivism . Ecological psychology . Scientific models . Scientific
understanding . Epistemic artifacts . Material engagement
* Giovanni Rolla [email protected]; [email protected] Felipe Novaes [email protected]
1
Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), São Lázaro Road, 197, Federação, Salvador, BA 40-210730, Brazil
2
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Marquês de São Vicente street, 225, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22451-900, Brazil
G. Rolla, F. C. Novaes
1 Introduction Enactivism and ecological psychology are two of the main branches of the research tradition on embodied cognition and, despite being historically independent from each other, they are broadly convergent and similar in spirit (Heras-Escribano 2019). In particular, both enactive and ecological approaches attempt to explain cognition from the bottom-up, focusing on how organisms engage with their immediate environment. Fundamentally, they agree that cognition cannot be fully understood in abstraction from the cognizing organism’s bodily morphology and its activities in its medium. Against cognitivist views, ecological psychologists emphasize (Bruineberg et al. 2019; Chemero 2009; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Turvey et al. 1981), and some enactivists agree (Barandiaran 2017; Di Paolo et al. 2017; Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017),1 that cognition is not fundamentally a matter of representing an external environment. Although there seems to be no agreement on what representations are (Rowlands 2017), what both the
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