Chapter 9 of The Embodied Mind helps us envision what an enactive cognitive science looks like. A good part of the chapter is dedicated to exploring an analogy between the situation in the sciences of the mind and in theoretical biology. Evolutionary thinking, which is central to biology, has been dominated by the adaptationist programme, very much in the same way that cognitive science has been dominated by the computationalist/representationalist dogma. The parallels between the two ways of thinking are many, including a preference for reductionist, linear, modular, and internalist explanations. In both cases the environment plays the role of an independent set of problems and it is the task of evolution and of cognition to find optimal solutions to these problems. The chapter explores strong criticisms of the adaptationist programme in biology. They broadly correspond to the authors’ own criticism of computationalism in cognitive science. In the process, an enactive alternative comes into sharper focus and crucially, a move from criticism into a positive science of life and mind begins to take shape. This move is illustrated by the then nascent (re)birth of autonomous robotics, which the authors describe as a kind of enactive AI.

Dr Ezequiel A. Di Paolo is a full-time Research Professor working at Ikerbasque, the Basque Science Foundation in Spain and a Visiting Professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. His interdisciplinary work on embodied and enactive approaches to life, mind, and society integrates insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and computational modelling. His recent research focus is on enactive theory, embodied intersubjectivity, language, ethics, and participatory sense-making. He is (co)author of over 180 publications (journal articles, books, and edited collections) including the books Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal (2017, Oxford University Press) and Linguistic Bodies. The Continuity between Life and Language (2018, MIT Press). He is co-editor of the forthcoming annotated edition of Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (MIT Press).

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