Editorial introduction to the special issue: 4E cognition research in Colombia

A special issue on 4E Cognition research in Colombia presents seven articles and two opinion pieces that explore how cognition is embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. The collection has two parts: conceptual proposals and applications to pathologies and situations. German Bula draws on Spinoza's ontology to derive hermeneutic keys for understanding mind and body reciprocally. Juan Loaiza proposes a convergence between enactivism, anthropology, and ethics of care, linking concern and social participation to autopoiesis. Alejandro Arango critiques enactivist perception theory for neglecting social practices, arguing that perception depends on cultural networks. Maria Clara Garavito examines incorporating others into extended cognition discussions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

How is it possible, even as a literary conceit, to feel one’s free will beating in one’s blood? The immediacy and spontaneity with which this idea is posited in a literary context contrasts with the subtle and painstaking work through which one may understand how bodily feelings, in a given weather and context, may tell us something about ourselves and our possibilities for action in a given situation; that is, with the work of understanding how cognition may be embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. This Special Issue of Adaptive Behavior: 4E Cognition research in Colombia consists of seven articles and two opinion pieces that gather the work of Colombian researchers working at home or abroad in the field of 4E Cognition. It has two main parts: the first has to do with conceptual proposal and the last with the application of 4E ideas to specific pathologies and situations. The first has articles by German Bula, Juan Loaiza, Alejandro Arango, Maria Clara Garavito, and Camilo Ramirez Motoa, all of whom present conceptual proposals geared toward a theoretical widening of 4E cognition. German Bula looks at Baruch Spinoza’s ontology of mind and body with the intention of deriving from it certain useful hermeneutic keys (as opposed to merely finding a curious forerunner of 4E research); particularly, Spinoza’s notion that ‘‘mind is the idea of body’’ is read as a hermeneutic key for understanding the body through what we know of the mind, and the mind through what we know of the body. Research that follows such a hermeneutic key would try to construct lingua francas between discourses on the body and discourses on the mind. Such a suggestion is put into practice by Juan Loaiza. His article proposes a convergence between enactivism, an anthropological view of social life, and a philosophy of the ethics of care. The article is centered around the concept of concern, which appears in enactivist philosophy of social participation. Bearing in mind that enactivism includes principles that serve to explain general biological processes (as opposed to merely human processes), Loaiza posits that concern links social participation (understood as a process that operates at different scales) and specially the practice of care, with the dynamics from which life emerges following the theory of autopoiesis. The author thereby establishes a continuity between the biological and the social, in which the practices of care appear in a continuum between the emergence of life and ethical practices. Following the same enactivist vein, Alejandro Arango performs a critique of the enactivist theory of perception, specifically with regard to understanding perception as a product of sensorimotor coordination. Arango points out that the enactivist theory of perception disregards the fact that perception is also founded upon social practices and that a theory of perception must not eschew its social dimension. Therefore, the author posits a perspective on perception inspired by Wittgenstein and perceptual practices. According to this idea, individual perception is the result of cultural networks operating in different levels. Specifically, Arango points out that perceptual practices explain three key features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects’ saliency, and modal-specific harmonylike relations. Maria Clara Garavito also proposes a deepening of our understanding of cognition as inherently social. Her article centers around the possibility of incorporating others in the context of discussions of 4E and extended cognition. She criticizes a certain narrow view of the extended mind (which she calls the narrow