CFP: Dialectics and the Embodied Mind

The enactive approach challenges the idea that the mind is confined to the individual, instead of emphasizing its emergence through dynamic interactions between self-constituting identities and their shared environments, spanning ecological and social dimensions. Enactive research has identified three key dimensions of embodiment: organismic regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. Each of these operates as a recursively self-producing process network with its own norms of continuation. Any given situation is thus structured by a web of organic, sensorimotor, and social norms, whose unfolding involves a negotiation between these sometimes conflicting constraints. This very interplay—where different levels of normativity co-determine one another—is what makes the enactive perspective, in contrast to more moderately embodied approaches, fundamentally dialectical.

The special issue aims to critically examine the claim that dialectics—the process of transforming difference and otherness into dynamic identity—is embedded in the very nature of the enactive approach.

Key questions include (but are not limited to):

- Does the enactive approach need to make its dialectical moves more explicit and what kind of dialectics might be best suited to the task?

- How is normativity scaffolded across biological and social domains?

- What roles do evolutionary, organizational, developmental, technical, and socio-linguistic factors play in driving cognitive complexity?

- How do these perspectives account for the scaling up from biological to cognitive autonomy?

- Does the enactive approach favor an additive or a transformative account of rationality?

Invited contributors

Ezequiel Di Paolo, Shaun Gallagher, Laura Mojica, Kate Nave, Glenda Satne, Dave Ward 

For further information: [email protected]