Agency from a radical embodied perspective: An ecological-enactive approach
Miguel Segundo Ortin
University of Wollongong
May 7, 2020, 8 a.m. UTC // May 7, 2020, 8 a.m. in UTC
Explaining agency is a major challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. I proceed by first problematizing the most important attempts to explain agency from the ecological side. Then, I turn into the enactive framework. My hypothesis is that such enactive framework is incomplete, and I show how it can be complemented by ecological psychology.
