The Extended Mind and Enactivism

The Extended Mind and Enactivism. A talk by John Harries (Oxford University).

There is a long tradition in the philosophy of mind, psychology and the cognitive sciences which locates cognition firmly inside the skull and which draws extensively on the metaphors of computing to describe the architecture of the mind. This neuro-centric view has been reinforced by the development of neuroimaging technologies, in particular Functional MRI. However in recent years there has also emerged a view of cognition with its roots in American Pragmatism and Phenomenology which radically extends the boundary of the mind to include the body and the surrounding environment and which gives due weight to the often overlooked role of affect (mood and emotion). The term “4E cognition” has been coined to describe this approach. The overlapping concepts of 4E describe the mind as embodied, embedded, enactive and extended. In this view the mind emerges in the interactions of embodied organisms with their environment. In my short presentation I will try to do justice to the key ideas of enactivism and the extended mind and why they open up rich research horizons and provide an exciting alternative to neuro centric approaches to cognition.

John Harries’ career has been divided between IT systems development and Organisational Development often combining the two. I have focused principally on the domain of healthcare in the UK, Europe and the USA. For some years I was a Fellow of the King’s Fund a charitable healthcare think tank and consultancy. Some years ago my dissertation for an MSc in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck (London University) studied early adopters of mobile email. I was struck by the strength of emotional attachment displayed by the users of Blackberries for their devices. This phenomenon has of course exploded with the adoption of smart phones. I have since pursued this interest in the emotional relationships between people and things, in particular architecture. After my retirement I was accepted to study for a Doctorate in Cognitive Archaeology at Oxford University under the supervision of Professor Lambros Malafouris. I completed this in 2021. My dissertation was entitled “Affect and Materiality in Therapeutic Spaces” and focused on the emotional relationship between people (staff, patients and families) and the environment in which they worked or in which they or their loved ones were cared for. In my research I made use of Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris 2013) with its foundations in Enactivism and the Extended Mind.