enactivism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a radical approach to cognitive science developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch that proposes that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by an inner mental theatre but the enactment of a world brought forth through the organism's ongoing history of structural coupling with its environment; enactivism draws on phenomenology — especially the work of Merleau-Ponty — and on biological systems theory to argue that meaning is not stored inside the head but arises in the dynamic loop of action and perception; the framework challenges both classical computationalism and representationalist versions of embodied cognition, positioning mind as something organisms do rather than something they have