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An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated. A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principals to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed. All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system.

This chapter explores the connection between the idea of consciousness understood as enactive cognition and the perceptions within philosophy that ‘knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history — in short, from our embodiment’. Various avatars of these three factors of our knowledge — body, language, and history — reappear over and over in what follows. However, what has become the main theme of the chapter arrived unexpectedly in the connection that emerged between an understanding of consciousness as an enactive phenomenon, and a speculative and specifically musical/sonic interpretation of the idea of intertextuality.

This chapter describes the revolutionary atmosphere of today’s cognitive science, clarifying the pivotal theses on which Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) leans, and introducing the main players—traditional Content Involving Cognition (CIC), newly articulated Conservative Enactive Cognition (CEC), and REC—in more detail. Rather than trying to argue for REC straightaway, it prepares readers for that task, asking them to flex their imaginative muscles by first picturing how things would have to look if REC were true—and, by comparison, where REC lives in conceptual space.

The taming of horses changed humans’ relation to space, movement, and speed. It increased their social agency and environmental impact. In fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer writes about the storytelling contest of a group of men and women travelling together on horseback to Canterbury. Bringing an enactive practice of language together with the dynamic of horse-riding, TheCanterbury Tales characterizes its storytelling pilgrims by the way they ride their horses and speak to each other. The pilgrims’ kinesis, narrative skills and cognitive styles are linked to a use of artefacts (e.g., clothing, weapons, stirrups) which defines them as characters. Chaucer conveys such distributed information by working with language in a way that successfully induces readers’ cognitive engagement, and triggers perceptual-motor simulations of situated actions in meaningful ways.

This chapter upsets the Content Involving Cognition (CIC) applecart by examining familiar reasons for thinking that we can go at least part of the way toward explaining basic cognition without having to call on the notion of content at all. For example, the well-known successes in building flexible, behavior-based robots and understanding the environment-involving cognitive antics of certain insects appear to have progressed precisely because CIC thinking was rejected. Appealing to these developments, it is argued that there is every reason to think the same approach will work when it comes to explaining many sophisticated human doings too—especially those associated with manual activities such as reaching and grasping. If this is right, it is possible that cognitive science may go much further than is typically supposed without CIC; potentially Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) has real reach. This overcomes a familiar worry that REC, even if it is true in some domains, has a very limited scope.

This chapter examines the pragmatist approach to cognition and experience and provides some of the conceptual background to the “pragmatic turn” currently underway in cognitive science. Classical pragmatists wrote extensively on cognition from a naturalistic perspective, and many of their views are compatible with contemporary pragmatist approaches such as enactivist, extended, and embodied-Bayesian approaches to cognition. Three principles of a pragmatic approach to cognition frame the discussion: First, thinking is structured by the interaction of an organism with its environment. Second, cognition develops via exploratory inference, which remains a core cognitive ability throughout the life cycle. Finally, inquiry/problem solving begins with genuinely irritating doubts that arise in a situation and is carried out by exploratory inference.

An emerging view in cognitive science considers cognition as “enactive” (i.e., skillful activity involving ongoing interactions with the external world). A key premise of this view is that cognition is grounded in the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies (i.e., the ability to predict sensory changes which ensue from one’s own action). It is proposed that the learning of sensorimotor contingencies serves basic sensorimotor processing and that it can also be used to establish more complex cognitive capacities, such as object recognition, action planning, or tool use. Recent evidence from robotics and neuroscience supports this claim and suggests that “extended” sensorimotor contingencies might be a viable concept for pragmatic cognitive science.

This chapter champions the notion of ‘strange’, paradoxical, level-crossing feedback loops as a means to address the shortcomings of information-processing approaches to cognition, especially as applied to musical improvisation. It highlights the inherent challenges of studying improvisation and consciousness, and suggests ways that embodied and enactive theories of cognition, and emerging ideas in predictive processing and social psychology, may offer productive ways to understand mind and consciousness, and the dynamics of collective musical improvisation. Improvising music together, the chapter argues, involves joint action, embodied coordination, collective attention, and shared intention in ways that challenge conventional understandings of cognition and consciousness.

A truly radical enactivism differs in important respects from the more conspicuous and already well-established branches of enactivism—Sensorimotor Enactivism and Autopoietic Enactivism. While Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) shares much with, and owes much, to its sister accounts, there are significant differences between some of its commitments and what is on offer in these frameworks. This chapter highlights these and identifies the most serious and fundamental challenge facing any bona fide content-free version of enactivism.

This chapter examines what acceptance of Radical Enactive Cognition means for the now stagnating debate about the extent and boundaries of mind. It argues that basic minds are extensive and not merely extended if they are contentless. It demonstrates how REC decisively advances debates about whether minds extend, moving beyond traditional stalemates. It shows how it is possible to refurbish some of the best proposals that have come forth from these discussions if REC is accepted. Specifically, it argues that thinking on this topic must be reframed in terms of extensive but contentless basic minds. It is possible that basic minds might be transformed, through engaging in wider practices, to become contentful scaffolded minds.

Maximally minimal intellectualism is the most modest, the least expensive, and the most plausible Content Involving Cognition (CIC) proposal. It would convert into Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) if it only abandoned the idea that perception possesses content that is essentially nonconceptual, trading that thought for the idea that perceiving is contentless. It is the position to beat. For this reason, examination of its chances of successfully motivating a need for and delivering on the promise of a theory of perceptual content provides the ideal means of framing and focusing on the pivotal questions: Are there any compelling grounds for thinking that perceiving is essentially representational? If so, what are they? This chapter considers the most promising current strategies for addressing these questions and finds them wanting. It concludes that there is, as yet, nothing on offer from the friends of CIC that should persuade us that perceiving cannot be, and in fact is not, contentless.

The Introduction provides an initial explanation of the phrases ‘live artefacts’ and ‘cognitive environment’ in the book’s title, connecting these with the assumption of a fundamental continuity between nature and culture, and emphasizing the affiliation between this assumption and the work of cognitive archaeologists and anthropologists. Drawing on the biological concept of autopoiesis, it sketches the hypothesis that literary utterances are life-forms, and suggests that human forms of expression, with all their remarkable plasticity, self-engendering proliferation, and powers of endurance, speak to ways of belonging to our native environment. The relation of the book’s arguments to the broader field of cognitive studies is then clarified, defining ‘cognition’ as embodied and enactive. The methodology adopted is described, assigning priority to imaginative utterances (literature in the broadest sense) as the primary object of knowledge. The Introduction is followed by a chapter-by-chapter Reader’s Guide to the book as a whole.

This chapter considers the implications of Radical Enactive Cognition for thinking about phenomenal consciousness. Does REC imply the conclusions about the extent of phenomenality that many enactivists argue for? Is there any compelling reason to suppose that phenomenality is extensive? The answers are complex. The chapter attempts to correct some confusions about the exact value of the enactivist strategy of going wide, and looks to environmental features when explaining why the phenomenal characters of experiences are as they are.