Enactivism

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science, with historical roots in Buddhist thought, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, holding that cognition arises through interaction between an acting organism and its environment rather than through the organism passively receiving information that it then translates into internal representations. On this view, an organism's environment is enacted, or brought about, through the active exercise of that organism's own sensorimotor processes, so that a living being and its environment stand in a relationship of mutual specification rather than the being simply landing inside a pre-existing world. The term was introduced as enaction by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in their 1991 book The Embodied Mind, and the position was initially built around sensorimotor skill before being extended to higher-level cognitive activity such as social interaction; it is closely related to situated cognition and embodied cognition and is presented as an alternative to cognitivism, computationalism and Cartesian dualism.