Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological Dilemmas
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Pinedo García, Manuel DeEditorial
Frontiers Media
Materia
Enactivism Ecological psychology Affordances Normativity Dispositionalism Analytic philosophy Representationalism Agency
Date
2020-07-30Referencia bibliográfica
de Pinedo García M (2020) Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological Dilemmas. Front. Psychol. 11:1637. [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01637]
Sponsorship
Spanish Government FFI2016-80088-P PID2019-10976RB-100; Andalusian government B-HUM459-UGR18; FiloLab Group of Excellence, Vicerrectorado de Investigacion, Universidad de Granada (Spain); Departamento de Filosofia I, Universidad de GranadaAbstract
Two important issues of recent discussion in the philosophy of biology and of the
cognitive sciences have been the ontological status of living, cognitive agents and
whether cognition and action have a normative character per se. In this paper I will
explore the following conditional in relation with both the notion of affordance and
the idea of the living as self-creation: if we recognize the need to use normative
vocabulary to make sense of life in general, we are better off avoiding taking sides
on the ontological discussion between eliminativists, reductionists and emergentists.
Looking at life through normative lenses is, at the very least, in tension with any kind of
realism that aims at prediction and control. I will argue that this is so for two separate
reasons. On the one hand, understanding the realm of biology in purely factualist, realist
terms means to dispossess it of its dignity: there is more to life than something that
we simply aim to manipulate to our own material convenience. On the other hand, a
descriptivist view that is committed to the existence of biological and mental facts that
are fully independent of our understanding of nature may be an invitation to make our
ethical and normative judgments dependent on the discovery of such alleged facts,
something I diagnose as a form of representationalism. This runs counter what I take
to be a central democratic ideal: while there are experts whose opinion could be
considered the last word on purely factual matters, where value is concerned, there
are no technocratic experts above the rest of us. I will rely on the ideas of some
central figures of early analytic philosophy that, perhaps due to the reductionistic and
eliminativist tendencies of contemporary philosophy of mind, have not been sufficiently
discussed within post-cognitivist debates