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Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2023) 22:841–865
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09806-w
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
GuilhermeSanchesdeOliveira1
Accepted: 7 February 2022 / Published online: 25 February 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
Abstract
A popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embod-
ied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the
label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional
cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting
point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on
the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more
reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for
how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cogni-
tion. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge,
I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive
science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a
broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied
phenomenon, to be situated. I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity,
which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same
terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embod-
ied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of set-
ting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific
practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activ-
ities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.
Keywords Embodiment· Situation· Reflexivity· Scientific practice· Embodied
cognitive science
1 Introduction
An increasingly popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to eschew strict brain-
centric reductionism and instead view cognition as embodied, embedded, situated,
extended, enactive, ecological, and so on. Research under these labels (and related
* Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira
gui.cogsci@gmail.com
1 Department ofPsychology & Ergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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ones, such as “4E cognition”) is diverse, including a number of different projects
and perspectives. In some circles the label “embodied cognition” is used as a cat-
egory-term to distinguish some cognitive processes (i.e., those that are embodied)
from others (i.e., those that aren’t): understood this way, it makes sense to consider
particular phenomena such as social cognition, language and consciousness and ask
whether they are embodied or not (e.g., Goldman & de Vignemont,2009; Arbib
et al., 2014; Prinz, 2009). In other circles, however, “embodied cognition” desig-
nates not a category that applies only to some cognitive phenomena but rather a
way of understanding and investigating all of cognition: from this perspective the
“whether” question doesn’t arise (its answer in every case would be “yes”), and
investigation is instead concerned with the question “how.” This second use of
“embodied cognition” is illustrated by work on a variety of topics, from wide com-
putation (e.g., Wilson, 1994, 2004), distributed cognition (e.g., Hutchins, 1995,
Hutchins & Klausen,1996), the extended mind and the “natural-born cyborgs” view
(e.g., Clark & Chalmers,1998; Clark,2003; Menary,2010), up to the radical, anti-
representational views of ecological psychology (e.g., Gibson, 1979; Richardson
etal.,2008; Chemero, 2009) and enactivism (e.g., Maturana & Varela,1980; Var-
ela etal. 1991; Di Paolo et al.,2017; Gallagher,2017). In this sense, embodiment
is not a hypothesis about particular instances of psychological and behavioral phe-
nomena, but is rather the starting assumption that informs how we conceptualize,
investigate and understand any and all psychological and behavioral phenomena. In
other words, “embodied cognition” in this sense amounts to a research program for
cognitive science as a whole, rather than simply a complement to more traditional
theoretical and methodological commitments.
The focus of this paper is on this second sense of “embodied cognition” as a
research program. The goal here is to contribute to the field’s ongoing development
by proposing a specific way of understanding embodied cognitive science, organ-
izing our research activities and opening up new avenues for inquiry. Inspired by
and in analogy to the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK), this paper invites practitioners to think of their work in embodied cognitive
science as part of a similarly “strong” research program. Now, the label “strong
program” in the context of embodied cognitive science might lead some readers to
think of the “radical” anti-representational approaches already mentioned, which I
am also going to be drawing from in my proposal. So it’s good to make it clear
from the start that what’s at issue in the present paper is tangential to discussions
about representation, computation and information processing: as will become clear,
a crucial feature of the strong program is that it is marked by reflexivity, which has
more to do with how and what we study than with whether we posit representations
in our explanations of cognitive phenomena.
Section2 provides an overview of the original “strong programme” in SSK and
a brief preliminary discussion of reflexive research in the sciences of the mind. The
idea of a “strong programme” in SSK was only possible in light of some under-
standing of what the usual, “non-strong” program in SSK was. Similarly, in order
to develop a strong program in embodied cognitive science, it’s important first to be
clear on the nature of the research program itself. Section3 elaborates on the brief
description provided here in the introduction to propose a candidate account of what
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
brings us together in embodied cognitive science. There I draw from Dewey’s notion
of “situation” to propose a view of what it means to take cognition, as an embodied
phenomenon, to be situated. Section4 then sketches how this account of embodied
cognition as situated (from Sect. 3) can be made reflexive through application of
insights from the “strong programme” in SSK (from Sect.2). The resulting view,
which I call situated reflexivity, is offered as a particular example of what, more
generally, work in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can
look like. As such, after sketching the view, I conclude in Sect.5 by briefly discuss-
ing paths for future development, not only for situated reflexivity itself but also for
other potential approaches that embrace the strong program in embodied cognitive
science.
2 The “strong programme” inSSK andthechallenge ofreexivity
The Strong Programme1 is the approach in the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK) developed in the 1970s by a number of researchers primarily at the Univer-
sity of Edinburgh and most prominently articulated under that specific name first
by David Bloor in his 1976 book Knowledge and Social Imagery (Bloor, 1991; see
also, e.g., Bloor, 1981, 1984, 2007). A seemingly obvious place to start describing
the Strong Programme would be to differentiate it from whatever the “weak” alter-
native in SSK was. But it’s helpful to begin with a prior and even more fundamental
distinction between the project of SSK in general and the philosophy of science it
was reacting to.
2.1 The strong programme andits four tenets
The dominant philosophical attitude in the mid-twentieth century was to approach
science with an almost exclusively logical and epistemological focus. This attitude
was neatly expressed by Karl Popper when he stated that in order to understand sci-
entific knowledge we need to understand “the objective logical relations subsisting
among the various systems of scientific statements, and within each of them” (Pop-
per, 2005, p. 22). From this perspective, leaving aside how certain ideas come to be
accepted or rejected by scientists, what matters is, given an ideal standard of ration-
ality, to understand why certain ideas ought to be accepted and others rejected. The
Strong Programme emerges alongside related but independent work (e.g., Kuhn,
1970) as a reaction to this overly abstract, intellectualized and normative picture
of scientific knowledge. As Barnes etal. (1996) put it decades later: “The concern
at that time was mainly to oppose the arguments of rationalist philosophers who
wished to treat science as a unique form of human activity, one which required no
empirical understanding other than that implied by describing it as rational” (p.
xii). In contrast, proponents of the sociological approach in science and technology
1 I will use the British spelling to refer to the original approach in the sociology of scientific knowledge,
and the American spelling for my proposal of an analogous approach in embodied cognitive science.
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studies sought to develop causal explanations of science, understanding scientific
knowledge “purely as a natural phenomenon” (Bloor, 1991, p. 5). In direct opposi-
tion to the dominant philosophical attitude, this meant focusing on identifying “the
conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge” (p. 7) independently of
ideal standards of rationality. Importantly, for them, the social factors that philoso-
phers had long neglected—such as perceptions of prestige and authority, at the indi-
vidual and interpersonal scales, up to institutional structures that sustain and rein-
force particular epistemic practices—become of central importance: after all, these
are key conditions that shape real-world science and that make a unique contribu-
tion to how scientific ideas, theories and practices fare, and especially to which are
rejected and which come to be accepted as knowledge.
This fundamental contrast with the dominant philosophical approach helps
delineate the contours of what a sociological approach to scientific knowledge was
generally interested in. But, out of all the different ways of doing research in SSK,
what made the strong programme “strong” was the fact that, in addition to favor-
ing a causal approach to understanding the nature of scientific knowledge, Bloor
proposed that explanations should be symmetrical and impartial as well as reflexive.
Beginning with symmetry and impartiality, the strong programme proposes
that, rather than using one set of explanatory principles to explain when things go
“wrong” in science and a different one to understand when things go “well,” the
same explanatory principles should be employed to make sense of all of science. For
example, we might think that extra-empirical social factors (e.g., racist ideology)
are important for explaining how, in the past, scientists embraced scientific theories
and practices that have since been discredited (e.g., eugenics). But it’s inadequate
to assume that social factors only play a role in these cases of “failure” or “bad sci-
ence,” and that these theories and practices came to be rejected and replaced on
purely rational grounds; rather, the idea is that social factors must also have con-
tributed to the shift to whatever is now accepted as “good science.” Bloor proposes
that we apply the same explanatory principles no matter the case: if our explanation
of the bad or failed science of the past is in terms of how certain social conditions
influenced the work of scientists, then it must have been a shift in those social con-
ditions (rather than the elimination of social conditions altogether) that occasioned
the better or more successful science of the present. As he puts it, our explanations
are to be “impartial with respect to [the] truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality,
success or failure” of the scientific theory in question; similarly, our explanations
are to be symmetrical in that “The same types of cause would explain, say, true and
false beliefs” (1976/1991, p. 7).
These stances on symmetry and impartiality help to shed light on the sense in
which, as mentioned above, the strong programme favors a “causal” explanatory
approach. Bloor (1976/1991) describes the pursuit of causal explanations of scien-
tific knowledge in contrast with what he refers to as a teleological perspective on
rationality. By this he means the assumption that instances of true belief, rational
behavior, and successful knowledge acquisition are natural and self-explanatory, and
that failure is the exception that demands explanation. He illustrates this teleologi-
cal perspective with the example of logical reasoning. When someone works suc-
cessfully from premises to a logically warranted conclusion, this success is seen as
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
simply following from logic itself, that is, from relations of entailment between the
propositions in question. But, as Bloor puts it, “when someone makes mistakes in
their reasoning then logic itself is no explanation. A lapse or deviation may be due
to the interference of a whole variety of factors” (1976/1991, p. 8, emphasis added).
What makes this interpretation of logical reasoning ‘teleological’ is the assumption
that epistemic success is ‘meant to be’ and that failure, in contrast, is the result of
an interference on the natural flow of events, a divergence from what should have
been. Bloor gives another suggestive image to illustrate this perspective: “As when
a train goes off the rails, a cause for the accident can surely be found. But we nei-
ther have, nor need, commissions of enquiry into why accidents do not happen” (p.
8). Applied to scientific knowledge, this teleological perspective sees success as in
some sense uncaused and almost inevitable, leaving only errors to be explained by
reference to some cause or other: “the rational aspects of science are held to be self-
moving and self-explanatory. Empirical or sociological explanations are confined to
the irrational” (p. 10). The strong programme’s causal explanatory orientation is to
be understood as a rejection of precisely this teleological stance on success. In line
with the principles of symmetry and impartiality, the idea is that causal explanation
should apply across the board rather than being relegated to instances of error. Suc-
cess is not self-explanatory. If social and other conditions play a causal role in con-
tributing to bringing about failure, then causes like these must also be at play when
it comes to success, be it in logical reasoning, for instance, or in the development of
scientific knowledge.
Lastly, the principle of reflexivity complements the strong programme in propos-
ing that the explanatory lens that sociologists employ to understand science should
also be turned against sociological work itself and applied to make sense of the soci-
ologists’ own explanatory practices. As Bloor explains, “In principle [SSK’s] pat-
terns of explanation would have to be applicable to sociology itself” and this has to
be the case for, he adds, “otherwise sociology would be a standing refutation of its
own theories” (p. 7). Bloor elaborates on this view as follows:
There is no reason why a sociologist or any other scientist should be ashamed
to see his theories and methods as emanating from society, that is, as the prod-
uct of collective influences and resources and as peculiar to the culture and
its present circumstances. Indeed if sociologists tried to evade this realisation
they would be denigrating the subject-matter of their own science. (Bloor,
1991p. 44)
In short, according to the strong programme, if sociologists appeal to social
causes to explain scientific knowledge in all its instances (successful or not, in line
with currently dominant ideological leanings or not, etc.), then the same causes must
be seen as contributing to sociological explanations of scientific knowledge—that
is, the same types of causes sociologists identify elsewhere must also play a role in
explanations of their own work as sociologists of scientific knowledge. To do the
sociology of science in line with the strong programme, then, means reflexively to
approach your subject matter (e.g., specific aspects of scientific practice and knowl-
edge production) with the awareness that your own work must be amenable to expla-
nation in the terms of your analysis. Importantly, this opens up the possibility of
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using SSK concepts, tools and methods to make SSK itself an object of study by
focusing on specific aspects of SSK practice and knowledge production.
2.2 The four tenets ofthestrong programme andresearch inthesciences
ofthemind
The goal of this paper is to propose a way in which these ideas from the strong pro-
gramme in SSK can inspire a corresponding strong program in embodied cognitive
science. Toward this goal, it’s helpful briefly to consider the extent to which the
four tenets of the strong programme are present in the sciences of the mind more
generally.
Work in the sciences of the mind is already by default concerned with causal
explanation in the relevant sense. Different fields focus on different phenomena and
produce different theories and explanations, with varying emphasis on what happens
at the neural level or at the level of psychological traits or of cognitive processes and
so on. Still, the sciences of the mind are part of the natural sciences, and as such, the
normative (typically logical and epistemological) concerns and teleological perspec-
tive against which SSK emerged aren’t a factor when it comes to determining how
we go about investigating mind and behavior. To be sure, commitment to a causal
explanatory approach in this sense does not entail a commitment to reductionism.
In different fields, researchers reject mechanistic approaches in favor of dynami-
cal, covering law, historical and/or evolutionary explanations. In the broad sense
described above, these count as causal in that they aim to identify conditions that
bring about the phenomena in question, as Bloor puts it, and this is the case even
if the conditions at play are dynamical relations, say, rather than mechanisms. Put
differently, regardless of the particular explanatory approach favored, the sciences
of the mind are causal in the sense of typically avoiding viewing phenomena as self-
explanatory: some approaches seem to rely on notions that maintain some kind of
teleological flavor (e.g., some ways of construing biological function or self-organi-
zation, for instance), but even those are in the business of identifying conditions that
contribute to bringing about the phenomena in question.
Work in the sciences of the mind also seems, by and large, to be impartial and
symmetric in the relevant senses. Some research projects and ways of framing
research questions persist despite increasingly appearing to be ideologically prob-
lematic. This is the case, for example, when it comes to research focusing on racial
and sex differences at the neural, psychological or cognitive levels. These are par-
ticularly contentious because they run the risk of reifying in biological terms differ-
ences that, if real, might ultimately be better explained in sociocultural terms. Still,
even questionable efforts like these tend to be part of a broader naturalistic project of
explaining all aspects of human mind and behavior in the same terms (be they neu-
ral, psychological, cognitive etc. in each case). Some research questions may be ill-
posed and/or ill-motivated, but that won’t in all cases entail partiality or asymmetry
in the explanatory approach and in the causal conditions posited.
Lastly, but more importantly for the purposes of this paper, we need to consider
how reflexivity figures in the sciences of the mind. A first point to note is that,
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
although the principle of reflexivity in the sense found in SSK is obviously not lim-
ited to sociological analyses, it doesn’t seem to apply universally to all of science
either. It seems reasonable to expect chemists and physicists to apply their particu-
lar causal explanatory approach impartially and symmetrically to all instances of
the phenomena they study. But chemists and physicists don’t appear to have a spe-
cial burden to understand themselves (e.g., their theories, methods and practices)
in exactly the same terms that they employ to explain their objects of study (e.g.,
atoms, molecules, reactions, etc.). The same cannot be said of sciences that have
humans as their object of study, which includes the sciences of the mind: it is appro-
priate to expect that the ideas and theories we develop to understand human behav-
ior also, self-referentially, apply to the particular human behavior of developing sci-
entific explanations of human behavior. Some examples of reflexivity in the sciences
of the mind (though not under the same name) include initiatives under the rubric
of “psychology of science” in the traditions of personality and social psychology
(e.g., Feist & Gorman, 2012; Feist, 1993, 2006a, 2006b; Richards, 2002) as well
as “cognitive science of science” in the computational, cognitivist approach (e.g.,
Thagard, 1993, 2012). Both of these lines of research apply theories and concepts
from the relevant fields to make sense of particular aspects of scientific practice,
such as creativity, problem solving, discovery, explanation, conceptual change, and
so on. In comparison to these developments in neighboring fields, embodied cog-
nitive science has clearly lagged behind. Some passing remarks and other detailed
but narrowly focused discussions can be found in work by Maturana and Varela
(1980, 1987) as well as by others in the enactive tradition influenced by them (see,
e.g., Stewart, 2010; Bottineau, 2010; Di Paolo etal., 2017). Although unquestion-
ably insightful, these examples can be seen as exceptions that prove the rule. As a
research program, embodied cognitive science is far from producing anything close
to a systematic effort at reflexive research. This is where drawing inspiration from
the strong programme in SSK can be especially helpful, or so I will propose.
3 Embodied cognition: getting clear onthesituation
The embodied cognitive science research program has been described as reject-
ing the “smallist” and “localist” orientation of mainstream cognitive science, and,
accordingly as starting from the assumption that cognition spans brain, body and
environment (Chemero & Silberstein, 2008; Sanches de Oliveira & Chemero,
2015; see also, e.g., Wilson & Golonka, 2013). Inclusion of the environment is a
relatively uncontroversial feature of the research program, one that’s often voiced
in the admission that, as an embodied phenomenon, cognition is in some impor-
tant sense situated. But in what sense? A whole body of work already exists that
explores related ideas under the label of “situated cognition” (e.g., Clancey, 1997,
2009; Kirsh, 1991, 2009; Kirshner & Whitson, 1997; Lave, 1988; Robbins &
Aydede, 2009a; Suchman, 1987). What exactly is meant by “situated cognition,”
however, is a matter of debate (Robbins & Aydede, 2009b; Roth & Jornet, 2013;
Wilson, 2002). At least on some formulations, situated cognition and embodied
cognitive science are not simply similar and compatible but they actually overlap
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conceptually and historically (see, e.g., Gallagher, 2009). On other formulations,
“situated cognition” is understood broadly enough as to encompass even work
in science and technology studies in the vicinity of SSK (see brief discussion in
Solomon, 2007). While these convergences and overlaps are suggestive, there are
other formulations, still, where “situated cognition” is interpreted in a more tra-
ditional cognitivist vein as being roughly equivalent to the first sense of “embod-
ied cognition” reviewed in Sect.1 (e.g., Wilson, 2002). For present purposes,
then, rather than trying to fix on the meaning of one disputed label (“embodied
cognition”) by reference to another disputed label (“situated cognition”), it will
be more productive to look for an independent reference point. Following Gal-
lagher’s (20172017) lead, here I draw from John Dewey’s notion of “situation” to
clarify what it means for cognition, as inherently embodied, to be situated.
In two books he published in 1938—Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and Experi-
ence and Education—Dewey describes a “situation” variously as a “contextual
whole,” a “field of observation,” and the “total environment.” For him, a situation
is the horizon or complex organic (i.e., material, biological, conceptual, affective,
etc.) condition that gives shape to our experience of the world: we always find
ourselves participating in some situation, and the particular situation we’re in at a
given point in time informs what we do and how we relate to objects, people, and
the world around us. As he puts it:
What is designated by the word “situation” is not a single object or event
or set of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments
about objects and events in isolation, but only in connection with a contex-
tual whole. This latter is what is called a “situation.” (Dewey, 1938/2008, p.
72)
And he adds:
In actual experience, there is never any such isolated singular object or
event; an object or event is always a special part, phase, or aspect, of an
environing experienced world—a situation. The singular object stands out
conspicuously because of its especially focal and crucial position at a given
time in determination of some problem of use or enjoyment which the total
complex environment presents. There is always a field in which observation
of this or that object or event occurs. (Dewey, 1938/2008, p. 72-73)
These and other passages emphasize how, for Dewey, we experience objects
and the environment always in relational rather than absolute terms. We don’t
experience apples, dogs, chairs, gardens and lakes, for example, in terms of the
colors and textures and other intrinsic, elementary characteristics that these
objects have, which are more or less stable and enduring. Rather, we experience
them in terms of their meaning to us, which is variable and changes over time
depending on what we are up to, whether we’re hungry, in a hurry, seeking soli-
tude, feeling playful, or having a picnic with friends, and so on. While the abso-
lute, intrinsic properties of objects and events matter, they are always accompa-
nied by different subjective states, and these “objective and internal conditions”
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
all constitute the experience: “Any normal experience is an interplay of these two
sets of conditions. Taken together, or in their interaction, they form what we call
a situation” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 42); as such, the environment for a person is
not just the physical space surrounding that person, but it is “whatever conditions
interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the expe-
rience which is had” (p. 43). Finally, it’s in this sense, understood as an interplay
of objective and subjective conditions, that for Dewey situations enable and limit
in particular ways individual experience: “control of individual actions is effected
by the whole situation in which individuals are involved, in which they share and
of which they are co-operative or interacting parts” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 53).
For him, then, the control of individual actions is not a subjective business that
merely happens to be surrounded by space and stuff. Rather, we are always in
some situation or other, and the particular situation we are in shapes our experi-
ence and informs what we do, which includes how we think: “a qualitative and
qualifying situation is present as the background and the control of every experi-
ence” (Dewey, 1938/2008, p. 76).
The relational character of situations is central to Dewey’s view and worth
emphasizing. Some of what Dewey is proposing about situations, and in particular
about how we engage with objects in situations, is relevantly related to the Gibso-
nian theory of affordances and affordance perception. For Gibson and others after
him, rather than perceiving absolute properties of an object and having to infer or
somehow estimate how to interact with the object, we instead directly perceive the
affordances or possibilities for action that the object makes available to us. Yet the
object’s affordances aren’t reducible to the characteristics the object has on its own:
affordances are made up by the relation between features of the agent (including
the agent’s sensorimotor makeup) and the characteristics of the object/environment
(Chemero, 2003, 2009; Gibson, 1966, 1979; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). Dewey’s
view of our engagement with objects and the environment “in a situation” thus over-
laps at least partially with what, later, Gibson would call affordance perception. At
the same time, Dewey’s notion of “situation” is also broader in that it can be seen
as explaining why, out of all the affordances a given environment could present to
typical members of a species, only a subset of those will be salient to an individual
member of the species—i.e., because of that individual’s particular situation. This
relates to recent discussions about von Uexküll’s notion of the “Umwelt” as the
agent-specific sense of environment in which affordance perception is situated (e.g.,
Baggs & Chemero,2020, Fultot & Turvey, 2019; Feiten, 2020).
These connections to ecological psychology offer a good occasion to clarify the
nature of Dewey’s view of situation and its relevance for embodied cognitive sci-
ence more generally. Dewey’s point is not (simply) about how, in particular situa-
tions, the world appears to individuals in a relational or agent-relative manner. This
interpretation would be too individualistic, and in tension with the pragmatist under-
standing of “experience” as an objective affair rather than mere “subjective private
consciousness” or appearances in a Cartesian theater (Dewey, 1929, p. 11; see also
James, 1909, 1912). In the foregoing I have used terms like ‘interaction’, ‘interplay’
and ‘relations’ without further qualification, much like Dewey himself tended to do
in his earlier work. Later, however, Dewey came to frame his perspective in more
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explicitly transactional terms (see Dewey & Bentley, 1946a, 1946b; Dewey, 1948).
The important difference is that, rather than understanding organism and environ-
ment as fully independent, pre-formed and self-contained entities that merely come
into contact with each other, Dewey sees the entire organism-environment situation
as the more fundamental unit that enable organism and environment to become what
they are when taken individually. Dewey illustrates this view with the example of
a commercial transaction in which buyer and seller exchange some goods. Terms
like ‘buyer’, ‘seller’, and ‘goods’ only make sense in reference to a transaction: “No
one exists as buyer or seller save in and because of a transaction in which each is
engaged”; moreover, “specific things become goods or commodities because they
are engaged in the transaction”; and all participants, including the goods in ques-
tion, undergo at least some amount of change “because of the exchange or transfer”
(Dewey, 1948, p. 197). So, despite what terms like ‘interaction’ and ‘relation’ might
suggest, it’s this transactional picture that Dewey means to offer with his notion
of situations as made up of subjective and objective conditions. As he puts it else-
where: “This interaction is the primary fact, and it constitutes a transaction. Only
by analysis and selective abstraction can we differentiate the actual occurrence into
two factors, one called organism and the other, environment” (Dewey, 1931, p. 252).
Subjective and objective factors don’t add up to yield a situation. On the contrary,
the (transactional) situation is the basis from which we can come to identify, for ana-
lytical purposes, subjective and objective contributors.
This transactional perspective finds an echo in ecological psychology not only
in the notion of affordances as relational, as just seen, but also in the broader Gib-
sonian approach of understanding psychological phenomena at the “ecological”
scale, in terms of an organism-environment mutuality or reciprocity (Lombardo,
1987; Heft, 2001; for critical discussions of this connection see, e.g., Costall, 2004,
2017; cf. Pedersen & Bang, 2016; van Dijk, 2021). Transactional thinking can also
be found in the enactivist conception of autopoiesis and in related views of the self
as emergent from (rather than a precondition for) organism-environment relations,
through an interplay of the organism’s self-differentiation from and participation in
its world (see, e.g., Kyselo, 2014; Thompson, 2004; Di Paolo & Thompson, 2014).
Importantly, however, transactionalism is not limited to these specific strands, but
can be seen as a feature of embodied cognitive science more generally (Crippen &
Schulkin, 2020).
It’s in line with this transactional reading that Dewey’s notion of situations as rela-
tional can help us make sense of the embodied cognitive science research program.
Understanding cognition as “situated” in this technical sense amounts to an alternative
way of explaining cognitive phenomena, not in terms of states and processes internal to
individuals, but interms of relations between individuals and the world. And this neatly
captures the view, common in contemporary embodied cognitive science, of cognition
as the interplay of brain, body and environment (see Fig.1). In Dewey’s perspective,
situations encompass subjective conditions such as our states of interest and need (in all
their neural, biological, affective, conceptual dimensions), as well as “objective” con-
ditions such as the intrinsic features of objects around us and patterns of engagement
with those objects and with other people, who also bring in their own subjective con-
ditions of interest and need, and so on. This inherently transactional nature means that
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situations cannot be reduced to appearances in subjective consciousness: for instance,
complex relational factors such as gender, ethnicity, and other social markers of identi-
ties and roles with the potential to occasion power differentials are always present and
contribute to the qualitative character of the situation, even if they aren’t salient as such
to some individuals some of the time. Insofar as we arealways in some situation or other,
we are always in some particular material and social arrangement with these absolute
and relational characteristics.
Finally, understanding cognition as situated in this Deweyan, relational sense
of “situation” can help clarify the general orientation of the embodied cognitive
science research program as being at odds with the smallist and localist research
program of mainstream cognitive science. Our embodied existence “in” the world
means that we can’t help but find ourselves “in” situations. Dewey explains what
this “in” means:
The statement that individuals live in a world means, in the concrete, that
they live in a series of situations. And when it is said that they live in these
situations, the meaning of the word “in” is different from its meaning when
it is said that pennies are “in” a pocket or paint is “in” a can. It means, once
more, that interaction is going on between an individual and objects and
other persons. The conceptions of situation and of interaction are insepara-
ble from each other. An experience is always what it is because of a transac-
tion taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his
environment. (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 43)
Dewey’s description resonates with the existential flavor of the phenomeno-
logical understanding of being as “in the world” (see, e.g., Heidegger, 1927/2001;
Fig. 1 In embodied cognitive science, cognition is understood as the interplay of brain-body-world,
where “world” encompasses not only surfaces and objects but also other people we engage with. Impor-
tantly, the claim that, as an embodied phenomenon, cognition is situated means that, more than sim-
ply happening in some physical space, cognition is always part of some or other definite situation—i.e.,
in Deweyan terms, a complex, qualitative contextual whole that is constituted by transactions between
organism and environment and that enables and constrains experience in particular ways
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Merleau-Ponty, 1945), by which phenomenologists meant much more than just a
matter of occupying a certain amount of physical space. Together with pragma-
tism, this phenomenological stance on the nature of embodied experience provides
some of the conceptual (even if not necessarily methodological) foundations for
contemporary embodied cognitive science (see, e.g., Chemero, 2009; Kaufer &
Chemero, 2021; Gallagher, 2017; Di Paolo etal., 2017; Heras-Escribano, 2019).
So, when researchers in embodied cognitive science say that, as an embodied phe-
nomenon, cognition is situated, a broad, nonpartisan (e.g., neither strictly ecologi-
cal nor enactivist) way of understanding what this means is: beyond saying that
cognition happens somewhere involving some body, we’re saying that it happens in
particular existential contexts made up of organism-environment transactions that,
at specific points in time, guide how resources from brain, body and world get har-
nessed in particular ways for particular purposes.
4 Embodied cognitive science embodied: theperspective ofsituated
reexivity
The goal of this section is to illustrate and motivate a strong program for embodied
cognitive science (inspired by that from SSK explored in Sect.2) by showing how
our understanding of cognition as embodied and situated (Sect.3) can, reflexively,
inform our understanding of science. This positive proposal, which I call “situated
reflexivity,” is one example among potentially many different paths for a strong
program in embodied cognitive science. Accordingly, after presenting this sketch
I close the paper (in Sect.5) by discussing broader theoretical and methodological
points that apply not only to this but also to other potential approaches that would
fall within a strong program in embodied cognitive science.
The starting point for us is to see what consequences a view of embodied cogni-
tion following the Deweyan notion of situation has for an embodied understanding
of science in general, and cognitive science in particular. Put simply, if we explain
cognition in terms of brain-body-world transactions in some specific situation,
then the same must be the case for cognition at play in our own work as scientists,
including even the practices we engage in when we work on embodied, situated
approaches to cognitive phenomena. That is, if we think that the embodied cogni-
tion framework is a fruitful way to make sense of cognition, then we can’t apply it
only to the “ordinary folk” but must also turn the same explanatory approach toward
understanding ourselves. And this leads to seeing science as an embodied practice,
something that embodied cognitive agents do by harnessing brain, body and envi-
ronmental resources according to the particular “situations” they find themselves
“in” (see Fig.2).
Insofar as it results from the relation between various “objective” and “subjec-
tive” conditions (as Dewey puts it), the situation of a cognitive scientist includes the
immediate physical space and behavior setting you find yourself in when developing
some specific partof your work. Discussing a particular aspect of the research (such
as an idea for a new theoretical or experimental project) can happen, for example,
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The strong program inembodied cognitive science
in a break room with supportive colleagues from your lab or research group, or in a
big lecture hall at a convention center with conference participants in the audience
who may turn out to be less receptive. These seemingly external conditions are, of
course, already relational: besides including what’s out there in the physical environ-
ment, they encompass elements of what you bring into the picture at that particular
point in time and space. You, like any other researcher in the field, have some or
other philosophical background, you have been trained (by other people) in some
tradition or other that has its own theoretical and methodological assumptions, and
so on—and these and other similar factors play a role not only in how you do the
work that you do, but even in what work you do. Abstract considerations about sta-
tistical significance, for example, can contribute to the success you anticipate some
research ideas (and not others) to have. But so can factors such as your work contract
status, institutional standards for performance review, and journal editing practices
in your specific field. If reappointment criteria at your university places higher value
on some types of publications rather than others, and if journals tend to publish cer-
tain kinds of research more than others, then having tenure or having only two years
left in your contract puts you in different situations, informing which work you see
as worth pursuing in ways that are specific to those circumstances. More generally,
how you engage with concepts, hypotheses, instruments, methods—and even which
of these you see as more or less useful, attractive, viable, and promising—all depend
on how subjective and objective conditions affect one another in that situation. And,
of course, all of these facts that apply to you also apply to your interlocutors, be they
Fig. 2 Applying the principle of reflexivity to the idea that cognition, as a brain-body-world transaction,
is situated leads to the recognition that researchers discussing the idea of embodied cognition (whether
in agreement or not) are themselves, by necessity, also “in” some “situation” or other. The situation
involves not only a particular physical space, but also some philosophical background, some theoretical
and methodological assumptions, and other such factors that guide our embodied actions in the world—
which includes how we engage with concepts, hypotheses, instruments, and methods at given points in
time, seeing some as more or less attractive, viable, promising, and so on
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close collaborators in the break room or complete strangers at the conference who
may be in a significantly different situation than you.
I call the perspective I’m sketching here situated reflexivity because it combines
the Dewey-inspired view of situated-embodied cognition discussed in Sect. 3 with
the reflexive attitude explored in Sect.2. Just as you might explain embodied cogni-
tion in the case of an “ordinary” person as the situation-driven harnessing of brain-
body-world resources to solve problems, for instance, it follows that your doing
just that—i.e., engaging in explanatory practices as a cognitive science researcher
who’s an embodied cognitive agent—is also to be understood as the harnessing of
brain-body-world resources to solve problems in some situation or other. Think-
ing in this way raises a number of interesting questions, opens up promising new
avenues for research, and it also has the potential to inform pressing philosophical
debates.
The first and more obvious point to emphasize is that the perspective of situated
reflexivity invites careful investigation of scientific situations. The conceptual bases
of the perspective are in line with a broadly pragmatist approach to naturalizing sci-
ence and understanding it as in continuity with other aspects of human life. This
idea is aptly summarized in Richard Rorty’s motto, natural science is not a natural
kind (Rorty,1991). Rorty finds support for his view in William James, for exam-
ple, claiming that, for James, “no distinction of kind separates the sciences from
the crafts, from moral reflection, or from art” (Rorty, 1980, p. 723). Similar ideas
are present in Dewey’s thought as well, as illustrated in his claim: “The history of
the development of the physical sciences is the story of the enlarging possession by
mankind of more efficacious instrumentalities for dealing with the conditions of life
and action” (Dewey,1929, p. 11). From a pragmatist perspective, then, science is, at
its best, an instrumentally useful practice: when science gives us truth, that means,
to co-opt James’ words, that science is carrying us “prosperously from [some]
part of our experience to [some] other part, linking things satisfactorily, working
securely, simplifying, saving labor” (James, 1907, p. 58). In this light, Dewey can be
read as suggesting that the historical development of science is the historical devel-
opment of ever better tools for enriching human life and for attaining human goals.
Importantly, however, here “better” (as in “better tools”) stands for some context-
dependent and situation-specific measure of effectiveness rather than an objective,
atemporal and decontextualized measure of accuracy in representing (or mirroring,
for Rorty) absolute reality.
This pragmatist link to other human practices is suggestive, but it can be easily
misunderstood. Recognizing that science stands on a continuum with other human
concerns and activities doesn’t entail that there are no distinguishing features: it’s
not like, once we have an account of, say, “ordinary” (non-scientific) problem
solving, we can call it a day. For instance, recent work on education and instruc-
tional design, especially in STEM fields (i.e., in science, technology, engineering
and mathematics), provides great insight into the development of complex cogni-
tive abilities such as mathematical reasoning from a broadly embodied, enactive and
ecological perspective (e.g., Abrahamson, 2021; Abrahamson & Sánchez-García,
2016; Heft, 2021; Hutto et al., 2015). The phenomena these studies focus on and
the results are no doubt important and promising. But of course, from understanding
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aspects of STEM education, there is still a big step to accounting for what we do
when we do science rather than learn about it as students. Despite the continui-
ties, arguably there are also many important differences between my mathematical
reasoning at the grocery store (see, e.g., Lave, 1988), an engineer’s mathematical
reasoning in designing a bridge, and a mathematician’s mathematical reasoning in
making discoveries about the dodecahedron (Athreya etal., 2020) or exotic spheres
(Goette etal., 2020). Recognition that science is a part of life and on a continuum
with other human practices is crucial, but it’s insufficient if it doesn’t also acknowl-
edge the differences.
This is where a relational understanding of situation and, accordingly, of cogni-
tion as situated, can be particularly useful. The recognition of continuity calls for
consideration of how sometimes abilities like the ones we use in our daily activities
come to be harnessed in unique ways for the purposes of doing scientific work. The
relational perspective of situated reflexivity expands this focus and helps us identify
particular features that account for the differences. But what kind of features and
differences? Internalist views would appeal to differences in intra-organismic char-
acteristics and processes, while externalist views would posit difference-makers in
the objective “context.” In contrast, by thinking in terms of organism-environment
transactions, situated reflexivity considers how these varied resources interact with,
and change, one another in the (relational) cognitive situation of scientists. And this
makes it possible to go beyond mere acknowledgement of continuity to reveal the
integral, constitutive role played by the specific inquiry situations that particular
researchers, research groups and academic communities find themselves “in.”
In this context, important targets of investigation would include the differences
and relations between distinct situations within science, on the one hand, and
between scientific and non-scientific situations, on the other. The former relates to
ongoing interest and concern with interdisciplinarity (see, e.g., Thorén & Persson,
2013; Andersen & Wagenknecht, 2013; Andersen, 2016; MacLeod, 2018), where an
important outcome would be a better understanding of how to promote collaborative
projects that bring together researchers from potentially very different disciplinary
backgrounds. As for the latter, a better understanding of situations (scientific and
otherwise) could also contribute to addressing concerns at the interface of science
and society, from issues relating to science communication and public understand-
ing of science (e.g., Keren, 2018; Millar & Wynne, 1988; Simis etal., 2016) to more
directly political questions having to do with public trust and uptake of scientific
findings in policy making (e.g., Oreskes & Conway, 2011; de Melo-Martín & Inte-
mann, 2018; Goldenberg, 2021; Oreskes, 2021). Finally, at the intersection of the
two we find initiatives where non-scientists are more than mere consumers of sci-
entific knowledge but play an active role in the the scientific process itself through
what is sometimes called “participatory research,” “citizen science,” and “commu-
nity-based research” (see, e.g., Koskinen & Mäki, 2016; Dunlap etal., 2021), which
can be seen as versions of interdisciplinary research where the parties collaborating
include not only scientists but also non-scientists of various backgrounds. Consid-
eration of cases like these can contribute to deepening our understanding of the dif-
ferent types of situations at play in science. At the same time, by approaching cases
like these through the lens of situated reflexivity, researchers in embodied cognitive
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science might also be able to bring further clarity to them and identify ways for
promoting more fruitful and productive situations for relations internal to science as
well as between science and society at large.
Examination of previous reflexive efforts in the sciences of the mind can also
provide useful guidance for research further developing the perspective of situated
reflexivity. Consider, for instance, Thagard’s (2012) work mentioned previously
investigating science from a computational, cognitivist perspective. Thagard
focuses on topics and aspects of science such as: explanation, justification, belief
revision, conceptual change, problem solving, discovery, creativity, and the role of
“values” in science. Many of these issues will be recognizable to anyone familiar
with traditional cognitive science and philosophy of science. Here, a strong
program in embodied cognitive science along the lines of the situated reflexivity
view motivates at least two types of projects. On the one hand, in contrast with the
internalist options provided by Thagard and others, we can work toward developing
relational, situational accounts of these aspects of scientific work in embodied
terms. And on the other hand, we can also ask whether this way of categorizing
aspects of embodied scientific practice is appropriate in the first place: it may be that
an embodied situational view of cognition motivates partitioning the phenomenon
in different ways. For instance, traditional cognitivist research described by
Thagard (2012) accounts for scientific innovation in terms of the combination of
mental representations and it accounts for problem solving in terms of the creation,
adaptation and use of mental models. In questions such as these, embodied cognitive
scientists might be in a position to offer alternatives that rectify the disembodied
nature of these accounts, but we may also find that a complete overhaul is called for
because the phenomena need to be more fundamentally reframed(see Sanches de
Oliveira, 2022).
Besides these more philosophical focal points, situated reflexivity also motivates
work of a more traditionally psychological nature. Conceptualizing embodied
cognition as situated in the Deweyan sense in terms of organism-environment
transactions raises a developmental question about how these relations unfold and
change over time. Accordingly, and reflexively, conceptualizing scientific practice
in the same embodied, situated way raises questions about how training and
apprenticing as a scientist and, over the long run, the work that goes into building
a scientific career, fit into those dynamic patterns of organism-environment
transaction. Different researchers in embodied cognitive science will be differently
positioned to explore these questions empirically: some through more or less
conventional laboratory experiments, setting up an inquiry situation where
participants engage in shorter-term development, e.g., in learning and scientific
discovery; others might be better positioned to, through a longitudinal lens,
gain insight into longer-term aspects of the phenomena in question; and others
still will be able to further shed light on these changes through an observational,
natural history approach following examples set by some versions of ecological
psychology (see, e.g., Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1991/2014; Heft, 2001, 2018).
This list is, of course, far from comprehensive, but it serves to indicate some of
the possibilities for different researchers given where embodied cognitive science
is at the moment.
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5 Conclusion: astrong program beyondtheanalogy
The goal of this paper has been to explore the prospect of a strong program in
embodied cognitive science inspired by the strong programme articulated by Bloor
and colleagues in the sociology of scientific knowledge.2 This involved considering
the consequences that our view of cognition as spanning brain, body and environ-
ment have for understanding science, including the practices we engage in when we
investigate and explain cognitive phenomena as spanning brain, body and environ-
ment. The perspective of situated reflexivity just sketched is one example of how
work in embodied cognitive science can proceed oriented by a strong program fol-
lowing a Deweyan interpretation of our broad commitments to embodiment. As is
clear from the pointers provided above, there are many different ways situated reflex-
ivity could be further developed, but the orientation is the same, namely applying a
Dewey-inspired view of organism-environment transactional situations reflexively to
understand science. But, of course, these directions don’t exhaust all the possibilities
for a strong program in embodied cognitive science: after all, other potential embod-
ied approaches to scientific practice not explicitly tied to analysis in Deweyan situ-
ational terms are potentially viable and desirable. For this reason I now close with
a more general discussion, to clarify the nature of my proposal as it applies to the
prospect of a strong program broadly construed, independently of alignment with
the specific perspective of situated reflexivity I favor.
Even interpreting my proposal modestly, thinking purely in terms of an analogy
to SSK would already be beneficial to embodied cognitive science. As the recent
literature suggests, many of us are interested in and working on developing accounts
that can be properly described as reflexive even in the absence of the term. Consider,
for example, recent work on model-based research from a broadly enactive-embod-
ied perspective (Rolla & Novaes, 2020), work on neuroscientific practice through
the lens of Gibsonian ecological psychology (van Dijk & Myin, 2019), and work
on art and design practices as providing not only content but also the means for
inquiry in the philosophy of embodied cognition (see Rietveld, 2019 and responses
by Ingold, 2020, Feitenet al.,2021, among others). For authors like these, the label
“strong program” I am proposing might seem to be merely “a new name for an
old way of thinking,” to paraphrase James (1907). Even so there might be some-
thing important to be gained by embracing the name because of what comes with
it. Anywhere in science, explicitly framed research programs are useful because of
how they can guide inquiry by organizing both research activities and the insight
gained through them. Research programs articulate explicit goals and concerns,
and through this they can draw attention to features in our objects of study, and in
our approaches to studying them, that might otherwise have remained implicit and
occluded from view; this, in turn, can open up new avenues of inquiry. And the fact
2 A different but very interesting and promising alternative approach for this paper would have been to
draw inspiration from the reflexivity and situated views of knowledge at play in feminist epistemolo-
gies and in feminist science studies more generally (see, e.g., Haraway,1988; Longino & Lennon,1997;
Campbell 2004; Code,2014; Ashton & McKenna,2020; Anderson,2020). I thank one of the reviewers
for this suggestion.
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is that, despite their clear commonalities, reflexive efforts like the ones just men-
tioned have remained separate, almost as if they are concerned with entirely inde-
pendent phenomena. Conceptualizing them as part of a larger vision and direction
in our field—a strong program in embodied cognitive science—can help reveal their
convergence in terms of shared objectives, which in turn can motivate exploring the
potential convergence of the insight these projects have to offer. Here, even thinking
of this strong program as being merely analogous to the one in SSK could thus help
us take a step beyond disconnected, piecemeal work and move toward a concerted
effort to address issues that many of us already agree are worth investigating.
Besides the analogy, however, I believe that even greater benefits are avail-
able to us through closer approximation between embodied cognitive science
and the strong programme in SSK.3 Given the nature of the embodied cognitive
science research program as articulated here, reflexive theorizing for us involves
a recognition of the importance of interpersonal, sociocultural, structural and
institutional conditions. The character of our reflexive shift makes the compari-
son to the strong programme in SSK seem particularly apt: after all, the strong
programme’s goal was precisely to emphasize the interpersonal, sociocultural,
structural and institutional aspects both of scientific work (i.e., SSK’s object of
study) and of research about that scientific work (i.e., SSK itself). This might
seem like an indication of what both SSK and embodied cognitive science got
right independently of one another: namely, that relational, transactional thinking
suits better our inquiry situation than the analysis of our objects of study in purely
internalist, individualistic terms. But as mentioned in Sect. 3, there is reason to
see historical and conceptual ties connecting contemporary embodied cognitive
science to anthropological and sociological approaches to scientific practice via
“situated cognition” research (Solomon, 2007; Gallagher, 2009; see also, e.g.,
Sutton, 2006; Silver, 2016). This being the case, it’s interesting that many prac-
titioners in embodied cognitive science today are not aware of these ties and are
not familiar with these bodies of work. Other than nods by Andy Clark (2003)
and Gallagher (2020) to Latour, most influential books in embodied cognitive
science from the past two decades entirely neglect anthropological and sociologi-
cal studies of science. For this reason, approaching the idea of a strong program
as more deeply linked to SSK (rather than merely in analogy to it) has the poten-
tial precisely to enrich and reorient some current discussions by inviting more
3 One potential objection to this approximation is based on the fact that SSK is antirealist whereas some
strands in embodied cognitive science, most prominently ecological psychology, present themselves
as being realists (see, e.g., Chemero, 2009). But this tension is only apparent because the “realisms”
in question apply to different domains. SSK’s anti-realism is metascientific (or second-order) and con-
cerns the nature of scientific theory and knowledge, whereas Gibsonian “direct realism” is scientific (or
first-order) and concerns the nature of perception. In short, even if Gibsonians are realists about percep-
tion, this doesn’t entail realism about the nature of scientific theories, including their own theory of per-
ception. In line with this observation, the ecological (direct realist) perceptual theory of affordances has
been argued to motivate anti-realism with regard to scientific models, conceptualized as tools with affor-
dances (Sanches de Oliveira,2016). More generally, debate about scientific realism has been argued to
be orthogonal to what’s at stake in realism/anti-realism distinctions within non-representational embod-
ied cognitive science (Zahidi,2014).
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careful consideration of these neglected, albeit relevant and related, fields. Here I
limit my consideration to methodological implications of this link.
In one of his many pieces defending the strong programme against philosophi-
cal objections, Bloor (2001) affirms that the strong programme’s objective “was to
codify and clarify an emerging body of case-studies, particularly by historians of
science,” to which he adds that “The real life-blood of the sociology of scientific
knowledge lies with such empirical work” (p. 15210). Besides the analysis of histor-
ical case-studies, which was the clear favorite for Bloor and others in the Edinburgh
school, another prominent method in the sociology of science is that of ethnographic
observation of working scientists (e.g., Knorr-Cetina, 2013; Collins, 1992; Latour &
Woolgar, 1979/1986; Latour, 1987). A major benefit of taking seriously the idea of a
strong program in embodied cognitive science as informed by SSK is the possibility
of drawing from these sorts of anthropological and sociological methods to comple-
ment the theoretical and experimental methods and approaches already dominant in
embodied cognitive science. Historical case-studies have been popular in some cir-
cles where research focuses on historical records of scientific reasoning approached
from the perspective of distributed cognitive processing (see, e.g., Tweney, 1985,
1989, 2014; Nersessian, 1992, 2002, 2008). Observational approaches appear in
some work targeting interpersonal coordination and communication from an embod-
ied perspective employing both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods (e.g.,
Rączaszek-Leonardi etal., 2018, 2019; Trasmundi, 2020; Trasmundi & Steffensen,
2016), but usually without attention to instances of scientific practice. And in fact,
both historical and observational approaches are typically absent in conventional
descriptions of what “4E cognition” and embodied cognitive science are all about
(see, e.g., Clark, 2014; Shapiro, 2014, 2019; Shapiro & Spaulding, 2021). On the
one hand, then, pursuing reflexive research through close attention to anthropologi-
cal and sociological (including historical) approaches in science studies would be
beneficial for us because it would significantly expand the embodied cognitive sci-
ence methodological toolkit. On the other hand, this (re)approximation need not
be a one-way street. Beyond embodied cognitive science researchers merely co-
opting what others have already been doing well for a long time, we would also
be in a position to bring in our own conceptual tools to collaborative investigations
and, through that, contribute with potentially new and insightful ways to advance
understanding of the phenomena under investigation. Besides the specific Dewey-
inspired transactional and situational perspective advocated here, other possibilities
include complementing conceptual, experimental and observational investigations
of scientific practice with analysis in terms of affordances (drawing from ecological
approaches) or sensorimotor contingencies (drawing from enactive approaches), to
mention just two.
In short, then, a strong program developed merely in analogy to the one in SSK
and that simply encouraged embodied cognitive science researchers to engage in
reflexive work would already be a boon to our field. Framed as such, the strong
program would invite researchers to consider how they can turn their methods
toward understanding scientific practice in general and even embodied cognitive
science practice in particular. And interpreted less modestly, the strong program
motivates consideration of additional methods and approaches that we might
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want to consider as we try to make sense of mind and behavior from an embodied
standpoint. In either case, a strong program for embodied cognitive science is
as methodologically pluralistic as the science itself. For instance, enactivists and
ecological psychologists already have different preferred research practices, and
the strong program doesn’t demand that researchers in either tradition give up
on those methods. The idea, rather, is to apply the same methods (of laboratory
experimentation, theoretical analysis, computational and mathematical modeling
etc.) in a different way, and to be open to potential new methods and approaches.
In this respect, the more radical framing that draws a closer link to research in the
anthropological and sociological traditions is perhaps the most helpful insofar as
it explicitly draws attention to specific possibilities of what to try and where to
look for guidance.
Seeing embodied cognition through a reflexive lens allows us to reconceptual-
ize scientific work in ways that go against dominant narratives in academic and
popular culture alike. This is a direction many of us are already taking informally
and independently, in a piecemeal fashion. This paper’s argument brings this very
fact to the forefront of attention and thereby enables us to directly confront our
concerns and the wide-ranging consequences that our view of cognition can have.
This proposal can also be expressed reflexively. For the past few decades, think-
ing of our work as being part of such a thing as “embodied cognitive science”
created an inquiry situation that enabled progress by organizing the different but
often overlapping intuitions, hypotheses, methods and theories different research-
ers from different backgrounds had been developing and using. Moving forward,
thinking in terms of a strong program for embodied cognitive science can con-
tribute to the field’s development as it grows and matures, and it can do so not
only because it organizes disparate efforts and interests many of us already have,
but also because it supports and enriches this work by helping us see differently
what is possible. This sets up a new situation in which we are better positioned to
understand scientific work (including our own work) and are further empowered
to contemplate what else we might work on, why and how.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this
articles.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
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