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Chapter 4
Explanatory Diversity andEmbodied
Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates
Pluralism
GuilhermeSanchesdeOliveira
Abstract Explanatory diversity is a salient feature of the sciences of the mind,
where different projects focus on neural, psychological, cognitive, social or other
explanations. The same happens within embodied cognitive science, where ecologi-
cal, enactive, dynamical, phenomenological and other approaches differ from each
other in their explanations of the embodied mind. As traditionally conceived,
explanatory diversity is philosophically problematic, fueling debates about whether
the different explanations are competing, compatible, or tangential. In contrast, this
paper takes the perspective of embodied cognitive science as its starting point and
accordingly approaches explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as
a phenomenon to be understood. Recent work has explored how the view of cogni-
tion as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cog-
nitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic
stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagree-
ments. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explana-
tions as disembodied entities that compete with one another, and instead thinking in
terms of different explanatory styles as embodied practices of explaining, many of
which might be legitimate and warranted independently of whether and how the
explanations themselves relate to one another.
4.1 Introduction
Scientists use a wide variety of approaches to explaining the world, and in many cases
this diversity of explanations seems perfectly straightforward. It’s not surprising that
researchers in different disciplines come up with different sorts of explanations when
they are investigating entirely unrelated phenomena. Along these lines, there’s nothing
particularly mysterious about the many differences between explanations in, say,
G. SanchesdeOliveira ()
Department of Psychology and Ergonomics, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: gui.cogsci@gmail.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
M.-O. Casper, G. F. Artese (eds.), Situated Cognition Research, Studies in Brain
and Mind 23, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39744-8_4
52
inorganic chemistry, entomology, cultural anthropology, andastronomy. It also seems
intuitive that, over time, the dominant approach to explaining a given phenomenon
changes and gets superseded by a novel, better approach, such as in the shift from
geocentric to heliocentric models, or from explanations in terms of phlogiston to oxy-
gen. What is particularly philosophically interesting is when different explanations
targeting the same phenomena run in parallel and even flourish at the same time.
This is precisely what we see in the sciences of the mind today. Some explana-
tions of human behavior make exclusive reference to events happening in the brain,
such as localized patterns of neural activity; other explanations focus on psycho-
logical features such as personality traits, or they focus on cognitive states and pro-
cesses such as representational structures and computational algorithms, and they
often do so without paying attention to neural goings-on; other approaches favor
explanation in terms of supra-individual factors, such as the ones found in parts of
social and environmental psychology, setting aside the individual neural or compu-
tational aspects of mind; and other approaches still seem to fall in neither of these
groups. Explanatory diversity is also very clearly present within embodied cognitive
science, where researchers coming from different traditions (e.g., dynamical sys-
tems theory, ecological psychology, enactivism, phenomenology, and neuroscience)
often disagree in how they investigate the embodied mind.
The existence of many different ways of explaining mind and behavior has tradi-
tionally fueled philosophical debate about how the different explanations relate to
one another, and in particular about whether different explanations can be integrated
or whether some explanations are more fundamental and can ultimately replace the
others. From this common philosophical perspective, explanatory diversity is a
problem to be solved. Some philosophers try to solve the problem by advocating for
the reduction of one type of explanations to the other, a move in the direction of
eliminating diversity or at least reducing the quantity of legitimate explanation
types in a given domain of inquiry. Other philosophers try to show, instead, that the
different types of explanations are compatible and complement each other, or that
they are tangential and can coexist even without integration: in positions like these,
the goal is to legitimize the continued existence of a plurality of explanations. But
whatever the position in each case, the starting point seems to be the same: philoso-
phers typically see explanatory diversity as problematic on its own, something that
calls for resolution or justification, something that we need to address somehow.
In contrast with this usual philosophical framing, and taking instead the perspec-
tive of embodied cognitive science as a starting point, this paper approaches the
question of explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenome-
non to be understood. In embodied cognitive science we use a variety of theoretical
and methodological resources to understand all sorts of behavioral phenomena in
terms of cognition as embodied, situated, enactive, ecological and so on. In line
with this, it makes sense to see scientists themselves as embodied cognitive agents
and, accordingly, to understand all aspects of scientific practice as aspects of situ-
ated embodied cognitive activity. This idea has been described in the recent litera-
ture as amounting to a reflexive shift—that is, a shift where we continue using the
same familiar theoretical and methodological resources we already use to
G. SanchesdeOliveira
53
understand behavioral phenomena in the cases of “ordinary people,” but we reflex-
ively apply those resources to develop an understanding of scientists and scientific
practices, including ourselves and our research practices. The goal of this paper is
to spell out the implications of this reflexive embodied shift for how we think about
explanatory diversity. As I will argue, reflexivity motivates reframing theoretical
and methodological disagreements: in contrast with the usual focus on explanations
as disembodied entities that compete with one another, we instead move toward
thinking of explanatory diversity in terms of alternative explanatory styles as
embodied practices of explaining, of making sense of the world. This reflexive
reframing, in turn, motivates thinking that multiple explanatory styles might be per-
fectly legitimate and warranted even if they are not compatible or integratable.
The paper is organized into two parts, with two sections each. I begin in Sect. 4.2
with a broad characterization of the traditional positions in the philosophical debate
surrounding explanatory diversity in science, which I illustrate with examples relat-
ing to research in embodied cognitive science. Given the paper’s overarching goal
of arguing that reflexivity motivates pluralism, it is important to consider in greater
depth the different types of pluralist perspectives that philosophers have developed.
This is what I do in Sect. 4.3, where I focus on pluralism of explanatory styles as a
compelling variety of pluralism. Having up to that point focused on perspectives on
explanatory diversity coming primarily from debates in philosophy of science, I
then move to the second part of the paper where we shift to a perspective informed
by embodied cognitive science. There the proposal is that, independently of the
philosophical reasons in its favor, pluralism of explanatory styles is particularly
attractive for researchers in embodied cognitive science who adopt a reflexive
stance. Section 4.4 begins to work toward this conclusion by considering reflexivity
itself, and identifying efforts within embodied cognitive science to develop reflexive
accounts of scientific practice. Section 4.5 then concludes by exploring how, having
taken this reflexive shift, there is good reason to see pluralism of explanatory styles
not only as an ally but as a natural consequence of our views. I close by discussing
the philosophical and scientific implications of the paper’s proposal. Besides reori-
enting, for embodied cognitive science researchers, the philosophical debates about
the relation between different explanatory approaches, these steps also open up new
avenues for theoretical and empirical work that more self-consciously applies the
tools from embodied cognitive science to understand scientific practice itself.
4.2 The Philosophical Problem ofExplanatory Diversity
The classical philosophical framing for the question of explanatory diversity was in
terms of a debate concerning the unity or disunity of science. The common assump-
tion was that the world comprises discrete levels of organization that account for the
differences between distinct scientific disciplines: “Reality, in the modern concep-
tion, appears as a tremendous hierarchical order of organised entities, leading, in a
superposition of many levels, from physical and chemical to biological and
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
54
sociological systems” (von Bertalanffy, 1950, p.164; cited in Oppenheim & Putnam,
1958). This basic picture of the world as a nested hierarchy of parts that decompose
into smaller parts that decompose into even smaller parts motivated two sorts of
responses. Reductionists saw the unity of science as an ideal to be accomplished
through the reduction of the vocabulary and explanatory principles used at the
higher levels to those used in the lower and more fundamental ones; in contrast,
anti-reductionists believed instead in the “autonomy” of explanation at higher levels
in the so-called “special sciences” (see, e.g., Oppenheim & Putnam, 1958; Putnam,
1967; Fodor, 1974, 1997).
More recent philosophical debate about explanatory diversity in the sciences of
the mind has moved away from discussions about the prospect of unification of all
of science, yet talk of “levels” has remained central for reductionists and anti-
reductionists alike. On one side of the contemporary debate, for example, John
Bickle’s “ruthless reductionism” sees the explanations provided in cognitive psy-
chology and even cognitive neuroscience as useful only when it comes to “phenom-
ena for which we don’t yet have experimentally verified cellular and molecular
mechanisms” (Bickle, 2005, p.237); ultimately these “higher level” explanations
are steps “in the search for lower level neuronal mechanisms” (Bickle, 2003 p.130)
as the goal is always to go “‘further down’ to cellular, synaptic, and ultimately
molecular biological mechanisms” (p. 4). In contrast, on the other side, anti-
reductionists typically also appeal to differences in levels but they do so for the
opposite goal, namely to justify the current existence, and permanence into the
future, of explanatory diversity. Within this camp, some anti-reductionists advocate
for integration, holding that good explanations need to combine contributions from
multiple disciplinary perspectives and their respective ontological levels. Along
these lines, for example, Paul Thagard claims:
I expect that computational models will increasingly aid our understanding of the relations
between different levels of mechanisms—for example, helping to relate the social to the
cognitive, the cognitive to the neural, and the neural to the molecular. (Thagard, 2005,
pp.218–219)
Other anti-reductionists instead highlight the independence of the different
approaches relative to one another and their individual value as legitimately
explanatory:
it is plausible to think that there are as many levels of description available as there are
levels of organization. (...) We may describe humans in terms of their physical make-up,
their chemical constitution, their physiological structure, their gross anatomy, their cogni-
tive capacities, their social role, and much more. All these give a distinctive perspective on
human psychology. (Richardson, 2009, p.474; emphasis added)
Anti-reductionists of different orientations thus coincide in rejecting the idea that
neuroscience (or, more specifically, cellular and molecular neuroscience, in the case
of ruthless reductionists like Bickle) is “the” science of the mind, the one that all
explanations should ultimately boil down to. But the question remains, even for
anti-reductionists, of just how much independence we take the different explanatory
approaches to enjoy: this is a question about the prospect of integration between
G. SanchesdeOliveira
55
different explanations (rather than of reduction of one to the other), which concerns
when and why combining different explanations and explanatory approaches might
be possible, justified, useful, and desirable.
4.2.1 Explanatory Diversity inEmbodied Cognitive Science
It’s in the context of these philosophical ideas and positions that debate about expla-
nation in embodied cognitive science—the focus of this paper—has unfolded in
recent years. Broadly construed, embodied cognitive science eschews brain-centric
reductionism and instead views cognition as embodied, embedded, situated,
extended, enactive, ecological, and so on.1 This has occasioned debates of two
types. On the one hand, there has been controversy about how the explanations
provided by embodied cognitive science sit with approaches such as the ones
already mentioned which favor explanation in neural, psychological, computational,
social or other terms. One example of this is the debate about the dynamical systems
approach that many advocates of embodied cognition use. Here the disagreement
centers on questions about the compatibility between dynamical explanation and
representational/computational explanation, as well as on questions about the
explanatory or descriptive nature of the dynamical approach vis-a-vis mechanistic
approaches (see, e.g., Van Gelder, 1995, 1998; Bechtel, 1998; Chemero, 2000;
Shapiro, 2010; Kaplan & Bechtel, 2011; Stepp etal., 2011; Zednik, 2011; Piccinini
& Craver, 2011; Gervais, 2015; Favela, 2020a, b).
On the other hand, besides debates about how embodied cognition relates to
other explanatory approaches in the sciences of the mind, there is also internal dis-
agreement, as researchers working within embodied cognitive science have debated
amongst themselves about how our different projects and views relate to one
another. One example of this is the current debate concerning the compatibility
between ecological psychology and enactivism. This debate is often framed around
tensions supposed to exist between the direct realist approach to perception devel-
oped in the Gibsonian tradition (Gibson, 1966, 1979; see also, e.g., Michaels &
Carello, 1981; Heft, 2001; Turvey, 2018) and the constructivism of the Maturana
and Varela tradition (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela etal., 1991; see also, e.g., Di
Paolo etal.,2010, 2017; Gallagher, 2017). While some take these and other differ-
ences to make ecological psychology and enactivism irreconcilable, other research-
ers have suggested that enactivist explanation at the level of individual agents and
agency can complement, and be integrated with, explanations from ecological psy-
chology that focus on organism-environment relations at the species level (see, e.g.,
Fultot etal., 2016; Di Paolo, 2016; Heras- Escribano, 2016, 2019; Baggs & Chemero,
2021; Ryan & Gallagher, 2020; Heft, 2020).
1 The handbooks edited by Newen et al. (2018), Shapiro (2014), and Calvo and Gomila (2008)
offer a comprehensive picture of the diversity of research in embodied cognitive science.
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
56
For a last example, some of the controversy surrounding work in (and inspired
by) the phenomenological tradition can be seen as straddling the internal and exter-
nal types of debates in embodied cognitive science. This is the case of the disagree-
ment about neurophenomenology, for instance. Here the source of contention is the
apparent tension in using the third-person methods of neuroscience (seen by some
as necessarily reductive and outside the scope of embodied cognitive science) in
conjunction with the study of subjective experience from an anti-reductionist stand
point (see, e.g., Varela, 1996; De Preester, 2002; Lutz & Thompson, 2003; Bayne,
2004; Overgaard, 2004; Zahavi, 2010; Pollard, 2014; Gallagher, 2012, 2017, 2018).
A related but clearly distinct line of research draws insights from the phenomeno-
logical tradition to make sense of phenomena studied empirically using the tools of
dynamical systems theory rather than those of neuroscience. This approach avoids
the tension between subjective experience and scientific measurement attending
neurophenomenology, yet it gives rise to some of its own questions. Here, an exam-
ple of an internal debate (i.e., fully within embodied cognitive science) concerns
how best to apply and interpret the empirical notion of interaction-dominant dynam-
ics (Holden etal., 2009), whether in terms of a Heideggerian view of tool use or in
light of Merleau-Ponty’s views on sensorimotor unity and embodied interaction
(see, e.g., Dotov etal., 2010, 2017; Sanches de Oliveira etal., 2019); naturally, this
line of research is additionally subject to external criticisms such as the ones men-
tioned previously concerning the status of dynamical approaches more generally,
i.e., whether they are explanatory or ‘merely descriptive’.
As these examples reveal, debates surrounding the different approaches at play
in embodied cognitive science research have by and large been shaped by the tradi-
tional philosophical perspective according to which the existence of explanatory
diversity in a given domain is a problem to be addressed, either by doing away with
that diversity (e.g., by showing that some explanations are more legitimate than oth-
ers) or somehow by justifying the continuation of that diversity (e.g., by identifying
compatibilities and complementarities between the different explanations). The
goal of this paper, once again, is to offer a different perspective on explanatory
diversity, one that’s reflexively informed by embodied cognitive science (rather than
only applied to it) and that approaches explanatory diversity as a phenomenon to be
understood. The outcome of this reflexive approach on scientific practice from an
embodied perspective, I will propose, is motivation to embrace a pluralistic take on
disagreement and explanatory diversity. But to be able to elaborate on this idea, we
first need to consider pluralism in more detail.
4.3 Explanation andPluralism(s)
Pluralism is a kind of anti-reductionism. But what does this mean? There are differ-
ent types of reductionism, and different views one may hold as a reductionist.
Brigandt and Love (2017), for instance, distinguish between ontological, method-
ological and epistemic reductionism, which they identify as logically independent
G. SanchesdeOliveira
57
but, in practice, often tacitly held in combination with one another. These differ-
ences aside, a common point of agreement for reductionists seems to be their evalu-
ation of explanatory diversity as, at best, only temporarily useful: in this view,
lower-level descriptions are more basic, more fundamental, and ultimately more
explanatory than descriptions in terms of processes at higher levels, such that hav-
ing access to a diversity of explanations and explanatory approaches is beneficial
only insofar as it enables developing descriptions that are reductive and, for that
reason, better positioned to get at what (supposedly) truly explains the phenomena.
Pluralists reject this overall picture. As Steel (2004) puts it, the difference
between the views is that “while reductionism asserts that there is a privileged, fun-
damental level of description, pluralism maintains that there are multiple autono-
mous perspectives from which the same phenomena can be studied” (p.66). To be
clear on the contrast, then, reductionists may favor reduction when it comes to the
relations between different scientific disciplines and their methods, and they may,
additionally or instead, favor reduction when it comes to aspects of phenomena
studied in the same field or domain; pluralists, in contrast, are anti-reductionists in
both senses.
But agreement on the negative aspect (i.e., rejecting reductionism) doesn’t entail
agreement on the positive details, and the recent literature in fact suggests that there
are multiple ways of adopting a pluralist stance with regard to explanatory diver-
sity—there is a plurality of pluralisms, if you will. This is precisely what van
Bouwel (2014) proposes. Following Mitchell (2009), van Bouwel offers a taxon-
omy that distinguishes between five types of pluralism that vary in the degree of
autonomy each assigns to different explanatory approaches and, relatedly, in how
much emphasis each places on the prospect of integration between explanations
from different research projects and disciplinary perspectives. Commenting on
these distinctions, Gijsbers (2016) argues that the differences between the five types
of pluralism boil down to a contrast between views that endorse integrationism and
views that endorse isolationism. Integrative pluralists, on the one hand, uphold the
ideal of combining explanations “into one unified explanation that is superior to
each of the individual ones”; the radical view he calls isolationist pluralism, on the
other hand, is “the view that [different] explanations all add to our understanding”
even if they “cannot be combined into a single integrated account” (Gijsbers, 2016,
pp.1–2).2
Following Gijsbers (2016), then, while integrationists and isolationists agree that
explanations at different levels enjoy some degree of autonomy relative to one
another, integrationists hold that we ultimately gain explanatory power by combin-
ing the different levels of description, a view that isolationists reject in favor of
continued separation between explanations. In the sciences of the mind, this can be
seen as translating into a disagreement about the role of explanations at the neural
2 Given that the views differ primarily on how they evaluate the prospect of integration (in particu-
lar whether they see integrated explanations as necessarily superior), some have argued that inte-
grationism should be seen as its own category, as a middle ground between reductionism and
pluralism rather than as a type of pluralism (see, e.g., Brigandt, 2010).
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
58
level. To be sure, both integrationists and isolationists would agree in thinking that
explanation at the neural level is insufficient—this is because both reject brain-
centric reductionism. Yet, the two views might part ways when it comes to the ques-
tion of whether inclusion of the neural level is even explanatorily necessary. For
integrationists the best explanations will likely incorporate explanations of phenom-
ena at the neural level, which need to somehow be combined with explanations at
the higher levels. Isolationists, on the other hand, hold that many different explana-
tions may be perfectly legitimate even if it’s not possible to integrate them, and,
accordingly, they may think that an explanation can be perfectly legitimate and
successful even if it leaves the brain entirely out of the picture.
4.3.1 Problems withIntegrationist andIsolationist Pluralisms
Although explanatory integrationism and explanatory isolationism have their
advantages, there are also significant philosophical drawbacks to each of them.
Beginning with integrationism, a difficulty is that the ideal of non-reductive inte-
grated explanations seems to be not only unrealistic but potentially even counter-
productive. This is what Potochnik and Sanches de Oliveira (2020) suggest. While
granting that combining insights from different explanations and disciplines can be
incredibly helpful in many cases, they argue that philosophers should not be overly
optimistic about explanatory integration—and not simply because integration is dif-
ficult to accomplish in some cases, but crucially because in many cases it could even
be detrimental. As they propose, scientists typically aim not for completeness of
explanation, but only for elucidating the causal patterns that are most directly rele-
vant for answering the questions that occasioned their research in the first place.
And pursuing integrated explanations can be unfruitful when, as they put it, “addi-
tional causal information occludes the causal pattern of immediate interest with
details that may be causally important but are incidental to the immediate research
aims” (Potochnik & Sanches de Oliveira, 2020, p.1315). Scientists develop expla-
nations to gain understanding of phenomena. Sometimes additional information can
provide better understanding. But we can’t assume that integrating different kinds
of explanations will always necessarily get us there, because sometimes too much
information can hinder rather than support understanding. Integration can be a good
thing, but integrationism—the normative view on integration as always good, the
ultimate ideal—isn’t.
Isolationism, on the other hand, seems problematic in at least two ways. The first
is that, if the view is framed as a normative perspective that mandates the continued
separation between research projects and disciplines, then isolationism is just plain
unrealistic and out of touch with real-world science. Although disciplines remain
independent and autonomous, there is an undeniable growing tendency toward col-
laborative initiatives bringing together not only different perspectives within a given
field but even across research programs and disciplines. This means that, under-
stood as a normative philosophical view about science (i.e., an -ism), isolationism
G. SanchesdeOliveira
59
flies in the face of a wide range of good research being done today—and this sug-
gests that it’s not the norm that scientists actually use to guide their own work.
But, second, even if isolationism is more negatively framed simply as a rejection
of integrationism, the reason for rejecting it matters. As seen earlier, the autonomy
of the different explanations we find in science (including the sciences of the mind)
is, for many philosophers, due to the independence between the levels of description
and associated levels of organization that these explanations are concerned with.
Pluralists of an isolationist bent typically hold that “there is a plurality of legitimate
and autonomous levels of description and explanation of a given phenomena[sic]”
(Steel, 2004, p.55; see also, e.g., Richardson, 2009). But appeal to levels seems like
a problematic basis for justifying pluralism. This is not only because there are so
many different conceptions of levels at play in science (see, e.g., Craver, 2007;
Eronen, 2013; Potochnik, 2017) but also because, for any given conception of lev-
els, it is doubtful that it can in fact capture the differences between the phenomena
focal to different explanations such that it can account for those explanatory differ-
ences. As Potochnik puts it, “no account of general, hierarchical levels of organiza-
tion succeeds, nor do the metaphysical, explanatory, epistemic, or causal
significances variously ascribed to levels of organization” (Potochnik, 2017, p.176).
Even if relationships of compositionality or of realization and implementation are
common and unproblematic, it doesn’t follow that all of reality falls into “discrete,
stratified levels” (ibid.), nor does it follow that the different types of explanation
neatly correspond to each of the supposed levels (if there were any).
4.3.2 Pluralism ofExplanatory Styles
For the reasons just considered, a particularly attractive alternative to both integra-
tionist and isolationist versions of explanatory pluralism is the pluralism of explana-
tory styles put forward by Potochnik and Sanches de Oliveira (2020). They
summarize their account as follows:
On our view of pluralism of explanatory styles, different approaches offer independent
explanations, even of the same phenomena, in terms of the distinct causal patterns they
focus on. The value of these explanations partly derives from their identification of broad
patterns in causal influence; this distinguishes our emphasis on causal patterns from an
emphasis on mere causal information or causal mechanism. This places the researchers who
seek explanation center stage: Which kind of potential cause is of immediate interest to
them is crucial in determining which kind of explanatory style is called for. (Potochnik &
Sanches de Oliveira, 2020, p.1316)
Two points are worth emphasizing. The first is that, unlike pluralisms about expla-
nation such as integrationism and isolationism, the pluralism in question here is one
about explanatory styles. More traditional pluralisms focus on the differences
between competing explanations, and can thus seem to treat explanations as if they
were self-contained entities that can be compared without consideration of their
context and the questions they were designed to answer. In contrast, the pluralism in
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
60
question here focuses on the diversity of styles of explaining at play in the different
sciences and even within a given field. Different explanatory styles may favor dif-
ferent causal patterns. For this reason, even though different explanations of the
same phenomena might differ, say, in the temporal and spatial scales they focus on,
the justification for this diversity doesn’t depend on any notions of levels, but may
instead be due to a diversity of causal patterns that are focal for the different
researchers and research groups. This makes a big difference. Pluralists about expla-
nation typically reject reduction to a fundamental level and, accordingly, ask which
other levels might also be explanatory. Pluralism of explanatory styles proposes
something radically different: “the question is not which levels are explanatory, but
which explanatory style is called for given the potential causal pattern of interest”
(Potochnik & Sanches de Oliveira, 2020, pp.1317–1318).
The second point has to do with how pluralism about explanatory styles differs
specifically from the integrationist type of pluralism about explanations. As seen
above, one challenge for integrationism is the fact that, for scientists, sometimes
less is more: simpler explanations can be, and often are, more useful and illuminat-
ing than others that are more complete and more true but also more complex.
Holding a pluralist perspective about explanatory styles makes it possible to cir-
cumvent this kind of challenge. Again, in this view explanatory diversity is under-
stood as arising because scientists sometimes adopt different styles of explanation
that favor distinct causal patterns even for explaining the same phenomena. This
difference in the causal patterns of interest is at once a difference that concerns the
phenomena in question (and the causal patterns they exhibit) and a difference con-
cerning the scientists themselves (and their interests). This means that, put differ-
ently, pluralism of explanatory styles is an interpretation of explanatory diversity
that explicitly takes into account both what’s being explained (the phenomena) and
who’s doing the explaining (the scientists). This difference in focus shows why we
can’t evaluate the prospect of integration of different explanations only in terms of
the explanations themselves. Trying to combine causal information from different
explanations can be counterproductive for some scientists if the information added
occludes the information most directly relevant to the causal patterns that are of
interest to those scientists; after all, the causal patterns are what the scientists are
trying to understand, and they are what will lead scientists to see some candidate
explanations as beingmore or less illuminating and explanatory. By emphasizing
how different explanations sometimes focus on different causal patterns even when
they target the same phenomena, pluralism of explanatory styles damps down the
philosophical expectation that it is always beneficial to (try to) integrate explanations.
4.4 Reflexivity, Mind, andEmbodiment
The previous two sections focused on different views relating to explanatory diver-
sity as discussed primarily in, and from the perspective of, philosophy of science.
One way to proceed now would be to consider how those philosophical views can
G. SanchesdeOliveira
61
be applied to disagreements in embodied cognitive science such as the ones reviewed
in Sect. 4.2.1. Along these lines, we could draw from a particular philosophical
perspective on explanatory diversity in order to adjudicate between two competing
explanations in embodied cognitive science, or perhaps to argue instead that the
explanations are compatible and integratable such that the diversity of explanations
is merely superficial. This is the usual approach in philosophical discussions about
embodied cognitive science (e.g., in philosophy of cognitive science), and I don’t
think there is anything terribly wrong with it. But my goal here is to offer a different,
less common perspective: rather than applying philosophical views about scientific
explanation to make sense of the theories and methods of embodied cognitive sci-
ence, the proposal here is that we work in the opposite direction, starting with views
from embodied cognitive science and exploring how those views can inform our
thinking about scientific explanation and the diversity we see in science. And the
crucial first step here is to see how embodied cognitive science can inform our view
of science, scientific practice and scientists—that is, how embodied cognitive sci-
ence is, or can be, reflexive.
4.4.1 Reflexivity?
There’s a very broad sense in which it’s reasonable to see embodied cognitive sci-
ence as unavoidably reflexive, because reflexivity lies at the foundation of any and
all scientific approaches to mind and behavior. This is a conclusion we might reach,
for instance, following Kurt Danziger’s historical account of the rise of modern
psychological categories:
Psychological discourse presupposes that individuals have learned to relate to themselves
in some sense as objects, that they have learned to introspect their own mental states, or self
consciously monitor their own actions, or describe their own character traits in a common
language. These are all examples of psychological self-objectification. (Danziger,
1997, p.23)
In this view, engaging in scientific theorizing about the mind is in and of itself
already a reflexive activity. This is clear by comparison with the use of scientific
methods to study various phenomena in, say, chemistry, physics, or geology. Even
if these phenomena are all related to human life in some way, the investigation in
these cases does not typically involve “self-consciousness” or “self-objectification,”
as Danziger put it, because the primary target of inquiry is not humans. In contrast,
the sciences of the mind necessarily consist in a form of scientific self-reflection: in
neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science—including embodied cognitive
science—we employ the same broadly naturalistic, scientific explanatory lens used
in other sciences, but we turn that lens to understanding human beings.
But there is a different, more restricted sense of “reflexivity” used in the social
sciences that is particularly relevant for us. In this narrower sense, reflexivity in the
social sciences concerns not simply theorizing about humans in general, but rather,
applying the theories and methods from the social sciences specifically to
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
62
understand science, including social science itself. This perspective is nicely illus-
trated by David Bloor’s approach in the sociology of scientific knowledge: in this
sense, in line with the way sociologists understand human behavior more generally,
a sociological perspective on science is reflexive when it sees sociological “theories
and methods as emanating from society, that is, as the product of collective influ-
ences and resources and as peculiar to the culture and its present circumstances”
(Bloor, 1976/1991, p.44).3
Understood in this narrower sense, as a specific and substantive theoretical and
methodological approach (rather than in the broad sense seen in Danziger’s quote
above), reflexivity is not something we can take for granted. No doubt, it makes
sense to expect the sciences of the mind to have interesting things to say about sci-
entific practices and scientific research. But it’s perfectly conceivable, and in fact
it’s common, for research on human behavior to go on without taking this extra step:
more often than not, researchers study many different human behaviors without
explicitly addressing the specific behaviors that some humans engage in when they
participate in scientific practices of theorizing, experimenting, explaining, and so
on. So even if the sciences of the mind are always reflexive in the broad sense,
research on mind, behavior and cognition does not by necessity include the nar-
rower and substantive reflexivity characteristic of theoretical and methodological
work that takes scientific practice itself as an object of investigation.
4.4.2 Reflexivity intheEnactive Tradition
Within embodied cognitive science, there is growing interest in reflexivity, but sub-
stantive reflexive research is still rare. Some of the earliest examples of reflexive
thinking appear in the work of the founders of enactivism, Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela. In his essay Biology of Cognition,4 for example, Maturana explic-
itly sets out to give an account of cognition that also applies to what he calls the
“observer,” that is, the cognitive agent who cognizes even about cognition. As he
puts it: “The observer is a human being, that is, a living system, and whatever
applies to living systems applies also to him” (1980, p.8); and “The observer is a
living system and an understanding of cognition as a biological phenomenon must
account for the observer and his role in it” (p.9). For Maturana this means that the
same biological principles of self-organization, autonomy and adaptation that
explain the simplest forms of life also explain how our functional organization
“gives rise to such phenomena as conceptual thinking, language, and self-
consciousness” (p.6).
3 For other discussions of “reflexivity” in the social sciences, see, e.g., Ashmore (1989) and
Lynch (2000).
4 Originally written in 1970, Biology of Cognition was published as the first part of Maturana &
Varela’s, 1980 book Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Citations refer to
this edition.
G. SanchesdeOliveira
63
Having developed an approach for making sense of cognition as a biological
function of living systems, Maturana and Varela extend the same approach to speak
of themselves as observers, a specific type of living system. But it’s interesting to
see that their comments stay at a general level, applying to meta-cognitive, self-
referential thinking of the type that all of us engage in when we contemplate our
own thoughts, behavior and experience. And this is different from offering a way of
making sense of the particular types of observation, understanding, explanation and
experience that only some observers engage in when they cognize about cognition
as scientists. Understanding meta-cognitive “self-observation” can be a helpful
starting point, but it doesn’t automatically translate into a substantive account of the
peculiar “self-observing” practices we engage in when we do work that contributes
to the shared enterprise of the sciences of the mind.
This early work is thus reflexive more in the broad sense (e.g., the one we find in
Danziger) than in the narrower, specific one we are interested in (e.g., in analogy to
the one used by Bloor and others in the social sciences). Only later—especially with
(and following) Maturana & Varela’s, 1987 book The Tree of Knowledge: The
Biological Roots of Human Understanding—are there clear steps in the direction of
an enactive understanding of scientific practice as scientific, that is, one that sheds
light on how doing science differs from other forms of thinking, solving problems
and so on. There we find, for instance, a suggestive discussion about the nature of
explanation. Maturana and Varela point out that their goal is to provide an account
of cognition in terms of “bringing forth a world,” and so they ask how they can
know that they have succeeded. In trying to answer their own question, they start by
considering what it means to offer a successful explanation: “An explanation is
always a proposition that reformulates or recreates the observations of a phenome-
non in a system of concepts acceptable to a group of people who share a criterion of
validation” (1987, p.28). As they recognize, this conception of explanation is so
broad that it applies equally to magical/superstitious thinking and to scientific
explanations. The difference that makes an explanation scientific rather than magi-
cal, in their view, has to do with the “criterion of validation” at play in the system of
explanations that scientists share. Their account comprises four different steps or
conditions that can, but need not be, chronologically ordered in this particular
sequence:
(a) Describing the phenomenon (or phenomena) to be explained in a way accept-
able to a body of observers
(b) Proposing a conceptual system capable of generating the phenomenon to be
explained in a way acceptable to a body of observers (explanatory hypothesis)
(c) Obtaining from (b) other phenomena not explicitly considered in that proposi-
tion, as also describing its conditions for observation by a body of observers
(d) Observing these other phenomena obtained from (b) (Maturana & Varela,
1987, p.28).
With this account on hand they can then answer the question of how to judge the
scientific adequacy of their own (enactive) account of cognition as the activity of
living beings bringing forth a world: they will know that they have succeeded in
giving a satisfactory scientific explanation
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
64
when we have set forth a conceptual system that can generate the cognitive phenomenon as
a result of the action of a living being, and when we have shown that this process can pro-
duce living beings like ourselves, able to generate descriptions and reflect on them as a
result of their fulfillment as living beings operating effectively in their fields of existence.
(Maturana & Varela, 1987, p.30)
Based on this picture and other insights discussed in the book, in the afterword
Varela expresses particularly clearly the reflexivity of their project when he describes
its logical conclusion: the result is that of “tracing autonomy from the realm of the
biological all the way up to the human—including the activity of scientists like
ourselves” (1987, pp.253–254).
More recent contributions to the enactivist literature have acknowledged the role
of reflexivity in enactivist thought and developed different aspects of the insights by
Maturana and Varela just reviewed (see, e.g., Stewart, 2010; Bottineau, 2010; Di
Paolo etal., 2017). Some of these can be seen as pursuing step d in Maturana and
Varela’s formulation cited above, identifying additional phenomena (including
those part of scientific practice) that follow from the enactive starting point. Other
noteworthy substantive examples that focus on particular dimensions of scientific
practice include work taking the enactive explanatory system to elucidate the nature
of model-based research as an embodied practice (Rolla & Novaes, 2022) as well as
work on scientific observation, understood as “socio-materially augmented” cogni-
tion and as “irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving” (Froese, 2022).
4.4.3 Situated Reflexivity
In parallel to work in the enactive tradition, another example of a substantive reflex-
ive approach offered in the recent literature in embodied cognitive science is the
perspective of “situated reflexivity” (Sanches de Oliveira, 2023). This perspective
draws from Dewey’s notion of “situation,” first, to put forward a transactional
understanding of the embodiment of cognition and, based on this, second, to explore
a way to reflexively make sense of the embodied cognitive activities at play in sci-
entific practice.
In embodied cognitive science it’s common to see cognition as a feature of brain
body-environment systems. In this view, to understand cognition as embodied is to
understand it as in principle not reducible to what goes on in the brain nor even in
the body as such: cognition is always an interplay of neural and bodily resources
situated in an environment. But what does it mean for cognition, as an embodied
phenomenon, to be “situated”?
Dewey argued that we aren’t “in” the environment in the same sense that you can
have a coin “in” your pocket. We aren’t simply surrounded by space. Rather, we
perceive, act and think in situations, and what we do, what we are and what we
become is defined through transaction with objects and other people in the environ-
ment. Noting that “situation” and “interaction” are thus intertwined, Dewey claims:
“An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an
G. SanchesdeOliveira
65
individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment” (Dewey, 1938a/1997,
p.43). Importantly, the situation is not just where cognition happens: to think this
way is to assume (erroneously) that cognition is fully on the side of the organism
and that the situation is fully on the side of the environment. Instead, Dewey
explains, the situation arises from a transaction between subjective (or organismic)
and objective (or environmental) conditions: “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, 1938a/1997, p.42). So the situation is relational.
But so is cognition itself, which cannot be understood purely in individualistic terms
because it is inextricable from the (transactional) situation: “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,
1938a/1997, p.53). In sum, then, the situation arises through transaction between
subjective and objective conditions, and, as situated, so does cognition: “a qualita-
tive and qualifying situation is present as the background and the control of every
experience” (Dewey, 1938b/2008, p.76).
On the first level, then, this Deweyan perspective helps clarify what it means to
think of cognition in terms of brain-body-environment systems: it means to think of
cognition as constituted by a “situation” transactionally made up by organismic
activity in, and variously constrained (i.e., enabled and restricted) by, the environ-
ment. This is illustrated in Fig.4.1a. The point of situated reflexivity, then, is to take
this way of thinking to the next level, and, from this embodied view of cognition in
general, to extend the scope of consideration so as to account for the embodied
cognitive activities of scientists, including researchers in embodied cognitive sci-
ence. This is illustrated in Fig.4.1b.
From the perspective of situated reflexivity, if embodied cognition is always fun-
damentally “situated” in the sense of arising from a transaction between subjective
and objective conditions, then it follows that we can’t straightforwardly extrapolate
from theoretical or experimental observations of embodied cognition in the case of
“ordinary folk” to draw definite conclusions about the activities and practices peo-
ple engage in as scientists. But this is not because science is unique in having a
special status compared to non-scientific activities. Rather, it’s because in some
sense, every situation is unique: although there may be general principles at play in
cognitive phenomena everywhere, the situated nature of cognition as an embodied
phenomenon means that there’s no such thing as “situation-neutral cognition.” It
follows that we can’t properly understanding problem solving, for instance, without
taking into account how the situation shapes both what constitutes a problem, what
counts as a solution, and what the process of solving the problem looks like, that is,
how it unfolds in that kind of situation (on this, see also, e.g., Kirsh, 2009).
The perspective of situated reflexivity thus opens up avenues for research focus-
ing precisely on the situations that make up scientific practice in different disciplin-
ary contexts, different research programs, and at the interface of science and
society—after all, situations can differ not only between different scientists and
scientific groups, but also between scientists and non-scientists in the general pub-
lic, policy makers and other stakeholders. This means that reflexive thinking is not
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
66
Fig. 4.1 (a) Illustration of the common understanding of cognition in terms of brain-body envi-
ronment systems. Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” helps elucidate how, as an embodied
phenomenon, cognition is “situated.” (b) Taking seriously the situated embodiment of all of cogni-
tion motivates, reflexively, considering the cognitive situations at play in scientific practice, includ-
ing our own practice as researchers in embodied cognitive science. See text for details. (Images
from Sanches de Oliveira, 2023; used with permission)
G. SanchesdeOliveira
67
the end point (such as when we conclude that the way we think about embodied
cognition for people in general must also apply to scientists like us): rather, in situ-
ated reflexivity it becomes the starting point, the motivation for substantive theoreti-
cal and empirical work applying ideas and methods from embodied cognitive
science to understand science, scientific practice, and scientists.
Finally, something that situated reflexivity has in its favor is that, although spe-
cific and substantive, it is still broad enough to be attractive for researchers coming
from different theoretical backgrounds and of different orientations and goals—
researchers in potentially very different inquiry “situations.” The examples of
reflexive thinking reviewed in Sect. 4.4.2 were all grounded exclusively in the enac-
tive tradition. In contrast, situated reflexivity is in principle a “nonpartisan” embod-
ied perspective. Perhaps the notion of situation at play here could be further fleshed
out following the principles of ecological psychology, for instance, in terms of the
ambient energy array that organisms with different developmental trajectories
encounter through their education of attention. But this Gibsonian ecological fram-
ing is not mandatory: alternative enactive interpretations of the Deweyan notion of
situation have been explored (see, e.g., Gallagher, 2017), and other applications
following potentially different frameworks within embodied cognitive science seem
possible as well. Research in embodied cognitive science inspired by situated
reflexivity can, therefore, be taken in a direction that prioritizes explanation in terms
of affordances, direct perception and ecological information, for instance, or alter-
natively in terms of sensorimotor contingencies, autopoiesis and sense-making.
Either way, the perspective of situated reflexivity provides a specific entry point and
angle from which to apply our conceptual and experimental tools toward investigat-
ing the situation-specific embodied cognitive practices of scientists, including
ourselves.
4.5 From aSituated Reflexive Stance onExplanatory
Diversity toPluralism ofExplanatory Styles
As stated at the beginning, the goal of this paper is to sketch and motivate a new
perspective on explanatory diversity in science inspired by ideas from embodied
cognitive science. The existence of multiple explanations in a given scientific
domain is traditionally seen as philosophically problematic, that is, something to be
addressed and solved somehow. In contrast, this paper pursues an alternative
approach, seeing explanatory diversity in science as a phenomenon to be under-
stood, and in particular a phenomenon to be examined reflexively, through the lens
of embodied cognitive science. The proposal is that taking the step toward situated
reflexive research in embodied cognitive science (as reviewed in the previous sec-
tion) provides a way to reconceptualize or reframe theoretical and methodological
disagreements in science. The goal of this concluding section is to explore precisely
what this reframing is, and how, in turn, it motivates a pluralist take on explanatory
diversity.
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
68
The clarified conception of the situation, in Deweyan terms as the interplay of
objective and subjective conditions, sheds light on important ways in which
researchers working in different projects, fields and disciplines can differ from one
another. As embodied agents, individual scientists harness brain-body-world
resources in particular ways that are specific to the situations they find themselves
“in.” It thus follows that their inquiry practices and the products of those practices
(e.g., particular descriptions, accounts, models, theories, laws) need to be evaluated
against the background of the objective and subjective conditions out of which they
arise. Some of these conditions have to do with whether the phenomena of interest
do in fact exhibit the focal causal patterns that scientists in a given research project
investigate—this is straightforwardly an objective condition. But other conditions
have to do with the factors that make some phenomena (rather than others) be of
special interest, as well as factors that make some causal patterns in those phenom-
ena (rather than other patterns in the same phenomena) become focal. And these are
neither purely objective nor purely subjective factors, but an interaction of both.
That is, although individuals can have an idiosyncratic sense of curiosity that
informs what sparks their interest, even this seemingly subjective aspect is not static
and detached, but it changes over time through experience and interaction with
other people, including through scientific training in particular research traditions.
The suggestion, then, is that when theoretical and methodological differences
arise in a given field or between disciplines, it becomes crucial to consider the extent
to which those differences might be due to a situational incompatibility, that is, due
to the fact that the parties disagreeing are operating in effectively distinct inquiry
situations. Rather than assuming that the different approaches are competitors in a
zero-sum epistemic game where only one can be right (more explanatory, more
accurate and true, and so on) in absolute terms, each might be presenting a reason-
able solution to the problems that arise in their respective inquiry situations. This
view is, of course, in line with well-known social and historical analyses in philoso-
phy of science such as Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) and many after him.5 The point,
however, is to see that these aren’t simply unrelated philosophical insights that run
parallel to the questions we are concerned with in embodied cognitive science.
Instead, our own scientific commitments motivate understanding the difference
between inquiry situations in terms of differences in the interplay of the subjective
and objective conditions that shape how scientists as embodied cognitive agents
determine certain research questions and attempt to answer them. Thinking care-
fully about our scientific commitments, then, should drive us toward thinking about
explanatory diversity in pluralist terms, and, in particular, viewing the diversity of
explanatory styles as potentially stemming from a diversity of embodied cognitive
situations.
5 This includes, for instance, at least some of the different philosophical perspectives that have been
labeled “perspectivism” (see discussion in, e.g., Giere, 2010, Teller, 2018, 2020, Massimi, 2022),
although the fact that perspectivism is often framed in the context of debate about realism and anti-
realism is important to bear in mind: that debate, while related in interesting ways, is still distinct
from and even tangential to the debate surrounding explanation and explanatory diversity that is
our focus here.
G. SanchesdeOliveira
69
In Sect. 4.3 we saw that there are good reasons for adopting a pluralist stance on
explanatory diversity, and in particular, reasons for favoring pluralism of explana-
tory styles rather than other types of “explanatory pluralism.” But the reasons
explored at that point in the paper all stemmed from debate within philosophy of
science. Given this paper’s focus and orientation, what matters now is to see how
pluralism of explanatory styles is well positioned to capture key consequences of
situated reflexivity for embodied cognitive science researchers, and is therefore
especially appealing for those of us working in embodied cognitive science.6
The consequences of adopting pluralism of explanatory styles for those of us
inspired by embodied, situated reflexivity are twofold. The first is that this perspec-
tive helps reorient debates about competing explanatory approaches in the sciences
of the mind. Traditional philosophical approaches, even pluralistic ones, tend to
focus on particular explanations (i.e., the products of practices of explaining, such
as particular propositions, physical or mathematical models, depictions and visual-
izations, simulations and so on) as abstract, disembodied, context-free entities and,
from this starting point, they attempt to determine the compatibility or integratabil-
ity of those entities. In contrast, thinking in terms of explanatory styles from an
embodied, situated perspective motivates focusing on the practices and practitioners
at work in the pursuit and generation of explanations, and to do so through consid-
eration of the situations that occasion the different research projects in the first place.
Different researchers are often in rather different inquiry situations, and the rela-
tive situation-specificity of their explanations makes it so that multiple cross-cutting
explanatory styles may be legitimate and warranted even when it comes to investi-
gations of the same phenomena. In more practical terms, this perspective enables
researchers in embodied cognitive science to make sense of their critics, of the chal-
lenges they level against embodied cognition, and of the competing explanations
they advance instead. Rather than brushing off the differences as due to a focus on
different levels (of phenomena or of analysis) or, perhaps worse, brushing off com-
peting explanations as plain wrong and misguided, the disagreement is reframed as
possibly arising from a difference in inquiry situations for which different explana-
tory styles, even if radically incompatible, might be legitimate.
Along these lines, for example, the continued success of some brain-centric
reductionist approaches suggests that they must have at least some purchase on the
way the world actually works and that they must also be addressing at least some-
what satisfactorily questions that, within that situation, call for answers. The con-
verse is also true, of course: many explanatory approaches that focus solely on
regularities at the level of organism-environment relations but make no reference to
neural states and processes surely provide some empirical traction and some sup-
port for the scientists’ understanding of important aspects of the relevant phenom-
ena. This doesn’t mean that brain-centric reductionism is the right way to go for
6 Naturally, this is not to say that cognitive scientists who don’t subscribe to a transactional embod-
ied and situated view can’t or shouldn’t adopt pluralism of explanatory styles. Maybe they can and
should, maybe not. The claim is simply that this pluralist stance is particularly attractive to those
of us who are already working within embodied cognitive science given our specific commitments
to thinking of cognition in embodied, situated terms.
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
70
everyone nor that explanation at the ecological scale (i.e., focusing on organism-
environment relations) is the right way to go for everyone. But neither does it mean
that an integration of the two is what is needed. This is because ‘what is needed’ is
necessarily anchored to someone in some situation. Given the reflexive embodied
view of cognition in situations, the pluralist conclusion is that not everyone has the
same needs, and not all scientific inquiry situations have the same types of problems
with the same types of solutions.
Consider recent work in Gibsonian, ecological approaches to neuroscience.
Here, researchers develop an understanding of the neural aspects of behavior, yet
they do so without giving up their primary focus on organism-environment rela-
tions, that is, without adopting brain-centric reductionism (see, e.g., Favela, 2014;
Kiverstein & Miller, 2015; de Wit etal., 2016; van Dijk & Myin, 2019; Raja &
Anderson, 2019; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2019). Developments like these illustrate
how researchers might expand the scope of their explanations without shifting
explanatory styles. Although they include investigation of certain types and aspects
of neural activity, it doesn’t seem right to describe these research projects as inte-
grating ecological and reductive neuroscientific insights: the inquiry situation for
each camp (ecological and reductionist neuroscience) remains generally unchanged
despite the local partial convergence, and accordingly so do their explanatory needs
also remain largely unchanged.
A similar move applies to disagreements within embodied cognitive science
itself, such as in the cases described earlier in the paper, in the clash between the
theories of ecological psychology and of enactivism, or between phenomenologically-
inspired approaches that adopt neuroscientific methods, dynamical systems meth-
ods, or neither. Rather than simply comparing the resulting explanations and
evaluating them (as if) in a context-free and situation-neutral manner, researchers
would do well to consider whether, and to what extent, the seemingly competing
theories and methods belong in similar inquiry situations: they may not, and may
not be strictly competing after all. Settling this question would help determine, in
cases of different explanations that target the very same phenomena, if they focus
on different causal patterns in those phenomena: if so, then the different explana-
tions might each be warranted as conducive to greater understanding (i.e., for some-
one, some community, some discipline etc.) even if integration is not viable or
helpful. In fact, adopting a pluralist stance means that settling the question of how
competing explanations and explanatory approaches relate to one another might, in
some cases, have little to do with the prospect of integration. Succeeding in making
sense of the differences doesn’t mean determining which competitor is right and
which one wrong, nor that a combination of both is the preferable outcome. Adopting
a pluralist stance with regard to explanatory styles and cognitive situations could
just mean learning to carry on and co-exist peacefully and respectfully.
This brings us to the second point. In addition to reorienting these and other
debates (which, from a philosophical standpoint, are often framed in an adversarial
manner, as competitors), this proposal has the additional consequence of directing
attention to new or understudied issues in embodied cognitive science. As we have
seen, adopting the perspective of situated reflexivity amounts to applying to
G. SanchesdeOliveira
71
ourselves the same explanatory principles we employ when we understand “ordi-
nary” cognition in terms of harnessing brain-body-world resources to solve prob-
lems in particular situations, i.e., in particular configurations of objective and
subjective conditions. Taking a naturalized perspective on science as a human activ-
ity calls for further elaboration in ways appropriate for an embodied approach in the
sciences of the mind. As a practice that is in continuity with other human practices,
science can be studied theoretically and empirically just as much, and just as well,
as any other aspect of human behavior.
Depending on one’s theoretical inclinations, a possible path for this kind of proj-
ect would be to apply in this domain insights related to wide computationalist and
extended versions of embodied cognitive science such as the ones defended by
Wilson (1994, 2004) and Clark (1997, 2008). A body of work already exists that
aims to shed light on the distributed nature of the many cognitive systems at play in
science (see, e.g., Giere, 2002, 2007; Giere & Moffatt, 2003; Hutchins, 2010, 2014;
Nersessian, 2005, 2019). The path here, then, could be one of further elaboration,
expanding on this body of work, or one of reacting to it and proceeding in novel
directions.
In contrast, for those of us working in anti-representational, ecological and enac-
tive versions of embodied cognitive science, the path is less obvious but the payoff
perhaps proportionally more significant. Scientific practices involve abstract reason-
ing, description and conceptual problem-solving, all of which can be seen as instances
of so-called “representation-hungry” cognition (Clark & Toribio, 1994). Some inter-
esting starting points exist, for example, in research on the embodied aspects of
STEM education and science learning (see, e.g., Hutto etal., 2015; Abrahamson &
Sánchez-García, 2016). Building upon initial findings such as these and following
through with developing reflexive approaches within embodied cognitive science
might therefore even help address the challenge of the “scaling up” of radical embod-
ied approaches to account for so-called “high” or “offline” cognitive processes. Many
proposals have been offered in recent years for addressing the scaling up problem in
general (see, e.g., Haselager etal., 2003; van Dijk & Withagen, 2016; Gallagher,
2017; Di Paolo etal., 2017; Casper, 2019;Bruineberg etal., 2019; Zahnoun, 2021;
Sanches de Oliveira etal., 2021), but there is still very little work exploring exactly
how these insights can translate into a specifically anti- representational reflexive
embodied understanding of science (see Sanches de Oliveira, 2022, 2023).
Taking the situatedness of cognition seriously motivates viewing science—in
line with the pragmatist roots of embodied cognition (Crippen & Schulkin, 2020)—
as in continuity with the rest of life, and in fact as one among many behaviors
humans engage in to address the demands of life. It also motivates understanding
the cognitive aspects of science as “situated” in complex configurations of subjec-
tive and objective conditions: this means—in line with the phenomenological roots
of embodied cognition (Käufer & Chemero, 2021)—understanding scientists as
being “in the world” in a strong relational sense, radically unlike the weak internal-
ist sense in which we might speak of a coin “in” a pocket or a ghost “in” the machine.
As a result, taking the situatedness of cognition seriously motivates reconsidering
scientific disagreements, reevaluating (and even empirically investigating) their
4 Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates…
72
roots, and adopting a pluralist attitude in the face of the diversity of explanatory
styles we find in science. In this light, we begin taking into account the potentially
radically different inquiry situations from which our critics might be raising chal-
lenges to our views, which motivates approaching those challenges with more grace
and empathy. Of course, we would appreciate the same courtesy in return.
Acknowledgements I’m thankful to Louie Favela, Tony Chemero and Angela Potochnik for
inspiring discussions of earlier versions of ideas that appear in this chapter, as well as to partici-
pants in the Methodology of Situated Cognition Research online workshop in 2021 for their help-
ful comments and questions.
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