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 ecological, 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 cognition as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cognitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagreements. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explanations 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.
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Notes
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Given that the views differ primarily on how they evaluate the prospect of integration (in particular whether they see integrated explanations as necessarily superior), some have argued that integrationism 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).
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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.
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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.
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Naturally, this is not to say that cognitive scientists who don’t subscribe to a transactional embodied 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.
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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 participants in the Methodology of Situated Cognition Research online workshop in 2021 for their helpful comments and questions.
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Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates Pluralism. In: Casper, MO., Artese, G.F. (eds) Situated Cognition Research. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39744-8_4
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