Definition
Enactivist theories assert that cognition is a process that occurs through feedback loops within the interaction of complex dynamical organisms/systems.
Characteristics
Closely related and often conflated with enactivist theory is embodied cognition. The distinction taken here is made on the basis of the roots of the two theories. Enactivism has biological roots, for example, in the writing of Maturana and Varela (1992) and others, whereas embodied mathematics has linguistic roots (see “Embodied Cognition”).
Enactivist theory is a development of biological and evolutionary science and complexity theory and addresses, among other things, the critique of Cartesian dualistic notions of object/subject. In enactivist theory, it is argued that cognition is a process that occurs through the interaction between the living organism and its environment (autopoiesis).
We propose as a name the term enactiveto emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of...
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References
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Goodchild, S. (2018). Enactivist Theories. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_173-3
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