Marek McGann

Several related approaches to cognitive science, including the enactive, ecological, or embedded varieties, share a tendency towards an emergentist conception of the cognitive agent and its environment. This sometimes leads them to claims of a relationship of mutuality, or reciprocality between agent and world. An emergentist perspective might lead us to ask the question as to the medium from which (or in which) this mutual relationship is emerging. I would like to examine a couple of different ways in which the concept of the medium has been deployed in cognitive science, within the enactive and ecological approaches in particular, and explore some of the implications an emergentist perspective has for how we think about the medium, and go about framing research questions in light of it.

In association with the Emergence in the Natural Sciences Project. All welcome.