Chapter 6: So, What Again Is 4E Cognition?

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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.

Today, we're appealing back the layers on one of the most exciting areas in philosophy of mind right now, the Forie movement.

That's right.

We're talking embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition.

And it's a field that has, you know, really fundamentally shifted how we think about the mind.

It's successfully convinced a whole generation of researchers that thinking isn't just something that happens inside your skull.

Oh, absolutely.

It leverages your body, the environment.

It's been a hugely influential movement, challenging decades of traditional, you might say, computational theory.

But here's the paradox, and this is what the critical note we're looking at from the Oxford handbook of Forie cognition really highlights.

Despite all the success in explaining where cognition happens out in the world, in the body, the movement often stumbles on the most basic question.

So what, again, is cognition?

Exactly.

What is the nature of the thing that's being extended or embodied or enacted?

And that is the ultimate tension we are diving into today.

It's, you could argue, a foundational crisis.

It really is.

If you're going to revolutionize a field, you have to offer a definition of your core phenomenon that's at least as rigorous, as clear, and as testable as the one you're trying to replace.

And the author of this critique argues that the Forie literature, especially in this section of the handbook,

frequently fails that very test.

Precisely.

The expectation is that you provide what philosophers call the mark of the cognitive, a clear line that separates cognitive systems from non -cognitive ones.

And this chapter argues the answers from Forie theorists are often too vague, sometimes incomplete, and in a few cases,

actually internally inconsistent.

Which threatens to make the whole framework, and this is a quote, pre -scientific.

That's a powerful charge.

It is.

So our mission today is to systematically review this assessment.

We're going to start by setting the benchmark, looking at the traditional cognitivist view.

Just to see what a clear definition looks like.

Exactly.

Then, we'll methodically examine the proposals from key Forie theorists.

We're talking Dieppal's inactivism, Kieberstein's look at radical embodied cognitive science.

The skilled intentionality framework from Rietveld and his colleagues, and of course the really radical view from Hutto and Mayen.

We're looking for where they tried to define cognition, and where, according to this critique, they just fell short.

Okay, let's get into it.

To really appreciate the severity of this definitional problem for Forie, we have to start where the revolution began.

With a traditional mainstream view, cognitivism.

Right.

And this isn't just a history lesson.

This provides the rigorous, if maybe ultimately challenged, structure that these Forie theories are really measured against.

And the most important piece of philosophical groundwork for cognitivism is this really clear distinction between cognition and behavior.

Okay, so behavior is the observable stuff, right?

The physical output.

Exactly.

It's what you can see and measure.

And it's a result of many, many causal factors all working together.

And they split those factors into two big categories.

So you have the endogenous factors, that's the internal stuff.

Things inside the organism.

Fatigue, memory, motivation, attention.

And then you have the exogenous factors, which are external.

The environment, the tools you're using, the rules of the game, the lighting in the room.

A cognitivist doesn't deny the importance of the environment.

They just demand that we separate the behavior from the cognitive process that contributes to it.

Let's ground this with that classic example the critique uses, because it illustrates this perfectly.

The Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

Ah, yes.

You know the one.

Three dowels, a pyramid of disks, and you have to move them from one peg to another.

Following very strict rules, one disk at a time, can't put a larger disk on a smaller one.

Right.

So solving that puzzle, the sequence of moves you make, how long it takes, the mistakes, that is the behavior.

That's the observable output, and then we can start dissecting the causal factors that influenced it.

So for example, if the disks are super heavy, or if the lighting is really bad, it might take longer.

Those are clear exogenous factors, environmental things affecting your performance.

And internally, if I'm tired or I'm distracted.

Those are endogenous factors.

But for the cognitivist, there is one specific crucial endogenous factor that they label cognition.

And that's the internal plan, right?

The strategy for moving the disks.

Exactly.

It's the internal computational and inferential mechanism that generates the plan.

So the key takeaway here is that the environment and the body are causally effective.

They absolutely impact performance.

But for cognitivists, they're just behavioral factors, not cognitive ones.

Cognition is reserved for that specific internal process that guides the behavior.

Not the behavior itself.

And that is the critical benchmark that 4E has to overcome.

It's not enough for a 4E theorist to just say behavior is important.

Of course not.

Cognitivists already agree with that.

The 4E theorist has to argue that cognition is behavior.

Or that that special internal factor is just unnecessary.

Okay, so if cognition is that special internal factor, we have to ask what precisely cognitivists think it is.

This is where it gets a little abstract, but it's essential.

This is the bare bones empirical hypothesis of mainstream cognitivism.

And it is.

Cognitive processes are inferential, computational processes over representations.

Okay, that's a dense phrase.

Let's tackle that head on.

First,

computation.

We're talking about manipulating symbols according to rules.

Think of it like an algorithm, a machine following a logical sequence of steps to transform an input into an output.

And representation, that's the internal symbol itself, right?

The thing that carries information about the world that the system is manipulating.

Correct.

But the most important and maybe the most contentious philosophical battlefield here is the idea of non -derived content.

Why is that so crucial?

Okay, break that down for us.

Well, derived content is simple.

It's meaning that depends on us agreeing on it.

The word tree on a page only means tree.

Because we, as a society, agree that's what it means.

The content is derived from a convention.

Like a $10 bill.

Its value is totally based on our social agreement that it has value.

Perfect analogy.

Non -derived content, on the other hand, is what cognitive scientists were desperately searching for.

It's meaning that is somehow built into the system's wiring, intrinsic to the structure itself, regardless of culture or convention.

So this is what they call naturalized semantics.

Exactly, trying to find a natural non -semantic basis for internal meaning.

Because if cognition is an internal process, its representations have to have this intrinsic meaning to explain how a mind connects to the world without an external interpreter.

So if you can't find non -derived content, the whole computational model kind of falls apart.

The internal symbols being manipulated don't actually mean anything on their own.

Precisely.

And finally, the inferential part.

This is why the processes have to be computational.

They're used to bridge gaps in information.

The most famous example, as the source mentions, is language acquisition.

Right, a child doesn't hear every single possible grammatically correct sentence, they only get what, primary linguistic data?

A very limited set of examples, some correct, some incorrect.

And yet,

they rapidly master the infinite possibilities of their native language.

So they have to go beyond the raw input.

They have to infer the full underlying grammar, the rules of the structure.

That capacity requires an inferential process.

The child has to hypothesize, test, and internally compute the grammar from limited data.

And that, for a cognitivist, is what intelligence is.

It's an inferential leap driven by internal computation over representations that have this non -derived content.

That's the whole package.

I can see why the Fourier movement erupted.

I mean, that is a highly demanding, very abstract, very internalist model.

It's incredibly complex, and the critiques of it are often very valid.

But, and this is the crucial point for our deep dive, for all its difficulty, the cognitivist view is at least well understood.

It provides a crystal clear, testable hypothesis about what cognition is.

Okay, but before we move on, we have to reinforce that distinction between the nature of cognition and its location, because that confusion causes a lot of problems.

A lot of problems, right.

The claim that cognition is computation over representations

does not automatically mean it has to be trapped in the brain.

And the critical note reminds us of things like extended functionalism or wide computationalism, people like Andy Clark.

Exactly.

They are saying, we accept the cognitivist definition, computation and representation, but we propose that the physical processes doing that computation can extend beyond the brain.

Into the body, into the environment.

Right, if you define a cognitive process by its function, its computational role, then that function could, in theory, be realized by a hybrid system of brain tissue, and say, a smartphone.

You can be an extended cognitivist.

So this is a crucial pivot point.

The four E authors we're focusing on today, the Paolo, Hutto, Mayen, they're not just extending the old definition.

No, they're rejecting it entirely.

They are trying to define cognition, C, as something fundamentally new.

Okay, so if the cognitivist benchmark requires a definition that's clear and consistent, let's see how the inactivist approach stacks up.

We'll start with DiPaolo.

What's interesting about DiPaolo is that he seems to be one of the few four E theorists who really takes this need for a definition seriously.

He does.

He recognizes that for a theory to be anything more than pre -scientific, it needs a clear mark of the cognitive, a conceptual category that can operationally distinguish cognitive systems from everything else.

He's setting a high bar for himself.

He's saying, if you can't define your remit, you haven't even started doing science yet.

So what's his proposal?

Well, his initial attempt proposes that cognitive systems must require ongoing, open -ended, precarious processes as a logically necessary element.

Whoa, okay, logically necessary.

That's a very strong claim.

That means it has to be true in all possible worlds.

The opposite would be a contradiction.

A very strong claim.

And this is where the critique starts to unravel his position.

Yeah.

Because where does he derive this logical necessity from?

Let me guess, not from logic.

He immediately undermined it by justifying it with an empirical observation.

He says something like, it is the nature of all known forms of cognitive systems to grow, develop, adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

Wait a minute.

If your argument is, all known examples of X have property Y, that's an empirical generalization.

That's not a logical necessity.

You can't just jump from what you observe in the world to what must be true for all time.

And that's the critical note's central objection.

The author uses this fantastic, slightly funny analogy.

I think I remember this one.

All known cognitive systems are also massive.

They have mass.

We've never seen a cognitive system without mass.

So should we conclude that being massive is a logically necessary element of cognition?

Of course not.

That would rule out any hypothetical future AI or a purely energetic consciousness.

The critique is showing that DiPaolo has just exaggerated his language.

He should have said these properties are, what, empirically characteristic or something?

Or highly characteristic, yeah.

Not logically necessary.

Yeah.

If the argument is purely empirical, the whole foundation of his mark becomes much less robust.

It looks like an overreach.

Okay, so maybe realizing that precarious, open -ended processes was a bit too much.

The critique notes that DiPaolo later offers a second, more general formulation.

He does.

He simplifies the definition.

The second proposal is, to be a cognitive entity is to be a generally non -stationary organization in a generally non -stationary relation with the world.

Okay, that's a bit of a mouthful.

But it moves away from the internal process language towards something more like a dynamic systems description of life.

Right, but this immediately brings up what the critique calls the non -cognitive organism challenge.

If you define cognition that broadly, how do you stop it from including all living things, even really simple ones?

And DiPaolo's aware of this.

He explicitly rejects the simple equation of life cognition.

He says, you know, digestion is a necessary life process.

But is it cognitive?

Probably not.

So he needs a boundary.

He has to believe that non -cognitive organisms exist.

He must.

If you can't draw a line that excludes some non -cognitive life forms,

then his definition is too broad to be useful for cognitive science.

And this is where the critique really hammers at home.

It does.

Can we find non -cognitive organisms that still possess a non -stationary organization in a non -stationary relation with the world?

I mean, what about a single -celled organism or even a plant tracking the sun?

They are certainly non -stationary organizations adapting to a non -stationary world.

And if those are deemed non -cognitive, which DiPaolo seems to think is possible,

then his definition fails.

It fails to provide the operational categories needed to distinguish the cognitive from the non -cognitive.

It becomes a necessary condition that's met by both cognitive and non -cognitive systems.

Which makes it useless for defining cognition itself.

It's the ultimate critique of his rigor.

He sets this high standard for defining operational boundaries, but his own definitions just fall short of that standard.

So if DiPaolo's attempt to define cognition through essential life processes fails, maybe the answer lies in defining it through interaction with the environment.

Which brings us to Kiverstein's discussion, which explores the limits of radical embodied cognitive science or RECS and its reliance on dynamic coupling.

And Kiverstein is trying to clarify the RECS approach here.

Because unlike the wide computationalists who just extend the location of the old definition, RECS proponents like Kemero, Hutto, and Mayan.

They reject the old computational definition entirely.

So how does RECS explain extension if it's not about computation or representation extending into the world?

They turn to dynamic systems theory.

Kiverstein describes their position this way.

Extended cognition happens when the variables describing one system are the parameters determining change in the other system and vice versa.

Okay, so that's continuous reciprocal influence, dynamic coupling.

Exactly.

The agent and the environment are so intertwined, so dynamically integrated that the physical state of the environment feeds back instantly and continuously to change the agent's internal state, which then changes the environment and so on.

And the outcome is what Kiverstein calls a single extended brain body world system.

Right.

For these theorists, the system is fundamentally unified.

It unfolds together.

The problem though, is that this focus on dynamic unity completely sidesteps the mark of the cognitive problem we've been tracking.

Why?

Because dynamic coupling is everywhere.

It's everywhere in the physical world.

We have to subject the RECS definition to the same boundary test we applied to DiPaolo.

And the critique uses two classic examples.

First, the Latke -Volterra model.

The classic ecological model of predator -prey dynamics.

Yes.

Imagine a population of foxes and a population of rabbits.

The number of rabbits determines the food supply, which is a parameter influencing the growth rate of the fox population.

And as the foxes grow, they eat more rabbits, which changes the parameter for the fox population, causing it to crash.

It's a perfect example of two systems whose variables continuously and reciprocally influence each other's parameters.

They form a single tightly coupled dynamic system.

So if the RECS definition of extended cognition is just a single system formed by tight reciprocal influence.

And the predator -prey ecosystem has to be an instance of extended cognition.

Which is absurd.

We're not suggesting that foxes and rabbits are collectively solving a cognitive problem as one big unified system.

Or think about coupled pendulums.

You can link two pendulums.

Their swings will influence each other until they synchronize.

Are they performing extended cognition?

Obviously not.

So Kiverstein's critique highlights that RECS needs a further condition.

Something beyond mere dynamic coupling to distinguish the cognitive from the non -cognitive.

And that condition, once again, is the missing definition.

And this leads us straight into a huge philosophical vulnerability, which the critique calls the coupling constitution fallacy.

This is a big one.

This is where the whole extension argument can collapse unless you have that internal definition already in place.

Explain the fallacy for us.

It's the logical error of arguing that just because two things are causally coupled, they cause changes in each other.

They therefore constitute a single system of a given kind.

Specifically, a cognitive one.

So my alarm clock causes me to wake up.

We're causally coupled.

But the alarm clock isn't part of my consciousness.

Exactly, it's just a coupled cause.

So let's apply this to the classic case.

Otto and his notebook.

Otto has Alzheimer's.

He uses a notebook to store memories.

And the proponents of extended cognition argue that the continuous reciprocal causal relation between Otto's brain and his notebook means the notebook constitutes part of his extended cognition.

The critique points out this only works if you presuppose something crucial.

For cognition to extend, there has to be something about the agent alone, Otto's brain, that makes it the source of cognition in the first place.

You can't extend non -cognitive material and suddenly call the whole system cognitive.

So the RECS argument is recursive.

They're trying to avoid the internalist question, what's the mark of the cognitive inside Otto's head, by saying, look, they're coupled.

But for that coupling to result in a cognitive system, Otto's head has to already contain the secret sauce, the definition of cognition.

It forces them right back to the original problem.

If they can't define what makes the brain cognitive and different from a stone or a pendulum, the whole extension argument falls prey to this fallacy.

They haven't provided a theory of cognition.

They've just provided a theory of really effective causal interaction.

But even if we accept the dynamical system's view that Otto plus notebook is a unified whole, why can't the brain still be a component doing cognitive stuff?

That's the final really insightful argument the critique makes against this radical anti -component position.

Look back at the Latke -Volterra model.

The foxes and rabbits.

Even as a single unified dynamic system, the components, the individual foxes and rabbits, still undergo their own internal processes.

Individual foxes starve.

Individual rabbits reproduce.

The system's overall behavior doesn't just eliminate the processes of its parts.

Exactly.

So within the unified extended system of Otto and his notebook,

why couldn't Otto's brain still be realizing internal processes defined by the cognitivists like computation or inference, while the notebook is realizing memory storage?

The RECS literature just skips over that question.

It often does.

It emphasizes the unified unfolding of the whole thing without addressing how internal cognitive processes might still exist and still need a definition within the components of that larger system.

It's another foundational gap.

Okay, so it seems like every attempt we've seen so far to define cognition runs into this boundary problem.

Let's pivot to the Skilled Intentionality Framework or SAIF.

From Rietveld, Denise and Van Westen.

Does their focus on skilled action give them an easier way out?

That's the question.

Well, SAIF takes a very different approach.

Instead of focusing on definitions, it really focuses on description.

Its whole purpose is to understand the entire spectrum of skilled human action.

Everything from creativity and language to just, you know, riding a bike.

So they're moving the goalpost from what is thinking to how do we skillfully interact with the world?

That's a good way to put it.

And the mechanism they propose for the skilled action is drawn heavily from ecological psychology.

So affordances.

Right.

SAIF defines skilled action as the continuous non -representational process of tending toward an optimal grip on one of many possible affordances.

And affordance is just a possibility for interaction the environment offers.

A chair for it is sitting, a knob for it's turning.

So skilled action is just finding the best way to use those opportunities.

Continuously.

It sounds like a powerful way to describe high level performance.

But what did the SAIF authors actually say about cognition itself?

And this is the fourth key failure that the critique identifies.

The SAIF authors say almost nothing about what cognition is.

They just state that their framework doesn't distinguish between higher and lower cognition.

Implying the whole process of skilled action is cognitive.

Right.

You just focus on the functional description of the skill.

So let's put SAIF next to the Cognitivist benchmark, back to the Tower of Hanoi.

Cognitivists want to dissect the skill into its component parts.

Motor control, attention, and that internal inferential plan they call cognition.

Their goal is reductionist.

Isolate the specific factor C that contributes to solving the puzzle.

Absolutely.

The SAIF framework on the other hand shows almost zero interest in that dissection.

SAIF is concerned with the holistic unfolding of the skilled action itself, the behavior, and it treats the ability to find the optimal grip on the disc affordance as the core phenomenon.

So SAIF avoids the whole definitional struggle by just saying, we're interested in the whole performance and we don't care how it breaks down internally.

Effectively, yes.

Yeah.

They sidestep the problem of defining the internal mechanism by focusing only on the resulting skilled behavior.

But it means they haven't provided a competing theory of mind, just a competing theory of action.

This sounds dangerously close to just redefining behaviorism.

In fact, a lot of critiques against radical embodied cognitive science accused it of being just that.

Warmed over behaviorism, yeah.

And that's a crucial distinction to make.

Earlier, our ECS models, particularly from Kemero, defined cognition as this broad, ongoing, active maintenance of a robust animal environment system.

Which is so broad that critics argued our ECS was just proposing to study what we already call behavior, any old organism environment interaction.

If a bacterium is swimming towards nutrients to maintain its system, does that count as cognition under Kemero's view?

The implication is yes.

So how does SAIF get away from that?

Well, Rietveld and his colleagues seem to pull back from that radical generality.

SAIF isn't concerned with just any organism environment dynamic.

They focus on the high -level, human -specific, special case of skilled human action.

Riding a bicycle, playing chess, giving a speech.

Exactly, not just any old adaptive dynamic.

So SAIF is focused on a special, narrow subset of behavior, which makes it less vulnerable to that critique.

But by narrowing their focus to action, they still neglect the question of what specific internal factor, the cognitive mechanism,

makes those actions possible in the first place.

They avoid the philosophical heavy lifting by just pointing to the beauty of the completed action.

Okay, we've seen De Paolo try and fail to define the mark.

We've seen the failures of defining it through coupling.

And SAIF just sidesteps the question.

So now we turn to the most radical position.

Championed by Hutto and Meehan, the explicit equation of cognition and behavior.

These are the standard bearers of radical and active cognition, or REC.

And they flat out assert this in their chapter.

Cognition is something that organisms do.

They argue it's an embodied activity out in the open, not a behind -the -scenes driver of what would otherwise be mere movement.

So they are throwing out the entire premise we started with, the need to distinguish C, the internal driver, from B, the observable movement.

For them, cognition is the movement.

And this position immediately leads them into what the critique calls a potential misrepresentation of the view they're trying to replace.

How so?

Hutto and Meehan claim that cognitivists assume cognitive processes are the only mechanisms responsible for intelligent activity.

But we already established with the Tower of Hanoi that that's just not true.

Cognitivists absolutely accept that motor, perceptual, and environmental factors are responsible.

Completely.

When a cognitivist studies that puzzle, they acknowledge that the configuration of the discs, environmental factor, is causally efficacious in determining the next move.

The environment is an undeniable cause of intelligent activity.

So the argument isn't about whether the environment is causally important.

It's about whether environmental factors are cognitive in nature.

That is the precise distinction.

REC advocates appeal to this equal partner principle, suggesting that neural, bodily, and environmental factors are all on the same footing.

And a cognitivist can agree they're on the same footing causally.

Yes, they are causally efficacious.

They influence the outcome just as much.

But, and this is the key, they are not cognitively efficacious.

A cognitivist would not accept that the puzzle discs are performing inference or manipulating representations.

Correct.

Only the internal factor, C, does that.

So the only way to reach the REC conclusion that the environment is an equal cognitive partner is to presuppose Hutto and Mayan's starting point.

That cognition is behavior.

That's circular.

It sounds like it.

We should treat the environment as cognitive because cognition is behavior and the environment is part of the behavior.

And creates this massive philosophical gap.

The central unanswered challenge of this whole critique is why should we accept that fundamental equation?

Why should we believe cognition is behavior?

Well, let me play devil's advocate for a second.

In science, sometimes you have to start with a bold axiom to launch a new research program.

Maybe they feel the empirical success of REC will eventually justify that initial leap.

That's a fair point about how science can develop.

However, the critical note reports that the foundational texts for inactivists and racers, like Maturana and Varela or Camero's early work, they propose this equation,

but they provide no explicit arguments for it.

They just assert it.

They just assert it.

So it's not just that they didn't justify it in this handbook chapter.

It's that the foundational justification seems to be missing from their major definitive works.

When challenged on this, the critique says they defer to other sources.

They do.

Which reinforces the idea that the argument for equating an internal factor with the behavior it influences is consistently absent from their own theoretical architecture.

So they treat the question, what is cognition, not as a challenge to be answered, but as a distraction to be ignored by just redefining the terms.

Exactly.

They wanna call the entire observed process cognition and just move on to describing the dynamics, but the consequence of that is severe.

Which is?

If you can't justify the equation of cognition and behavior, then the entire REC project collapses back into a very sophisticated form of behaviorism.

Studying the unfolding of action without ever explaining the internal generative mechanisms that make complex human behavior possible.

They're avoiding the difficulty of the mind by focusing only on the body's output.

That's the argument.

Wow.

Okay, this has been a fascinating journey into what really feels like a definitional crisis for forecognition.

We started with the cognitivist view, rigorous, detailed, clear, even if it's challenged.

And then we saw four different approaches within 4E that either attempt or fail to provide an adequate replacement.

So let's emphasize the ultimate conclusion of this critique.

The central unifying issue is the collective reluctance or maybe inability of these 4E accounts to answer the question, what is cognition?

With enough detail, consistency, or non -circular argumentation to meet the scientific standard they claim to uphold.

Let's do a quick recap of the failures, one by one, DiPaolo.

He correctly identified the need for a mark of the cognitive, but then failed to provide one that was either logically sound or empirically discriminating.

His move from empirical observation to logical necessity was flawed.

And his final definition was just too broad.

And Kiverstein's look at radical embodied cognitive science showed that dynamic coupling isn't enough.

Right, it's ubiquitous in nature pendulums, predator -prey systems.

If that's your only criterion, everything becomes cognitive.

This leaves RECS wide open to the coupling constitution fallacy and forces them back to the original internalist problem.

What makes the agent's brain the cognitive source in the first place?

You can't extend cognition until you first define it internally.

And the skilled intentionality framework, SSAI, simply described the beauty of the whole rather than the mechanism of the parts.

Rietveld and his colleagues just avoided the question entirely.

They focused on describing sophisticated human action, the behavior, without showing any interest in isolating the specific endogenous cognitive factors that drive it.

Finally, Hutto and Mayen, who went the furthest.

They just equated cognition and behavior.

But their radical claim that the environment is an equal cognitive partner

only follows if you presuppose the very equation that they failed to provide a substantive argument for.

Leaving their whole position resting on a conceptual shift without the necessary philosophical scaffolding.

That's the core of the critique.

So what does this all mean for you, the listener, who might be exploring the exciting potential of 4E?

What's the mandate this critique places on the field?

I think the significance is massive.

4E has been stunningly successful in proving that cognition is spatially and temporally extended.

It has revolutionized the debate over where the mind is.

But this critique argues that to move beyond just being a descriptive framework to become a rigorous replacement theory, the 4E movement has to focus on providing a clear, non -representational, non -commutational answer to what cognition fundamentally is.

Which leaves us with a provocative final thought.

One that really encapsulates the challenge for the next generation of 4E theorists.

Lay it on us.

We've seen really convincing arguments against the old representational inference -based view of cognition.

But if we tear down that entire structure, the internal symbols, the rule manipulation, what specific testable hypothesis is left?

What's left that successfully differentiates a complex embodied organism solving the Tower of Hanoi from a coupled physical system like a Lotka -Volterra model?

Exactly.

The definition of that core, unique cognitive property.

That mark is the critical next step 4E has to take to secure its place as a true scientific theory of mind.

If they don't, they risk being seen not as having solved the problem of cognition.

But simply as having renamed sophisticated behavior.

Actually fascinating.

Thank you for guiding us through the high stakes foundations of 4E philosophy.

My pleasure.

It's a debate that really determines the future direction of cognitive science itself.

And thank you, the listener, for taking this deep dive with us into the source material that matters.

We'll catch you next time.