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Sensorimotor Life
Abstract
This book elaborates a series of contributions to a non–representational theory of action and perception. It is based on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. These enactive ideas are applied and extended to provide a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of sensorimotor meaning and agency. This account supplies non–representational extensions to the sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience based on the notion of the living body as a self–organizing dynamic system in coupling with the environment. The enactive perspective entails the use of world–involving explanations, in which processes external to an agent co–constitute mental phenomena in ways that cannot be reduced to the supply of information for internal processing. These contributions to sensorimotor theories are a dynamical–systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies, a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery, and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, with its implications for sensorimotor subjectivity. New tools are provided for examining the organization, development, and operation of networks of sensorimotor schemes that compose regional activities and genres of action with their own situated norms. This permits the exploration of new explanations for the phenomenology of agency experience that are favorably contrasted with traditional computational approaches and lead to new empirical predictions. From these proposals, capabilities once beyond the reach of enactive explanations, such as the possibility of virtual actions and the adoption of socially mediated abstract perceptual attitudes, can be addressed.
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“For example, in rejecting ecological psychology, enactivists have mainly focused themselves on proponents of the physical approach (cf.Paolo et al., 2017;Varela et al., 1991).”
From Productive pluralism: The coming of age of ecological psychology. (2024) · cites this paper as Paolo et al., 2017
In the citing paper
“As such, perception reflects what matters to the organism from the standpoint of its continued viability (Jonas, 1966; Di Paolo et al., 2017). What is perceived is not simply what is present, but what is relevant to the agent's self-maintenance.”
From Toward Enactive Artificial Intelligence (2026) · cites this paper as Di Paolo et al., 2017
In the citing paper
“This hypothesis resonates with the enactive tradition (e.g., Di Paolo et al., 2017; Di Paolo and Thompson, 2024) but departs from its biocentric assumptions, extending the possibility of cognitive emergence beyond living organisms (Section 3).”
From Wetware network-based AI: a chemical approach to embodied cognition for robotics and artificial intelligence (2026) · cites this paper as Di Paolo et al., 2017
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Metadata
- Authors
- Di Paolo, E., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X.
- ORCID
- Barandiaran, Xabier
- Venue
- Oxford Scholarship Online
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 2017-06-22
- OpenAlex
- W3001991410
- Cited by
- 420
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 55 · 2025: 69 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 54 · 2019: 51 · 2018: 33 · 2017: 3
- FWCI
- 25.22
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Oxford University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
- Keywords
- enactivism, sensorimotor theory, perception, agency, sensorimotor contingencies, dynamical systems, phenomenology of agency
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