Enactive Cognition As Mental Action

Cognition is an important way for the mental to connect the world.The fundamental problem of philosophical epistemology lies in how to know oneself and the world.Descartes’ epistemology separated the subject and object of cognition and opened the epistemology turn of modern philosophy.Since the second half of the 20th century,there has been a remarkable pragmatic turn in Western epistemology,emphasizing the necessary role of action and the interaction between subject and object in the cognitive process.The rise of cognitive science research echoes this shift,with the classical representationalist paradigm gradually shifting to the action-centered second generation of cognitive science.The status of the subject’s representation of the object in cognitive activities has become the focus of controversy.Both the pragmatist of epistemology and the paradigm of the second generation of cognition science argue that the core of cognitive activity is action rather than representation,and the interaction between the embodied subject and the environment and between different embodied subjects is the core element of cognition.Then,how should the role of “representation” be repositioned in an action-centered cognition paradigm? Based on Proust’s Evaluativism Metacognition theory,an action-centered cognition paradigm would have the potential to explain cognitive agency and normativity in order to respond to this challenge.Evaluativist Metacognition theory views first-order cognitive activity as an action of the mental.Metacognition is a part of first-order cognitive action.Metacognition evaluates and regulates first-order cognitive action,and this regulation relies on the agent’s metacognitive feelings to guide the completion of cognitive action in an anti-representationist way through the agent’s sensitivity to the external features of the cognitive action.Based on the challenges posed by metacognition theory to representationalism,this paper proposes a metacognition-based model of Embodied-Enactive-Situational cognition integration,analyzes each element of the model separately,and points out why the three cognitive elements of Embodied,Enactive,and Situational can be the most important elements of the cognition model.