Does the Enactive Approach Provide the Framework for a New Definiton of Learning?

What does learning mean for a living, thinking being? What are the mechanisms involved in mastering a new ability or transforming an existing one? For just over a century, the sciences that study intelligent behavior have proposed precise definitions and models of learning, favoring a behaviorist and internalist approach to learning, initially seen as an associative process, then as a process of acquisition, and finally as a process of self-organization. Is the enactive approach, and more generally the 4E approaches to cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), likely to change the definition of learning in the same way that these approaches are changing definitions in relation to cognition more generally? We first take a long look at the different ways in which learning has been understood over the last hundred or so years. We examine to what extent these successive new interpretations were useful, and we discuss their limitations. Then, in a second, shorter section, we attempt to lay the groundwork for an enactive definition of learning, which is conspicuously absent from the work of the pioneers.