Cognitive Pragmatism and Enactivism

The increasing references to the pragmatist movement within contemporary cognitive science is a sign that it has finally started to address an issue it long neglected, and that might be appropriately labeled the problem of cognitive pragmatism. The article first attempts to sketch out a general definition of this problem, and then provides a detailed examination of one of the specific issues involved in it. This issue, which is of a critical nature, consists in determining whether the enactivism of A. Noë, taken as particularly representative of the form currently assumed by the enactivist current, can be interpreted as a vindication of cognitive pragmatism, and if so, as a receivable one. After defending a positive answer to the first question, on the basis of the idea that cognitive pragmatism should be fundamentally understood as the hypothesis that action is essential to cognition, it answers the second one negatively. A negative answer essentially motivated by the claim that the pragmatist dimension of Noë’s enactivism is insufficiently grounded, because it rests on a key distinction between constitutive and non-constitutive dependency that Noë leaves wholly unanalyzed and that is far from being unquestionable.