Philosophy of Situated Cognition

• Applicant: Dr. Mark-Oliver Casper
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542329417

The 4E research debate is a branch of cognitive science and philosophy of mind that assumes cognitive phenomena to be either extended, enacted, embodied, or embedded. Philosophers strongly influence this debate while they surprisingly neglect a specific cluster of questions. These are questions that relate studies of scientific practice with cognition research, such as “How can we identify cognitive phenomena?”, “How should cognitive phenomena be studied and explained?”. This neglect is the case, especially for one of the 4Es, the approach of enactivism Answers to these questions are urgently needed in order to understand whether the required impact of the 4Es on established cognitive science and its practice can be achieved at all. The research project developed in this proposal addresses the methodological and methodical weaknesses of enactivist cognition research. The main goals are (i) to create a methodological framework for enactivism, called "explanatory pluralism", that clearly specifies the conditions under which different methods and explanations of cognitive science can be used by enactivism. A further task is (ii) the identification of new methods, and thus an expansion of the existing methodological repertoire, in order to empirically investigate cognitive phenomena from an enactivist perspective. For the latter, ethological research practice will be a key issue.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants