Abstract

Research programs in cognitive science that are apparently very different from each other have been gathered together on the grounds that they are seen to contribute to a view of cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted and extended – the so-called ‘4E cognition’. This article examines some of these research programs and steers away from a widespread Kuhnian rethoric that extols them as an exercise of extraordinary science, which preludes the establishment of a new post-classical paradigm. By contrast, we argue that a reformist program can be distilled from four decades of controversies on the foundations of cognitive science which aspires to incorporate some important ideas from the literatures on 4E cognition into the computational-representational framework.