Mental Coordinative Structures: Situating Mental States within Radically Embodied Approaches to Cognition

Abstract Since its inception more than 15 years ago, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has successfully challenged several of the axioms and research paradigms shared by semantic-representationalist approaches in the cognitive sciences, while developing a variety of alternatives to their concepts and methodologies. Currently, these alternatives are becoming increasingly well established within empirical research that investigates complex behaviors and skill acquisition, as the constitutive role of the agent’s body and environment for these cognitive feats becomes more apparent (see e.g. Button et al., 2020). However, the adoption of concepts and methodologies from RECS into research paradigms investigating cognitive activity that is more detached from the environment, such as language use and self-reflection, has been slow and even controversial at times (Miłkowski et al., 2018). In this paper, I argue that this gap of adoption results from a conceptual gap within RECS itself: While being an explicitly anti-representationalist framework, RECS has not provided a conceptual alternative to mental representations that is explanatorily powerful enough to match the practical value of such representations to experimental researchers investigating cognitive processes that are mostly decoupled from the environment. If RECS is to achieve recognition among a larger variety of research paradigms, it needs to provide such a conceptual alternative. I argue that a novel conceptualization of mental states as coordinative structures of brain-involving systems is a promising candidate for this alternative.