Cognitive Ecology: Towards an Integration of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science and Marxism

This preprint discusses the continuities and discontinuities between Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) and Marxism. The guiding hypothesis for this discussion is the assertion that the two programs are philosophically and theoretically compatible as they both attend to the corporeal organisation of living bodies that engage with their environment. Both traditions emphasise the concreteness of lived experience, and both traditions take a starting point in the kinetic impermanence of this experience. RECS, for instance, traces perception to a perceiver moving through the environment (in Gibson’s perceptual psychology) and Marx explicitly evoked Epicurus’s kinetic materialism and the dialectics of change and changeability. Both thus build on a premise of pedesis where the historical development is ‘neither strictly necessary nor strictly random’ (Nail, 2020, p. 13). In RECS, this prompts the researcher to attend to the precarity and overdetermination of behaviour, and in Marxism it emphasises the historicity of the human corporeal organisation, and with that the underdetermination of biology as insufficient as a frame for understanding this corporeal organisation. The discussion is guided by the assumption that the integration of the two traditions can function is an important guide for the development of cognitive ecology, the cognitive science of embodied organism-environment systems.