1 ENACTIVE VISION (for L. Shapiro, ed. ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EMBODIED COGNITION) Erik Myin University of Antwerp, Department of Philosophy, Centre for Philosophical Psychology & Jan Degenaar University of Antwerp, Department of Philosophy, Centre for Philosophical Psychology, and University Paris V, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception 1. Enactivism and the sensorimotor account Enactivism, ever since its first formulation by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, has always laid great emphasis on organism/environment interactions as the proper framework for studying cognition. Minds have to be understood as “enacted” by situationally embedded living organisms. By proposing this approach to minds, enactivists have explicitly opposed themselves to cognitivists, who take representation as their central posit (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991). Thus, it is claimed that cognition is, rather than representation of the world, “the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991, p. 9, see also Thompson 2007). True to the enactivist motto that “a path is laid down in walking,” the role of internally stored rules and representations in accounting for cognition is thus replaced by an embodied history of interactions. By taking up this position, enactivism reveals itself as committed to a strong notion of embodiment. Such a concept has to be distinguished from other senses of embodiment. One way to use ‘‘embodiment’’ is to emphasize the role of the particular properties of the body in shaping our cognitive capacities. Thus, to give a rather trite example, it could be argued that having ten fingers lies at the basis of the decimal system, so that even mathematics has a basis in the body. Such a use of the notion of embodiment is in no way incompatible with a traditional cognitive science approach, in which computations and internal representations are assigned a key role when it comes to providing an explanation of our cognitive capacities. In particular, one could conceive of the specifics of the body as constraining the form or content of our representations or computations. In the sense of “embodied” at stake here, “embodied” is used in contrast with ‘‘representational,’’ such that saying that some capacity is embodied is to deny that it involves internal representations. One could argue, for example, that people embody the rules of their native language, in the sense that the rules are manifest, and only manifest in their utterances, or other practical dealings with language. The structure of language