FROM INSTRUMENTAL TO CONSTITUTIVE

TECHNOLOGY AND RADICAL EMBODIMENT

Resumen

4E cognitive science is not a unitary framework. Embodiment, embedment, extendedness, and enactment are said in different and often incompatible ways. In this paper, I explore the field of 4E cognitive science by grouping its different approaches in three main categories: embodied cognitive science, the hypothesis of the extended mind, and radical embodiment. Then I defend that, while embodied cognitive science and the hypothesis of the extended mind still hold an instrumental use of technology alike to classic computational cognitive science, radical embodiment purports an embodied use of technology that entails a fully new characterization of its relation to cognitive systems. In the last part of the paper, I evaluate some consequences of the understanding of such a relation for the coupling-constitution debate and the political status of technology.