2025/10/05 by Luis H. Favela · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11245-025-10277-2
openalex publication_date 2025/10/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract Radical embodiment faces two interrelated challenges. The first concerns what it offers metaphysically and epistemically as a comprehensive investigative framework that approaches it criticizes do not. The second, related challenge, concerns a tension between understanding targets of investigation as simultaneously both holistic and multiscaled. The NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT) is presented as illustrative of a radical embodied approach that faces these challenges. While NExT clearly offers an epistemic toolkit for studying its three primary scales of investigation—namely, neural populations, body synergies, and ecological information—it does not offer an argument to metaphysically justify those particular scales. An answer to these challenges is offered by appealing to a complexity science conception of emergence, which is deeply interconnected with the methodology of effective theories to both identify and assess real clumps of phenomena in the world. By deeply intertwining its metaphysics and epistemology, this conception of emergence offers an answer to the challenges faced by NExT and other radical embodied approaches.