Reading and understanding: on some differences between Wittgenstein and 4E cognitive science

Pierre Steiner

Pierre Steiner

Abstract

Along some striking and real convergences, are there also relevant differences between Wittgenstein and 4E cognitive science? This paper answers positively to that question, by focusing upon the cognitive or psychological status of reading and understanding in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology and in enactivism. The main difference deals with the posited relations between reading, understanding, and material processes. Despite its anti-representationalist, externalist and anti-intellectualist core, enactivism continues to conceive cognition as supervenient on processes, whereas for Wittgenstein, the relations between psychological phenomena and concomitant processes are mediated by psychological concepts, behavioural criteria and normative practices.

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