This post is by Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It is based on their chapter “Embodied, embedded, enactive, extended… and exclusionary? Toward an inclusive E-Cognition for cognitive diversity,” published in Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition, which explores how 4E approaches can be made more inclusive of neurodiversity.
Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada) Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada)
If, following Alice Crary and the political turn in analytic philosophy, one takes the conceptual
and methodological to be political, then 4E Mental Health concepts express a range of political
commitments. Some of these merit special attention in debates about how cognitive diversity and
disability should be understood and recognized. In our chapter at Analytic Philosophy and 4E
Cognition, this is exactly our goal: to critically examine 4E Mental Health from the lens of the
Neurodiversity movement and its academic branch, the neurodiversity paradigm.
First, an anxiolytic for those anxious that the movement is poles apart from a situated and
embodied approach to mental health:
Mind is an embodied phenomenon… So when I say that neurodiversity is the diversity among minds, I’m really saying that it’s the diversity among bodyminds. (Walker, 2021, pp. 53–54)
This is Nick Walker writing, who coined the term “neurodiversity paradigm”. If that’s not
enough, our chapter contains a long list of contemporary neurodiversity scholars—Amandine
Catala, Robert Chapman, Ginger Hoffman, Damien Milton, to name a few—who use 4E-
Cognition concepts to develop a more inclusive approach to cognition. This affinity stems from a
shared rejection of traditional cognitivism. Instead of viewing divergent cognitive profiles like
ADHD or autism as necessarily pathological conditions stemming from inner deficits in
“universal” or “normal” information processing, both reconceptualize them in radically situated
terms.
Concepts of cognitive health are relational: they track the (mis)match between individuals’
cognitive profiles and hegemonic sociomaterial niches. Furthermore, the very concept of
neurodiversity advances an ecological account of cognitive functioning, very much in line with
extended views: here, “healthy” or “functional” apply not—or not only—to individual cognitive
profiles, but to the broader collective dynamics to which they contribute. Finally, neurodiversity
activists also reclaim the role of folks with lived experience in knowledge production about their
own minds and the need to tailor research and intervention to their specific needs and values.
This aligns fully with enactivists’ radically person-centered views, which assign the utmost
importance to each individual’s history and values in assessing their mental status.
Notwithstanding these affinities, some 4E Mental Health proposals still rely heavily on
exclusionary neuronormative assumptions. The story usually goes as follows: while rejecting the
traditional cognitivist account of the abilities taken as archetypical of a “normal” mind, they leave
the archetype itself unquestioned. The problem with autistic social cognition is not a failure in
Theory of Mind mechanisms, but a lack of normal, direct perceptual access to others’ minds. The
problem with people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder is their pathological extension
of metacognitive abilities to other people’s minds. There is, necessarily, a problem with these
alternative cognitive profiles; one that a 4E science is better equipped to describe.
It is somewhat surprising that 4E concepts, for all their liberatory potential, are so often wielded
to reinforce neuronormative assumptions. But is it? We argue that these exclusionary assumptions
are not casual, but partly reflect a deeper problematic commitment to a residually Cartesian,
descriptivist understanding of the mind. On this view, the sort of mental abilities that make up a
“normal” mind is something that can be described, a series of facts that cognitive science can
eventually discover in a relatively perspective-independent manner. Even (most) enactivists, for all
their emphasis on agents’ individual norms and values, think these ultimately stem from natural
processes that can be scientifically established, even if on a case-by-case basis. Notions of mental
health and normality are thus viewed as primarily fact-tracking, where those best positioned to
adjudicate on an agent’s mental status are the scientifically informed elite.
We argue for mental expressivism instead—the view that the primary function of mental concepts is
to express evaluative commitments—as a way to unlock the liberatory potential of 4E
frameworks. Disagreements about an agent’s mental status do not (primarily) involve clashes
between competing descriptions of facts, but rather conflicts in how those should be evaluated.
To insist that stimming is, or can be, a neurodivergent exercise of self-regulation—rather than a
deficit in this mental capacity—is not to deny relevant facts (for instance, that it often occurs in
response to stressful situations), but to contest how these should be evaluated: namely, as
manifestations of a meaningful and valuable alternative way of relating to oneself and to the
world.
Such disagreements exhibit what Moore identified as a hallmark of the evaluative: an
intrinsic openness to contestation. No accumulation of data, no value-neutral account of neural
mechanisms or sensorimotor dynamics, can yield a definitive scientific theory of what a “normal”
mind is. Recognizing this, we argue, helps uplift the epistemic standing of all neurodivergent
individuals, regardless of how well-positioned they are to contribute directly to scientific debates.
The take-home message for a genuinely inclusive 4E account, then, is this: our choices of mental
vocabulary, including the theoretical frameworks through which we theorize the mind, inevitably
reflect which courses of experience and action we deem correct. They express our evaluative
commitments about what can plausibly be recognized as grounding a personal and political
identity. However “natural” or “universal” certain cognitive capacities seem to us, this only marks
the limits of our current evaluative perspectives and practices of mental interpretation, and the
extent to which they are entrenched in hegemonic socio-material niches. It may now sound
unintelligible—mad, even—to suggest that Miguel’s experience of obsession-compulsion
contains anything that he could reclaim as constitutive of an alternative notion of mental health.
But so did autistic notions of flourishing not long ago. We may not be able to change our
perspectives overnight, sure. Yet they can—and do—change, in part, by exposing ourselves to
divergent ways of evaluating and regulating one another. And if the aim is not merely to describe
what mental health currently looks like, but to transform what it can be, we are better off keeping
this evaluative dimension in view.