Foundations of enactive cognitive science

This special issue contains a selection of the papers presented at the international symposium entitled ‘Foundations of Enactive Cognitive Science’, which was held in Windsor, UK, in February 2012. In organizing this symposium, our explicit goal was to create the space for researchers attracted to the concept of enaction to discuss the research agenda(s) for what could be described as an alternative or an extension to the orthodox paradigm(s) in cognitive science. About 70 researchers represented the five continents, and a dozen of academic disciplines. More extensive proceedings of the event can be found at http://reading.ac.uk/ cinn/enactivism, including videos of the talks and the panel discussion, graciously hosted on http://youtube. com/aisbtube. Cognitive science came to be in a very particular technological context. At the end of the 1950s, researchers from disciplines as diverse as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience and computer science, sat together for the first time at the same symposium; an event that would redefine the very nature of the research agenda into cognition. Miller (2003), who attended the symposium, remembers that discussions to that effect sparked from a paper by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon describing their ‘logic theory machine’, a computer implementation of some of Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s inference rules, taken from their opus Principia Mathematica (1927). Miller tells us that he