Interactivism: introduction to the special issue

At the center of interactivism is a commitment to a fundamental metaphysics of process, such as that of contemporary physics’ quantum fields. Process ontologies have on occasion been proposed at least since Heraclitus, but Western thought has been dominated by substance and atom metaphysics—characterized by a basic assumption that there must be some unchanging substratum that underlies all change—since the Parmenidean challenge to change, and Empedocles’ and Democritus’ responses in terms of unchanging earth, air, fire, and water or unchanging atoms (Graham 2006). Over the last several decades there have been multiple strands of growing appreciation of the power and importance of process approaches.1 These have developed in philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology, and have involved disparate process frameworks such as abstract machine theory, dynamic systems theory, autonomous agent approaches (including robotics), and threads from classical Pragmatism. In cognitive science, computationalism and connectionism were major developments toward process frameworks, but they are not pure process approaches because they are based on non-process assumptions about representation.2 In any case, they are not process frameworks within which a model of representation might be developed, because they include assumptions concerning the nature of representation directly within the frameworks themselves. Issues concerning representation have, in fact, been at the core of the evolution of philosophical and cognitive science concerns with mental phenomena over these