Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we examine an enactive approach to social cog-nition, a species of radical embodied cognition typically pro-posed as an alternative to traditional cognitive science. Ac-cording to enactivists, social cognition is best explained byreference to the social unit rather than the individuals that par-ticipate in it. We identify a methodological problem in thisapproach, namely a lack of clarity with respect to the modelof explanation it adopts. We review two complaints abouta mechanistic explanatory framework, popular in traditionalcognitive science, that prevent enactivists from embracing it.We argue that these complaints are unfounded and propose aconceptual model of enactive mechanistic explanation of so-cial cognition.