Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological Dilemmas.

Two important issues of recent discussion in the philosophy of biology and of the cognitive sciences have been the ontological status of living, cognitive agents and whether cognition and action have a normative character . In this paper I will explore the following conditional in relation with both the notion of affordance and the idea of the living as self-creation: if we recognize the need to use normative vocabulary to make sense of life in general, we are better off avoiding taking sides on the ontological discussion between eliminativists, reductionists and emergentists. Looking at life through normative lenses is, at the very least, in tension with any kind of realism that aims at prediction and control.

Affordances and Landscapes: Overcoming the Nature-Culture Dichotomy through Niche Construction Theory.

In this paper we reject the nature-culture dichotomy by means of the idea of affordance or possibility for action, which has important implications for landscape theory. Our hypothesis is that, just as the idea of affordance can serve to overcome the subjective-objective dichotomy, the ideas of landscape and ecological niche, properly defined, would allow us to also transcend the nature-culture dichotomy. First, we introduce an overview of landscape theory, emphasizing processual landscape theory as the most suitable approach for satisfying both cultural and naturalist approaches.