The Epistemological tension within the Embodied cognition Research Programme

I first present the general lines of the research programme on embodied cognition. The view that cognition spans through brain, body and world - from which it follows that cognitive activities are not intracranial events that happen through the manipulation of representations - occupies a central position within the programme. I present its genesis, namely, the autopoietic project by the Chileans Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. That project reveals an antirealist and constructivist background, according to which cognition is the construction of the world by the organism. I then present the theoretical ground that recently took the spotlight, namely, sensory-motor enactivism. That variety of enactivism implies a moderate realism, according to which there are objective structures to be explored according to the organism's bodily morphology. Thus, there is an epistemological tension at the programme's core. I thus offer a possibility of dissolving that tension, namely: rejecting one of the main theses of the autopoietic project - the strong life-mind continuity thesis - and offering a better construal of what it means to say that cognition requires that the organism build its environment.