In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives toward building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. Wide perspectives are essentially research heuristics for building mechanistic explanations. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We argue that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals toward the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.

This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of strongly embodied cognition can play distinctive and positive roles in constraining imagining, thereby complementing Amy Kind's argument for the epistemic relevance of imagination "under constraints" and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson's argument for justification by imagination.

Pretending is often conceptualized as an imaginative and symbolic capacity, positing mental representations in its explanation. This paper proposes an alternative way to explain pretending with the use of affordances, instead of mental representations, as explanatory tools. It shows that a specific notion of affordance has to be appropriated for affordances to play the relevant explanatory roles in pretense. This analysis opens up a discussion on the nature of affordances, clarifying how on various conceptions the environment and the animal play a role in shaping affordances. It then clarifies which notion is best compatible to explain pretending; the paper suggests that a particular conception of affordances as dispositional properties of the environment (a la Turvey 1992) can make affordances explanatorily useful. The paper then shows how the environmental affordances with animal effectivities, placed in the right context (formed by canonical affordances or other people), could form an explanation of basic kinds of pretend play (section 3). The paper is a proof of concept that some forms of cognitive activity, such as basic pretense, can be explained by embodied and enactive theorists without the need to posit mental representations. It emphasizes the non-trivial role of social and cultural factors in actualizing pretense, providing a crucial aspect of a coherent explanation of basic pretense.