Enactive problem-solving: an alternative to the limits of decision making

This chapter presents an alternative framework to explain human decision making, which revives Newell and Simon’s tradition of problem solving and incorporates it into the new research program of embodied cognition. Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiates it from decision making, which he considers a phase downstream of the former. Moreover, he sees the rationality of an action as rooted in the ability of the actor to adapt. This ability in turn is rooted less in the internal environment of the actor than in the pragmatic external environment. According to Simon, environmental feedbacks are the most effective means of modelling human actions in solving a problem. The selectivity in the solution of a problem is based on the recursive feedback of information from the environment. In fact, problem space is about the possible situations to be searched in order to find one which corresponds to the solution. The correspondence between action and solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. When solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in the sense of wide and strong embodied cognition, that is, to a recursive feedback process leading up to the final action. The new term enactive problem-solving summarizes this fusion between the two moments and could well represent the phenomenon. Finally, enactive problem-solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function appears effective both in practical and motor tasks and in abstract and symbolic ones.