The conference's anchor point is the currently emerging understanding of the mind advanced by the 4E (enactive, embodied, embedded, extended mind) paradigm. In this revolution in contemporary cognitive science and philosophy, perception is seen as an active sensorimotor process in which perceptual reality is not “transmitted from the environment to the agent through the senses”, but is rather created through an embodied and sensorimotor coupling of the agent with its environment. From the point of view of mathematical logic, this contrast can be formulated as follows: in classical logic, the semantics of formulae are given by a function that maps symbols to their referents, called the interpretation function. In the novel approach one does not assume the a priori existence of such a mapping; rather, one asks how agents’ embodiment and situatedness gives rise to semantics.

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Another contrast can be observed between the logical theories of cognition and the promising new field of active inference. Active inference, based on the Free Energy Principle proposed by Karl Friston, states that cognitive agents act to minimize the surprise associated with their sensory input. In this inherently probabilistic in-terpretation, every self-sustaining entity is seen as unwittingly performing Bayesian inference about the hidden states of its environment. Emphasizing the deep connection between action and sensing, active inference can also be seen as a mathematical expression of situation concepts from phenomenology and pragmatism, according to which the skillful agent and its environment are co-defined.

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For a detailed description of the scientific and philosophical focus areas of the conference, see the Call for Abstracts section.