The motifs of radical embodied neuroscience

Abstract In this paper, I analyse how the emerging scientific framework of radical embodied neuroscience is different from contemporary mainstream cognitive neuroscience. To do so, I propose the notion of motif to enrich the philosophical toolkit of cognitive neuroscience. This notion can be used to characterize the guiding ideas of any given scientific framework in psychology and neuroscience. Motifs are highly unconstrained, open‐ended concepts that support equally open‐ended families of explanations. Different scientific frameworks—e.g., psychophysics or cognitive neuroscience—provide these motifs to answer the overarching themes of these disciplines, such as the relationship between stimuli and sensations or the proper methods of the sciences of the mind. Some motifs of mainstream cognitive neuroscience are the motif of encoding, the motif of input–output systems, and the motif of algorithms. The two first ones answer the question about the relationship between stimuli, sensations and experience (e.g., stimuli are input and are encoded