IN HiS ARTiCLE,“DELUSiON, Reality, and Inter-subjectivity,” Thomas Fuchs gives an “enactivist” account of how primary delusions in early schizophrenia evolve. First, subjects experience the “loss of familiar, commonsensical meanings”—known as delusional mood. Consecutively they experience new “revelatory significances,” in perception as well as in social interaction, with all experiences becoming radically “subjectivized.” Out of these “uncanny, spurious and made” experiences delusions develop. Suddenly the formerly uncanny experiences make sense. This new subjective reality, however, is “rigid.” Subjects are no longer able to take on different perspectives. The usually present, shared reality we live by is lost. Delusions cannot be challenged anymore by arguments, and communication must proceed by suspending traditional common sense, as Fuchs correctly notes and as every experienced psychiatrist will teach the novice. The picture Fuchs eloquently paints is hardly novel. Rather, it is now the received view in biological psychiatry of how persecutory delusions evolve (Kapur, 2003). So what is new in Fuchs’s account? If anything, it is the enactivist approach. Enactivism is a part of what today is called situated cognition: cognitive abilities of a system are embodied, situationally embedded, extended, and enacted (the four Es)(Walter, 2010, 2013). As Fuchs notes according to the four Es, cognition is not a passive process. Rather, it is an active adaptive achievement of systems that have to survive in an ever-changing environment to which they are coupled from the sensorimotor up to the communicative level. Mental states are not isolated representations in the head, but are constituted relationally. However, in contrast to what Fuchs seems to be thinking, situated cognition is not typically human, but characteristic for all biological organisms. Moreover, it is also thought to be one of the most promising theories of cognition for autonomous (nonliving) systems, for example, in robotics.

Fuchs does a good job in describing psychopathology from an enactivist point of view. Unfortunately though, he does not go any further. He uses explanatory language, where mostly redescription with some new fancy terminology is found. Moreover, he seems to imply that neurocognitive explanations of delusions necessarily must fail because of enactivism. However, this is not true. To the contrary. In the last decade highly innovative