Agency and contextuality in cognitive psychology - From Active Inference to (cognitive) frame analysis

We argue that cognition is fundamentally reliant on the property of contextuality, understood to mean the active construction of cognitive meaning by an agent. If warranted, this argument would explain the significant methodological difficulties encountered by cognitive psychology within the last decades. We propose the Active Inference framework, which grounds cognitive contextuality in the self-organizing dynamics of biological systems, as a conceptual and computational model of cognition. On this basis, we propose the program of cognitive frame analysis as an alternative to the documentation of “behavioral laws” by cognitive psychology.