Abstract

I argue that autonomy is substantially relational by appealing to a variety of findings from the cognitive sciences. I gather findings related to a variety of paradigms of the cognitive sciences under the collective banner Relational Cognition and argue that these speak in favor of contingent relational accounts of autonomy by demonstrating the relational nature of cognition and agency. I focus on the ways in which these findings emphasise the embedded nature of cognition. I pay particular attention to the frameworks of 4E cognition because of their general emphasis on how cognition operates in concert with the external environment of the agent. This, I argue, speaks in favor of externalist approaches to autonomy. For example, 4E cognition explores how the human mind exploits its embodied nature to offload part of its internal, mental processing to features of its external environments. By operating in this fashion, an agent’s development and effective exercise of many of her cognitive capacities depend upon her prior embedding into particular environments. This perspective is conceptually very similar to relational accounts of autonomy which emphasise the situatedness of agents, positing that individual autonomy is necessarily contingent on certain social relations. I illuminate this conceptual overlap and bridge it in two ways. First, more broadly through a contingency argument, and second, by connecting relational cognition to the social self thesis which is a central conceptual component of relational accounts of autonomy. Finally, in light of all this, I claim that liberal theorizing on autonomy needs to grant a greater importance to the environments of agents for their ability to develop and practice autonomous agency. I criticise Joseph Raz’s conception of autonomy in this manner and suggest that a relational cognition perspective provides an instructive avenue for further developing a more externalist liberal understanding of autonomy.