Mia Burnett and Shaun Gallagher argue that aesthetic experience cannot be adequately explained by a narrow extended-mind model focused on tools, instruments, or external cognitive scaffolds. Their central claim is that art requires a broader 4E account—embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and ecological—because artworks offer complex affordances that exceed pragmatic tool-use. They criticise versions of active externalism that treat music, instruments, notebooks, or artworks mainly as resources for functional cognition, arguing that such models overlook the affective, cultural, social, and sensorimotor dimensions of aesthetic experience. Against Alva Noë’s view of art as a “strange tool,” they propose an affordance-based enactive approach centred on “double attunement”: the beholder experiences both what the artwork represents and how the artwork materially, formally, and culturally presents it. Their case study of Sandy Rodriguez’s You Will Not Be Forgotten shows how a work can simultaneously afford affective response, political reflection, cultural memory, and embodied attention. The conclusion is that aesthetic experience is not a detached internal judgement or a mere use of external tools, but a situated, embodied, culturally permeated encounter in which multiple affordances co-operate within one unified experience.
