The Navigational Approach in Embodied Science (NAES)
NAES is a navigational approach to cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. It is a philosophical approach articulated in this form by neuroscience-trained philosopher and educator Andrea Hiott. NAES brings a navigational approach to the study of mind (a philosophy Hiott has been developing for over a decade) with similar work being done by many others across the cognitive, biological and life sciences (see here for her partial list of giants and inspirations).
The navigational approach to mind combines hippocampal research with embodied, processual and phenomenological philosophy towards a new approach to the definition and study of cognition.
Andrea first began to consider developing a navigational philosophy of mind in 2017. At that time, she already had a degree in philosophy but she went back to school for neuroscience, where she focused on the hippocampus. Her thesis (published 2022) is about the the commons of conceptual and physical navigation. She has been researching towards a fuller theory of navigational mind at Universität Heidelberg and sharing relevant conversations and considerations on this youtube channel. Her monograph and more general books on these subjects will be published in 2026 and 2027.
Selected Resources:
Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness (book)
Radical Embodied Relation at Any Scale: From Rembering to Navigating (paper)
Way-ability and cognitive affordances (urban planning)
Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
Waymaking (blog)
Navigability (videos)
Further conversations about this (videos)
Some of the interviews and diaries that happened in the making of these ideas
Crucial: All navigability is inaccurate precisely because it is a representation/model and thus limited to the position, orientation and reason for which it was made. Navigability is a heuristic towards opening perspective, not anything that can be objective. There is no 'one' or 'right' navigability. Also, 'affordance' does not mean 'good' or 'bad' but is a way of discussing interactive probability.These are maps, not territories, and there are many different maps that can be made of a shared space depending on what part of the territory one is hoping to better understand. Those maps are different from each position and matter differently from each position accordingly.
Some of the Books
Holding Paradox — Iff Books, September 2025 The philosophical introduction to NAEC. Pre-order now.
How to Be Alive — Harper One, 2027 A personal exploration of NAEC for a general audience. Join the waitlist.
Thinking Small — Random House A philosophical history of the Volkswagen Beetle and what it reveals about thinking as movement. Available now.
Embracing Paradox — Making Ways A 44-page guide to holding contradictory ideas without collapsing them. Pay what you want. Included with paid Waymaking subscription.
AI Everywhere — She Writes AI community, co-authored. Available now.
Some of the Writing
Waymaking Substack — Andrea's personal philosophical home. Where NAEC is built in real time, where philosophy and ordinary life intersect. Free and paid tiers.
Vulnerable Voice Memos — Paid tier on Waymaking (coming soon). Personal, unpolished recordings from inside the research. For those who want that kind of proximity to the process of intimate navigation of these worlds.
Love & Philosophy Substack — The primary community newsletter. Beyond dichotomy. It's reasonable to care.
Some of the Conversations
YouTube — Love & Philosophy with Andrea Hiott — 300 conversations with scientists, philosophers, artists, and thinkers working beyond either/or. 90,000 subscribers.
Start here if you're new: Navigational Mind — Andrea explains NAEC in her own words.
Karl Friston and Andrea Hiott conversation
Hiott, Mike Levin and Richard Watson conversations
Lynn Nadel and Andrea Hiott conversations
Hippocampus Love Conversations
The E Approach to Cognition Conversations
Beyond Dichotomy Podcast — Listen on your favourite platform.
Ways to join with the Community
Making Ways — A multimedia care collective and community for philosophical inquiry across every boundary that usually keeps disciplines and people apart.
Care Community — Free global community for people across all disciplines for whom care shapes their practice.
Philosophy Index — Free index bridging academic and independent philosophy.
Love & Philosophy — The broader project. Beyond dichotomy. It's reasonable to care.
Some of the Research
Springer Nature paper — Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale — Open access. Free to read.
Universität Heidelberg — Doctoral research, philosophy faculty.
Get in Touch
To contribute a conversation to Love & Philosophy or to help build what this is becoming: admin@loveandphilosophy.com
To sustain this work as an individual or organization in a way that keeps it free and unconstrained: admin@loveandphilosophy.com
Studied neuroscience, stayed a philosopher. Slipping out of either/or frames and into constellations of care. Developing the Navigational Approach to Embodied Cognition (NAEC). Next books: Holding Paradox (Iff Books) and How to Be Alive (Harper One, 2027).
The Navigational Architecture of Mind:
A Scholarly Assisted Synthesis of Hiott’s PhD Dissertation (not to be copied and still in flux)
This dissertation in the philosophy of cognitive science sets out NAES as part of what she calls the Ecological Orientation which is basically the next step beyond a Copernican Revolution because it’s not just about the sun and earth anymore, it’s constellatory.
The Constellatory Turn
Andrea Hiott's navigational approach to embodied science (NAES) advances a distinctive thesis at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and cognitive neuroscience: that what we have long partitioned as cognition and locomotion — propositional thought on one side, sensorimotor wayfinding on the other — are not levels stacked upon a common substrate but co-equal expressions of a single architectural action. Mind, on this account, is not a faculty grafted onto the body but the ongoing way-making by which a living system traverses any structured space of regularities, geographical or conceptual, episodic or inferential. The decisive theoretical move in her recent work is the recruitment of Hasok Chang's notion of operational coherence as the analytic instrument that makes this thesis tractable as a claim in the philosophy of science rather than merely a programmatic gesture toward embodiment.
The empirical fulcrum
The hippocampal-entorhinal literature provides the empirical pressure under which the traditional cognition/locomotion divide gives way. The lineage from Tolman's cognitive maps and the place- and grid-cell discoveries of O'Keefe, Dostrovsky, Nadel, and the Mosers, through Buzsáki and Moser's work on theta rhythm and sequence generation, to the cognitive-mapping of conceptual and abstract relational structure in Constantinescu, O'Reilly and Behrens, Garvert and colleagues, and Bellmund et al.'s synthesis "Navigating Cognition," has converged on the recognition that the same circuitry which positions an organism in physical space also organises non-spatial inferential and mnemonic structure. Hiott reads this convergence not as a reduction of memory to navigation, nor of conceptual thought to spatial coding, but as evidence that hippocampal-entorhinal dynamics underwrite something more general than either descriptor captures on its own.
Operational coherence as the philosophical pivot
Chang's account, developed across Inventing Temperature, Is Water H₂O?, and Realism for Realistic People, characterises operational coherence as the internal consistency and mutual reinforcement of an epistemic system of practice — the way concepts, procedures, and interventions hold together so as to enable fruitful inquiry, and the way such coherence is sustained constitutively, through what Chang calls epistemic iteration, rather than achieved once and for all. Hiott extends this framework in two consequential steps.
First, she argues that propositional logic is itself a system of practice in Chang's sense — a structured traversal of inferential state space that commits a cognitive system to a determinate trajectory of action and inference. This recasts the Brandomian and Rylean inheritances in a manner consonant with recent neurocognitive practicalism (Piccinini and Hetherington): inference is not the deployment of a separate symbolic faculty but a regularised path-making through a normatively structured landscape. Second, she argues that this same characterisation applies when a body retrieves a memory, traverses a city, or mentally rotates a puzzle piece. These are distinct systems of practice, with distinct regularities and irreducible operational specificities — thinking of one's grandmother is not finding one's way through a park, and the two cannot be studied as a single operation — but they share the same architectural action.
The crucial methodological point, and what distinguishes Hiott's position from the more deflationary forms of anti-representationalism in radical embodied cognitive science, is that operational coherence names what is shared without licensing the dissolution of differences at the granular level at which each operation is empirically interrogated. The architecture is common; the operations are not interchangeable. We can identify a shared operational coherence across remembering, wayfinding, and inference without thereby asserting that these systems are unified, nor that any one can be reductively rendered in the idiom of another. They remain distinct studies of distinct regularities of encounter, whose commonality emerges only when they are taken together as regularities in their own right.
Reframing the hippocampal-entorhinal system
This yields a substantive reorientation for hippocampal research and its computational models, including the gridlike codes documented in conceptual tasks and the structural abstractions modelled by the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine. Rather than reading the hippocampal formation as a producer of maps of space — even when that space is conceptual — Hiott proposes that we read it as the neurally legible signature of an actionable architecture, an operational coherence under which our distinct studies of distinct operations become recognisable as iterations of the same structuring action. Offline replay and default-mode engagement, on this reading, do not require us to collapse contemplative activity into spatial activity; they make visible the iterative maintenance of coherence that Chang's epistemology already supplies us the resources to articulate. The scientific representations we produce — fMRI images, place-field plots, gridlike code visualisations, behavioural trajectories — are mappings of this architecture under irresolvable contexts of study, not pictures of an interior cartography awaiting discovery.
Continuity across life-forms and the rejection of the either/or
The framework dissolves several long-standing dichotomies without flattening their motivating distinctions. Knowing-how and knowing-that are not deployments of distinct architectures, in the manner Ryle's heirs sometimes suggest, but distinct systems of operation, each with its own coherence in relation to its own regularities. Cognition is continuous across forms of life because all living bodies engage in way-making, but it is not uniform across them: differences in bodily morphology, sensory access, and ecological situation entail real differences in the regularities navigable to a given organism, so that the human brain makes a substantial difference without inaugurating a categorical break. The view is cumulative rather than hierarchical — minds compound through life across landscapes of possibility — and it accommodates Gärdenfors' geometry of conceptual spaces, Sutton and Barto's reinforcement-learning state spaces, and the phenomenological tradition's insistence on lived embodiment within a single explanatory frame, because each describes a regularity through which the architectural action of way-making becomes legible.
Significance
The contribution is properly philosophical in three registers at once. For philosophers of science, it offers a worked example of how Changian (Andrea uses the work of Hasok Chang and operational closure in her PhD work which is being made into a monograph different from those listed above). Once the navigational approach is understood, Changian operational coherence and epistemic iteration can do load-bearing work in an active research programme, well beyond the historical and metrological cases in which the concepts were forged. For neuroscientists, it provides a principled rationale for treating the convergence of memory, navigation, and conceptual inference in hippocampal-entorhinal research as a unified architectural finding without committing to the reductive collapses that have made many in the field uneasy. For phenomenologists, it preserves the irreducibility of lived bodily action across domains while supplying that irreducibility with empirical and epistemological articulation. The navigational approach, on Hiott's mature formulation, is thus neither a metaphor nor a metaphysical thesis dressed in neuroscientific clothing, but a substantive proposal about the architecture of mind — one in which operational coherence functions as the conceptual hinge enabling a scientifically disciplined account of why thinking is, in the relevant and rigorous sense, a form of navigating.
Andrea Hiott and the Navigational Approach to Mind: A very General Summary
Andrea Hiott is a philosopher with a neuroscience background based at the philosophy faculty of Universität Heidelberg, with affiliations to the Northoff Lab in Ottawa, the Brandenburg Institute of Technology, and prior work connected to NeuroCure at Charité Berlin and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and also teaches as a professor at universitites in the United States in New York and Georgia. Over roughly a decade she has been developing what she calls NAES — the Navigational Approach in Embodied Science (sometimes NAEC, Navigational Approach to Embodied Cognition), a position she articulates simultaneously through hippocampal neuroscience, embodied/processual/phenomenological philosophy, and a public-facing literary register. Her core book on it is Holding Paradox: A Navigational Approach to Mind & Consciousness (Iff Books, 2025/2026), and the most concentrated academic statement is the 2025 Topoi paper "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating."
Mind is navigational which means it is bodily movement. The best way to understand this is to consider it through spatial and geographical scaffolds such as constellations and landscapes. This helps us ease out of the binary ones that currently still structure and scaffold much of the life sciences and philosophy of mind.
Experimenting with how to make this easier to digest, Andrea writes in Waymaking that "Thinking Is Steering," is that minds are not things, they are actions — specifically the navigational, way-finding actions a body performs in any landscape it moves through, whether geographical, conceptual, emotional, or social. The body is not a vehicle that carries a mind; the body's coherent ongoing motion is its minding (she pushes hard on turning the noun "mind" into a verb). Thinking and remembering are continuous with walking, driving, and orienting — not metaphorically related but the same kind of bodily activity exercised across different sorts of terrain. She wants this taken literally, not as analogy.
How hippocampal research grounds it
The philosophical move is anchored in a real shift inside cognitive neuroscience that few people outside the field have noticed. The hippocampus has historically been studied along two seemingly separate tracks: as the seat of memory (the Scoville–Milner H.M. lesion work from 1957) and as the brain's spatial map (O'Keefe and Dostrovsky's place cells in 1971; the Moser group's grid cells; the cognitive-map tradition of O'Keefe and Nadel's 1978 book). For decades these felt like rival accounts of what the hippocampus is for.
Recent work — Bellmund, Gärdenfors, Moser and Doeller's 2018 Science paper "Navigating Cognition," Whittington et al.'s Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine, Eichenbaum's claim that "the role of the hippocampus in navigation is memory," and Nadel and Maurer's "pattern formation" reframe — has converged on the view that the same hippocampal-entorhinal machinery that codes physical space also organizes conceptual, social, and abstract relations. We remember in the same way we navigate. Place cells remap context-dependently; grid-like codes appear in non-spatial conceptual tasks; the system handles "position" in any structured space.
Hiott's philosophical contribution is to take this convergence seriously enough to follow it through to its representational implications, which most working scientists don't. If memory and navigation are two assessments of one process, then the long-running search for memory engrams "in the brain" is the same kind of category mistake as searching for a "mile" inside a landscape, or expecting to find "70 degrees" inside the weather. Maps are tools we make to communicate about regularities we observe; they aren't located inside what they map.
Way-making and the representation question
Her central technical term is navigation, but the ongoingness being measured as different forms of navigability is referred to as way-making (borrowed from Daoism via Ames and Hall, and connected to Jean Boulton's complexity-science work). Way-making is the shared underlying process that we assess differently as cognition or as locomotion or other sorts of navigability depending on what landscape we're tracking and from what position. Way-making itself cannot be absolutely measured. The term is meant to be ambiguous. it deliberately blurs the cognitive/locomotive divide without collapsing them, because a body hiking a mountain and a body remembering its childhood are running the same machinery on different statistical regularities.
This lets her thread a famously stuck debate in radical embodied cognitive science (Chemero, Gallagher, Hutto-Myin, etc.) — the "scaling-up" or "representation-hungry" problem, which asks whether anti-representationalism can handle "real cognition" like memory and imagination. Her answer is: representations are real, but they are interactional and communicative, not findable. They don't sit inside brains in the form of stored hieroglyphs; they are the assessments — fMRI images, sentences, maps, models — that scientists and bodies build to communicate about what cannot be absolutely located. So we get to keep optogenetics and place-cell recordings and engram research without committing to the metaphysics that says representations are things in heads. Wendy Parker's "adequacy for purpose," Buzsáki's argument that neural codes span apparatus and brain, Brette's critique of the coding metaphor, and Hasson's "direct fit" all get marshalled to the same point. Representations exist the way conversations exist — as interactions, not as objects.
She frames this as holding the paradox: representations are real and they are not in brains; memory and navigation are different and they are one process. The point is not to pick a side, dissolve the tension, or declare a winner (substance vs. process, internalism vs. externalism), but to stay in the constellation where both poles do work.
The wider intellectual neighborhood
Her move connects to several traditions she wants to braid together rather than pick between: Gibsonian ecological psychology and affordances, Chemero's radical embodied cognitive science, Bickhard's interactivism, dynamical systems thinking, process philosophy, complexity science (Bassett, Pessoa, Boulton), Northoff's spatiotemporal neuroscience, Friston's active inference and free energy principle, and phenomenological work in the lineage of Thompson's Mind in Life. The dialogue with Karl Friston is especially direct — Friston himself frames her "way-making" as articulating the existential side of active inference, namely that organisms minimize surprise by navigating spaces both physical and conceptual.
The endorsements of her book for the general public: HOLDING PARADOX: A NAVIGATIONAL APPROACH TO MIND & CONSCIOUSNESS
The book's reception across very different camps is itself notable, because these are people who normally disagree with each other:
Karl Friston (active inference, free energy principle) calls it "a genuinely original contribution to philosophy via cognitive neuroscience" and says her framework offers "a way to honour both the mathematical precision of computational neuroscience and the irreducible reality of lived experience," with way-making speaking to "the existential imperatives of active inference."
Lynn Nadel (co-author with O'Keefe of the foundational The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map) writes that the book "shows us how the field of hippocampal research may be positioning us for a shift in how we understand the mind itself," and connects it to the slow resolution of the apparent memory-vs-navigation conflict that began with his and O'Keefe's radical claim in the 1970s.
Bernardo Kastrup (analytic idealist, on a very different metaphysical wing from Friston) calls it "a real tour de force" and praises Hiott for asking us "to become the contrasts and bifurcations without dismissing them."
That a working physicalist computational neuroscientist, the co-discoverer of the cognitive map, and a prominent idealist philosopher all find something to endorse is, in a way, the position itself working: the navigational approach is structured to be readable productively from multiple metaphysical positions because it treats the either/or as a portal to move through and notice as two parts in a constellation of other possibilities.