"The vast sea of what humans do and experience is best understood by appeal to nothing more than ... more "The vast sea of what humans do and experience is best understood by appeal to nothing more than dynamically unfolding, situated embodied interactions and engagements with worldly offerings. Basic mentality is neither underwritten by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor is it, it itself, inherently contentful. To think otherwise is to ascribe features and characteristics to basic minds that only belong to enculturated, scaffolded minds that are built atop them.
This book advances this view by radicalizing enactivism. Enactive or embodied approaches to cognition give explanatory pride of place to dynamic interactions between organisms and features of their environments over the contentful representation of such environmental features. Radically Enactive or Embodied Cognition, REC, goes further than its conservative cousins by denying that even basic Cognition necessarily Involves Content, by denying CIC.
Defenders of CIC must face up to the Hard Problem of Content. Positing informational content, it is argued, is not compatible with explanatory naturalism. This motivates the view that engaged interactions with environmental offerings involves being sensitive to covariant information but it does not involve literally picking up and processing informational contents. The same verdict applies to perceptual experiences. Even maximally minimal intellectualist proposals offer no compelling reason for supposing that perceptual experience is inherently contentful. Radicalizing Enactivism concludes by examining the consequences of adopting REC about basic minds for debates about how far minds extend and how we might best understand phenomenal aspects of experience."
Most of what sentient beings do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfoldi... more Most of what sentient beings do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds – including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that all minds are necessarily or essentially contentful – that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Hutto and Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition which holds that some kinds of minds – basic minds – are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. These authors oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter–thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual ... more Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual experience has representational content. On one side of the debate, we find representationalists claiming that perceptual experience is representational in that it always presents the world as being a certain way. Perceptual experience is therefore said to have content, which can be evaluated for truth or accuracy. Against the idea that perception has content, relationalists have leveled an argument based on the generality of content, which we shall here refer to as the Generality Problem of Perception (GPP). We will analyze and assess existing replies to the GPP. Based on these analyses, we will conclude that representationalists have as yet not offered a convincing answer to the problem and that, after almost 20 years, the problem still stands.
New version of paper on the enactive, mainly sensorimotor approach to visual perception for the s... more New version of paper on the enactive, mainly sensorimotor approach to visual perception for the second version of The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition
Preliminary version of a manuscript destined for the SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology (new... more Preliminary version of a manuscript destined for the SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology (new 2023 version)
One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one valu... more One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing an retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as "something we do", and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid reshaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC's lights therefore, the "is" of memory is "oughty" through and through.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09775-6
This paper responds to Alva Noë's general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it respo... more This paper responds to Alva Noë's general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism's actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë's own version of Sensorimotor Knowledge Enactivism.
The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of... more The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are “same, yet different”. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.
REC, or the Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition makes a crucial distinction
between basi... more REC, or the Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition makes a crucial distinction
between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC's views on
basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism
claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. I show how a
correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how
REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.
The ambitious, mathematically elegant unificatory proposal of Predictive Processing (PP) to accou... more The ambitious, mathematically elegant unificatory proposal of Predictive Processing (PP) to account for perception and action seems to have taken the world by storm. Though many different varieties of PP may be distinguished, most of them adhere to representationalism in one form or another. In this paper, we inquire into these representational foundations. We argue that PP is best understood in a non-representational way. We argue that the most popular way of construing representational content in PP, despite pretensions to the contrary, proliferates representations unacceptably. Next we show that PP’s explanatory potential can be retained without positing representations. We thus show that PP can’t have and doesn’t need representations to do its explanatory work, and conclude that our efforts are better placed in furthering the programme of non-representational PP.
A dominant idea is that impaired capacities for Theory of Mind (ToM) are the reasons for impairme... more A dominant idea is that impaired capacities for Theory of Mind (ToM) are the reasons for impairments in social functioning in several conditions, including autism and schizophrenia. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that challenges this influential assumption. We conducted three studies examining the association between ToM and social functioning in participants diagnosed with a non-affective psychotic disorder and healthy individuals. We used both the Experience Sampling Method, a structured diary technique collecting information in daily-life, and a standardized questionnaire to assess social functioning. Analysed data are part of Wave 1 and Wave 3 of the Genetic Risk and Outcome of Psychosis (GROUP) study. Results were highly consistent across studies and showed no significant association between the two constructs. These findings question the leading assumption that social cognition is a prerequisite for socialfunctioning, but rather suggest that social cognition is possibly a result of basic social interactive capacities.
Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that ou... more Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for an individual’s perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact.
The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has alle... more The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.
Focusing on the contemporary scene, this paper argues against some detractors that answering the ... more Focusing on the contemporary scene, this paper argues against some detractors that answering the RTM-question matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. In making this case, the structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s (2017) argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM question are stipulated then it is possible conduct substantive RTM debates that do not collapse into merely verbal disagreements. Combined, Sections 2 and 3 demonstrate how, by employing specifying stipulations, we can get around Rowland’s arbitrariness challenge. Section 2 reveals why RTM, as canonically construed in terms of mental states exhibiting intensional (with-an-s) properties, has been deemed a valuable explanatory hypothesis in the cognitive sciences. Targeting the canonical notion of mental representations, Section 3 articulates a rival non-representational hypothesis that, we propose, can do all the relevant explanatory work at much lower theoretical cost. Taken together, Sections 2 and 3 show what can be at stake in the RTM debate when it is framed by appeal to the canonical notion of mental representation and why engaging in it matters. Section 4 extends the argument for thinking that RTM debates matter. It provides reasons for thinking that, far from making no practical or theoretical difference to the sciences of the mind, deciding to abandon RTM would constitute a revolutionary conceptual shift in those sciences.
Representationalists are on the run. One of cognitive science’s traditional foundations –its cogn... more Representationalists are on the run. One of cognitive science’s traditional foundations –its cognitivist cornerstones- has been brought into question. Ultimately, this threatens its commitment to a united representational-cum-computational theory of mind. What’s the worry, we may ask? Serious doubts have been raised about whether mental representational content lies at the roots of cognition – about whether mental representational contents will feature in our mature accounts of the basis of cognition. If mental representational content is the source of so much trouble, a tempting move might be to ditch it. But can this be done while keeping faith with the assumption that explanations in cognitive science, foundationally, involve representations of some sort? Deflationists think so. They seek to retain mental representations in their ground floor theorizing about the nature of cognition while abandoning any ontological commitment to the existence of mental representational contents. Hence, deflationists about mental representations seek to retain a commitment to representationalism while at the same time denying that mental representational contents – with the aforementioned set of troublesome properties – figure in explanations of intelligent activity. In what follows, we will review in turn, and deflate, the most promising deflationist approaches on today’s market.
SUMMARY: Apart from the common use of " sensation " to refer to bodily feelings, the word has bee... more SUMMARY: Apart from the common use of " sensation " to refer to bodily feelings, the word has been adopted by philosophers and scientists to talk about specific feelings arising from stimulation of the sensory organs. Sensations are often ascribed particular properties: of being conscious and inner, of being more immediate than perception, and of being atomic. In epistemology sensation have been taken as infallible foundations of knowledge, in psychology as elementary constituents of perceptual experience. Critics have argued that, given the nature of knowledge and of perceptual experience, sensations are unfit to play these roles. Some philosophers have ascribed mistaken theorizing about sensation to the tendency to conceive of sensations as inner objects of experience. As an alternative the adverbial theory of sensations has been proposed. According to it sensations are ways of experiencing, rather than objects of experience. Representationalism proposes to conceive of sensations as representations. Yet another way of thinking about sensations is to characterize them as embodied reactions of organisms to specific stimuli. An important issue that needs to be addressed by all general accounts of sensations is whether it is legitimate to treat theoretical posits such as colour sensations on a par with bodily sensations such as pain.
The idea that the number-sensitive behavior of young infants is best explained by ascribing (inna... more The idea that the number-sensitive behavior of young infants is best explained by ascribing (innate) conceptual knowledge of numbers and numerical operations to them is widespread in both philosophy and psychology. Furthermore, such knowledge is deemed necessary as a basis to acquire more sophisticated arithmetical knowledge. We will argue that, despite its initial plausibility, ascription of innate conceptual knowledge fails to account for the observed behavior. In particular, we will argue that the key-assumption, viz. that the behavior is to be explained as a product of knowledge deployment is not only unwarranted, but that the postulation of the required knowledge raises unsolved problems. We argue that these problems can be avoided if one adopts a socio-historical view of the ontogenesis of arithmetical knowledge. On this account, knowledge acquisition requires a community of already accomplished knowers. To substantiate our claims, we will sketch an account, inspired by Wittgensteinian models of language acquisition, of how a child could acquire numerical knowledge within a community of already accomplished reckoners on the basis of universally shared non-epistemic behaviors.
"The vast sea of what humans do and experience is best understood by appeal to nothing more than ... more "The vast sea of what humans do and experience is best understood by appeal to nothing more than dynamically unfolding, situated embodied interactions and engagements with worldly offerings. Basic mentality is neither underwritten by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor is it, it itself, inherently contentful. To think otherwise is to ascribe features and characteristics to basic minds that only belong to enculturated, scaffolded minds that are built atop them.
This book advances this view by radicalizing enactivism. Enactive or embodied approaches to cognition give explanatory pride of place to dynamic interactions between organisms and features of their environments over the contentful representation of such environmental features. Radically Enactive or Embodied Cognition, REC, goes further than its conservative cousins by denying that even basic Cognition necessarily Involves Content, by denying CIC.
Defenders of CIC must face up to the Hard Problem of Content. Positing informational content, it is argued, is not compatible with explanatory naturalism. This motivates the view that engaged interactions with environmental offerings involves being sensitive to covariant information but it does not involve literally picking up and processing informational contents. The same verdict applies to perceptual experiences. Even maximally minimal intellectualist proposals offer no compelling reason for supposing that perceptual experience is inherently contentful. Radicalizing Enactivism concludes by examining the consequences of adopting REC about basic minds for debates about how far minds extend and how we might best understand phenomenal aspects of experience."
Most of what sentient beings do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfoldi... more Most of what sentient beings do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds – including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that all minds are necessarily or essentially contentful – that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Hutto and Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition which holds that some kinds of minds – basic minds – are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. These authors oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter–thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual ... more Much of contemporary philosophy of perception revolves around the question of whether perceptual experience has representational content. On one side of the debate, we find representationalists claiming that perceptual experience is representational in that it always presents the world as being a certain way. Perceptual experience is therefore said to have content, which can be evaluated for truth or accuracy. Against the idea that perception has content, relationalists have leveled an argument based on the generality of content, which we shall here refer to as the Generality Problem of Perception (GPP). We will analyze and assess existing replies to the GPP. Based on these analyses, we will conclude that representationalists have as yet not offered a convincing answer to the problem and that, after almost 20 years, the problem still stands.
New version of paper on the enactive, mainly sensorimotor approach to visual perception for the s... more New version of paper on the enactive, mainly sensorimotor approach to visual perception for the second version of The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition
Preliminary version of a manuscript destined for the SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology (new... more Preliminary version of a manuscript destined for the SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology (new 2023 version)
One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one valu... more One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing an retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as "something we do", and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid reshaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC's lights therefore, the "is" of memory is "oughty" through and through.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09775-6
This paper responds to Alva Noë's general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it respo... more This paper responds to Alva Noë's general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism's actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë's own version of Sensorimotor Knowledge Enactivism.
The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of... more The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are “same, yet different”. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.
REC, or the Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition makes a crucial distinction
between basi... more REC, or the Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition makes a crucial distinction
between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC's views on
basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism
claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. I show how a
correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how
REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.
The ambitious, mathematically elegant unificatory proposal of Predictive Processing (PP) to accou... more The ambitious, mathematically elegant unificatory proposal of Predictive Processing (PP) to account for perception and action seems to have taken the world by storm. Though many different varieties of PP may be distinguished, most of them adhere to representationalism in one form or another. In this paper, we inquire into these representational foundations. We argue that PP is best understood in a non-representational way. We argue that the most popular way of construing representational content in PP, despite pretensions to the contrary, proliferates representations unacceptably. Next we show that PP’s explanatory potential can be retained without positing representations. We thus show that PP can’t have and doesn’t need representations to do its explanatory work, and conclude that our efforts are better placed in furthering the programme of non-representational PP.
A dominant idea is that impaired capacities for Theory of Mind (ToM) are the reasons for impairme... more A dominant idea is that impaired capacities for Theory of Mind (ToM) are the reasons for impairments in social functioning in several conditions, including autism and schizophrenia. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that challenges this influential assumption. We conducted three studies examining the association between ToM and social functioning in participants diagnosed with a non-affective psychotic disorder and healthy individuals. We used both the Experience Sampling Method, a structured diary technique collecting information in daily-life, and a standardized questionnaire to assess social functioning. Analysed data are part of Wave 1 and Wave 3 of the Genetic Risk and Outcome of Psychosis (GROUP) study. Results were highly consistent across studies and showed no significant association between the two constructs. These findings question the leading assumption that social cognition is a prerequisite for socialfunctioning, but rather suggest that social cognition is possibly a result of basic social interactive capacities.
Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that ou... more Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for an individual’s perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact.
The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has alle... more The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.
Focusing on the contemporary scene, this paper argues against some detractors that answering the ... more Focusing on the contemporary scene, this paper argues against some detractors that answering the RTM-question matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. In making this case, the structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s (2017) argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM question are stipulated then it is possible conduct substantive RTM debates that do not collapse into merely verbal disagreements. Combined, Sections 2 and 3 demonstrate how, by employing specifying stipulations, we can get around Rowland’s arbitrariness challenge. Section 2 reveals why RTM, as canonically construed in terms of mental states exhibiting intensional (with-an-s) properties, has been deemed a valuable explanatory hypothesis in the cognitive sciences. Targeting the canonical notion of mental representations, Section 3 articulates a rival non-representational hypothesis that, we propose, can do all the relevant explanatory work at much lower theoretical cost. Taken together, Sections 2 and 3 show what can be at stake in the RTM debate when it is framed by appeal to the canonical notion of mental representation and why engaging in it matters. Section 4 extends the argument for thinking that RTM debates matter. It provides reasons for thinking that, far from making no practical or theoretical difference to the sciences of the mind, deciding to abandon RTM would constitute a revolutionary conceptual shift in those sciences.
Representationalists are on the run. One of cognitive science’s traditional foundations –its cogn... more Representationalists are on the run. One of cognitive science’s traditional foundations –its cognitivist cornerstones- has been brought into question. Ultimately, this threatens its commitment to a united representational-cum-computational theory of mind. What’s the worry, we may ask? Serious doubts have been raised about whether mental representational content lies at the roots of cognition – about whether mental representational contents will feature in our mature accounts of the basis of cognition. If mental representational content is the source of so much trouble, a tempting move might be to ditch it. But can this be done while keeping faith with the assumption that explanations in cognitive science, foundationally, involve representations of some sort? Deflationists think so. They seek to retain mental representations in their ground floor theorizing about the nature of cognition while abandoning any ontological commitment to the existence of mental representational contents. Hence, deflationists about mental representations seek to retain a commitment to representationalism while at the same time denying that mental representational contents – with the aforementioned set of troublesome properties – figure in explanations of intelligent activity. In what follows, we will review in turn, and deflate, the most promising deflationist approaches on today’s market.
SUMMARY: Apart from the common use of " sensation " to refer to bodily feelings, the word has bee... more SUMMARY: Apart from the common use of " sensation " to refer to bodily feelings, the word has been adopted by philosophers and scientists to talk about specific feelings arising from stimulation of the sensory organs. Sensations are often ascribed particular properties: of being conscious and inner, of being more immediate than perception, and of being atomic. In epistemology sensation have been taken as infallible foundations of knowledge, in psychology as elementary constituents of perceptual experience. Critics have argued that, given the nature of knowledge and of perceptual experience, sensations are unfit to play these roles. Some philosophers have ascribed mistaken theorizing about sensation to the tendency to conceive of sensations as inner objects of experience. As an alternative the adverbial theory of sensations has been proposed. According to it sensations are ways of experiencing, rather than objects of experience. Representationalism proposes to conceive of sensations as representations. Yet another way of thinking about sensations is to characterize them as embodied reactions of organisms to specific stimuli. An important issue that needs to be addressed by all general accounts of sensations is whether it is legitimate to treat theoretical posits such as colour sensations on a par with bodily sensations such as pain.
The idea that the number-sensitive behavior of young infants is best explained by ascribing (inna... more The idea that the number-sensitive behavior of young infants is best explained by ascribing (innate) conceptual knowledge of numbers and numerical operations to them is widespread in both philosophy and psychology. Furthermore, such knowledge is deemed necessary as a basis to acquire more sophisticated arithmetical knowledge. We will argue that, despite its initial plausibility, ascription of innate conceptual knowledge fails to account for the observed behavior. In particular, we will argue that the key-assumption, viz. that the behavior is to be explained as a product of knowledge deployment is not only unwarranted, but that the postulation of the required knowledge raises unsolved problems. We argue that these problems can be avoided if one adopts a socio-historical view of the ontogenesis of arithmetical knowledge. On this account, knowledge acquisition requires a community of already accomplished knowers. To substantiate our claims, we will sketch an account, inspired by Wittgensteinian models of language acquisition, of how a child could acquire numerical knowledge within a community of already accomplished reckoners on the basis of universally shared non-epistemic behaviors.
According to the sensorimotor approach, perceptual experience is something we do, not something t... more According to the sensorimotor approach, perceptual experience is something we do, not something that happens in us. That is, having perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of engaging with our environments in particular ways. We will argue that the sensorimotor position should best be seen as a form of identity theory. Unlike in the classical identity position however, the sensorimotor approach identifies conscious experience, not with internal or neural processes, but with bodily processes in spatially and temporally extended interactions with environments. After having considered some of the most common objections to the sensorimotor view of perception and perceptual awareness as something we do, we will compare the sensorimotor approach with other enactivist positions, namely Mind/Life Continuity Enactivism, and Radical Enactivism.
The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains co... more The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains cognition. Our analysis reveals that there is no compelling evidence or argument for thinking that brains compute. It makes the case for inverting the explanatory order proposed by the computational basis of cognition thesis. We must reverse the polarity of standard thinking on this topic, and ask how it is possible that computation, natural and artificial, might be based in cognition and not the other way around.
In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that per... more In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that perception is something we do. I will argue that understanding perceiving as a bodily doing allows for a strong non dualistic position on the relation between experience and objective physical events, one which provides insight into why such relation seems problematic while at the same time providing means to relieve the tension. Next I will show how the claim that perception is something we do does not stand in opposition to, and is not refuted by the fact that we often have perceptual experience without moving. In arguing that cases of motionless perception and perception-like experience are still doings it will be pointed out that the same interactive regularities which are engaged in in active perception still apply to them. Explaining how past interactive regularities can influence current perception or perception-like experience in a way which remains true to the idea that perception is a doing, so I will argue, can be done by invoking the past—the past itself, however, not its representation. The resulting historical, non-representational sensorimotor approach can join forces with Gibsonian ecological psychology—provided that such is also understood along lines that don't invoke externalist remnants of contents.
We address some frequently encountered criticisms of Radical Embodied/Enactive Cognition. Contrar... more We address some frequently encountered criticisms of Radical Embodied/Enactive Cognition. Contrary to the claims that the position is too radical, or not sufficiently so, we claim REC is just radical enough.
Is consciousness the one remaining mystery science stands on the threshold of solving? It is temp... more Is consciousness the one remaining mystery science stands on the threshold of solving? It is tempting to compare the issue of consciousness at the beginning of the 21st century to that of life halfway through the 20th century. The latter story begins with skeptics in the early 20th century who thought that life would withstand a complete scientific analysis because the mechanisms underlying heredity were not within the reach of the explanatory potential of natural science.
Dit is een boek met opstellen over wetenschappelijke reductie. De redacteurs, die zelf hun sporen... more Dit is een boek met opstellen over wetenschappelijke reductie. De redacteurs, die zelf hun sporen reeds hebben verdiend op dit gebied, bieden oorspronkelijke artikels aan van een aantal auteurs die belangrijke bijdragen hebben geleverd aan het recente denken over wetenschappelijke reductie:
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Books by Erik Myin
This book advances this view by radicalizing enactivism. Enactive or embodied approaches to cognition give explanatory pride of place to dynamic interactions between organisms and features of their environments over the contentful representation of such environmental features. Radically Enactive or Embodied Cognition, REC, goes further than its conservative cousins by denying that even basic Cognition necessarily Involves Content, by denying CIC.
Defenders of CIC must face up to the Hard Problem of Content. Positing informational content, it is argued, is not compatible with explanatory naturalism. This motivates the view that engaged interactions with environmental offerings involves being sensitive to covariant information but it does not involve literally picking up and processing informational contents. The same verdict applies to perceptual experiences. Even maximally minimal intellectualist proposals offer no compelling reason for supposing that perceptual experience is inherently contentful. Radicalizing Enactivism concludes by examining the consequences of adopting REC about basic minds for debates about how far minds extend and how we might best understand phenomenal aspects of experience."
Papers by Erik Myin
between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC's views on
basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism
claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. I show how a
correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how
REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.
In what follows, we will review in turn, and deflate, the most promising deflationist approaches on today’s market.
This book advances this view by radicalizing enactivism. Enactive or embodied approaches to cognition give explanatory pride of place to dynamic interactions between organisms and features of their environments over the contentful representation of such environmental features. Radically Enactive or Embodied Cognition, REC, goes further than its conservative cousins by denying that even basic Cognition necessarily Involves Content, by denying CIC.
Defenders of CIC must face up to the Hard Problem of Content. Positing informational content, it is argued, is not compatible with explanatory naturalism. This motivates the view that engaged interactions with environmental offerings involves being sensitive to covariant information but it does not involve literally picking up and processing informational contents. The same verdict applies to perceptual experiences. Even maximally minimal intellectualist proposals offer no compelling reason for supposing that perceptual experience is inherently contentful. Radicalizing Enactivism concludes by examining the consequences of adopting REC about basic minds for debates about how far minds extend and how we might best understand phenomenal aspects of experience."
between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC's views on
basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism
claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. I show how a
correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how
REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance perception.
In what follows, we will review in turn, and deflate, the most promising deflationist approaches on today’s market.