Radicalizing enactivism Hutto, Daniel D; Myin, Erik
2013, 20121214, 2012, 2013-06-26
eBook, Book
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless.
Most of what humans 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 basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin 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.
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. It shows 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 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.
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 and 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 re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through.
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 the 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: Just Radical Enough Myin, Erik; Hutto, Daniel D.
Studies in logic, grammar and rhetoric : the Journal of University of Bialystok,
6/2015, Volume:
41, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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.
Perception as Something We Do Myin, E.
Journal of consciousness studies,
2016, Volume:
23, Issue:
5-6
Journal Article
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.
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 standardised 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 social functioning, but rather suggest that social cognition is possibly a result of basic social interactive capacities.
Sensory substitution devices provide through an unusual sensory modality (the substituting modality, e.g., audition) access to features of the world that are normally accessed through another sensory ...modality (the substituted modality, e.g., vision). In this article, we address the question of which sensory modality the acquired perception belongs to. We have recourse to the four traditional criteria that have been used to define sensory modalities: sensory organ, stimuli, properties, and qualitative experience (Grice, 1962), to which we have added the criteria of behavioral equivalence (Morgan, 1977), dedication (Keeley, 2002), and sensorimotor equivalence (O’Regan & Noë, 2001). We discuss which of them are fulfilled by perception through sensory substitution devices and whether this favors the view that perception belongs to the substituting or to the substituted modality. Though the application of a number of criteria might be taken to point to the conclusion that perception with a sensory substitution device belongs to the substituted modality, we argue that the evidence leads to an alternative view on sensory substitution. According to this view, the experience after sensory substitution is a transformation, extension, or augmentation of our perceptual capacities, rather than being something equivalent or reducible to an already existing sensory modality. We develop this view by comparing sensory substitution devices to other “mind‐enhancing tools” such as pen and paper, sketchpads, or calculators. An analysis of sensory substitution in terms of mind‐enhancing tools unveils it as a thoroughly transforming perceptual experience and as giving rise to a novel form of perceptual interaction with the environment.
According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at ...best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena—those involving absent and abstract features—require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the consideration of cognition regarding the absent and the abstract can move the debate about representationalism along. Whether or not cognition involving the absent and the abstract requires the positing of representations depends upon whether more basic forms of cognition require the positing of representations.
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