2021 Synthese Special issue on radical views on cognition: introduction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reconceiving representation-hungry cognition: an ecological-enactive proposal
Enactive approaches to cognitive science aim to explain human cognitive processes across the board without making any appeal to internal, content-carrying representational states. A challenge to such a research programme in cognitive science that immediately arises is how to explain cognition in so-called 'representation-hungry' domains. Examples of representation-hungry domains include imagination, memory, planning and language use in which the agent is engaged in thinking about something that may be absent, possible or abstract. The challenge is to explain how someone could think about things that are not concretely present in their environment other than by means of an internal mental representation. We call this the 'Representation-Hungry Challenge' (RHC). The challenge we take up in this article is to show how hunger for representations could possibly be satisfied by means other than the construction and manipulation of internal representa-tional states. We meet this challenge by developing a theoretical framework that integrates key ideas drawn from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology. One of our main aims is thus to show how ecological and enactive theories as non-representational and non-computational approaches to cognitive science might work together. From enactive cognitive science, we borrow the thesis of the strict continuity of lower and higher cognition. We develop this thesis to argue against any sharp conceptual distinction between higher and lower cognition based on representation-hunger. From ecological psychology , we draw upon our earlier work on the rich landscape of affordances. We propose thinking of so-called representation hungry cognition in terms of temporally extended activities in which the agent skilfully coordinates to a richly structured landscape of affordances. In our framework, putative cases of representation-hungry cognition are explained by abilities to coordinate nested activities to an environment structured by interrelated socio-material practices. The RHC has often figured in arguments for the limitations of non-representational approaches to cognitive science. We showcase the theoretical resources available to an integrated ecological-enactive approach for addressing this type of sceptical challenge.
Prospects of enactivist approaches to intentionality and cognition
Synthese, 2019
We discuss various implications of some radical anti-representationalist views of cognition and what they have to offer with regard to the naturalization of intentionality and the explanation of cognitive phenomena. Our focus is on recent arguments from proponents of enactive views of cognition to the effect that basic cognition is intentional but not representational and that cognition is co-extensive with life. We focus on lower rather than higher forms of cognition, namely the question regarding the intentional and representational nature of cognition found in organisms simpler than human beings, because enactivists do not deny that more sophisticated cognitive phenomena are representational and involve content. After introducing the debate on the naturalization of intentionality (Sect. 2), we briefly review different varieties of enactivism and introduce their central claims (Sect. 3). In Sect. 4 we turn to radical enactivism in order to focus on the arguments for a thoroughly nonrepresentational, enactive account of perception and basic cognition. In particular, we discuss three major issues: First, what is supposed to replace the representational analysis of perception in a radical-enactive explanation of perception? How does the enactive explanation of perception compare to the best scientific work on the neuroscience of perception? Second, what is-on an enactive account-the function of neural processing in the brain for the generation of perception if not to produce representations? This question is especially pressing since one implication of autopoietic enactivism (accepted by radical enactivists) is that even the simplest organisms, i.e. single-celled organisms, have cognitive capacities (Sect. 5). Since they lack brains and nervous systems, enactivists must specify the (possibly) unique contribution of the brain and nervous system in those animals who have them. In Sect. 5, we evaluate the advantages of an autopoietic-enactive approach to the naturalization of intentionality and end with a suggestion how cognition may relate to intentionality and representation.
Synthese, 2019
This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a postcognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one (the neural dynamics of the sensorimotor contingencies and the emergence of enactive agency) and the personal one (the dynamics that emerges from the organism-environment interaction in ecological terms). If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent postcognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology.
The biological emergence of representation
Reductionism and the development of knowledge, 2002
The concept of emergence has received strong and potentially fatal criticism. But if ontological emergence does not occur, if strong reductionism is correct, then all of our familiar world -rocks, trees, and persons, including representation and mind -is at best epiphenomenal relative to basic physical particles. I outline one of the most serious of these criticisms, by Jaegwon Kim, and conclude that escaping Kim's critique forces a shift in metaphysics -a shift to a process metaphysics. Pragmatism in general, and Piaget in particular, worked within a process framework -a framework of action and interactionand thereby potentially parry Kim's collapse of genuine emergence. Within this framework, they attempted to model, among other things, the nature of representation. I argue, as did Piaget, that representation emerges naturally in the evolution of interactive biological agents, but with crucial divergences in the specifics of the theories. In the theory proposed, representation emerges as the natural solution to problems of action selection and evaluation. Primitive representation, in worms, perhaps, is concerned with relatively unorganized single actions. More familiar kinds of representation -of manipulable objects, for example -emerge in highly complex organizations of interaction possibilities in ways adumbrated in Piaget's constructivism. Adoption of a dynamic, a pragmatic, approach to representational phenomena, in turn, permits and forces numerous consequent changes, many of them theoretically fundamental, in all of psychology, including in the nature of persons as social beings.
Dynamicism, radical enactivism, and representational cognitive processes: The case of subitization
Philosophical Psychology, 2020
The role of representational cognitive processes (RCPs) in theories of cognition remains a source of disagreement in philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience. These debates are stoked by arguments that purport to show that RCPs neither receive support from nor support computational theories of cognition, and that dynamicist Embodied, Embedded, Extended (3E) and radical enactivist views of cognition show that RCPs can either be taken out of our heads or dispensed with entirely. We argue that these criticisms fail. We review familiar arguments for thinking that cognitive processes are representational. Next, we consider the challenge that RCPs neither support nor are supported by computational views of cognition, as well as the challenge that neurocomputational RCPs are rendered superfluous by dynamicist views of cognition. We then consider the challenge that intracranial RCPs are rendered superfluous by 3E and radical enactivist views of cognition. We grant that representation is neither necessary nor sufficient for computation. However, we argue that independent reasons support the explanatory utility of neuro-computational RCPs in dynamicist and 3E accounts of cognition and that radical enactivism's claim that all RCPs are extracranial is mistaken about at least one species of cognitive processing, that of subitizing.
We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism
2007
The philosophical tradition mistakenly asks how the inside (i.e. thoughts, ideas, concepts) can represent the outside (i.e., the world). This trap is a consequence of the view that mind and body must be two ontologically different entities. On this view the problem of meaning is to explain how disembodied "internal" ideas can represent "external" physical objects and events. Several centuries have shown that given a radical mind-body dichotomy, there is no way to bridge the gap between the inner and the outer. When "mind" and "body" are regarded as two fundamentally different kinds, no third mediating thing can exist that possesses both the metaphysical character of inner, mental things and simultaneously possesses the character of the outer, physical things. Embodied Realism, in contrast to Representationalist theories, rejects the notion that mind and body are two ontologically distinct kinds, and it therefore rejects the attendant view that cognition and language are based on symbolic representations inside the mind of an organism that refer to some physical thing in an outside world. Instead, the terms "body" and "mind" are simply convenient shorthand ways of identifying aspects of ongoing organismenvironment interactions-and so cognition and language must be understood as arising from organic processes. We trace the rejection of this mind-body dualism from the philosopherpsychologists known as the early American pragmatists (James and Dewey) forward through recent cognitive science (such as Varela, Maturana, Edelman, Hutchins, Lakoff, Johnson, Brooks). We argue that embodied realism requires a radical reevaluation of the classical dualistic metaphysics and epistemology-especially the classical Representationalist theory of mind-and we conclude by investigating the implications for future investigations for a new, pragmatically-centered cognitive science.
The Incipient Mind Argument: The Persistence of Absolutist Thinking in Biological Philosophy of Mind
The incipient mind argument is the central argument of Evan Thompson’s solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper challenges Evan Thompson’s (and Francisco Varela’s) assumption of a pristine form of subjectivity, as well as of interiority in unicellular life forms. I claim that this assumption makes sense only as a useful strategy for an absolutist account of mind. In this paper, I argue that Thompson’s thesis is erroneous at the object-level, as well as at the meta-level of his argumentation. By paying greater attention to the meta-level of his exposition, I show that Thompson’s assumption of an “incipient mind” obeys an absolutist, two-sided pattern of thinking and, therefore, that his argumentation fails to give an accurate account of the systemic generation and development of mind. After demonstrating this, I suggest an innovative action-based approach to mind in order to accurately give an account of its real-constructive development.
Cognition and Life: The Autonomy of Cognition
Brain and Cognition, 1997
In this paper we propose a philosophical distinction between biological and cognitive domains based on two conditions that are postulated to obtain a useful characterization of cognition: biological grounding and explanatory sufficiency. According to this, we argue that the origin of cognition in natural systems (cognition as we know it) is the result of the appearance of an autonomous system embedded into another more generic one: the whole organism. This basic idea is complemented by another one: the formation and development of this system, in the course of evolution, cannot be understood but as the outcome of a continuous process of interaction between organisms and environment, between different organisms, and, specially, between the very cognitive organisms. Finally, we address the problem of the generalization of a theory of cognition (cognition as it could be) and conclude that this work would imply a grounding work on the problem of the origins developed in the frame of a confluence between both Artificial Life and an embodied Artificial Intelligence.