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Overview
Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones.
Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262339780 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2017 |
| Series: | The MIT Press |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 598 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Erik Myin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and coauthor of Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (MIT Press).
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Abbreviations xxvii
I
1 Revolution in Mind? 1
E Is the Word 1
Old School Cognitivism 3
Degrees of Radicality 4
With and without Content 10
Naturalist Rules of Engagement 13
2 Reasons to REConceive 21
Equal Partners 21
Continuity and Break 26
Less Can Be More 32
A Radical REConceiving 35
Handling the Hard Problem 41
3 From Revolution to Evolution 55
REC's Positive Program 55
A Certain Take on Predictive Processing 57
Bootstrap Heaven or Hell? 67
4 RECtifying and REConnecting 75
RECtifying 75
Making Sense of Sense Making 75
Keeping Affordances Affordable 82
REConnecting 88
5 Ur-Intentionality: What's It All About? 93
Getting to the Bottom of Intentionality 93
Ur-Intentionality: The Natural Explanation 104
Objects and Objections 114
6 Continuity: Kinks Not Breaks 121
Getting Radical about the Origins of Content 121
REC's Fatal Dilemma? 122
Evolutionary Discontinuity? 128
Kinky Cognition: A Sketch of a Possible Story 137
II
7 Perceiving 147
Out of the Armchair 147
Once More unto the Predictive Breach 150
Integration and Interface 163
Basic Perceiving Meets Content 171
8 Imagining 177
Beyond REC's Reach? 177
Trouble in Mind! Imagine That 183
A Hybrid, Pluralist Solution: Two Takes 188
Bask Imaginings at Work: When REC Met MET 193
9 Remembering 203
Memory's Many Kinds 203
Enactive, Embodied RECollections 204
Narrative Practice and Autobiographical Memory 206
The Puzzle of Pure Episodic Remembering 215
Roles and Functions of Remembering 221
Epilogue: Missing Information? 233
Don't Mess with Mr. In-Between! 233
Neurodynamics 236
Extensive Dynamics 245
Loops into Culture 253
Notes 255
References 283
Index 315
What People are Saying About This
The Radical Enactivist challenge is not going away any time soon. The next phase of this debate in the philosophy and sciences of cognition will be based on the substantial development of the view embodied in this book.
This exciting book, like its predecessor, Radicalizing Enactivism, offers an empirically informed and admirably clear explication of Hutto and Myin's distinctive position on the question of how truly representational cognition might emerge out of simpler, contentless varieties. Theirs is a compelling vision of psychological evolution, with which anyone thinking about the emergence of the different varieties of mentality must reckon.
The Radical Enactivist challenge is not going away any time soon. The next phase of this debate in the philosophy and sciences of cognition will be based on the substantial development of the view embodied in this book.
—Paul E. Griffiths, Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney
This exciting book, like its predecessor, Radicalizing Enactivism, offers an empirically informed and admirably clear explication of Hutto and Myin's distinctive position on the question of how truly representational cognition might emerge out of simpler, contentless varieties. Theirs is a compelling vision of psychological evolution, with which anyone thinking about the emergence of the different varieties of mentality must reckon.
—Helen Steward, Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action, University of Leeds; author of A Metaphysics for FreedomThe Radical Enactivist challenge is not going away any time soon. The next phase of this debate in the philosophy and sciences of cognition will be based on the substantial development of the view embodied in this book.
—Paul E. Griffiths, Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney