Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content

by Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin

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.

Genres: Philosophy

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2017

About the author

Born and raised in New York, I finished my undergraduate degree as a study abroad student in St Andrews, Scotland where my maternal roots lie. I returned to New York to teach fourth grade in the Bronx for a year in order to fund my MPhil in Logic and Metaphysics. I then carried on my doctoral work in York, England. We, my wife and three boys, lived in England for over 20 years. Australia is our new home since I took up the position of Professor of Philosophical Psychology and Head of Philosophy at the University of Wollongong, Australia in 2013. Previously I worked at the University of Hertfordshire since 1993, where I served as Head of Philosophy from 1999 to 2005.

My research is a sustained attempt to understand human nature in a way which respects natural science but which nevertheless rejects the impersonal metaphysics of contemporary naturalism. My recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. I am best known for promoting thoroughly non-representational accounts of enactive and embodied cognition, and for having developed a hypothesis which claims that engaging with narratives, understood as public artefacts, plays a critical role in underpinning distinctively human forms of cognition.

Reaching beyond philosophy, I have often been invited to speak at conferences and expert meetings aimed at anthropologists, clinical psychiatrists/therapists, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.

I am called upon regularly to serve major research bodies worldwide: including the European Research Council (ERC); Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK; and the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), USA. Since migrating to Australia I have joined the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, and served as Chair of its Humanities and Creative Arts Panel.

The following assessment, provided in support of my Readership application, is indicative of my intended style of approach: "He writes with polish, sophistication, direction and insight. Hutto exhibits a marvelous sense of adventure: he tries to tackle difficult problems and enthusiastically defends positions because they strike him as deep and best, not because they are popular or will readily get him published. Yet he publishes with ease." George Graham, August 1999.

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evolving Enactivism covers a lot of ground, from basic perception to autobiographical memory. The basic thesis is that all these cognitive activities are "contentless", or free of representations (which are defined as mental models of the environment that have veridicality conditions). Hutto's approach is to summarize claims made by cognitive scientists and philosophers on relevant issues and criticize these claims. This approach is useful, in a number of ways. Readers can access a variety of references, discover what topics within embodied cognition interests them most, and easily branch off into these directions through Hutto's references. Also, readers can get a better sense of the fields overall and a more nuanced understanding of each argument, since they are in meaningful juxtaposition to each other.

However, there are problems to Hutto's approach as well. Because he covers so many topics within this one book, his criticisms of opposing arguments are sometimes hurried and unconvincing. In the end, he has very few points that challenge traditional representational views on cognition. He repeats these points over and over again throughout the chapters, in different phrasings. He doesn't examine the possible counterarguments to his own arguments and supports them often using general claims (he rarely uses detailed empirical evidence).

Furthermore, he doesn't even go into theories in the extended mind literature to support his claims, until the epilogue (and there, he reviews these theories only briefly). I believe theories in the extended mind, including Gibson's ecological affordances and Noë's sensorimotor contingency theory, offer great conceptual resources that Hutto could've drawn upon to support his thesis. In the end, by merely sticking to his few points when responding to the various challenges to radical embodied cognition, he make it seem that this non-traditional view differs merely semantically from the traditional representationalist view. On my reading, it seems Hutto's version of embodied cognition is similar to representationalism, and even identical to it when concerning "offline" cognitive activities (e.g. imagination and memory). The only difference Hutto maintains on these latter issues is that his version of embodied cognition eschews the veridicality conditions that representationalist views maintain.

If readers are interested in Hutto's book and the fields of embodied cognition and enactivism, I would instead point them to Chemero's "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science" (2009) and Rowlands' "The New Science of the Mind: from Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology" (2010). These two books present positive theories for embodied cognition that substantively differ from those in traditional representationalism. These two books do not shy away from philosophical detail and empirical studies. They give convincing accounts on how embodied cognition can explain information processing (and thereby perception and other cognitive activities) in a non-representationalist way, which is something I think Hutto fails to do.

The one point I appreciate that Hutto makes, and which other books on embodied cognition that I've read do not, is that non-representationalism in cognition entails that cognitive activities (e.g. perception, imagination, and memory) do not have an objective teleology. Traditional representationalist accounts assume that these cognitive activities have the inherent function to be accurate to "external reality." In my metaphysical view, there is no determinate, objective reality, so this lack of objective teleology sounds true to me. It is pleasing existentially that we have freedom to choose our own ends, and our cognitive abilities are there to aid in pursuing them.

[Larry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jargony footnotes to the 2013 book. just because content appears to be indeterminate when colored by language doesn’t mean that it really is

[Tim Murkens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written, full of enthusiasm and a lot of promises, but loosely argued with not much follow through. The real arguments are few and far between, with only a handful of new examples to support Hutto and Myin's case. If you're not already on the enactivist bandwagon, you probably won't join yet. H&M seem to have lost their faith in content-free cognition, leaving the project a bit uncertain. REC makes for good slogans, though.