How can we explain the intelligence of behaviors? Radical enactivists maintain that intelligent behaviors can be explained without involving the attribution of representational contents. In this paper, I challenge this view by providing arguments showing that the intelligence of a behavior is reliant on ways of presenting the relative purpose and the environment in which that behavior is performed. This involves that a behavior is intelligent only if intesional contents are ascribed to the related agent. Importantly, this conclusion also concerns (...) basic behaviors such as those related to the perception of affordances in the environment. Accordingly, either affordance-related behaviors are not instances of intelligent behaviors and can be accounted in a contentless way or affordance-related behaviors are intelligent, but cannot be accounted without involving contents and modes of presentation. (shrink)

Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, the argument against explanatory exclusionism, the (...) case for scientific benefits of representations, and the charge of inconsistent ascription of representational status in EV. I argue that the middleman was never cut in EV, and is controversial to boot, otherwise equal, non-representational explanations have primacy over representational explanations, due to the lack of naturalistic grounds for representations and the unnecessarily ascribed cognitive load to the system. Further, I show that puts the cart before the horse, and the arguments on offer are viciously circular. However, the final objection, lays bare a deeper issue for EV. At the cost of giving up the middle position, however, the explanatory tools already available to EV can be shown to cover the work initially thought to require representation. I conclude that EV is best altered to be a non-representational theory of perception. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In (...) this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified. (shrink)

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.

How could neural processes be associated with phenomenal consciousness? We present a way to answer this question by taking the counterintuitive stance that the sensory feel of an experience is not a thing that happens to us, but a thing we do: a skill we exercise. By additionally noting that sensory systems possess two important, objectively measurable properties, corporality and alerting capacity, we are able to explain why sensory experience possesses a sensory feel, but thinking and other mental processes do (...) not. We are additionally able to explain why different sensory feels differ in the way they do. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

There is now an established literature on the link between later Wittgenstein and enactivist approaches in cognitive science. However, is this link not just a matter for card carrying Wittgensteinians? Can enactivists not manage perfectly well without Wittgenstein? In this paper, I show why some enactivists should care about Wittgenstein. Focusing on the enactivist view, “Sensorimotor Identity”. I argue that proponents of this view can use Wittgensteinian considerations to resolve an issue confronting their view and thereby shore up their proposed (...) dissolution of the explanatory gap. Some enactivists thus have in fact much to gain by engaging with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Many authors have identified a link between later Wittgenstein and enactivism. But few have also recognised how Wittgenstein may in fact challenge enactivist approaches. In this paper, I consider one such challenge. For example, Wittgenstein is well known for his discussion of seeing-as, most famously through his use of Jastrow’s ambiguous duck-rabbit picture. Seen one way, the picture looks like a duck. Seen another way, the picture looks like a rabbit. Drawing on some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about seeing-as, I show (...) how Wittgenstein poses a challenge for proponents of Sensorimotor Enactivism, like O’Regan and Noë, namely to provide a sensorimotor framework within which seeing-as can be explained. I claim that if these proponents want to address this challenge, then they should endorse what I call Sensorimotor Identification, according to which visual experiences can be identified with what agents do. (shrink)

Sensorimotor Theory is the claim that it is our practical know-how of the relations between our environments and us that gives our environmental interactions their experiential qualities. Yet why should such interactions involve or be accompanied by experience? This is the ‘absolute’ gap question. Some proponents of SMT answer this question by arguing that our interactions with an environment involve experience when we cognitively access those interactions. In this paper, I aim to persuade proponents of SMT to accept the following (...) three claims. First, that appeals to cognitive access fail to answer the absolute gap question. Second, that SMT can be read in a way that rejects the gap question. Third, that if proponents of SMT are prepared to read SMT in a way that rejects the absolute gap question, then they can also reject the claim that cognitive access is needed to explain experience. (shrink)

Despite the remarkable progress made in consciousness research during recent decades, there is still no sign of a general agreement about the location of its object. According to internalists, consciousness resides inside the brain. According to externalists, consciousness is partly constituted by elements or aspects of the environment. Internalism comports better with the existence of dreams, hallucinations and sensory imaging. Externalism seems to provide a more promising basis for understanding how we can experience the world and refer to the content (...) of our consciousness. I argue that the framework of structural realism supports internalism and helps to reveal the reasons behind the apparent explanatory success of the externalist approach. More specifically, structural realism supports the view that the structure of our consciousness is always present in our neural processes and only sometimes in an extended system that includes elements of the environment. (shrink)

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 post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the (...) theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its “alerting capacity” and “corporality”, respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by (...) becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism. (shrink)

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference (...) to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory is an influential account of perception and phenomenal qualities that builds, in an empirically supported way, on the basic claim that conscious experience is best construed as an attribute of the whole embodied agent's skill-driven interactions with the environment. This paper, in addition to situating the theory as a response to certain well-known problems of consciousness, develops a sensorimotor account of why we are perceptually conscious rather than not.