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Neo-pragmatic intentionality and enactive perception: a compromise between extended and enactive minds

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Abstract

The general idea of enactive perception is that actual and potential embodied activities determine perceptual experience. Some extended mind theorists, such as Andy Clark, refute this claim despite their general emphasis on the importance of the body. I propose a compromise to this opposition. The extended mind thesis is allegedly a consequence of our commonsense understanding of the mind. Furthermore, extended mind theorists assume the existence of non-human minds. I explore the precise nature of the commonsense understanding of the mind, which accepts both extended minds and non-human minds. In the area of philosophy of mind, there are two theories of intentionality based on such commonsense understandings: neo-behaviorism defended, e.g., by Daniel Dennett, and neo-pragmatism advocated, e.g., by Robert Brandom. Neither account is in full agreement with how people ordinarily use their commonsense understanding. Neo-pragmatism, however, can overcome its problem—its inability to explain why people routinely find intentionality in non-humans—by incorporating the phenomenological suggestion that interactional bodily skills determine how we perceive others’ intentionality. I call this integrative position embodied neo-pragmatism. I conclude that the extended view of the mind makes sense, without denying the existence of non-human minds, only by assuming embodied neo-pragmatism and hence the general idea of enactive perception.

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Notes

  1. However, see the articles collected in the special issue of Topoi (2009, vol. 28 issue 1) about the relation between the extended and the enactive views of the mind.

  2. This is not to say that Clark is totally dismissive of phenomenology. He sometimes refers to phenomenological descriptions, e.g., of the transparency of equipment and the body, in support of his claim of the extended cognition. His insistence is on stepping outside the phenomenological arena in deciding the relevance of the bodily skills to the constitution of perceptual experience, but not more than that.

  3. See Adams and Aizawa (2001, 60–62) for a similar criticism of the idea of extended cognition.

  4. The idea is sometimes called “conceptual functionalism” (Block 1980) as well. I avoid this terminology since I doubt that what matters for commonsense functionalism is only the conceptual understanding of the mind—a form of understanding that can be used in judgments and reasoning. Some part of our understanding, I think, is exploitable only in practical interactions but not in intellectual thoughts. For the same reason, I prefer the phrase “commonsense understanding of the mind” instead of “commonsense concept of the mind”.

  5. The argument above draws heavily on Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (2006). See chapter 5 of the book for further arguments and references. Here I will not address this debate any further since it is not directly relevant to the following argument.

  6. Some commonsense functionalists do endorse this view (e.g., Lewis 1972). See Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (2006 chap. 3) to see why commonsense functionalists had better appeal to implicit and tacit understandings revealed not only in our use of mental state terms but also in our daily practical interactions with the environment.

  7. Haugeland (1990) also discusses another position called neo-Cartesianism. Neo-Cartesians, according to Haugeland, argue that intentionality is originally attributable only to brain processes. I will not discuss this position since my aim is to clarify the nature of the commonsense understanding of intentionality and the mind presupposed by the extended mind thesis; neo-Cartesianism is obviously in conflict with this thesis.

  8. Furthermore, this suggests that neo-behaviorism cannot explain how anything can have intentionality at all. On pain of infinite regress, this position needs to explain how anything can have the intention to explain and predict another creature’s behaviors without appealing to any other intentional stance. Neo-behaviorism could not satisfy this requirement without being self-contradictory since it clearly goes against their thesis that a creature is intentional only in relation to another intention to explain and predict its behaviors. Adams and Aizawa (2001) develop this line of criticism of the extended mind thesis (49). This criticism, however, is effective only insofar as the extended mind thesis relies on the neo-behaviorist conception of intentionality.

  9. Later, Haugeland doubts that neo-pragmatism is attributable to Heidegger (see Haugeland 1990, 170, note 37).

  10. Haugeland’s (1990) version of neo-pragmatism may not require the linguistic character of the social norms constitutive of intentionality. To be sure he argues: “the instituted intentionality of public symbols is original intentionality” (156, emphasis in original). However, it is unclear whether he means by “public symbols” language in particular. He also says: “instituted relations among public paraphernalia are the third-base [i.e., neo-pragmatic] archetype of intentionality” (152–153). And also: “The extant normative order in the communal pattern …… is the fountainhead of intentionality, public and private” (156). These latter quotes suggest that he does not think that the social norms determinant of intentional states are necessarily linguistic. In other places, his commitment to the possibility of non-linguistic social norms is more explicit (Haugeland 1996; 1998a). Important for the purpose of the following argument, however, he seems to deny that such social norms are sharable between human and non-human animals. Hence, in line with other neo-pragmatists, he does not count non-human animals as having original intentionality as such (Haugeland 1994).

  11. Other intentional states are defined in such terms as well. Desires, for example, are defined as discursive commitments to a pattern of material practical inferences (Brandom 2000 chap. 2).

  12. This is not to claim that we always make an explicit inference to the conclusion that a creature is similar enough to a person to be regarded as an intentional patient. The understanding concerning the similarity between the movements, neo-pragmatists would say, is implicitly drawn on in the interaction with the creature. Thus, one cannot argue against Cash’s proposal based on simple phenomenological evidence that we do not interact with non-human animals by making explicit inferences. However, it is true that this proposal is obscure about how precisely we identify and use the similarity in question in our daily encounter with non-human animals (Gallagher and Miyahara 2011).

  13. Neo-pragmatists might argue that what is similar is the manner of acting taken on a more abstract scale. Even if the specific movements of the cockroach are not similar to those made by a person, they might say, their general pattern is very much like the pattern of the movements generated by a person trying to escape. Then, however, they need to clarify why we do not take everything as having intentionality. For if we are allowed to abstract away the particularities of the movement, then any moving object could be taken as being similar to a person. I see no other answer to this question than saying that a creature, to whom the notion of intentionality is applicable, and a person are similar to each other primarily in terms of their respective intentionality. Then, however, contrary to Cash’s proposal, the similarity of their movements is based on the original “ascription” of intentionality rather than the opposite. The question is to clarify precisely what this original “ascription” is and how it is possible. In fact, this is another way of viewing the question I am going to pursue in the following sections.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. I appreciate the feedback offered to the earlier versions of this article by Dr. Shaun Gallagher and Dr. Mason Cash from the University of Central Florida.

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Correspondence to Katsunori Miyahara.

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Miyahara, K. Neo-pragmatic intentionality and enactive perception: a compromise between extended and enactive minds. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 499–519 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9212-4

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