¹ For book-length examples, see: Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Gallagher, S., How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wheeler, M., Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Thompson, E., Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D., The Phenomenological Mind: an Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar; and Rowlands, M., The New Science of the Mind: from Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is not an exhaustive list.

² See e.g. Dreyfus, H.L., What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1972)Google Scholar; Dreyfus, H.L., Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, chapter 6)Google Scholar; Dreyfus, H.L., What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

³ For this view of AI, see e.g. Boden, M.A., Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, chapter 4)Google Scholar.

⁴ For evidence and discussion of this response, see Boden, Mind As Machine, 838–49.

⁵ Rupert, R., Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World.

⁷ McDowell, John, ‘The Content of Perceptual Experience’, The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994), 190–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Rupert, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, 157.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Heidegger, M., Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962 [1927])Google Scholar.

¹¹ See e.g. Dreyfus, Herbert L., ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’, in Husbands, P., Holland, O. and Wheeler, M. (eds.), The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 331–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Kiverstein, J. and Wheeler, M. (eds.), Heidegger and Cognitive Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), 62–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A shortened version appears under the same title in Philosophical Psychology, 20 (2007), 247–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another version appears in Artificial Intelligence, 171 (2007), 1137–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Heidegger, Being and Time, 96.

¹³ Some philosophers will want to complain that I have omitted a crucial element of naturalism, namely a commitment to some form of physicalism; for a characterization of naturalism that explicitly includes such a commitment, see e.g. Sterelny, K., The Representational Theory of Mind (Oxford and Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar. My own current view (which represents a shift since Wheeler 2005) is that this extra requirement is either unnecessary (since some form of physicalism will be assumed by science, which, on continuity grounds, means that a commitment to whatever form of physicalism that is will become a constraint on philosophical theorizing) or wrong (since science will embrace the existence and the causal-explanatory powers of non-physical stuff, which means that continuity with science will not require a philosophical commitment to physicalism).

¹⁴ Ratcliffe, Matthew, ‘There can be no Cognitive Science of Dasein’, in Kiverstein and Wheeler, Heidegger and Cognitive Science, 135–56Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Although this is the kernel of Ratcliffe's argument, I have suppressed some potentially important details. For a fuller discussion, see Wheeler, Michael, ‘Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies’, in Kiverstein and Wheeler, Heidegger and Cognitive Science, 176–212Google Scholar.

¹⁶ McDowell, ‘The Content of Perceptual Experience’.

¹⁷ McDowell, John, ‘Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind’, in De Caro, M. and Macarthur, D. (eds.), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 104Google Scholar.

¹⁸ McDowell, The Content of Perceptual Experience', 197.

¹⁹ Rietveld, Erik, ‘Context-Switching and Responsiveness to Real Relevance’, in Kiverstein, J. and Wheeler, M., Heidegger and Cognitive Science, 105–34Google Scholar.

²⁰ The term ‘affordance’ is famously due to J.J. Gibson. See, e.g. Gibson, J.J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1979)Google Scholar.

²¹ Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, C. (London and New York: Routledge, 1962 [1945])Google Scholar.

²² For this point, see e.g. Dreyfus, ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’, 340.

²³ Gallagher, Shaun, ‘Are Minimal Representations still Representations?’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16 (2008), 351–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, special issue on ‘Situated Cognition: Perspectives from Phenomenology and Science’, M. Ratcliffe and S. Gallagher (eds.).

²⁴ Dreyfus, ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’, 345–6.

²⁵ Taylor, Charles, ‘Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger’, in Guignon, C. B. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 325Google Scholar.

²⁶ Dreyfus, ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’.

²⁷ Here I do not have the space to discuss in detail the arguments that might carry us from ‘vast and holistic’ to ‘indeterminate’ and, ultimately, to ‘unrepresentable’. For present purposes it is enough to register (i) the general thought, which is surely plausible enough, that massive holism and indeterminacy are obstacles to representation, (ii) the fact that phenomenologists, especially those of a Heideggerian persuasion, often adopt a nonrepresentational constitutive account of human sense-making on precisely those grounds, and (iii) the fact that, as we shall see, a nonrepresentational constitutive account of sense-making has, in some quarters, placed a constraint on the cognitive-scientific account of the enabling mechanisms underlying relevance-sensitivity. That said, it is worth noting that the central considerations in the frame here are Heidegger's account of everyday contexts as massively holistic networks of meanings, coupled with his admittedly sketchy treatment of what he calls value-predicates; Heidegger, Being and Time, 97, 132. For discussion, see e.g. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, chapter 6; Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, chapter 7.

²⁸ For a more careful justification of this appeal to structural isomorphisms, see Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, 225–36.

²⁹ See e.g. Freeman, W., How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Dreyfus, ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’, 360.

³¹ This particular idea is developed and defended in more detail in Cappuccio, Massimiliano and Wheeler, Michael, ‘Ground-Level Intelligence: Action-Oriented Representation and the Dynamics of the Background’, in Radman, Z. (ed.), Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition, and the Phenomenon of the Background (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), 13–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For additional considerations regarding the causal basis of relevance-sensitivity, which explain why a key contribution will additionally be made by a kind of intrinsic context-embeddedness that is realized by non-Dreyfusian mechanisms of special-purpose adaptive coupling, see Wheeler, ‘Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies’.

³² Sutton, John, ‘Batting, Habit, and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill’, Sport in Society 10 (2007), 763–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation from page 775. Sutton's example may be opaque to those readers who have not been initiated into the wonders of the incomparable sport of cricket. The key point of the example is that the batsman in question, Strauss, increased his scoring possibilities by expertly using his pre-shot bodily positioning and posture to alter the kind of shot that would be solicited from him by a certain sort of ball, as bowled by Gillespie.

³³ As immortalized in the 2010 movie The King's Speech. For further discussion, see Cappuccio and Wheeler, ‘Ground-Level Intelligence’.

³⁴ Heidegger, Being and Time, 102–7.

³⁵ See, most famously, Rodney Allen Brooks, ‘Intelligence Without Representation’, Artificial Intelligence 47: 1–3 (1991), 139–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Intelligence Without Reason’, in Proceedings of 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (San Mateo, California: Morgan Kauffman, 1991, 569–95). Both of these seminal papers in situated robotics are reprinted in Brooks' Cambrian Intelligence: the Early History of the New AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)Google Scholar.

³⁶ In arriving at his enabling-level idea that the world is its own best model, it is possible that Brooks may even have been influenced, perhaps indirectly, by Dreyfus's phenomenological claim that ‘The meaningful objects […] among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the world itself’; Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do, 265–6. For a description of the historical context that makes this a genuine possibility, see Dreyfus, ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require Making it more Heideggerian’, 331–7.

³⁷ See e.g. Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, 196–8.

³⁸ Franceschini, N., Pichon, J.M. and Blanes, C., ‘From Insect Vision to Robot Vision’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, series B 337 (1992), 283–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ See e.g. Clark, A., Being There: Putting Brain, Body, And World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Wheeler Reconstructing The Cognitive World.

⁴⁰ In previous treatments (e.g. Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, ‘Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies’.) I have presented the discovery of constitutive-level representations with an action-oriented profile as hailing largely from a creative phenomenological unpacking of Heidegger's notion of un-readiness-to-hand. These treatments were incomplete in that they were insufficiently sensitive to the extent to which this is a case of the science driving the philosophy.

⁴¹ Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 10.

⁴² Preester, Helena De, ‘From Ego to Alter Ego: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and a Layered Approach to Intersubjectivity’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), 133–142CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Somewhat mysteriously, the distinction between reducing a phenomenon and eliminating that phenomenon is not always respected in philosophy. Nevertheless, that distinction is a crucial weapon in, for example, the arguments for eliminative materialism about the propositional attitudes, as developed by Paul Churchland. As he puts it, ‘folk psychology is a radically inadequate account of our internal activities, too confused and too defective to win survival through intertheoretic reduction’ (my emphasis); see Churchland, Paul, ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’, The Journal of Philosophy, 78 (1981), 67–90Google Scholar, quotation from page 72.

⁴⁴ Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, 4–5.

⁴⁵ My claim that we should unpack naturalism not in terms of reduction, but in terms of the general conditions under which philosophy should concede its ground, bears an affinity with Huw Price's formulation of what he calls ‘subject naturalism’ as being the view that “[s]cience tells us that we humans are natural creatures, and if the claims and ambitions of philosophy conflict with this view, then philosophy needs to give way”; Huw Price, ‘Naturalism without Representationalism’, in D. Macarthur and M. de Caro, Naturalism in Question, quotation from page 4. This is not to say that my minimal naturalism is equivalent to Price's subject naturalism; it is not.

⁴⁶ This parenthetical remark regarding the very idea of a final science signals a hesitancy which will become important later, when we revisit the understanding of science required by minimal naturalism.

⁴⁷ Heidegger, Being and Time.

⁴⁸ Heidegger's full account of temporality is much more complicated than my necessarily brief treatment here will suggest. For my own more detailed interpretation, see Wheeler, M., ‘Martin Heidegger’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2011, Zalta, E.N. (ed.)Google Scholarhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/.

⁴⁹ Fabrega, Horacio and Nutini, Hugo, ‘Witchcraft-Explained Childhood Tragedies in Tlaxcala, and their Medical Sequelae’, Social Science and Medicine 36 (1993), 793–805CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁰ Many thanks to Peter Sullivan (in discussion) for raising this objection.

⁵¹ Chakravartty, A., ‘Scientific Realism’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2011, Zalta, E.N. (ed.)Google Scholarhttp://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/scientific-realism).

⁵² Wheeler, Reconstructing The Cognitive World, 137–8, 152–7; ‘Martin Heidegger’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, section 2.4.

⁵³ Heidegger, M., Basic Problems of Phenomenology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 203Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ An example of such a dimension would be the long-standing sexist distinction in biology between the sperm cell as an active heroic force that burrows through the egg coat to penetrate the egg and activate the developmental program, and the egg cell as passive matter transported along the fallopian tube until it is assaulted and fertilized by the sperm. This distinction was duly elaborated over many years by experimental work in biology before the egg was finally granted its own active contribution. See Martin, Emily, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’, Signs, 9 (1991), 485–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keller, Evelyn Fox, ‘Gender and Science’, in Hull, D.L. and Ruse, M. (eds.), The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 398–413Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Many thanks to James Williams for discussion of this issue. The position sketched at this point in the main text is supposed to be duly sensitive to Williams' Deleuzian claim that the realm of the transcendental must remain a space in which critique may happen, rather than simply ‘part of a vast and gradually filled in account of reality’. See, Williams, James, ‘Science and Dialectics in the Philosophies of Deleuze, Bachelard and DeLanda’, Paragraph: a Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 29 (2006), 98–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation from page 103. I strongly suspect that Williams will judge that I am not being sensitive enough.

⁵⁷ Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962/1970, second edition, with postscript)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 261–2.

⁵⁹ T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 160ff.

⁶⁰ Some sections of this paper include passages of text adapted from: Cappuccio and Wheeler, ‘Ground-Level Intelligence’; Wheeler, ‘Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies’. For useful critical discussion of the ideas presented here, many thanks to James Williams, and to audiences at Bochum, Bristol, Copenhagen, Hull, Lyon and Stirling. Thanks also to Havi Carel for valuable editorial feedback.