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Re-affirming experience, presence, and the world: setting the RECord straight in reply to Noë

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Abstract

This paper responds to Alva Noë’s general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism’s actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë’s own version of Sensorimotor Knowledge Enactivism.

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Notes

  1. If REC really advanced only one, botched argument it would in fact have no argument for its main thesis at all. Given that this is what Noë believes, it explains why he holds that REC’s only tactic is to “merely to insist that experience is content-free and non-representational”, and “merely to react against [the alternative possibility]” (this volume).

  2. In developing our arguments in those chapters we also introduced the notion of a Maximally Minimal Intellectualism which “rejects the intuition that if perception is representational then it must represent in a truth-evaluable way” (Hutto and Myin, 2013, p. 102).

  3. This focus on the whole organism has always been a feature of REC, from the very beginning: “it is important to realise that it is the whole embodied attitude of creature that exhibits intentionality and not some functionally specified ‘mental state’” (Hutto 2006a, p. 18).

  4. REC’s position on ‘doings’ and ‘acting’ is discussed in Chapter 3 of Hutto and Myin (2013) – see pp. 50ff – and more recently in Hutto and Robertson (2020).

  5. Noë’s analysis overlooks the possibility that one might follow Berkeley in taking the phenomenal to be the very substance of world.

  6. Like Bickhard (2007) it is perfectly possible to hold that “Using utterances to generate representations with truth value and that refer are accomplishments of language use, but language is not a directly representational kind of phenomenon” (p. 177). Thus, one can say, “Truth conditions and truth values, for example, are not properties of sentences or utterances, but of what utterances can be used to create. Representational intentionality, then, inheres not in the ‘‘semantics’’ of language but in ‘‘pragmatic’’ consequences and aims of using language.” (p. 179).

  7. He gives the following example: “The human grip on what a book is, the possession of that concept, whatever else we want to say about this, is connected with the way humans use books and with the role that books play in human life. The monkey, by virtue of its different form of life, can have no such experience … Every animal is at home in its own ecological niche; its form of life make it distinctively adapted to the entities proper to that world. So it turns out that our experience is not a merely culturally enriched version of what the (cognate) animal already has” (Noë, this volume).

  8. Noë (2012) makes strong claims in this regard. He compares what is required for experience the-world-as-present to what we do when experiencing a piece of art. He says, “What is true of the experience of the work of art is true of human experience quite generally. The world shows up for us in experience only insofar as we know how to make contact with it, or, to use a different metaphor, only insofar as we are able to bring it into focus. One reason why art is so important to us is that it recapitulates this fundamental fact about our relation to the world around us: the world is blank and flat until we understand it.” (p. 2).

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Hutto, D.D., Myin, E. Re-affirming experience, presence, and the world: setting the RECord straight in reply to Noë. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 971–989 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09775-6

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