Abstract
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.
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Notes
To be fair, there is a passage in Hutto and Myin (2017, p. 9), which is ambiguous, and can be read as committing REC to the view that all perception is basic. There, it is stated that:
“Still it [sensorimotor enactivism] too (…) maintains representationalism about the character of even the most basic kinds of cognition, such as perception.”
Though this passage can possibly be read in an “all perception is basic” way, it is also open to the interpretation that only some forms of perception are basic. Given the fact that so much of Hutto and Myin (2017, pp. 8–9) is conspicuously aimed at elaborating the idea that capacities such as perception can occur in basic and content-involving ways, it should be clear enough which reading is the correct one.
Note that this implies that an instance of basic cognition that becomes content-involving because of its embedding in a content-involving context, is not fully transformed by that embedding. There is no “trickling down” of content from the context to the episode so that the episode, when taken out of this context has itself changed its nature. For more on this, see Hutto and Myin (2017, pp. 90–92).
This does not mean all human affordance perception after truth telling practices have been established is content-involving.
Myin (2016) provides some reasons for why any genuinely explanatory notion of affordance needs to refer to such previous acquaintance/motor expertise.
As an aside, note that such selectionist story can apply to situations in which a neural process X specific for wordly condition Y, occurs without that the wordly condition is currently sensed. A neural process specific for that situation could be active, for example, on the basis of a history of interactions in which the currently un-sensed situation was reliably correlated with a currently sensed situation. If this process iterates, currently active neural processes could be specific for quite distant worldy situations. Or, differently said, there can be targeted sensitivity for what’s “absent” (in the sense of not currently sensed), without any specification of what’s absent in the content-involving sense. Contentless cognition, therefore, can exhibit sensitivity to what’s not currently sensed, and needn’t be thought of on a simple stimulus-response model.
Zipoli Caiani situates his case against REC in a contrast between the “extensional” analysis versus “intensional” analyses (see Zipoli Caiani 2018, Sect. 3). His characterization of “extensional analyses” is seriously incomplete however, in omitting any diachronic dimension—something prominently present in Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017).
Hutto and Myin (2017, p. 91) are quite clear on this: “Although superficially, talk of basic and nonbasic, contentful minds may suggest it, REC denies that there are really two distinct and separate kinds of minds in operation here. By REC’s lights cognition is always dynamic [and] interactive (…) but in some cases cognitive interactions are also content-involving. Even when cognition involves content and inferential processes the ultimate character of cognition remains enactive and dynamic. In other words, cognition can be content-involving without becoming content-based.” (emphasis added).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks for comments on previous versions go to Victor Loughlin, Ludger van Dijk and Farid Zahnoun, as well as to the anonymous referees for this paper. My research on the issues discussed in this paper is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders, Project G049619N, “Facing the Interface”.
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Myin, E. On the importance of correctly locating content: why and how REC can afford affordance perception. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 25–39 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02607-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02607-1