Invited Talks
Handling the hard problem of content with kinky cognition
Daniel Hutto
Autopoietic theory, enactivism, and the cognitive status of living beings
Mario Villa-Lobos
Enactivism and autopoietic theory (AT) share a set of core assumptions with respect to living beings and cognition. There is, however, a crucial but usually overlooked difference between their respective views. Enactivism assumes that there is a natural mark of the cognitive, and associates said mark with some exclusively biological properties. AT, on the contrary, claims that there is no such thing as a natural mark of the cognitive, and does not see living beings as intrinsically cognitive systems. That is, whereas enactivism tends to see cognitive systems as constituting a natural kind, AT sees them as constituting a conventional kind. In this presentation, I examine the philosophical ground of AT's conventionalist stance and its significance for cognitive science.
Perceiving without, and with, content
Erik Myin
According to REC, or Radical Embodied or Enactive Cognition, basic forms of perception are intentional but do not involve content, neither of the conceptual nor of the nonconceptual variety. In this talk I will present the position and show how it is able to withstand some of the most commonly made objections to it. I will argue that aspectual perception is possible without invoking content, as is making sense of the connection between basic perception and judgment. I will also address some empirically inspired objections. That is, I will show that the account can deal with both inter- and intra-modal interactions in perception, as well as with cases of so called cognitive penetration, or the absence of it where it would be expected (as in some illusions). To answer these empirical challenges one should move from a synchronic to a diachronic perspective, so I will argue.
Varieties of Enactivism and the Continuity Challenge
Glenda Satne
Enactivism comes in many forms. In all its flavours Enactivism commits to the idea that cognition is a form of enaction, a sort of interactional engagement with the world that involves agents that are embodied and embedded in such surroundings. Enactivism in all of its different forms also rejects the idea that cognition should (always) involve representing objects and facts. Despite these common core claims, there are several important differences between such enactivist positions. In this talk, I am interested in exploring what has been labelled the “continuity problem” (Menary 2015, Clowes and Mendonça 2015) affecting Radical Enactivism, which denies that cognition must always and everywhere involve content but concedes that sometimes cognition is content-involving. Such a form of Enactivism is described as committing to a “saltationist view” that is incompatible with evolutionary continuity between human specific forms of cognition and those of other animals. In discussing such challenge, I distinguish three different issues associated with continuity: (i) evolutionary continuity, (ii) philosophical continuity and (iii) psychological continuity and discuss the motivations that each of these provide for thinking that human specific forms of cognition are continuous with non-human ones as matter of necessity.
Getting Clear about “Thinking”:Wittgenstein on mind, content, representation, and other metaphysical concepts
Marcelo Carvalho
Enactivism has as its counterpart the refusal of representational theories of mind. It describes itself as part of an anti-representational turn. Conceptions of the relationship between mind and representations, by its turn, are intrinsically woven in the debate about semantics (about the “relationship” between objects, representations, and meaning). Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy is part of this semantical debate. It vigorously contraposes the supposition that meaning is in any sense related to representations in mind (or to any other kind of “object”). The description of language that we find in it is entirely situated in the context of our actions and practices. There is no place in Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy for representations or reference (and, as a consequence, there is no room for supposing that language relates, in any sense, to an ontology). The Philosophical Investigations are quite concerned with showing that there is no reference or representation also in our use of psychological and perceptual concepts. As a result, it may be directly related to the debate about mind and representation. It may be reconstructed as a logical defense of a quasi-Enactivism, as a conception about the meaning of our sensorial and psychological concepts according to which they are meaningful only because they are part of living beings’ practices in particular contexts. However, Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy does not, and could not, present a true defense of Enactivism. All it cares is with getting “clear about the meaning of the word ‘think’”, and to do that, we need only “watch ourselves thinking; what we observe will be what the word means!” Language does not demand representations in mind.
