Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content

Radicalizing Enactivism

Basic Minds without Content

Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hutto, Daniel D.

Radicalizing enactivism : basic minds without content / Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01854-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-0-262-31216-5

1. Cognition—Philosophy. 2. Philosophy and cognitive science. 3. Philosophy of mind. 4. Cognitive science. 5. Content (Psychology) I. Myin, Erik. II. Title.

BF311.H89 2013

128'.2—dc23

2012016253

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

for our wives, Farah and Inez, and our children, the three Hutto boys and the three Myin girls

ad augusta per angusta

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1 Enactivism: The Radical Line

2 Enactivisms Less Radical

3 The Reach of REC

4 The Hard Problem of Content

5 CIC’s Retreat

6 CIC’s Last Stand

7 Extensive Minds

8 Regaining Consciousness

References

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 6.1 A version of the Müller-Lyer illusion

Preface

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations.

—Aldous Huxley

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

—Thomas Henry Huxley

Catching a swirling leaf, finding one's way through unfamiliar terrain, attending and keeping track of another's gaze, watching the sun rising at the horizon—the vast sea of what humans do and experience is best understood by appealing to dynamically unfolding, situated embodied interactions and engagements with worldly offerings.

Where we find such familiar activity we find basic minds. But, we propose, the nature of the mentality in question is not underwritten by processes involving the manipulation of contents, nor is it, in itself, inherently contentful. Basic minds do not represent conditions that the world might be in. To think otherwise, as many do, is to ascribe features and characteristics to basic minds that belong only to enculturated, scaffolded minds that are built atop them.

Just what is content? At its simplest, there is content wherever there are specified conditions of satisfaction. And there is true or accurate content wherever the conditions specified are, in fact, instantiated.

For many, it is definitional that minds—of any sort at all, including basic minds—entail the existence of content. Content, some hold, is necessitated by any intelligent interaction with the world. They take it that the best explanation of even the most basic kinds of cognition requires positing contents that are acquired and transformed in order to create representations that then inform and guide what an organism does or experiences. As we use the term, basic cognition means something narrower than basic mentality. It denotes mental activity that exhibits intentional directedness, but it doesn't necessarily imply phenomenality. Basic mentality denotes mentality that may exhibit both intentional directedness and phenomenality.

It may be believed that wherever there is intentionally directed cognition there must be content in the sense defined above. To think this is to endorse an ambitious version of CIC, the thesis that Cognition necessarily Involves Content. More modestly, it may be believed that wherever there is at least perceptual experience there must be content. This would be to endorse a less ambitious version of CIC.

This book challenges the popular and deeply rooted intuition that at least one or other of these versions of CIC is true. We advance the fortunes of the counter-thesis: that there can be intentionally directed cognition and, even, perceptual experience without content. We maintain that this thesis may be true, and we try to make the reader believe it too. Not only is it not ruled out a priori; on close inspection, we find no compelling reasons to doubt its truth. Quite the opposite. As philosophers, we are in the business of promoting possibilities. We will have succeeded if, having reached the end of the book, the reader is convinced that the idea of contentless basic minds cannot be cursorily dismissed; that it is a live option that deserves to be taken much more seriously than it is currently.

Our game plan is to achieve this by radicalizing enactivism. Radicalizing enactivism?! Surely, enactivism is already quite radical enough! Enactivism, after all, gives explanatory pride of place to dynamic interactions between organisms and features of their environments over the contentful representation of such environmental features.

Many present-day philosophers and cognitive scientists acknowledge the importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds. Yet despite being daring and groundbreaking in many respects, most existing enactive and embodied proposals about cognition are advanced in theoretically modest forms, often retaining some residual commitment to CIC. This commitment usually takes the form of holding fast to the view that basic minds are contentful but allowing that the vehicles that bear such contents—those at the coal face of cognitive processing—might be extra-neural, stretching into the wider body or the environment, at least in some instances. This is to endorse a form of Conservative Enactive or Embodied Cognition (abbreviated CEC).

By our lights, CEC doesn't go nearly far enough for its own good. In chapter 2 we will explain why, focusing on a prominent example. In a nutshell, it is only by completely rejecting CIC about basic minds that enactivism gains the resources for justifiably silencing its critics. If we are right, radicalizing enactivism is necessary if enactivism is to provide a stable, defensible, and strategically tenable framework for thinking about basic minds. This requires nothing short of a thoroughgoing and wholehearted rejection of CIC. Since certain prominent variants of enactivism harbor conservative tendencies and thus fail to break with tradition in the required way, it is necessary to press for a radicalized enactivism—that is, for Radical Enactive (or Embodied) Cognition (REC), which denies that basic minds are contentful.

Isn't this just riding the crest of a fashionable wave? It is certainly true that the widespread acceptance of embodied and enactive approaches in the cognitive sciences has anteceded a clear articulation and philosophical defense of such approaches—one that would motivate rational acceptance of their framework commitments. A convincing justification for believing in such approaches has lagged behind their general endorsement by the cognitive science community. This raises the worry that the whole enactive and embodied turn in cognitive science is backed by little or nothing more than an unreasoned attachment to certain attractive but ultimately empty pictures and slogans. For this reason, Prinz is right to proclaim that—at least in one sense—enactive and embodied approaches may be easier to sell than to prove (2009, p. 419).

We aim to supply the philosophical clarifications and strong support that have been sorely missing. In view of this ambition, we recognize that, in another sense, Prinz is quite wrong about REC's being an easy sell. Even when REC is backed by solid philosophical arguments that favor it, we don't expect that it will be attractive to many analytic philosophers. As things stand, there is great resistance even to the mere suggestion that the prominent forms of basic mentality of the sort that we discuss (which include human visual experience) might lack content. To many this is counterintuitive and plainly false.

We think REC has a better chance of being true than its CIC or CEC rivals. But we have to work hard to show this. We are well aware that some readers will be tempted to dismiss the view we favor as a non-starter. Worse, some will regard it as simply inconceivable. Thus, we concentrate our efforts on ensuring that REC gets a fair hearing. This is best done by testing its mettle against the best proposals of those who represent avant-garde thinking in the philosophy of cognitive science. In order of appearance, we critically review how it fares in comparison with claims made by Noë, Thompson, Clark, Wheeler, Dretske, Millikan, Gauker, Burge, Chalmers, McDowell, Menary, and Block.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for this labor, describing the revolutionary atmosphere of today's cognitive science, clarifying the pivotal theses on which REC leans, and introducing the main players—traditional CIC, newly articulated CEC, and REC—in more detail. Rather than trying to argue for REC straightaway, it prepares readers for that task, asking them to flex their imaginative muscles by first picturing how things would have to look if REC were true—and, by comparison, where REC lives in conceptual space.

Chapters 3–6 make a two-phase argument for REC. These chapters upset several bedrock assumptions about the nature of basic minds—assumptions that many regard to be, if not utterly beyond question, at least wholly secure and needing little attention.

Chapter 3 overturns the CIC applecart by examining familiar reasons for thinking that we can go at least part of the way toward explaining basic cognition without having to call on the notion of content at all. For example, the well-known successes in building flexible, behavior-based robots and understanding the environment-involving cognitive antics of certain insects appear to have progressed precisely because CIC thinking was rejected. Appealing to these developments, we argue that there is every reason to think the same approach will work when it comes to explaining many sophisticated human doings too—especially those associated with manual activities such as reaching and grasping. If this is right, it is possible that cognitive science may go much further than is typically supposed without CIC; potentially REC has real reach. This overcomes a familiar worry that REC, even if it is true in some domains, has a very limited scope.

Three main options present themselves to defenders of CIC at this point. Option A: These aren't cases involving bona fide cognition. The activities in question are too simple and directly coupled to the environment to require genuine cognitive explanation. This looks like mere post hoc, ad hoc stipulation. Option B: These are cases of bona fide cognition. REC is true of them. But cognition of this kind is extraordinarily limited. It won't scale up greatly, and hence it poses no interesting challenge to CIC's larger ambitions. Option C: These are cases of bona fide cognition. But they imply CIC—although the most promising CIC proposal about such cases comes in the form of CEC. Ergo, REC is false across the board.

Obviously, option C is the strongest, least concessionary move for fans of CIC to make. In considering whether such cognition really involves content, we describe the features of the most credible CEC challenge to REC, one that invokes action-oriented representations. In answer to this challenge, chapter 4 ups the ante and goes beyond the arguments provided in chapter 3 that were designed only to establish that we don't need CIC to explain many forms of basic cognitive activity. It argues that we simply can't have CIC accounts in this domain—even in the form of CEC—without surrendering explanatory naturalism.

All CIC accounts of basic cognition face a crippling problem: they are unable to account for the origins of content in the world if they are forced to use nothing but the standard naturalist resources of informational covariance, even if these are augmented by devices that have the biological function of responding to such information.

Defenders of CIC must face up to the Hard Problem of Content: that positing informational content is incompatible with explanatory naturalism. The root trouble is that Covariance doesn't Constitute Content. If covariance is the only scientifically respectable notion of information that can do the work required by explanatory naturalists, it follows that informational content doesn't exist in nature—or at least that it doesn't exist independently from and prior to the existence of certain social practices. If informational content doesn't exist in nature, then cognitive systems don't literally traffic in informational content, as CIC and CEC stories assume they do. This is so a fortiori if there is no naturally occurring informational content in the world.

The Hard Problem of Content presents proponents of CIC with a dilemma, and with the customary three possible moves. First, they might try to avoid the dilemma's horns by demonstrating that Covariance does Constitute Content, by showing that what they propose is already consistent with explanatory naturalism after all, or by finding another naturalistic candidate to explain informational content. We examine these possibilities but regard them to be forlorn. Second, they can opt to be impaled on the first horn: to posit informational content but reject explanatory naturalism. This might take the form of assuming that facts (including correspondences between facts) entail truth-bearing contents. This might work if contents were identical with their own truth conditions—that is, if they somehow both specified and realized their conditions of satisfaction in absence of thinkers. Accordingly, informational contents might be primitive, unexplained features of reality itself. However, there is a price, since it is not obvious that this proposal is compatible with physicalism. Still, it might be compatible with some kind of unexplanatory naturalism. For example, informational content might be an irreducible property of fundamental reality, having status similar to that of qualia in Chalmers’ system. Third, they can opt to be impaled on the second horn. This looks less painful. It requires accepting that covariance doesn't entail or constitute content—i.e., that it lacks inherent, truth-bearing properties. But it also requires accepting that the only scientifically respectable notion of information in play—the only one that can do the work required by naturalists—is the notion of information as covariance. However, if this is accepted it follows that sensitivity to covariances is not sensitivity to informational content.

Adopting this third option assumes that basic cognition boils down to systems engaging in informationally sensitive interactions with environmental offerings. This involves being sensitive to covariant information, but it doesn't involve picking up and processing informational contents. Cognitive systems don't pick up or take in any informational contents; there are no such things as informational contents to take in. Such imagined contents are not objective commodities, and cognitive systems do not traffic in them in the ways CIC and CEC require.

At this point, the best and most strategically secure move that friends of CIC can make is to cut their losses by surrendering the idea that content is needed in order to explain the kinds of engaged activity that have been the focus of attention up to this point. Their retreat might take the form either of a concession to REC or of a revival of the Option A strategy (that of denying that the activity in question implies bona fide cognition). Either way, CICers of this persuasion insist that content comes into play only when there are quite distinctive mental phenomena to be accounted for. With this in mind, it turns out that there are good reasons to try to draw the CIC line when what is being dealt with is full-blown perception and perceptual experience. Prima facie, it looks to be a good bet that where we find mentality of this kind we—undeniably—find the most basic, truly contentful minds.

Chapter 5 lays out the options for those who plan to fall back on perception, invoking this strategy to preserve CIC. In particular, it reveals why adopting a hyperintellectualist position is of no avail. Apart from assuming that perceptual experience is inherently contentful, hyperintellectualists also assume that it depends on a great deal of background representational activity. These latter commitments inherit the problems of the discredited CIC accounts—those examined and dismissed in chapter 4. Nevertheless, all of the commitments that make hyperintellectualism hyper can be rejected in favor of a minimal intellectualism—one that skirts the crippling Hard Problem of Content while remaining a solid CIC proposal about perceptual experience. We consider how those who want to defend CIC in this domain might go even lower, adopting maximally minimal intellectualism—the most modest and credible CIC view of how perceptual experience might be essentially contentfully representational.

The preceding analysis sets the stage for CIC's last stand. Having clarified these matters, we are able to assess whether REC might not plausibly advance further into what is generally taken to be utterly safe CIC territory, extending its reach to include perceptual experience—even human visual experience. To show that such an advance is plausible, chapter 6 argues against the best and most plausible maximally minimal intellectualist proposals on today's market. After detailed examination, it is found—in the cold light of reason—that those proposals offer no serious resistance, and that there is no compelling ground for rejecting the conclusion that perceptual experience is inherently contentless.

Let us be clear. In pressing for REC, we do not say that CIC is never true. We do not say that cognition is never informed by or never involves content. We have no truck with that claim. We are not advancing Really Radical Enactive or Embodied Cognition as a thesis about the nature of all minds. Some cognitive activity—plausibly, that associated with and dependent upon the mastery of language—surely involves content. Still, if our analyses are right, a surprising amount of mental life (including some canonical forms of it, such as human visual experience) may well be inherently contentless. If true this is not trivial, since such forms are often taken to definitively imply the existence of representational content. If REC is true, then CIC's picture of basic minds must be surrendered completely. This picture of mind to be abandoned has dominated mainstream philosophical and scientific thinking, in one way or another, since the days of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke.

Some interesting results follow from trading in CIC, even in the form of CEC, for REC. In chapter 7