This is nominally a book review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (The MIT Press, 2013). But it is a narrowly focused and highly prejudicial review, which presents an analysis of a contradiction at the heart of the book. Radicalizing Enactivism is a powerful and original philosophical argument against representations in cognition, but it repeatedly endorses an old-fashioned representationalism about language. I show that this contradiction arises from the authors’ unexamined, reflexive adoption of traditional linguistic concepts and terminology, which presuppose a representational interpretation of linguistic capacities and phenomena. The key piece of evidence for this analyses is the separability of Hutto and Myin’s substantive remarks on the ontogeny of language-dependent cognitive capacities, which they explain in terms of scaffolding and decoupling, from the representational gloss on those remarks that they present as if it were simply identical with observed empirical matters of fact. They follow a model laid out in Hutto’s earlier work, in which everyday linguistic activity is understood as instantiating abstract public vehicles with representational content (i.e., sentences which express propositions). I argue that this model is susceptible both to pre-existing arguments against representational theories of language and to a variant of their own ‘Hard Problem of Content’. The take-away lesson from Radicalizing Enactivism is that anti-representationalist accounts of language remain unconvincing – even to radicals like Hutto and Myin – because they have no way of explaining the phenomenal experience of literate speakers, wherein words really do feel like instantiations of abstract forms with determinable semantics. I suggest that anti-representationalists can address this by focusing on the ways in which patterns of attention become stabilized and interpersonally regularized as we learn language.

Key words: Content, Representation, Languaging, Enactivism, Distributed language, Hutto and Myin

Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist theories vary in strength. At their core they seek to establish that subjective, phenomenal consciousness (of the kind that involves the having of first-personal points of view or perspectives on the world – perspectives that incorporate experiences with specific phenomenal characters) is either exhausted by, or supervenes on, capacities for mental representation. These proposals face several serious objections.

Key words: enactivism, externalism, intentionality, internalism, methodological solipsism, misrepresentation, mode of presentation, narrow content, phenomenal character, psychosemantics, qualia, representational content, subjectivity, supervenience, teleofunctions

A certain philosophical frame of mind holds that contentless imaginings are unimaginable, “inconceivable” (Shapiro 2014a, p. 214) – that it is simply not possible to imagine acts of imagining in the absence of representational content. Against this, this paper argues that there is no naturalistically respectable way to rule out the possibility of contentless imaginings on purely analytic or conceptual grounds. Moreover, agreeing with Langland-Hassan (2015), it defends the view that the best way to understand the content and correctness conditions of non-basic, hybrid imaginative attitudes is to assume that basic sensory imaginings are enlisted to play many different kinds of cognitive roles depending on the surrounding contentful attitudes that imaginers adopt toward them. Finally, it argues that when it comes to understanding how pure, basic sensory imaginings do their explanatorily important work there is every reason to focus on the properties of such imaginings that enable appropriate interactions and exactly no reason for thinking that representational contents are amongst those properties.

This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information, it does not establish a sufficient measure of representational content. We argue that this follows from the fact that the KL-divergence is a measure of relative entropy, which can be shown to be the same as covariance (through a set of additional steps). It is well known that facts about covariance do not entail facts about representational content. So there is no reason to think that the KL-divergence is a measure of (mis-)representational content. This paper thus provides an enactive, non-representational account of Bayesian belief optimisation in hierarchical PP.

Key words: predictive processing, enactivism, (mis-)representation, kullback–leibler-divergence, relative entropy, mutual information, generalised synchrony, covariance, shannon information

“Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us, ” writes Alva Noë. “It is something we do. ” In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought – that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.

Excerpt: First, I present some general considerations concerning the smartness DSP [“direct social perception”] requires. In section 3, I present a rough outline of the enactive approach to cognition (including perception) and argue that there is evidence to suggest the main versions of enactivism reject the notion of perceptual representational content. I argue in section 4 that views that reject that notion fail to yield the sort of smartness DSP requires. In section 5, I discuss the significance of these findings, before briefly summarizing the main points of my article.

Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is that the very idea of ascribing representational content to internal, sub-personal processes is a theoretical confusion. This paper criticises some of the arguments made by Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017) for the stronger anti-representational claim and suggests that the default Enactivist view should be the weaker non-representational position.

Key words: enactivism, embodied cognition, extended mind, representational content, intentionality, teleo-semantics, imagination, verbal disputes

The ‘received view’ about computation is that all computations must involve representational content. Egan and Piccinini argue against the received view. In this paper, I focus on Egan’s arguments, claiming that they fall short of establishing that computations do not involve representational content. I provide positive arguments explaining why computation has to involve representational content, and how that representational content may be of any type (distal, broad, etc.). I also argue (contra Egan and Fodor) that there is no need for computational psychology to be individualistic. Finally, I draw out a number of consequences for computational individuation, proposing necessary conditions on computational identity and necessary and sufficient conditions on computational I/O equivalence of physical systems.

Key words: Computation, Representation, Computational identity, Explanation, Narrow content, Physical computation

There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in Austin’s term, dumb. Perceptual experience is not as such either veridical or delusive. It may mislead, but it does not take representation to accomplish that

Key words: content, experience, metaphysics, perception, representation, harman, mcdowell.

The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of _the same_ functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition.

Key words: Life-mind continuity thesis, autopoiesis, mind, cognition