Any adequate account of emotion must accommodate the fact that emotions, even those of the most basic kind, exhibit intentionality as well as phenomenality. This article argues that a good place to start in providing such an account is by adjusting Prinz’s (2004) embodied appraisal theory (EAT) of emotions. EAT appeals to teleosemantics in order to account for the world-directed content of embodied appraisals. Although the central idea behind EAT is essentially along the right lines, as it stands Prinz’s proposal needs tweaking in a number of ways. This article focuses on one – the need to free it from its dependence on teleosemantics. EAT, so modified, becomes compatible with a truly enactivist understanding of basic emotions.

Key words: emotion, emotional appraisal theory, enactivism, teleosemantics

This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s (2017) argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM-question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM-question are stipulated, then it is possible, conduct substantive RTM debates that do not collapse into merely verbal disagreements. Combined, Sections 2 and 3 demonstrate how, by employing specifying stipulations, we can get around Rowlands’s arbitrariness challenge. Section 2 reveals why RTM, as canonically construed in terms of mental states exhibiting intensional (with-an-s) properties, has been deemed a valuable explanatory hypothesis in the cognitive sciences. Targeting the canonical notion of mental representations, Section 3 articulates a rival nonrepresentational hypothesis that, we propose, can do all the relevant explanatory work at much lower theoretical cost. Taken together, Sections 2 and 3 show what can be at stake in the RTM debate when it is framed by appeal to the canonical notion of mental representation and why engaging in it matters. Section 4 extends the argument for thinking that RTM debates matter. It provides reasons for thinking that, far from making no practical or theoretical difference to the sciences of the mind, deciding to abandon RTM would constitute a revolutionary conceptual shift in those sciences.

Key words: mental content, radically enactive cognition, computational theory of mind, representational theory of mind, teleosemantics

In the last decade several prominent critics have charged that invocation of representations is not only not essential for cognitive science, but should be avoided. These claims have been followed by counterarguments demonstrating that the notion certainly is important in explanations of cognitive phenomena. Analyzing some important contributions to the debate, Anthony Chemero has argued that representationalists still need to explain the significance of the notion once there is an available formal account of a system and has, accordingly, challenged representationalists to provide such an explanation. This paper’s first part explains why the representationalist should take an interest in Chemero’s challenge. It discusses William Bechtel’s account of the representational structure of the Watt Governor, which, among other things, was motivating Chemero to question the relevance of a representational account once a dynamical one is available. The second part contains the answer to Chemero’s challenge. It is motivated by the thought that only a representational account of the Watt Governor with a comparable level of detail could possibly add explanatory value to a dynamical account. However, accepting the account also means that it becomes difficult to understand dynamical and representational accounts as rivals. Instead, it would be more adequate to speak of a dynamical account of the representational structure.

Key words: cognitive science, dynamical systems theory, explanation, representation, semantics, teleosemantics, watt governor.

The main aim of Section 1 is to get to grips with the radical element of Radical Enactivism (RadEn): the conviction that basic cognition is to be explained in a thoroughly non-representational fashion. I first contrast the Enactivist approach with the traditional representational approach to cognition. Thereafter, I introduce RadEn’s notion of representation in terms of content. I then describe RadEn’s worries about naturalising content by relying on the notion of information, in terms of which the contemporary debate is set. I end this section with Hutto and Myin’s formulation of the Hard Problem of Content. In Section 2, I introduce Radical Enactivism’s distinction between basic, contentless, cognition and linguistically mediated thought, which is mirrored in the distinction between basic minds and linguistic superminds. Basic cognition is described in terms of biosemiotics: an Enactivist makeover of teleosemantics – an approach that accounts for content in terms of functions of organisms. I further describe how RadEn describes cognition that deals with objects that are absent in terms of recreative imaginings. I then introduce Hutto’s account of linguistic content, which is based on Davidsonian interpretationalism: content can only be ascribed through a process of radical interpretation, which functions as an intensionality test that can only be passed by the fine-grained responding of linguistically competent creatures. In Section 3, I raise some initial worries for RadEn’s distinction between basic and linguistic cognition. I argue that linguistic mediation is not necessary for adopting a propositional attitude if we accept the intensionality test as a criterion. Thereafter, I argue that even if we adopt a linguistically mediated propositional attitude, the symbols of natural language are not the intentional objects of our attitudes. It is only when we talk about language that we shift our attention to the linguistic symbols and they become intentional objects. After that, I argue that, using the the resources available to RadEn, it will be impossible to make sense of the notion of a proposition. In Section 4, I trace the problems stated in Section 3 to problematic assumptions about language. I argue that the root problem is that Hutto conceives of our linguistic competence as being made possible by an abstract system of symbols, and that conceiving of language in this way robs us of the possibility to explain how language works. I show that Davidson, who is the main source of inspiration for Hutto’s account of language, never meant his theory of meaning as a theory that could also explain our linguistic abilities. Although Hutto extends the Davidsonian approach to include the acquisition of words through social triangulation, this extension does not explain how language works. After that I give some general objections to thinking of language in terms of an abstract symbol system. I argue that the main function of language is not to represent the world, but to coordinate behaviour. These considerations will provide the basis for showing the implications of relinquishing an abstract symbol system view of language and the alleged distinction between the basic and supermind, which I consider in the final Section of this thesis.