Abstract
The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC’s view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC’s notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.
Highlights
REC thereby rejects a standard motivation for introducing contentful information processing as a necessary ingredient for all kinds of cognition: the flexibility that contentful representation allegedly brings to the table
What makes the move of a chess piece a checkmate is that it is a move in a particular normative practice that has developed out of other practices and activities. It is with content-involving abilities: they have a special character but that special character is due to particular practices that have emerged in the natural history of the human species (Hutto and Satne 2015)
We argue that this problem only arises if assumptions are made about what makes cognition content-involving that are contrary to REC
Summary
According to the Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition, REC for short, all cognition is a matter of organism/environment interaction that is best explained in terms of learning, adaptation, and change acquired through a history of preceding interactions (see Hutto and Myin 2013, p. 8). It is with content-involving abilities: they have a special character but that special character is due to particular practices that have emerged in the natural history of the human species (Hutto and Satne 2015) With both the underlying continuity and the role of context in place, notably the context of sociocultural practices, REC’s answer to the two alleged gaps mentioned above can take shape. In this response, the view of the mind that fuels the interface problem is eschewed: a picture of the mind as consisting of two components, one contentless and one content-involving, which need to “interface” every time a contentinvolving activity is engaged in is rejected. We detail how basic and contentinvolving forms of cognition can be understood as being the same but different in a way that avoids contradiction or paradox
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