Theatre Hunger: An Underestimated ‘Scaling Up’ Problem

Abstract

AbstractThe proponents of ecological and enactive approaches (e-approaches) to cognitive science find common cause in rejecting representation as a core explanatory posit. In its stead, they suggest that cognitive scientists work with non-representational explanations that emphasise embodied interaction. The ‘scaling up’ objection to e-approaches says that, whilst their non-representational explanatory toolkit might well account for ‘basic’ cognitive capacities, it will founder when confronted with the ‘representation hunger’ of ‘higher’ cognition. Proponents of e-approaches tend to focus their attention upon the scaling up problem posed by truth-conditional language, with it being thought that non-perceptual experiences readily submit to a non-representational analysis. In this paper I argue that non-perceptual experiences possess an oft overlooked, non-linguistic kind of ‘representation hunger’— they hunger for a private mental space within which the representational function of standing-in for is performed. I contend that such theatre hunger poses serious difficulties for e-approaches which they are presently ill-placed to satiate. Hence, I conclude that the theatre hunger of non-perceptual experiences presents a much more serious problem for e-approaches than is often acknowledged.