Overview
Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds—including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness
About the Authors
Daniel D. Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.
Erik Myin is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp.
Endorsements
“This important book testifies to the ‘enactive’ viewpoint in cognitive science having now come of age. In arguing that minds lack informational content, Hutto and Myin develop an original version of the enactive view that reshapes current philosophical thinking about embodied and extended cognition. Both proponents and critics of the enactive viewpoint will need to come to terms with this new enactive manifesto.”
—Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto
“Most books that try to push the conceptual envelope tend to sacrifice analytic rigor for clarity of vision. That is surely not the case in Radicalizing Enactivism. Hutto and Myin defend a position that pushes ideas that most people think are a few steps too far several steps farther. The fact that their genuinely radical conclusions are supported by dense analytical argumentation makes the book a serious challenge to the status quo in the philosophy of mind.”
—Anthony Chemero, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, University of Cincinnati; author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science