I use cognitive science and philosophy, past and present, to study the ways in which human perception, agency and understanding co-emerge from embodied interactions with a structured environment.
How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accom... more How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle's contrast between 'additive' and 'transformative' conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic 'additivism' about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as a distinct 'layer' or 'storey' of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a 'transformative' conception of rationality-one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us.
Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: "utopian" and ... more Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: "utopian" and "scientific." I agree that contemporary enactivists would benefit from more clearly distinguishing these projects and their success conditions. However, I wonder whether there are times when letting these projects merge with each other might be helpful, or even necessary.
I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mind... more I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mindindependent objects to which the subject is perceptually related, mediated by the subject's practical understanding of their sensorimotor relation to those properties. This position conjoins two existing strategies for explaining the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: accounts appealing to perceivers' limited, non-inferential access to the details of their sensory relation to the environment, and the relationalist conception of phenomenal properties. Bringing these two positions together by emphasizing their sensorimotor common ground allows each one to respond to damaging objections using the resources of the other. The resulting 'sensorimotor relationalism' about conscious vision provides a promising schema for explaining phenomenal properties of perceptual states, replacing 'Hard' questions with tractable ones about the perceptual relation and its sensorimotor underpinnings.
Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy ... more Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists in passing on something valuable from inside the academy to the outside. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of taking philosophy into prisons and argue that making the case for public philosophy in general, and philosophy in prisons in particular in these transactional terms risks obscuring what we take to be a distinctive and valuable outcome of public philosophy. Importantly, it risks obscuring what those who participate in a particular kind of public philosophy--including the professional philosophers--experience as valuable about the activity: its transformational potential.
Introduction to a special issue of Synthese on the relationships between the Gestalt Psychologica... more Introduction to a special issue of Synthese on the relationships between the Gestalt Psychological and Phenomenologal traditions and contemporary embodied cognitive science. Briefly summarises these research traditions and their interrelations, and situates the (future classic!) papers making up the SI in this narrative. Co-authored (and co-edited) with Alistair Isaac.
What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G.E.M. Anscombe and David... more What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G.E.M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality - the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman's conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman's work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximise the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognisable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritise the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round - we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman's view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded, and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding.
Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other... more Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by reflections on the bodily basis of an important kind of understanding, and skepticism over whether this bodily basis can be inculcated in the absence of actual, flesh-and-blood, classroom interactions. This paper focuses on the ways in which such worries arise in the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus. The negative conclusion for which I argue is that endorsing Dreyfus's Merleau-Pontian picture of the relationship between bodily skill and understanding does not commit us to his general pessimism concerning online learning—bodily, emotional, and interactive dimensions might be essential to learning, but we lack reasons to think that online learning necessarily lacks these dimensions. The negative argument motivates a positive claim: rather than giving up on online learning we should focus on designing courses and pedagogies that scaffold the bodily, affective and interactive dynamics constitutive of understanding in a particular domain.
Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known me... more Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities (such as treatments or therapies), our intentional relationship to the environment (such as implicit or explicit beliefs about a treatment's healing powers) and bodily effects (placebo responses). How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue that an 'enactive' conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects.
Just over 25 years ago, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied ... more Just over 25 years ago, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (TEM). An ambitious synthesis of ideas from phenomenology, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, Buddhist philosophy and psychology, it attempted to articulate a new research programme: an enactive cognitive science, that would bridge the gap between the empirical study of the mind and the disciplined reflection on our lived experience that characterises phenomenological and Buddhist practices. This enactive approach to the study of mind represented a confluence of several streams of thought whose effect on the cognitive scientific landscape was becoming gradually more pronounced. A vision of cognition as active, embodied, and embedded was beginning to crystalise, and TEM consolidated and further strengthened existing trends. In the intervening years, the theoretical currents that flowed into TEM have only grown stronger within cognitive science and philosophy of mind. As a result, the ‘enactivist’ label has gained in currency, as different combinations of TEM’s main conceptual ingredients have been concocted and presented by different researchers. A consequence of this is the apparent existence of a variety of distinct but overlapping ‘enactivisms’, the relations between which are not always clear. This special issue aims to provide a clearer picture of the enactivist theoretical landscape, some of its distinctive landmarks, and the disputed borders between its main provinces. Each of the papers in this issue takes up and pursues a live theoretical issue for enactivist research, while at the same time shedding light on the conceptual geography of enactivism. In this introduction, we frame these contributions by providing a brief sketch of the streams of thought that flowed into TEM and the origins of enactivism, and the main theoretical channels that have emerged from it.
Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought a... more Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought are essentially interdependent and co-emerge from a tangle of sensorimotor processes that are both cause and effect of the web of interactive and communicative practices they weave us into. In this paper, I reconstruct this view and its main motivations, with a particular focus on three important aspects. First, Hurley argues that an essential aspect of conscious perception – its perspectival unity – constitutively depends on agency. That is, agency is a transcendental condition on the possibility of perception (§3). Second, understanding why this dependence obtains involves understanding why perception and agency emerge together, and how they do so on the basis of a web of interrelated capacities for sensorimotor control (§2, §4). Third, understanding these first two aspects of Hurley's view is the key to understanding the sophisticated interplay between i) her arguments for the causal interdependence of sensory input and motor output, and ii) her arguments for the essential interdependence of perception and agency.
In our target paper we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela (2002), enactivism has incor... more In our target paper we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela (2002), enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by (Jonasian) anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the Jonasian Inference; i.e., the idea that we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value.
The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans J... more The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans Jonas. Jonas credits all living organisms with experience that involves particular "existential" structures: nascent forms of concern for self-preservation and desire for objects and outcomes that promote well-being. We argue that Jonas's attitude towards living systems involves a problematic anthropomorphism that threatens to place enactivism at odds with cognitive science, and undermine its legitimate aims to become a new paradigm for scientific investigation and understanding of the mind.
The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of th... more The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of their historical link and conceptual affinities, offer very different views on the nature of living beings. In this paper, we compare these views and evaluate, in an exploratory way, their respective degrees of internal coherence. Focusing the analyses on certain key notions such as autonomy and organizational closure, we argue that while the autopoietic theory manages to elaborate an internally consistent conception of living beings, the enactive approach presents an internal tension regarding its characterization of living beings as intentional systems directed at the environment.
The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about percept... more The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism – the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our agentive experience, and that the two forms of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 1). I then argue that i) we do indeed find such parallels: the way in which an action is directed towards its goal through our bodily movements parallels the way in which an experience is directed towards its object through our perceptual sensation (Section 2), and ii) reflecting on sensorimotor skills shows why the two instances of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 3). Section 4 gives reasons for generalizing beyond the cases considered so far by applying the enactive view to Kohler's landmark studies of perceptual adaptation. The final section clarifies the form of enactivism to which the previous sections point. The view that emerges is one whereby our perceptual and practical skills are interrelated aspects of a single capacity to have one's mind intentionally directed upon the world. The transparency of experience,
Synaesthetes persistently perceive certain stimuli as systematically accompanied by illusory colo... more Synaesthetes persistently perceive certain stimuli as systematically accompanied by illusory colours, even though they know those colours to be illusory. This appears to contrast with cases where a subject's colour vision adapts to systematic distortions caused by wearing coloured goggles. Given that each case involves longstanding systematic distortion of colour perception that the subjects recognize as such, how can a theory of colour perception explain the fact that perceptual adaptation occurs in one case but not the other? I argue that these cases and the relationship between them can be made sense of in light of an existing view of colour perception. Understanding colours as ways in which objects and surfaces modify light, perceived through grasping patterns and variations in colour appearances, provides a framework from which the cases and their apparent disanalogy can be predicted and explained. This theory's ability to accommodate these cases constitutes further empirical evidence in its favour.
A variety of recent ‘enactivist’ proposals suggest that the
material basis of conscious experienc... more A variety of recent ‘enactivist’ proposals suggest that the material basis of conscious experience might extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and nervous system and into the environment. Clark (2009) surveys several such arguments and finds them wanting. Here I respond on behalf of the enactivist. Clarifying the commitments of enactivism at the personal and subpersonal levels and considering how those levels relate lets us see where Clark’s analysis of enactivism goes wrong. Clark understands the enactivists as attempting to provide hypotheses about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying experience according to which those mechanisms contingently include portions of the environment. But understanding enactivism instead as primarily offering an alternative conception of experience at the personal-level, with apparent implications for the location of the subpersonal mechanisms of experience, allows us to make better sense of the enactivist arguments, and make the case for conscious externalism.
How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with,... more How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent's direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one's intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of 'sensorimotor expectations') the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. 2
How should we understand the relationship between conscious perception and action? Does an appeal... more How should we understand the relationship between conscious perception and action? Does an appeal to action have any place in an account of colour experience? This essay aims to shed light on the first question by giving a positive response to the second. I consider two types of enactive approach to perceptual consciousness, and two types of account of colour perception. Each approach to colour perception faces serious objections. However, the two views can be combined in a way that resists the criticisms to each. Furthermore, the hybrid view we arrive at lets us see which enactive account of perceptual consciousness we should prefer in the case of colour.
Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception, 2021
What does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? And w... more What does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? And what form should such an approach take? I address these questions by first distinguishing three different ways of drawing philosophical conclusions based on phenomenological reflection: 'Humean' phenomenology, which attempts to discern the structure of perceptual experience via reflection on its surface properties; 'Kantian' phenomenology, which aims to provide a priori arguments about the structure perceptual experience must have if it is to possess universally agreed upon manifest properties; and 'Husserlian' phenomenology, which aims to achieve an intuitive grasp of the essential properties of perceptual experience via attempted imaginative variation of its aspects and properties. Drawing on arguments from Merleau-Ponty, I then argue that the shortcomings of each of these approaches motivate a 'Merleau-Pontian' conception of phenomenology as 'radical reflection' - a mode of reflection on perceptual experience that simultaneously attempts to understand the origins and authority of reflection itself. The methodology for philosophy of perception that results is a thoroughly interdisciplinary one, aiming to reconcile philosophical conclusions about the necessary structures of perceptual experience with our best empirical knowledge of the bodily, psychological, cultural and historical contingencies that shape both our experiences and our reflective capacities.
We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, e... more We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended.
How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accom... more How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle's contrast between 'additive' and 'transformative' conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic 'additivism' about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as a distinct 'layer' or 'storey' of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a 'transformative' conception of rationality-one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us.
Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: "utopian" and ... more Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: "utopian" and "scientific." I agree that contemporary enactivists would benefit from more clearly distinguishing these projects and their success conditions. However, I wonder whether there are times when letting these projects merge with each other might be helpful, or even necessary.
I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mind... more I argue that the phenomenal properties of conscious visual experiences are properties of the mindindependent objects to which the subject is perceptually related, mediated by the subject's practical understanding of their sensorimotor relation to those properties. This position conjoins two existing strategies for explaining the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences: accounts appealing to perceivers' limited, non-inferential access to the details of their sensory relation to the environment, and the relationalist conception of phenomenal properties. Bringing these two positions together by emphasizing their sensorimotor common ground allows each one to respond to damaging objections using the resources of the other. The resulting 'sensorimotor relationalism' about conscious vision provides a promising schema for explaining phenomenal properties of perceptual states, replacing 'Hard' questions with tractable ones about the perceptual relation and its sensorimotor underpinnings.
Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy ... more Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists in passing on something valuable from inside the academy to the outside. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of taking philosophy into prisons and argue that making the case for public philosophy in general, and philosophy in prisons in particular in these transactional terms risks obscuring what we take to be a distinctive and valuable outcome of public philosophy. Importantly, it risks obscuring what those who participate in a particular kind of public philosophy--including the professional philosophers--experience as valuable about the activity: its transformational potential.
Introduction to a special issue of Synthese on the relationships between the Gestalt Psychologica... more Introduction to a special issue of Synthese on the relationships between the Gestalt Psychological and Phenomenologal traditions and contemporary embodied cognitive science. Briefly summarises these research traditions and their interrelations, and situates the (future classic!) papers making up the SI in this narrative. Co-authored (and co-edited) with Alistair Isaac.
What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G.E.M. Anscombe and David... more What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G.E.M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality - the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman's conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman's work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximise the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognisable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritise the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round - we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman's view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded, and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding.
Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other... more Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by reflections on the bodily basis of an important kind of understanding, and skepticism over whether this bodily basis can be inculcated in the absence of actual, flesh-and-blood, classroom interactions. This paper focuses on the ways in which such worries arise in the influential work of Hubert Dreyfus. The negative conclusion for which I argue is that endorsing Dreyfus's Merleau-Pontian picture of the relationship between bodily skill and understanding does not commit us to his general pessimism concerning online learning—bodily, emotional, and interactive dimensions might be essential to learning, but we lack reasons to think that online learning necessarily lacks these dimensions. The negative argument motivates a positive claim: rather than giving up on online learning we should focus on designing courses and pedagogies that scaffold the bodily, affective and interactive dynamics constitutive of understanding in a particular domain.
Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known me... more Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities (such as treatments or therapies), our intentional relationship to the environment (such as implicit or explicit beliefs about a treatment's healing powers) and bodily effects (placebo responses). How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue that an 'enactive' conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects.
Just over 25 years ago, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied ... more Just over 25 years ago, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (TEM). An ambitious synthesis of ideas from phenomenology, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, Buddhist philosophy and psychology, it attempted to articulate a new research programme: an enactive cognitive science, that would bridge the gap between the empirical study of the mind and the disciplined reflection on our lived experience that characterises phenomenological and Buddhist practices. This enactive approach to the study of mind represented a confluence of several streams of thought whose effect on the cognitive scientific landscape was becoming gradually more pronounced. A vision of cognition as active, embodied, and embedded was beginning to crystalise, and TEM consolidated and further strengthened existing trends. In the intervening years, the theoretical currents that flowed into TEM have only grown stronger within cognitive science and philosophy of mind. As a result, the ‘enactivist’ label has gained in currency, as different combinations of TEM’s main conceptual ingredients have been concocted and presented by different researchers. A consequence of this is the apparent existence of a variety of distinct but overlapping ‘enactivisms’, the relations between which are not always clear. This special issue aims to provide a clearer picture of the enactivist theoretical landscape, some of its distinctive landmarks, and the disputed borders between its main provinces. Each of the papers in this issue takes up and pursues a live theoretical issue for enactivist research, while at the same time shedding light on the conceptual geography of enactivism. In this introduction, we frame these contributions by providing a brief sketch of the streams of thought that flowed into TEM and the origins of enactivism, and the main theoretical channels that have emerged from it.
Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought a... more Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought are essentially interdependent and co-emerge from a tangle of sensorimotor processes that are both cause and effect of the web of interactive and communicative practices they weave us into. In this paper, I reconstruct this view and its main motivations, with a particular focus on three important aspects. First, Hurley argues that an essential aspect of conscious perception – its perspectival unity – constitutively depends on agency. That is, agency is a transcendental condition on the possibility of perception (§3). Second, understanding why this dependence obtains involves understanding why perception and agency emerge together, and how they do so on the basis of a web of interrelated capacities for sensorimotor control (§2, §4). Third, understanding these first two aspects of Hurley's view is the key to understanding the sophisticated interplay between i) her arguments for the causal interdependence of sensory input and motor output, and ii) her arguments for the essential interdependence of perception and agency.
In our target paper we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela (2002), enactivism has incor... more In our target paper we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela (2002), enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by (Jonasian) anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the Jonasian Inference; i.e., the idea that we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value.
The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans J... more The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans Jonas. Jonas credits all living organisms with experience that involves particular "existential" structures: nascent forms of concern for self-preservation and desire for objects and outcomes that promote well-being. We argue that Jonas's attitude towards living systems involves a problematic anthropomorphism that threatens to place enactivism at odds with cognitive science, and undermine its legitimate aims to become a new paradigm for scientific investigation and understanding of the mind.
The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of th... more The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of their historical link and conceptual affinities, offer very different views on the nature of living beings. In this paper, we compare these views and evaluate, in an exploratory way, their respective degrees of internal coherence. Focusing the analyses on certain key notions such as autonomy and organizational closure, we argue that while the autopoietic theory manages to elaborate an internally consistent conception of living beings, the enactive approach presents an internal tension regarding its characterization of living beings as intentional systems directed at the environment.
The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about percept... more The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism – the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our agentive experience, and that the two forms of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 1). I then argue that i) we do indeed find such parallels: the way in which an action is directed towards its goal through our bodily movements parallels the way in which an experience is directed towards its object through our perceptual sensation (Section 2), and ii) reflecting on sensorimotor skills shows why the two instances of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 3). Section 4 gives reasons for generalizing beyond the cases considered so far by applying the enactive view to Kohler's landmark studies of perceptual adaptation. The final section clarifies the form of enactivism to which the previous sections point. The view that emerges is one whereby our perceptual and practical skills are interrelated aspects of a single capacity to have one's mind intentionally directed upon the world. The transparency of experience,
Synaesthetes persistently perceive certain stimuli as systematically accompanied by illusory colo... more Synaesthetes persistently perceive certain stimuli as systematically accompanied by illusory colours, even though they know those colours to be illusory. This appears to contrast with cases where a subject's colour vision adapts to systematic distortions caused by wearing coloured goggles. Given that each case involves longstanding systematic distortion of colour perception that the subjects recognize as such, how can a theory of colour perception explain the fact that perceptual adaptation occurs in one case but not the other? I argue that these cases and the relationship between them can be made sense of in light of an existing view of colour perception. Understanding colours as ways in which objects and surfaces modify light, perceived through grasping patterns and variations in colour appearances, provides a framework from which the cases and their apparent disanalogy can be predicted and explained. This theory's ability to accommodate these cases constitutes further empirical evidence in its favour.
A variety of recent ‘enactivist’ proposals suggest that the
material basis of conscious experienc... more A variety of recent ‘enactivist’ proposals suggest that the material basis of conscious experience might extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and nervous system and into the environment. Clark (2009) surveys several such arguments and finds them wanting. Here I respond on behalf of the enactivist. Clarifying the commitments of enactivism at the personal and subpersonal levels and considering how those levels relate lets us see where Clark’s analysis of enactivism goes wrong. Clark understands the enactivists as attempting to provide hypotheses about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying experience according to which those mechanisms contingently include portions of the environment. But understanding enactivism instead as primarily offering an alternative conception of experience at the personal-level, with apparent implications for the location of the subpersonal mechanisms of experience, allows us to make better sense of the enactivist arguments, and make the case for conscious externalism.
How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with,... more How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent's direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one's intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of 'sensorimotor expectations') the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. 2
How should we understand the relationship between conscious perception and action? Does an appeal... more How should we understand the relationship between conscious perception and action? Does an appeal to action have any place in an account of colour experience? This essay aims to shed light on the first question by giving a positive response to the second. I consider two types of enactive approach to perceptual consciousness, and two types of account of colour perception. Each approach to colour perception faces serious objections. However, the two views can be combined in a way that resists the criticisms to each. Furthermore, the hybrid view we arrive at lets us see which enactive account of perceptual consciousness we should prefer in the case of colour.
Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception, 2021
What does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? And w... more What does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? And what form should such an approach take? I address these questions by first distinguishing three different ways of drawing philosophical conclusions based on phenomenological reflection: 'Humean' phenomenology, which attempts to discern the structure of perceptual experience via reflection on its surface properties; 'Kantian' phenomenology, which aims to provide a priori arguments about the structure perceptual experience must have if it is to possess universally agreed upon manifest properties; and 'Husserlian' phenomenology, which aims to achieve an intuitive grasp of the essential properties of perceptual experience via attempted imaginative variation of its aspects and properties. Drawing on arguments from Merleau-Ponty, I then argue that the shortcomings of each of these approaches motivate a 'Merleau-Pontian' conception of phenomenology as 'radical reflection' - a mode of reflection on perceptual experience that simultaneously attempts to understand the origins and authority of reflection itself. The methodology for philosophy of perception that results is a thoroughly interdisciplinary one, aiming to reconcile philosophical conclusions about the necessary structures of perceptual experience with our best empirical knowledge of the bodily, psychological, cultural and historical contingencies that shape both our experiences and our reflective capacities.
We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, e... more We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended.
- Collates twelve full-length articles by leading and up-and-coming academics on the exciting top... more - Collates twelve full-length articles by leading and up-and-coming academics on the exciting topic of philosophy of emotions. - Focuses on the different roles that emotions play in our life, particularly their role in knowledge; - Investigates the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning, a prominent research programme in the cognitive sciences. This innovative new volume analyses the role of emotions in knowledge acquisition. It focuses on the field of philosophy of emotions at the exciting intersection between epistemology and philosophy of mind and cognitive science to bring us an in-depth analysis of the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning. With twelve chapters by leading and up-and coming academics, this edited collection shows that emotions do count for our epistemic enterprise. Against scepticism about the possible positive role emotions play in knowledge, the authors highlight the how and the why of this potential, lucidly exploring the key aspects of the functionality of emotions. This is explored in relation to: specific kinds of knowledge such as self-understanding, group-knowledge and wisdom; specific functions played by certain emotions in these cases, such as disorientation in enquiry and contempt in practical reason; the affective experience of the epistemic subjects and communities.
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Papers by Dave Ward
material basis of conscious experience might extend beyond the
boundaries of the brain and nervous system and into the
environment. Clark (2009) surveys several such arguments and
finds them wanting. Here I respond on behalf of the enactivist.
Clarifying the commitments of enactivism at the personal and
subpersonal levels and considering how those levels relate lets us
see where Clark’s analysis of enactivism goes wrong. Clark
understands the enactivists as attempting to provide hypotheses
about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying experience
according to which those mechanisms contingently include portions of the environment. But understanding enactivism instead as
primarily offering an alternative conception of experience at the
personal-level, with apparent implications for the location of the
subpersonal mechanisms of experience, allows us to make better
sense of the enactivist arguments, and make the case for conscious externalism.
Chapters in edited collections by Dave Ward
material basis of conscious experience might extend beyond the
boundaries of the brain and nervous system and into the
environment. Clark (2009) surveys several such arguments and
finds them wanting. Here I respond on behalf of the enactivist.
Clarifying the commitments of enactivism at the personal and
subpersonal levels and considering how those levels relate lets us
see where Clark’s analysis of enactivism goes wrong. Clark
understands the enactivists as attempting to provide hypotheses
about the subpersonal mechanisms underlying experience
according to which those mechanisms contingently include portions of the environment. But understanding enactivism instead as
primarily offering an alternative conception of experience at the
personal-level, with apparent implications for the location of the
subpersonal mechanisms of experience, allows us to make better
sense of the enactivist arguments, and make the case for conscious externalism.
- Focuses on the different roles that emotions play in our life, particularly their role in knowledge;
- Investigates the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning, a prominent research programme in the cognitive sciences.
This innovative new volume analyses the role of emotions in knowledge acquisition. It focuses on the field of philosophy of emotions at the exciting intersection between epistemology and philosophy of mind and cognitive science to bring us an in-depth analysis of the
epistemological value of emotions in reasoning. With twelve chapters by leading and up-and coming academics, this edited collection shows that emotions do count for our epistemic enterprise. Against scepticism about the possible positive role emotions play in knowledge, the
authors highlight the how and the why of this potential, lucidly exploring the key aspects of the functionality of emotions. This is explored in relation to: specific kinds of knowledge such
as self-understanding, group-knowledge and wisdom; specific functions played by certain emotions in these cases, such as disorientation in enquiry and contempt in practical reason;
the affective experience of the epistemic subjects and communities.