Radicalizing Enactivism. Basic Minds without Content

Until very recently, the field of cognitive science was (almost) in complete agreement in characterizing the mind as a computational mechanism dealing with brain-based representations to produce actions. Accordingly, cognition was defined as always involving represented information and neurally-based computational processes operating on it. In the last decade or so, an alternative to the representational brain paradigm started to emerge, especially from those who defend a conception of human minds as embodied and embedded in physical and social environments (systems in which brain, bodies, and the world are thought to form an indivisible whole). Is this emerging paradigm—enactivism—a genuine alternative to the representational–computational model of the mind or just an extension of it? Answering this question is the aim of Hutto and Myin's book. To achieve it, the book argues that we must radicalize enactivism. By radicalizing enactivism, the authors seek to liberate this new trend in cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind from the remainders of the old tradition of conceiving all cognition in terms of mental representations. The authors question the need to posit contentful representations at the roots of cognition—whether such content is conceptual or non-conceptual, or appears at personal or subpersonal levels of processing. The problematic notion is not in their view primarily the notion of representation (thinly understood), but rather the assumption that underlies the theoretical talk of representational or informational states, namely that minds ‘always and everywhere’ need to deal with contents in order to cognize (p. 9).