Anthony Chemero

This paper examines two twenty-first-century developments in the enactive approach in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. The first is the surging interest in Hans Jonas, which begins with Weber and Varela's 'Life After Kant' (2002) and continues up to the present. The second is the 'social turn' that the enactive approach has taken, especially after De Jaegher and Di Paolo's (2007) work on participatory sense-making. We look at these two developments through the lens of the problem of other minds. We argue that they are incompatible due to a residual solipsism in Jonasian phenomenology. Ultimately, this leaves enactive theory with a choice between embracing Jonas or embracing the social turn in enactive theory. We recommend replacing Jonasian influences with those from the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We argue that enactivism can evade the problem of other minds using Merleau-Ponty's discussion of 'flesh' and 'expression'.

As with much contemporary philosophical and scientific research, the predominant metaphysics of situatedness is monism, particularly, physicalism. Here, we claim that while monism is the proper metaphysical thesis, empirically-supported theories of situated phenomena require ontological pluralism as well. We defend this position via the example of bird flocks, which are situated systems that exhibit ontologically plural features, namely, component dominance and interaction dominance. The description of these features will illustrate that understanding these phenomena requires a coevolution of conceptual and methodological development. Specifically, ontological features are partially identified and evaluated by way of the analyses applied to them. Both descriptive and normative lessons are drawn. Descriptively, research on bird flocks demonstrate that natural phenomena may not be readily cast via a monistic ontology (e.g., component dominant), even at the same scale of investigation. The normative consequence is that while research on situated systems need not reject metaphysical monism, it ought to begin from a pluralistic position concerning ontology.

This dissertation examines claims made by philosophers and cognitive scientists that cognition does not involve the use of internal, mental representations. Anti-representationalism, the name for the position advocated in such claims, has become rather popular in recent years; indeed, it has become fashionable to simply adopt anti-representationalism. Arguments in favor doing so usually go like this: Here is a model of some cognitive phenomenon. There are no representations in this model. If cognition in general works like this model does, there are no representations in cognition either. Such arguments suffer from a lack of attention to a particular type of detail. Though those who make arguments like this one may spend a good deal of time characterizing cognitive models, they rarely say in any detail what exactly they take representations to be. It is, therefore, difficult to know how seriously to take their arguments. ;The purpose of this dissertation is provide the detail necessary to make as good a case as is possible for anti-representationalism. In order to do that, I begin by sketching and defending a theory of representation. I then use this theory to show that, given three assumptions, none of the arguments for anti-representationalism are sound: all systems for which the assumptions hold will use internal representations. This leaves two options for defending anti-representationalism. First, one might argue that anti-representationalism is a claim about explanations of cognition; that is, it is a claim that our best explanations of cognition will not refer to internal, mental representations, despite the fact that cognitive systems may really use representations. Second, one might reject one of the three assumptions required to show that the arguments for anti-representationalism are unsound; in particular, one might defend anti-representationalism by claiming that the required assumption of metaphysical realism is false