•  482
    Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items—e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on—in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the e…Read more
  •  457
    Interacting? Yes. But, of What Kind and on What Basis?
    Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2): 543-546. 2009.
    De Jaegher’s (2009) paper argues that Gallagher, who aims to replace traditional theory-of-mind accounts of social understanding with accounts based on direct perception (hereafter DP), has missed an important opportunity. Despite a desire to break faith with tradition, there is a danger that proponents of DP accounts will remain (at least tacitly) committed to an unchallenged, and perhaps unnoticed, sort of individualism inherent in traditional theories (i.e. those that regard our engagement wi…Read more
  •  361
    Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (706): 102178. 2014.
    Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognit…Read more
  •  273
    The Natural Origins of Content
    Philosophia 43 (3): 521-536. 2015.
    We review the current state of play in the game of naturalizing content and analyse reasons why each of the main proposals, when taken in isolation, is unsatisfactory. Our diagnosis is that if there is to be progress two fundamental changes are necessary. First, the point of the game needs to be reconceived in terms of explaining the natural origins of content. Second, the pivotal assumption that intentionality is always and everywhere contentful must be abandoned. Reviving and updating Haugelan…Read more
  •  246
    Consciousness Demystified
    The Monist 78 (4): 464-479. 1995.
    Professor Dennett has recently embarked on what he considers a “demystifying philosophical investigation” with respect to the phenomena of consciousness. In essence the strategy he has employed is one of getting us to “trade in” our ordinary intuitions so as to soften us up for the first phases of a full-fledged “scientific” explanation of consciousness in terms of sub-personal systems and their ontogenetic origins. His hope is that, once we are freed from certain misleading metaphors about the …Read more
  •  182
    Philosophy of Mind’s New Lease on Life: Autopoietic Enactivism meets Teleosemiotics
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (5-6): 44-64. 2011.
    This commentary will seek to clarify certain core features of Thompson’s proposal about the enactive nature of basic mentality, as best it can, and to bring his ideas into direct conversation with accounts of basic cognition of the sort favoured by analytical philosophers of mind and more traditional cognitive scientists – i.e. those who tend to be either suspicious or critical of enactive/embodied approaches (to the extent that they confess to understanding them at all). My proposed way of open…Read more
  •  179
    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 ...
  •  170
    The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60 43-68. 2007.
    This paper promotes the view that our childhood engagement with narratives of a certain kind is the basis of sophisticated folk psychological abilities —i.e. it is through such socially scaffolded means that folk psychological skills are normally acquired and fostered. Undeniably, we often use our folk psychological apparatus in speculating about why another may have acted on a particular occasion, but this is at best a peripheral and parasitic use. Our primary understanding and skill in folk ps…Read more
  •  153
    Narrative self-shaping: a modest proposal
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (1): 21-41. 2016.
    Decoupling a modestly construed Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis from Strong Narrativism this paper attempts to motivate devoting our intellectual energies to the former. Section one briefly introduces the notions of self-shaping and rehearses reasons for thinking that self-shaping, in a suitably tame form, is, at least to some extent, simply unavoidable for reflective beings. It is against this background that the basic commitments of a modest Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis are articulated.…Read more
  •  151
    Folk psychology as narrative practice
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8). 2009.
    There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’ abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best character…Read more
  •  150
    An Ideal Solution to the Problems of Consciousness
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 5 (3): 328-43. 1998.
    This paper distinguishes three conceptual problems that attend philosophical accounts of consciousness. The first concerns the problem of properly characterizing the nature of consciousness itself, the second is the problem of making intelligible the relation between consciousness and the ‘physical’, and the third is the problem of creating the intellectual space for a shift in philosophical framework that would enable us to deal adequately with the first two problems. It is claimed that physica…Read more
  •  124
    Neural representations not needed - no more pleas, please
    with Erik Myin
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 241-256. 2014.
    Colombo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2012) argues that we have compelling reasons to posit neural representations because doing so yields unique explanatory purchase in central cases of social norm compliance. We aim to show that there is no positive substance to Colombo’s plea—nothing that ought to move us to endorse representationalism in this domain, on any level. We point out that exposing the vices of the phenomenological arguments against representationalism does not, on its …Read more
  •  119
    Narrative and Understanding Persons
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 60 1-16. 2007.
    The human world is replete with narratives – narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narrati…Read more
  •  114
    This paper argues that mind-reading hypotheses, of any kind, are not needed to best describe or best explain basic acts of social cognition. It considers the two most popular MRHs: one-ToM and two-ToM theories. These MRHs face competition in the form of complementary behaviour reading hypotheses. Following Buckner, it is argued that the best strategy for putting CBRHs out of play is to appeal to theoretical considerations about the psychosemantics of basic acts of social cognition. In particular…Read more
  •  104
    Representation Reconsidered (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (1): 135-139. 2011.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  101
    Editorial: Social Cognition: Mindreading and Alternatives
    with Mitchell Herschbach and Victoria Southgate
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3): 375-395. 2011.
    Human beings, even very young infants, and members of several other species, exhibit remarkable capacities for attending to and engaging with others. These basic capacities have been the subject of intense research in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind over the last several decades. Appropriately characterizing the exact level and nature of these abilities and what lies at their basis continues to prove a tricky business. …Read more
  •  100
    Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian Point of View
    American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 281-302. 2013.
    Enactivists seek to revolutionize the new sciences of the mind. In doing so, they promote adopting a thoroughly anti-intellectualist starting point, one that sees mentality as rooted in engaged, embodied activity as opposed to detached forms of thought. In advocating the so-called embodied turn, enactivists touch on recurrent themes of central importance in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. More than this, today's enactivists characterize the nature of minds and how they fundamentally relate to t…Read more
  •  94
    An extended argument that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition withou…Read more
  •  91
    The Extended Mind (review)
    Analysis 71 (4): 785-787. 2011.
  •  88
    This is a truly groundbreaking work that examines today’s notions of folk psychology. Bringing together disciplines as various as cognitive science and anthropology, the authors analyze and question key assumptions about the nature, scope and function of folk psychology.
  •  88
    Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation
    In D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Reassessed, Springer. pp. 115--135. 2007.
    This paper spells out just how the Narrative Practice Hypothesis, if true, undercuts any need to appeal to either theory or simulation when it comes to explaining the basis of folk psychological understanding: these heuristics do not come into play other than in cases of in which the framework is used to speculate about why another may have acted. To add appropriate force to this observation, I first say something about why we should reject the widely held assumption that the primary business of…Read more
  •  85
    Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion (review)
    Philosophical Investigations 33 (2): 187-191. 2009.
    Analytic philosophy (AP), some proclaim, is dead or in crisis. It should be so lucky. Its status may be, in fact, much more ephemeral. In this readable and accessible monograph, Preston makes out an interesting and engaging case for the claim that AP has never really existed at all. At first blush this news is a bit hard to swallow. After all there seem to be many, many existing practitioners in our discipline that regard themselves as analytic philosophers and these adherents clearly exert a po…Read more
  •  84
    Wittgenstein and Reason (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (2). 2009.
  •  84
    Predictive Processing accounts of Cognition, PPC, promise to forge productive alliances that will unite approaches that are otherwise at odds. Can it? This paper argues that it can’t—or at least not so long as it sticks with the cognitivist rendering that Clark and others favor. In making this case the argument of this paper unfolds as follows: Sect. 1 describes the basics of PPC—its attachment to the idea that we perceive the world by guessing the world. It then details the reasons why so many …Read more
  •  79
    The brain as part of an enactive system
    with Shaun Gallagher, Jan Slaby, and Jonathan Cole
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4): 421-422. 2013.
    The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational-representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Ch…Read more
  •  77
    Enactivism
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.
    Enactivism The term ‘enaction’ was first introduced in The Embodied Mind, co-authored by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch and published in 1991. That seminal work provides the first original contemporary formulation of enactivism. Its authors define cognition as enaction, which they in turn characterize as the ‘bringing forth’ of domains of significance through organismic activity that … Continue reading Enactivism →
  •  73
    REC: Revolution Effected by Clarification
    Topoi 36 (3): 377-391. 2017.
    This paper shows how a radical approach to enactivism provides a way of clarifying and unifying different varieties of enactivism and enactivist-friendly approaches so as to provide a genuine alternative to classical cognitivism. Section 1 reminds readers of the broad church character of the enactivism framework. Section 2 explicates how radical enactivism is best understood not as a kind of enactivism per se but as a programme for radicalizing and consolidating the many different enactivist off…Read more
  •  73
    Overly Enactive Imagination? Radically Re‐Imagining Imagining
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1): 68-89. 2015.
    A certain philosophical frame of mind holds that contentless imaginings are unimaginable, “inconceivable” (Shapiro, p. 214) ‐ that it is simply not possible to imagine acts of imagining in the absence of representational content. Against this, this paper argues that there is no naturalistically respectable way to rule out the possibility of contentless imaginings on purely analytic or conceptual grounds. Moreover, agreeing with Langland‐Hassan (2015), it defends the view that the best way to und…Read more
  •  72
    A Cause for Concern
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 381-401. 1999.
    This paper argues against causalism about reasons in three stages. First, the paper investigates Professor Davidson's sophisticated version of the claim that we must understand reason-explanations as a kind of causal explanation to highlight the fact that this move does no explanatory work in telling us how we determine for which reasons we act. Second, the paper considers Davidson's true motivation for regarding reasons-explanations as causal which connects with his claim that reasons are cause…Read more
  •  71
    Re-Authoring Narrative Therapy
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (2): 157-167. 2017.
    How we narrate our lives can affect us, for good or ill. Our narrative practices make an undeniable difference to our psychosocial well-being. All so-called "talking cures" – including traditional psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy and newer techniques – are motivated by this insight about the power of personal narratives. All therapies of the discursive ilk make use of narratives, in one way or another, as a means of enabling individuals to frame, or reframe, and to manage t…Read more