Adrian Wieczorek

Radical Enactive Cognition challenges teleosemantic representationalism while proposing a naturalistic, content-free account of basic intentionality – “Ur-intentionality” – based solely on teleofunctional resources such as information-as-covariance and natural selection, a view known as Teleosemiotics. This paper argues that this appropriation is insufficient to ground content-free intentionality. Two problems for functional information-as-covariance are identified: the Determinacy Problem and the Distality Problem. Furthermore, teleofunctionalism fails to prevent Ur-intentionality from collapsing into a form of stimulus-response behaviorism, which Radical Enactivism itself deems non-cognitive. An enactive stimulus-response account is developed to show that teleofunctional mechanisms can explain adaptive behavior without invoking intentionality. The paper concludes that these issues pose a serious and previously overlooked challenge to non-representational, selectionist theories of cognition – the Hard Problem of Intentionality – and points to possible ways to deal with the problem.

The article aims to recognize Heidegger’s late phenomenology of language as a situational ontology. It is shown that this approach is motivated by a hitherto unnoticed problem of relevance that goes beyond the traditional frame problem. The problem of relevance is introduced and presented as a novel key to make sense of Heidegger’s concept of language as the “showing” (Zeigen) of an involving context. It is demonstrated how both representational and pragmatic-enactive models of language give rise to the problem. Finally, Heidegger’s radical situational approach to language and thinghood is classified as a variant of realism that can be called “Involving Realism” which is contrasted critically against other contemporary forms of Realism such as Enactive Realism or New Realism.

This introductory talk focuses on Heidegger’s late work, especially his 1959 collection of essays Unterwegs zur Sprache – On the way to language. My thesis is the following: Heidegger's late work marks a general shift from a metaphysical, i.e. a total, definite and centre-oriented description of the world, which is still present in Sein und Zeit, to a strictly situational ontology characterized by its openness, ambiguity and absence of centre. This constellation of our life-world is language, insofar language is the guiding, yet indefinite way of our involvement or engagement in open affairs. I spell out this main tenet by sketching what I call the situatedness, institutionality and responsiveness of language in the later Heidegger. These points are further developed in an essay project currently under review. © Adrian Wieczorek

The paradigm of mental representation plays a decisive role in shaping our understanding of the mind in philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. A widespread assumption is that the mind is an internal representation of the world which can be accurate or illusory. Yet it is precisely the overuse of this paradigm that leaves open fundamental questions: How should the role of representation be understood, and under what natural conditions does representational status come about? This book provides a systematic answer to both questions with a focus on perception and sensory systems. It offers a critical appraisal of the leading conception of basic representation, the naturalistic ‘tracking’ theory in its various forms, drawing on examples from biology, psychology and robotics. It is argued that this paradigm has not yet met the essential requirements for a naturalisation of representation. Drawing on insights from phenomenology and enactivism, a more restrictive model is developed which, whilst avoiding both deflation and intellectualism, thereby enhances the explanatory power of the representational approach across its various fields of application.

Presented at the international conference "Green Intelligence? - Debating Plant Cognition" in Basle, Switzerland on October 23th 2021. A critical reply to Marc Artiga, Communication and Deception in Plants. Objecting to Artiga's arguments in favor of Plant Cognitivism, I try to show why deception does not imply cognitive or representational (contentful) states. Sensory detectors or communication channels in plants, simpler animals or artificial sensory systems do not need to display a perspective on the world to be tricked. Correlational failure and hard-wired response mechanisms can suffice. Furthermore, I offer a sketch of an explanatory understanding of content in terms of objectivity, arguing against the dominant overgeneralization of representation in terms of functional information-use. (© Adrian Wieczorek)

Presented at the international conference "Language, Languages and Post-Cognitivism" in Venice, 15 July 2022. In my talk, I present an original interpretation of the late Heidegger as a genuine ontology of situatedness. I start out by showing the (concealed) early "heideggerian" roots of the current "4E"-paradigm in philosophy of mind and cognitive science with regard to world-disclosure and language. In the main part of my talk, I try to demonstrate how enactivism is too action-centered to adequately account for the embeddedness and phenomenality of language. In return, I sketch four ontological aspects of human situations from a late Heidegger point of view. Finally, I argue that language is the basic structure of such human situatedness, and that art, instead of ordinary language, opens the way for its understanding.(© Adrian Wieczorek)