Daniel D. Hutto

Narrative practices appear to matter to psychological well-being, yet dominant frameworks generally sideline narrative practices in mental health contexts, treating them, at best, as marginal. We argue that if we are to give narrative practices their due in mental health contexts, we must set aside certain misleading imaginative frames that dominate our thinking in this domain. To illustrate this, we focus on Weinrabe and Murphy’s ( 2026 ) scaffolding–plumbing (S–P) metaphor which was newly introduced to defend the medical model by treating mental dysfunction as a harmful failure in neurocognitive ‘plumbing’, while allowing external ’scaffolding’ a role in installing and shaping that plumbing. The S–P metaphor was introduced to remind us that when focusing on the importance of external factors which shape cognition, we ought not thereby underplay the importance of what goes on within cognizers. While acknowledging this, we nonetheless give reasons for thinking the S-P metaphor itself is philosophically problematic and unhelpful for understanding how narrative practices make the sort of difference they apparently do make to psychological well-being in the here-and-now. Drawing on a Radically Enactive/Embodied account of Cognition (REC) and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH), we offer an alternative way of thinking about these matters. Within that alternative framework, narrative practices are not merely developmental supports but ongoing world-involving activities that can shape agency, possibilities, and the state of people’s mental health in real time. We illustrate how this clarification can liberate our thinking about what matters to our mental health. Focusing on the case of addiction we show, for example, how narrative practices can sustain or disrupt addictive cycles even in the presence of significant neuroadaptation. Far from ignoring the brain, our non-reductive alternative reconceives the brain as a participant in dynamic organism–environment interactions rather than the sole or main locus of psychopathology.

The radically enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) holds that cognition is not always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations. Arguments for REC have assumed that its opponents defend a substantive notion of representation—a notion that entails the existence of content-carrying mental states. This paper considers the prospects of representationalism of a different stripe—one that prefers deflated notions representation. For example, deflationists hold that talk of mental representations might just be a kind of convenient labeling that does not commit theorists to any substantive claims about the explanatory work done by psychosemantic properties. Taking the deflationary option thus undercuts the crucial motivation for positing mental representations in the first place. This chapter argues that, should the deflationist arguments prove warranted, they provide reason to hold that some forms of cognition are contentless, à la REC.

Established wisdom in cognitive science holds that the everyday folk psychological abilities of humans -- our capacity to understand intentional actions performed for reasons -- are inherited from our evolutionary forebears. In _Folk Psychological Narratives_, Daniel Hutto challenges this view (held in somewhat different forms by the two dominant approaches, "theory theory" and simulation theory) and argues for the sociocultural basis of this familiar ability. He makes a detailed case for the idea that the way we make sense of intentional actions essentially involves the construction of narratives about particular persons. Moreover he argues that children acquire this practical skill only by being exposed to and engaging in a distinctive kind of narrative practice. Hutto calls this developmental proposal the narrative practice hypothesis (NPH). Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons (that is, folk psychological narratives) supply children with both the basic structure of folk psychology and the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice. In making a strong case for the as yet underexamined idea that our understanding of reasons may be socioculturally grounded, Hutto not only advances and explicates the claims of the NPH, but he also challenges certain widely held assumptions. In this way, _Folk Psychological Narratives_ both clears conceptual space around the dominant approaches for an alternative and offers a groundbreaking proposal.

Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and defend its core thesis. The extended mind thesis states that under certain (specialized and particular) conditions cognitive processes may be constituted by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. The extended mind thesis is part of a larger family of theoretical frameworks such as embodied cognition, distributed cognition, and various versions of enactivism (Gallagher in South J Philos 56: 421–447, 2018; Hutchins in Cognition in the wild, The MIT Press, 1995; Varela et al. in The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience, The MIT Press, 1991; Di Paolo in Topoi 28:9–21, 2009; Hutto and Myin in Radicalizing enactivism: basic minds without content, The MIT Press, 2013; Hutto and Myin in Evolving enactivism: basic minds meet content, The MIT Press, 2017). In this paper we revive and clarify the commitments of Radical Enactivism’s Extensive Enactivism, compare it to alternatives, and provide new arguments and analyses for preferring it over what is on offer from other members of the extended-distributed-enactive family of positions.

In this chapter, we begin by explaining the concept of embodied cognition and the “4Es” and an embodied approach to social cognition known as interaction theory. Then, through an examination of work at three clinics, we show how these concepts are important in their application to various clinical settings. We conclude by discussing two innovative models of embodied psychotherapy practice involving the use of intersubjective group encounter and new applications of virtual and mixed realities. We argue that these practices have relevance for studying the relationship of body, brain and environment in the clinical neuroscience of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Radically enactive accounts of perceiving directly and diametrically oppose their representationalist rivals. This is true even of the most radical predictive processing theories of perception which embrace some enactivist assumptions yet retain some commitment to representationalism. Which framework should we prefer? This chapter seeks to make headway on this question by focusing on the special explanatory challenge that a certain class of perceptual illusions poses to predictive processing theories of perception. The perceptual illusions in question, of which the Müller-Lyer is the paradigm, reveal that what we see can systematically fail to update in light of what we know. We review and reject two prominent PP attempts to address this challenge—one conservative, one radical. We find both kinds of PP proposal wanting, for different reasons. In the end, we propose an alternative, simpler radical enactive, RE, explanation of the full pattern of effects of perceptual illusions: it is that our basic modes of perceiving take the form of contentless, non-inferential habits that are distinct from, and come before and below, our capacities for contentful perceptual judgement. We give reasons for thinking that this RE proposal can adequately and elegantly account for the full set of empirical findings about our patterns of response to perceptual illusions of the sort under scrutiny in this chapter.

Many contemporary analytic philosophers find it self-evidently true that perceiving is necessarily, constitutively – always and everywhere – contentful. For them it is axiomatic that if one is to perceive then the world must be represented as being a certain way. Accordingly, the idea that perceiving is necessarily contentful is secured if it is also assumed that “To say that any state has content is just to say that it represents the world as being a certain way. It thus has … a ‘correctness condition’ – the condition under which it represents correctly” (Crane 1992, p. 139). This paper argues against the truth of this axiom, with a little help from Wittgenstein. Not only is it conceivable that perceiving is contentless, it is difficult to get a clear handle on the imagined alternative – that it is inherently contentful – let alone to justify it.

Enactivists have made several forays into the domain of ethical thought over the past decades: their proposals vary in foci and ambition (Colombetti and Torrance in Phenomenol Cogn Sci 8:505–526, 2009, Fourlas and Cuffari in Topoi 41:355–371, 2022, as reported by Di Paolo and De Jaegher (Linguistic bodies: the continuity between life and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2022), Pescador Canales and Mojica in Topoi 41:257–274, 2022). Rather than survey that terrain, this paper goes back to basics and revisits a seminal series of lectures by Varela on ethical expertise from 1999 that is standardly cited as a cornerstone for these sundry efforts. It reviews and questions some of the core claims and assumptions Varela makes in his attempt to bring enactivist ideas to bear on moral psychology and ethical expertise. His analysis is revealed to be lacking in crucial respects. Specifically, Varela mischaracterizes and undervalues Aristotle’s contributions to virtue ethics and fails to take stock of a pivotal Aristotelian lesson about what is required for being an ethical agent at all. This paper attempts to rectify that omission. It also considers, afresh, reasons why we should take a neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics and phronesis then seriously today. Doing so, ironically, puts us in a position to directly respond to the concerns Varela raised about the unhealthy dominance of rule-based ethical approaches in Western thought. Finally, the paper shows that if we are interested in understanding how to enact phronesis at least one variety of enactivism—namely, radical enactivism—provides a promising framework for helping us to do so. This is because radical enactivism recognizes the existence of both contentless and contentful modes of cognizing and the need to understand how they interact and influence each other in complex ways.

Advocates of radical enactivism maintain that contentful cognition is kinky, and that we need a kinky explanation of its natural origins (Hutto & Satne 2017, Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism. MIT Press.). In advancing this idea, they maintain that there are qualitatively important cognitive differences between creatures capable of full-fledged contentful thought and speech and those which are not. Moreover, they maintain that the capacity for full-fledged contentful cognition needs special kind of explanation – it needs an explanation that isn’t a simple tale of the mere elaboration or embellishment of prior existing forms of cognition. Moyal-Sharrock (2021a, 2021b) rejects the need to introduce kinks of either sort. This contribution responds to her critical assessment, defending the radical enactivist stance on the need to keep contentful cognition kinky.

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In spite of the relatively open communicative processes which, on many accounts, are posited between hierarchical levels of the cognitive system in order to facilitate the minimization of prediction errors, perceptual illusions seemingly allow prediction errors to rule. Even if, at the top, we have reliable and secure knowledge that the lines in the MLI are equal, or that the rubber hand in the RHI is not our hand, the system seems unable to correct for sensory errors that form the illusion. We argue that the standard PEM explanation based on a short-circuiting principle doesn’t work. This is the idea that where there are general statistical regularities in the environment there is a kind of short circuiting such that relevant priors are relegated to lower-level processing so that information from higher levels is not exchanged (Ogilvie and Carruthers, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7:721–742, 2016), or is not as precise as it should be (Hohwy, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Such solutions (without convincing explanation) violate the idea of open communication and/or they over-discount the reliable and secure knowledge that is in the system. We propose an alternative, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) solution. We argue that PEM fails to take into account the ‘structural resistance’ introduced by material and cultural factors in the broader cognitive system.

Relaxed naturalism and liberal naturalism both invite us to adopt a philosophy of nature that includes a range of non-scientific phenomena in its inventory while nevertheless keeping the supernatural at bay. This paper considers the question of how relaxed naturalism relates to liberal naturalism and what refinements are required if they are to succeed in their joint cause of developing a tenable alternative to scientific naturalism. Particular attention is given to what might be added to the naturalist’s toolbox when it comes to identifying and dealing with supernatural excesses and clarifying how philosophers can do positive metaphysical work in support of the naturalistic project.

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 existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radical enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of neurodynamics.

This paper will argue that intellectualism about skill—the contention that skilled performance is without exception guided by proposition knowledge—is fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualists about skill run into intractable theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical modes of presentation. It then examines a proposed solution by Carlotta Pavese which seeks to identify practical modes of presentation with motor representations that guide skilled sensorimotor action. We argue that this proposed identification is problematic on empirical and theoretical grounds, and—as such—it fails to deliver on its explanatory ambitions. In the final analysis, it will be argued that intellectualism about skill is, in any case, superfluous when it comes to accounting for the aspects of skilled performance it purports to explain.

This paper argues that radical enactivism (RE) offers a framework with the required nuance needed for understanding of the full range of the various forms of pretense. In particular, its multi-storey account of cognition, which holds that psychological attitudes can be both contentless and contentful, enables it to appropriately account for both the most basic and most advanced varieties of pretense. By comparison with other existing accounts of pretense, RE is shown to avoid the pitfalls of representationalist theories while also allowing us to combine the best elements of the praxeological enactivist (Weichold & Rucińska, 2021 ) and Langland-Hassan’s ( 2020, 2021 ) proposals about pretense, while avoiding their key shortcomings.

This chapter proposes a radically enactive account of remembering that casts it as creative, dynamic, and wide-reaching. It paints a picture of remembering that no longer conceives of it as involving passive recollections – always occurring wholly and solely inside heads. Integrating empirical findings from various sources, the chapter puts pressure on familiar cognitivist visions of remembering. Pivotally, it is argued, that we achieve a stronger and more elegant account of remembering by abandoning the widely held assumption that it is rooted in the retrieval of stored information or content in order to represent past events. We demonstrate how a radically enactive account of the roots of remembering can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature while, at same time, accommodating experientially rich forms of episodic memory.