•  8
    Sensory consciousness explained (better) in terms of ‘corporality’ and ‘alerting capacity’
    with J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva NOë
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 369-387. 2005.
    How could neural processes be associated with phenomenal consciousness? We present a way to answer this question by taking the counterintuitive stance that the sensory feel of an experience is not a thing that happens to us, but a thing we do: a skill we exercise. By additionally noting that sensory systems possess two important, objectively measurable properties, corporality and alerting capacity, we are able to explain why sensory experience possesses a sensory feel, but thinking and other men…Read more
  •  1082
    Enacting is Enough
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1): 24-30. 2009.
    In the action-space account of color, an emphasis is laid on implicit knowledge when it comes to experience, and explanatory ambitions are expressed. If the knowledge claims are interpreted in a strong way, the action-space account becomes a form of conservative enactivism, which is a kind of cognitivism. Only if the knowledge claims are weakly interpreted, the action space-account can be seen as a distinctive form of enactivism, but then all reductive explanatory ambitions must be abandoned
  •  105
    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
  •  18
    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 ...
  •  987
    The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains cognition. Our analysis reveals that there is no compelling evidence or argument for thinking that brains compute. It makes the case for inverting the explanatory order proposed by the computational basis of cognition thesis. We give reasons to reverse the polarity of standard thinking on this topic, and ask how it is possible that computation, natural and artificial, might be based on cognition and no…Read more
  •  10
    Reasons for pragmatism: affording epistemic contact in a shared environment
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (5): 973-997. 2019.
    Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point …Read more
  •  43
    REC: Just Radical Enough
    Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 41 (1): 61-71. 2015.
    We address some frequently encountered criticisms of Radical Embodied/Enactive Cognition. Contrary to the claims that the position is too radical, or not sufficiently so, we claim REC is just radical enough.
  •  17
    Neural representations not needed - no more pleas, please
    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
  •  421
    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
  •  63
    Much ado about nothing? Why going non-semantic is not merely semantics
    Philosophical Explorations 21 (2): 187-203. 2018.
    This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, on…Read more
  •  10
    Sensory substitution devices provide through an unusual sensory modality (the substituting modality, e.g., audition) access to features of the world that are normally accessed through another sensory modality (the substituted modality, e.g., vision). In this article, we address the question of which sensory modality the acquired perception belongs to. We have recourse to the four traditional criteria that have been used to define sensory modalities: sensory organ, stimuli, properties, and qualit…Read more
  •  13
    Reasons for pragmatism: affording epistemic contact in a shared environment
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (5): 973-997. 2019.
    Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point …Read more
  •  36
    Reasons for pragmatism: affording epistemic contact in a shared environment
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (5): 973-997. 2019.
    Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point …Read more
  •  48
    The Is and Oughts of Remembering
    Topoi 41 (2): 275-285. 2022.
    One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize…Read more
  •  47
    Re-affirming experience, presence, and the world: setting the RECord straight in reply to Noë
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (5): 971-989. 2021.
    This paper responds to Alva Noë’s general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism’s actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë’s own version of Sensorimotor Knowledge Enactivism.
  •  42
    A twofold tale of one mind: revisiting REC’s multi-storey story
    with Jasper C. van den Herik
    Synthese 198 (12): 12175-12193. 2020.
    The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, acc…Read more
  •  32
    REC, or the radical enactive/embodied view of cognition makes a crucial distinction between basic and content-involving cognition. This paper clarifies REC’s views on basic and content-involving cognition, and their relation by replying to a recent criticism claiming that REC is refuted by evidence on affordance perception. It shows how a correct understanding of how basic and contentless cognition relate allows to see how REC can accommodate this evidence, and thus can afford affordance percept…Read more
  •  309
    Enactive vision
    with Jan Degenaar
    In Lawrence A. Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, Routledge. pp. 90-98. 2014.
  •  40
    Perception as Something We Do
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (5-6): 80-104. 2016.
    In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that perception is something we do. I will argue that understanding perceiving as a bodily doing allows for a strong non-dualistic position on the relation between experience and objective physical events, one which provides insight into why such relation seems problematic while at the same time providing means to relieve the tension. Next I will show how the claim that perception is something we do does not…Read more
  •  59
    Reincarnating the Identity Theory
    Frontiers in Psychology 9 (3): 1--9. 2018.
  •  39
  •  10
    No Strength from Weakness (review)
    with Laura M. Nascimento
    Constructivist Foundations 13 (1): 126-128. 2017.
    This commentary questions the target article’s claim that enactivism and representationalism, even in an allegedly weak form, are compatible. We argue that, for a viable enactivism, it is the notion of contentless interaction that must be turned to in order to account for basic cognition, including basic color perception. Enactivism so construed can provide all the benefits the authors want: it can question exaggerated forms of objectivism, without incurring the costs that holding on to contentf…Read more