Pierre Steiner

Enactivism does not have its primary philosophical roots in pragmatism: phenomenology (from Husserl to Jonas) is its first source of inspiration (with the exception of Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism). That does not exclude the benefits of pragmatist readings of enactivism, and of enactivist readings of pragmatism. After having sketched those readings, this paper focuses on the philosophical concept of intentionality. I show that whereas enactivists endorse the idea that intentionality is a base-level property of cognition, pragmatism offer(ed) us some reasons not to proceed this way. It is therefore doubtful to hold that pragmatists and enactivists would converge in the defence of a common, non-representational conception of intentionality.

In this chapter, I pursue two aims. Firstly, I propose an original survey and analysis of the way proponents of 4E cognition have until now defined the relations between normativity and cognitive science. A first distinction is made between making normativity an explanandum of 4E cognitive science, and turning normativity into a property or part of the explanantia of 4E cognitive science. Inside of the latter option, one must distinguish between methodological, ontological and semantic claims on the value of normativity for studying and defining cognitive phenomena. The second aim of the paper consists in developing the further claim that normativity is an essential property of daily intentional concepts and of scientific concepts. I show how 4E cognition might further develop this latter claim in the context of recent debates about cognitive ontologies in neuroscience.

The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.

John Stewart commits himself to the defence of a demanding version of enaction. Among its many original features, John’s version of enaction includes a questionable form of anti-representationalism, and leaves room for the Varelian idea that intentionality is a biological property. This stance anticipates contemporary endorsements in 4E cognition of intentionality as a non-representational and non-contentful property. Once it is deprived of its representational tinsels, intentionality appears to us again as a property of object-directedness. Nevertheless, is the autopoietic model of intentionality as object-directedness coherent and convincing? And do we need intentionality when we describe the meaningful relations between organisms and their environments? The article seeks to answer to these questions.

I situate the originality and the ambiguities of the target paper in the context of post-cognitivist cognitive science and in relation with some aspects of Charles Sanders Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism. I then focus on what the authors call « pre-reflective self-consciousness », highlighting some ambiguities of the characterizations they propose of this variety of consciousness. These ambiguities can become difficulties once one grants a crucial methodological role to this consciousness in the study of cognitive activities.

Se doper, dans le sport, c'est avoir recours à des produits dont l'usage est interdit par un règlement. Mais en deçà de ces règlements, existe-t-il des principes ou des valeurs en vertu desquels l'usage de ces produits constituerait nécessairement un crime moral, une forme de tricherie, ou un danger sanitaire? Cet essai développe une réponse négative à cette question, et propose ainsi une déconstruction des principes hygiénistes, égalitaristes et naturalistes qui sont presque toujours invoqués pour justifier le caractère nécessaire de la lutte contre le dopage. Rien ne nous empêche alors d'imaginer l'émergence de nouveaux types de sports professionnels, fonctionnant à partir d'une législation anti-dopage minimale, voire inexistante. Plus généralement, la question du dopage sportif permet de concevoir et de problématiser à nouveaux frais les rapports que nous entretenons avec les techniques d'augmentation de la performance.

Un citron, La Joconde et le Père Noël. Aucun de ces trois objets ne se trouve dans notre esprit, pourtant, nous parvenons à les concevoir. Comment ? Mobilisant les ressources du pragmatisme et de la philosophie des techniques, Pierre Steiner développe l’idée que nos pensées ne visent pas le monde mais y sont inscrites. Les principales traditions philosophiques ont en commun le présupposé que l’esprit serait comme un archer qui aurait le pouvoir, par la pensée, de « viser le monde », ce que l’on nomme « intentionnalité », et l’idée que les techniques ne sont que des applications de celle-ci. Contre ces présupposés, l’auteur propose une relecture critique de l’histoire de la philosophie ainsi qu’une reconsidération de la nature technique de notre intelligence. Une pensée est un acte qui nous engage dans une situation et les concepts ne sont pas des représentations mais des techniques d’usage de signes. En dialoguant rigoureusement avec la phénoménologie et la philosophie analytique du langage et de l’esprit, mais aussi avec les sciences cognitives, Pierre Steiner combine dans cet ouvrage archéologie historique et discussion critique. Il aboutit à un positionnement radicalement nouveau.

The term “social cognition” can be construed in different ways. On the one hand, it can refer to the cognitive faculties involved in social activities, defined simply as situations where two or more individuals interact. On this view, social systems would consist of interactions between autonomous individuals; these interactions form higher-level autonomous domains not reducible to individual actions. A contrasting, alternative view is based on a much stronger theoretical definition of a truly social domain, which is always defined by a set of structural norms; moreover, these social structures are not only a set of constraints, but actually constitute the possibility of enacting worlds that would just not exist without them. This view emphasises the heteronomy of individuals who abide by norms that are impersonal, culturally inherited and to a large extent independent of the individuals. Human beings are socialised through and through; consequently, all human cognition is social cognition. The article argues for this second position. Finally, it appears that fully blown autonomy actually requires heteronomy. It is the acceptance of the constraints of social structures that enables individuals to enter new realms of common meaningfulness. The emergence of social life marks a crucial step in the evolution of cognition; so that at some evolutionary point human cognition cannot but be social cognition.

The notion of “intentionality” is much invoked in various foundational theories of meaning, being very often equated with “meaning”, “content” and “reference”. In this paper, I propose and develop a basic distinction between two concepts and, more fundamentally, properties of intentionality: intentionality-T and intentionality-C. Representationalism is then defined as the position according to which intentionality-T can be reduced to intentionality-C, in the form of representational states. Nonrepresentationalism is rejecting this reduction, and argues that intentionality-T is more fundamental than intentionality-C. Non-representationalism allows for a new layered view of the relations between cognitive intentionality and linguistic intentionality; this view is presented at the end of the paper.

Criticisms and rejections of representationalism are increasingly popular in 4E cognitive science, and especially in radical enactivism. But by overfocusing our attention on the debate between radical enactivism and classical representationalism, we might miss the woods for the trees, in at least two respects: first, by neglecting the relevance of other theoretical alternatives about representationalism in cognitive science; and second by not seeing how much REC and classical representationalism are in agreement concerning basic and problematic issues dealing with mental content and intentionality. In order to expand and exemplify these ideas, this paper presents two heterodox positions on intentionality and on the relations between content and representation. Special attention is paid to the way REC is rejecting these positions: I argue that this rejection reveals common assumptions with classical representationalism, but also undermines the coherence of REC’s conception of intentionality.

In order to account for how organisms can apprehend the contents of the external representations they manipulate in cognizing, the endorsement of representationalism fosters a situation of what I call cognitive overdetermination. I argue that this situation is problematic for the inclusion of these external representations in cognitive processing, as the hypothesis of extended cognition would like to have it. Since that situation arises from a commitment to representationalism (even minimal), it only affects the viability of representationalist versions of extended cognition.

Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that cognitive science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy.

Based on an endorsement of the hypothesis of extended cognition, this paper proposes a criticism of the representationalist assumptions that still pertain to these contemporary models of cognition. I first rehearse some basic problems akin to any representationalist model of cognition, before proposing some more specific arguments directed against the necessity, the plausibility, and the coherence of the marriage between extended cognition and contemporary representationalism. Extended and distributed models of cognition have the resources to get rid of representationalism, and they should better do it. Their adherence to representationalism might be an by-product of the extended character of the scientific study of cognition.

I propose a systematic survey of the various attitudes proponents of enaction (or enactivism) entertained or are entertaining towards representationalism and towards the use of the concept “mental representation” in cognitive science. For the sake of clarity, a set of distinctions between different varieties of representationalism and anti-representationalism are presented. I also recapitulate and discuss some anti-representationalist trends and strategies one can find the enactive literature, before focusing on some possible limitations of eliminativist versions of enactive anti-representationalism. These limitations are here taken as opportunities for reflecting on the fate of enactivism in its relations with representationalism and anti-representationalism.

This paper aims at answering the question “When is informational content explicitly represented in a cognitive system?”. I first distinguish the explicitness this question is about from other kinds of explicitness that are currently investigated in philosophy of mind, and situate the components of the question within the various conceptual frameworks that are used to study mental representations. I then present and criticize, on conceptual and empirical grounds, two basic ways of answering the question, the first one coming from the classical computational theory of mind, the latter one issued from a procedural conception of informational contents. I then argue for a new answer to the initial question, an answer that retains some valuable insights of the criticized theories, but which underlines the importance and the interpretational source of the distinctiveness proper to explicitly represented contents

This paper is a discussion of Claire Petitmengin and Michel Bitbol's article 'The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence' . In section I, I present what I take as being the main points they defend in that article, and put them in relation with the global purpose of the special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies in which their article is included. In section II, I start discussing the paper by comparing the conception of description they defend with a constructivist/pragmatist account of description and knowledge. This leads me, in section III, to introduce very briefly the pragmatist conception of experience that underlies that latter account. As that pragmatist conception of experience insists on the fact that lived experience goes beyond the subjective/objective duality, and as it therefore calls for a redefinition of what lived experience is, I naturally wonder whether B&P might endorse that pragmatist conception of experience, somehow standing in tension with the importance of subjectivity in the definition of what lived experience is for many first-person approaches to lived experience