Topoi
May 3, 2026
Daniel D. Hutto, Benedetta Cogo
Abstract 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...
Synthese
March 1, 2025
Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff
5 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
August 7, 2024
Daniel D. Hutto
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...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
15 citations
Abstract E-approaches to cognition—enactive, embodied, ecological—conceive of minds as fundamentally relational and interactive. They are often heralded as offering a new paradigm for thinking about the mental. Yet only the most radical versions of E-approaches—those that seek not to complement but to replace traditional cognitivist accounts of mind—have any prospect of ushering in a truly...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Ian H. Robertson, Michael D Kirchhoff
89 citations
Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been...
The MIT Press eBooks
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
482 citations
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 without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of...
Evolving Enactivism
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
This chapter introduces the E-turn in cognitive science –the move to embrace enactive, embodied, extended and ecological views of cognition–and the empirical and theoretical considerations that spurred it on. It explains how E-approaches differ from classical forms of cognitivism: in particular the degree to which different E-approaches move away from the cognitivist commitments to...
Evolving Enactivism
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
Chapter 4 provides further examples of RECtification, this time with the aim of showing how REC can fruitfully ally with and strengthen two prominent nonrepresentational E-approaches to cognition—Autopoietic-Adaptive Enactivism and Ecological Dynamics. These examples of RECtification reveal REC’s capacity to marshal and combine powerful resources for explaining basic minds in naturalistic...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2014
Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff, Erik Myin
94 citations
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...
Review of General Psychology
June 1, 2013
Daniel D. Hutto
A properly radical enactivism—one that eschews the idea that all mentality is necessarily contentful and representational—has better prospects of unifying psychology than does traditional cognitivism. This paper offers a five-step argument in support of this claim. The first section advances the view that a principled way of characterizing psychology's subject matter is what is required if it...
The MIT Press eBooks
December 14, 2012
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
515 citations
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated,...