The MIT Press eBooks
December 14, 2012
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
515 citations
Basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most human doing and experiencing involves dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists acknowledge the importance of situated, embodied engagements for understanding basic minds, but hold that such minds are necessarily contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. This book promotes a radically enactive, embodied approach: some kinds of minds are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. It defends the thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrates advantages for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
The MIT Press eBooks
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
482 citations
Cognition can be divided into two basic types: contentless, interactive forms and content-involving forms. The most elementary cognitive processes—perceiving, imagining, remembering—do not require picking up, storing, or representing information in the brain. Instead, they are fundamentally dynamic, relational, and contentless. Only some forms of cognition involve content. This duplex account of the mind offers a naturalistic explanation of basic minds without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff, Erik Myin
94 citations
Rejecting mental representation as the basis of cognition, radical enactive and embodied approaches challenge mainstream cognitive science. This paper argues that abandoning representationalism for pure empirical functionalism fails to provide a clear criterion for what counts as cognitive and lacks adequate ways to distinguish cognitive activity. It also contends that commonsense functionalism is undermined by how people actually use psychological concepts. Instead, the authors advocate for extensive enactivism, which differs from extended mind and distributed cognition theories by grounding cognition in embodied action without relying on internal representations.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Ian H. Robertson, Michael D Kirchhoff
89 citations
Basic Emotion Theory (BET) has been central to affective science for decades, guiding research on facial expressions, neuroimaging, and evolutionary psychology. Philosophers have recently called for abandoning BET entirely. This paper defends BET against those criticisms, arguing that the theory should be retained. It also addresses concerns that BET's reliance on affect programs makes it outdated. The authors propose that with minor adjustments, BET can overcome these objections when reinterpreted through a radically enactive account of emotions. Rather than discarding BET, the paper shows how its core ideas can be revised and preserved, concluding that the revised BET remains a valuable framework.
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
15 citations
Radical versions of enactive, embodied, and ecological approaches to cognition, which seek to replace rather than complement traditional cognitivist accounts, may offer a genuine conceptual revolution. This chapter evaluates the major options proposed by E-theorists, rating each by radicality. It reviews the hard problem of content and argues that adopting a radical approach is one of the most attractive ways to address it, opening up a positive research program worth exploring.
Synthese
March 1, 2025
Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff
5 citations
The extended mind thesis holds that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain to include parts of the body and environment under certain conditions. This paper revives and clarifies the commitments of Radical Enactivism's Extensive Enactivism, compares it to related frameworks like embodied and distributed cognition, and provides new arguments for preferring it over other positions in the extended-distributed-enactive family.
Evolving Enactivism
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
The chapter introduces the 'E-turn' in cognitive science—the shift toward enactive, embodied, extended, and ecological views of cognition—and the empirical and theoretical developments that prompted it. It contrasts E-approaches with classical cognitivism, particularly in how far they depart from commitments to representationalism, computationalism, and mechanistic explanation. Against this backdrop, the chapter argues that REC's proposal is not merely revisionary but revolutionary. It also outlines the basic rules of naturalistic play, cautioning that dismissing REC based on a priori intuitions about cognition's essence violates naturalistic methodological principles.
Evolving Enactivism
May 19, 2017
Daniel D. Hutto, Erik Myin
Chapter 4 demonstrates how the Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) framework can be applied to two existing nonrepresentational approaches to cognition: Autopoietic-Adaptive Enactivism and Ecological Dynamics. By 'RECtifying' these approaches, the chapter shows that REC can combine their resources to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. The chapter concludes by addressing the need to explain how basic, contentless minds can develop into contentful minds—a process called REConnecting. This is necessary because REC holds that some cognition involves content and that organisms acquire content-involving cognition by mastering specific sociocultural practices.