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Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content

Online ISBN:
9780262312172
Print ISBN:
9780262018548
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Book

Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content

Published:
14 December 2012
Online ISBN:
9780262312172
Print ISBN:
9780262018548
Publisher:
The MIT Press

Abstract

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, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds—including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. This book promotes the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition which holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. It opposes the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. The authors defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.

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