The Reach of REC
The Reach of REC
This chapter upsets the Content Involving Cognition (CIC) applecart by examining familiar reasons for thinking that we can go at least part of the way toward explaining basic cognition without having to call on the notion of content at all. For example, the well-known successes in building flexible, behavior-based robots and understanding the environment-involving cognitive antics of certain insects appear to have progressed precisely because CIC thinking was rejected. Appealing to these developments, it is argued that there is every reason to think the same approach will work when it comes to explaining many sophisticated human doings too—especially those associated with manual activities such as reaching and grasping. If this is right, it is possible that cognitive science may go much further than is typically supposed without CIC; potentially Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) has real reach. This overcomes a familiar worry that REC, even if it is true in some domains, has a very limited scope.
Keywords: Content Involving Cognition, Radical Enactive Cognition, cognitive science, flexible robots, insects, reaching, grasping
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