Thursday 13 September 2012

Not radical enough

Here is a review/critique I wrote on Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin's new book Radicalizing Enactivism.  Like most anti-representation or anti-content theories, they are against content only up to a point.  What I fail to understand, is when such theories introducing representations or content, what happens to all the arguments they just mounted against them?  Why do those arguments only apply to a subset of representations and not when these authors want to use them? For more see below:



Title: A reply to Radicalizing Enactivism: how scaffolding fails to solve the hard problem of content

Extended Abstract: In their new book, Radicalizing Enactivism (RE), Hutto and Myin present compelling arguments for why basic minds do not have content.  In particular, they introduce the Hard Problem of Content (HPC) i.e.: that “informational content is incompatible with explanatory naturalism” (RE, p. xv).  By reviewing a range of theories, the pair demonstrate the futility of recent attempts to distinguish content from covariance.  Content is information within a system, whereas a covariant system can be explained purely by way of causal interactions.  However, in spite of these arguments, Hutto and Myin do not present a theory of mind that is content free.  Instead, they label a total rejection of content as really radical enactivism (RRE), which they claim is a bridge too far.  They conclude that while basic minds do not have content, highly intelligent minds, such as human minds, do trade in content and that this content is made possible due to our linguistic abilities.  In this paper I will challenge Hutto and Myin's conclusion and show how their appeal to language is at odds with the arguments employed by RE to deny contentful cognition.  Hutto and Myin themselves fail to make the choice in the dilemma that they claim HPC presents: either solve how content arises from covariance (even though it does not seem possible to rectify with naturalism) or give up content altogether.

Firstly, I will explicate why an appeal to content is seen as necessary to account for intelligent minds.  For this we must go back to Hutto’s earlier work in which he argues that linguistic minds necessarily have content.[1]  Hutto relies on the Davidsonian model of language, which involves propositional attitudes, such as believing that it is raining outside, or desiring a piece of cake.  These attitudes are contentful because they are about things.  We can know this aboutness because propositions have a truth value.  For example, the statement “it is raining outside right now,” can be true or false depending on the state of the world.  This idea is then used by Hutto[2] to conclude that any language user must have propositional attitudes and therefore content.  In other words, as language is necessarily propositional, any language user must have propositional states in order to be able perform linguistic tasks.

Where Hutto and Myin diverge from a traditional propositional approach[3] is that they insist that the linguistic cognition is only possible through social practices.  This is predicated on the idea of scaffolding, i.e. that the ability to perform certain actions is necessarily linked to an agents' interaction with, and development alongside, elaborate tools and structures in the agent's environment.[4]  This idea of scaffolding appears to be an extremely useful one in terms of understanding the development of human capabilities.

However, what it does not do is solve the HPC, in particular, how the learning of linguistic social practices leads to the creation of content.  This could be contrasted to non-linguistic practices that, supposedly, would not lead to content; for example, learning to use utensils to eat with (forks in some cultures and chopsticks in others).  While there is no doubt that the idea of scaffolding does seem to fit within a naturalistic framework, it does not actually answer the question of how content arises within cognitive systems.  The idea that language is propositional is not validated by the claim that language arises due to social practices.  All it tells us is something about how we learn language, not the constitution of language itself (contentful or not).  To solve the HPC in favor of content, a plausible naturalistic account for the emergence of content is requisite.  At best, Hutto and Myin’s appeal to languages as being contentful could be seen as falling back on the Default Linguistic Mind (as opposed to the Default Internal Mind, see RE, p.137).  This position assumes content is involved in linguistic cognitive practices without reflecting on how it arises within a causal, naturalistic world.

With this assumption exposed, we can see how it works against Hutto and Myin’s particular approach.  For the majority of the book, the authors employ a bottom-up strategy that is at the heart of enactivism: the development of a theory of cognition based on the low-level mechanics of cognition systems.  This is precisely what leads them to conclude that content is often mistaken for covariance and it is covariance that explains cognition at this level.  However, while Hutto and Myin use a bottom-up approach to dismiss other contentful theories of cognition, their statement that language must involve content is driven purely from the top-down received view that language is necessarily contentful.  The bringing together of these two approaches does not make the neat fit that the authors seem to believe it does.

While a bottom-up/top-down switch is common to other enactivist theories, [5] Hutto and Myin’s position relies so heavily on showing that content does not easily emerge from within a naturalistic framework (if at all), the fact that they posit content without specifically tackling the HPC is puzzling.  Moreover, it undermines their critique of other appeals to content: if radical enactivism can simply ignore the HPC when it is convenient, then surely any other theory can too.  The insistence that language must involve content is no different from the insistence that basic minds must involve content if neither side is backed by an account of how content arises.

In light of these concerns, I will conclude that RE presents a strong case for why cognition should be understood as contentless.  The only mistake the authors make is that they view their own work as pushing back the location of content (outside of basic minds), when they should instead view their work as ultimately rejecting content altogether.  Their appeal to language in order to introduce content seems more like a traditional philosophy of language reflex than a thoroughly thought out position.  Only by removing this reflex does the book become a radical work at all.


[1] Hutto, D. D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Socio-Cultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[2] Hutto is not alone in making this step , for a very similar combination of language and cognition see Clark, Andy (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[3] cf. Fodor, Jerry A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[4] Sterelny, Kim (2010). Minds: extended or scaffolded? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4):465-481.
[5] Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.