10 years of radical enactivism

REC holds that minds are not originally descriptive. However, minded organisms can acquire descriptive abilities, affecting perception, imagination, and memory. I will unpack and illustrate this key claim of REC and show how it resonates with prominent pieces of philosophizing in history. I will show why REC’s view sketched is ‘radical’ in a pejorative sense only from a contingent historical perspective such as that of current analytical philosophy of mind. Still, the view opposed by REC, that of minds as originally descriptive, acts like a magnet for philosophical thinking. I consider how this could be based in attitudes about understanding and explanation that are bound up with doing philosophy. Finally, I explore how REC could be further developed to weaken the grip of these ideas.

Often, when a business or institution expands its endeavours beyond the operations by which it originally became known, the owners officially change its name to merely its initials. The company Consumer Value Store, for example, is now simply registered as CVS, and the ‘A’ and ‘M’ in Texas A&M no longer stand for anything (originally standing for ‘Agricultural’ and ‘Mechanical’, respectively). In this talk, I consider the possibility that Hutto and Myin ought to exercise their executive control and remove the term ‘enactive’ from REC. I take the motivations for such a decision to be quite obvious: REC disagrees with the ‘enactive program’ advanced by Varela, Thompson and Rosch on so many key issues that it is hard to construe the published disagreements between the proponents of the positions to amount to mere sibling disputes. This is anecdotally evidenced by Thompson’s claim that to refer to REC as a species of enactivism is “a misnomer” (Thompson 2018). In this talk, I consider the central claims and ambitions of the enactive approach set forward in Varela et al.’s (1991) seminal the Embodied Mind (alongside subsequent characterisations of the enactive approach provided by Thompson). I argue that REC, given its explicitly Wittgensteinian motivations (Hutto 2013), is entirely at odds with such ambitions and their philosophical implications, and especially their characterisation of cognitive activity as implicating strong life-mind continuity. I then examine REC’s position on the notion of representational cognition and contrast it with Alva Noë’s (2012) notion of “accessing” the world. This, I argue, touches on an insurmountable tension between REC and other enactive approaches that cannot be bridged without one of the positions sacrificing its philosophical purpose. What of REC, then? In closing, I point to a sensible characterisation of REC provided by Farid Zahnoun, which construes it as a philosophical “meta-framework” that has been exploited to good effect nuancing frameworks in the contemporary cognitive sciences.

References

• Hutto, D. D. (2013). Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian point of view. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(3), 281-302.
• Noë, A. (2012). Varieties of presence. Harvard University Press.
• Thompson, E. (2018). Review of Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
• Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (2017). The embodied mind, revised edition: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT press.

Enactivist philosophy is now taught at university to budding philosophers of mind. An example of this in the Netherlands can be found in the masters in Philosophy of Neuroscience (PNS) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The inclusion of enactivist material in post-graduate education is a success in our goal to develop an understanding of cognition that is inclusive of lived experience, the body, and the environment. However, the methods of education remain rooted in cognitivist commitments, undermining the lessons of enactivism being taught. Enactivism teaches that meaning is created through embodied engagement with the environment and others, weaving one’s own experience and history into the building of knowledge. In theory, education consistent with enactivism would incorporate the body, the environment, and lived experience into its teaching methods. In practice, in PNS, a cognitivist approach is used to teach enactivism. This is characterised by a tendency to transfer theoretical knowledge from teacher to student as though it is an independent object obtained only through the use of thought and language. The methods are sedentary and exclude the subjective experience of students and teachers from the learning process, thus perpetuating a divide between the student, peers, teachers, and world. Thus, it can be said that while enactivism is taught in theory, it is has not yet permeated into educational practice. In this thesis I address the tension that emerges between the theory of enactivism and the practice of teaching it. By doing so, the aim is to offer a framework for implementing enactivist education at the university level. This framework is built on four sources. First, it draws from the philosophy of enactivism and its background in phenomenology. Second, it incorporates established models of education such as Social-Emotional Learning and Experiential Learning. Third, it is enriched by interviews conducted with professors and researchers who are implementing innovative methods in their own classrooms. Finally, it is born of my own experience as a student of PNS. The culminative framework consists of five core tenets for the design of education that aligns with enactivist philosophy: (1) The Spatial Environment, (2) The Intersubjective Environment, (3) The Body, (4) First-Person Experience, and (5) Affect. Overall, the framework of enactivist education illustrated in this thesis is informed by enactivist principles of embodied and embedded cognition and supported by interdisciplinary and experiential insights from philosophy, cognitive sciences, and pedagogy. In sum, the thesis provides a foundation to incorporate enactivism into educational design, which constitutes an essential step towards our goal to fully realise radical enactivism.

While I do not disagree with the main principles presented in "Acts of Remembering: From A Radically Enactive Point of View", this communication investigates additional aspects of enactive accounts of remembering, specifically focusing on emotions—an area that radical enactivism has not fully addressed in memory studies. My previous research introduced emotion as an affective episode with intentionality, guided by bodily changes and integrating perceptual and intellectual experiences. These emotions are shaped by embodied appraisals, preparing individuals for action and embedding emotion deeply in their life stories. Enactivism connects the subject and environment in a co-emergent process, aligning with both analytic philosophy and post-Heideggerian phenomenology by defining affectivity as embedded not only within individuals but also within the environment. Bodily extended emotions, such as atmospheric affectivity or Stimmung, illustrate how collective emotions can be individually experienced. Examples like weather influencing moods or emotional contagion highlight how enactivism assumes the phenomenological concept of the lived body, where meaning is communicated through physical expression. However, analytic philosophy of memory often overlooks this, as it focuses primarily on procedural memory. My work aims to redirect attention toward affectivity and emphasize how deeply emotions shape the act of remembering. It thus creates several modalities of emotional memory. The main claim is that meaningful affective memories should be both the biased way a past/future event is constructed and the way it can condition someone to act in the world as soon as it takes place. Enactive remembering is not only relying on brain mechanisms, but also on repetitive emotionally-biased behavior patterns given by sense-making because it presupposes the phenomenological lived body. It obeys different degrees of embodied engagement necessarily. Both subject-centered and world-centered approaches converge on a radical understanding of the environment as a consequence. As Casey (2021) notes, when two subjects interact within a shared space, the environment creates them as emotional agents - it bears the emotion out of them. I show how the same past patterns of bodily dispositions and appraisals are disclosed as memory re-establishes a past interaction in the present. That is, smiling when recalling having met a dear friend, having a PTSD flashback, having unconscious bodily dispositions through procedural memory, perpetuating past emotional momentum with identical bodily reactions in the past and the present and the phenomenon of spontaneous recalling obey, generally, the very same logic: re-creating an affective environment through what is contextually available now. I also suggest that this process can also occur vicariously - a radical concept of environment here has its most significant expression. Embodied resonance explains how emotional contagion allows one person to experience another’s memories through mechanisms like mirror neurons by being close to each other, which gives, for instance, an original explanation for vicarious traumatisation. This also points to a concept of the extended body, where the line between personal and shared memories becomes blurred, though some causal connection remains, as the original event happened for at least one person. Places, in turn, are concrete relations within a network of possible relations that can happen in multiple ways, depending on what the subject is engaged with.

The Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) revolution remains incomplete. For instance, I show that promising accounts of E-Cognition suffer by ignoring REC. Furthermore, REC gives reason to get more radical in rejecting first wave “extended” cognition in favor of third wave “distributed” accounts of cognition (Cash 2013; Sutton 2010). It’s also best poised to be not just scientifically but also politically “radical”. REC challenges cognitivist views that cognition depends on inherently meaningful cognitive states. Instead, it explains “basic” cognition as contentless, involving direct interaction with the environment without information-carrying representations. A major challenge for REC is explaining higher-level “real” cognition—such as language, reasoning, imagery, and memory—that doesn’t rely on direct interaction with physically present objects.  One reason I believe the REC revolution is not yet complete is because some allegedly 4E Cognitive Science advocates seem not to take the “Enactive” part of 4E seriously. And they need it. For example, Favela (2024)integrates neuroscience and ecological psychology, advocating a complex dynamic systems methodology to model dynamic, looping processes between agents’ brain, body and environmental affordances. But Favela gives a big promissory note at the end of his book (177), claiming there are no insurmountable obstacles to using the methods of complexity science to explain “real” cognition. However, I argue that he can’t cash out that promissory note without REC. This is because REC explains higher-level cognition as arising in dynamic interaction with new cognitive tools—sociocultural symbolic practices—whose emergence can be explained naturalistically (e.g. Hutto and Myin 2012; Hutto and Myin 2017; Hutto 2024; Gallagher 2020; see also Haugeland 1990). I show how REC can explain how a child’s socialization into normative and linguistic practices—interacting with symbolic objects— is crucial for developing higher-level cognition. I also show how socialization into a linguistic practice also permeates what might be taken to be pre-reflective “basic” perception (Hutto et al. 2020). Thus REC —and cognitive science in general— is unavoidably a social science. Cognition is distributed across populations and artifacts, and unfolds over evolutionary, intergenerational, developmental and behavioral timescales.  A consequence is that the REC revolution should not focus on individuals’ “Extended” cognition, but should show how socialization into pre-existing Socially Distributed cognitive processes help individuals’ abilities develop. Also, “Enculturated” should be a core component of “E-cognition”. Also, REC is positioned well to discuss cognition as a social skill, with political implications. It can address structural explanations of cognition and how individual cognition is permeated by collective and distributed understanding, meanings, institutions, and practices (Gallagher 2020). It can address the ways cognitive tools and practices are often differentially (mal)distributed, in ways that align with political categories such as gender, race, and class (Protevi 2009). REC can also helpfully examine ways in which such tools and practices can either reinforce or resist oppression and promote social change (Haslanger 2019; Maiese 2022). Thus, REC is well positioned to be both politically and scientifically radical.  Among approaches to Cognitive Science, it alone seems poised to engage more deeply with political philosophy of mind.

References 

• Cash, Mason. 2013. "Cognition without borders: “Third wave” socially distributed cognition and relational autonomy." Cognitive Systems Research 25-26: 61-71. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.03.007.
• Favela, Luis H. 2024. The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment.Routledge.
• Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and Interaction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 
• Haslanger, Sally. 2019. "Cognition as a Social Skill." Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (1): 5-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/24740500.2019.1705229.
• Haugeland, John. 1990. "The Intentionality All-Stars." Philosophical Perspectives 4: 383-427.
• Hutto, Daniel. 2024. "Keeping cognition kinky: a reply to Moyal-Sharrock on contentful cognition and its origins." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10018-7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10018-7.
• Hutto, Daniel, Shaun Gallagher, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, and Inês Hipólito. 2020. "Culture in Mind – An Enactivist Account: Not Cognitive Penetration but Cultural Permeation." In Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications, edited by Constance A. Cummings, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Shinobu Kitayama, Robert Lemelson and Carol M. Worthman, In Current Perspectives in Social and Behavioral Sciences, 163-187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hutto, Daniel, and Erik Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Hutto, Daniel, and Erik Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Maiese, Michelle. 2022. "Mindshaping, Enactivism, and Ideological Oppression." Topoi 41 (2): 341-354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-021-09770-1.
• Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Sutton, John. 2010. "Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind and the Civilizing Process." In The Extended Mind, edited by Richard Menary, 189-225. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; A Bradford Book.

What have the arguments, analyses and clarifications offered in Radicalizing Enactivism achieved after 10 years? What is the shape of things now? How has the ground shifted? How does REC stack up compared to the latest variants of its cognitivist and enactivist rivals? What prospects hold for REC in the future? How might adopting a REC framework matter to the approaches we take to topics of current philosophical, theoretical, and practical concern? With these questions front of mind, looking ahead and looking behind, this keynote revisits some familiar terrain with fresh eyes in its effort to actively explore the existing philosophical landscape and its possible future.