Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Mit Press)

Hutto, Daniel D.,Myin, Erik

ISBN 10: 0262534649 / ISBN 13: 9780262534642

Published by The MIT Press, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # IN-mon0000032428

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Mit Press)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262534649
• ISBN 13: 9780262534642
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless.

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. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They 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.

About the Author

Daniel D. Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong and the author of Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis for Understanding Reasons (MIT Press) and coauthor of Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (MIT Press).

Erik Myin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and coauthor of Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (MIT Press).