Daniel Hutto

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Wollongong

This paper argues that mind-reading hypotheses (MRHs), of any kind, are not needed to best describe or best explain basic acts of social cognition. It considers the two most popular MRHs: one-ToM and two-ToM theories. These MRHs face competition in the form of complementary behaviour reading hypotheses (CBRHs). Following Buckner (Mind Lang 29:566–5...

We review the current state of play in the game of naturalizing content and analyse reasons why each of the main proposals, when taken in isolation, is unsatisfactory. Our diagnosis is that if there is to be progress two fundamental changes are necessary. First, the point of the game needs to be reconceived in terms of explaining the natural origin...

Decoupling a modestly construed Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis (or NSSH) from Strong Narrativism this paper attempts to motivate devoting our intellectual energies to the former. Section one briefly introduces the notions of self-shaping and rehearses reasons for thinking that self-shaping, in a suitably tame form, is, at least to some extent, s...

This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both c...

This commentary raises a question about the target article's proposed explanation of what goes on when we think through other minds. It highlights a tension between non-mindreading characterizations of everyday social cognition and the individualist, cognitivist assumptions that target article's explanatory proposal inherits from the predictive pro...

Objectives Goal-setting is one of the most common strategies used to increase physical activity. Current practice is often based on specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) goals. However, theory and research suggests that this approach may be problematic. Open goals (e.g., “see how well you can do”) have emerged as a pos...

Predictive Processing accounts of Cognition, PPC, promise to forge productive alliances that will unite approaches that are otherwise at odds (see Clark, A. Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). Can it? This paper argues that it can’t—or at least not so long as it sticks with the cogn...

This paper shows how a radical approach to enactivism provides a way of clarifying and unifying different varieties of enactivism and enactivist-friendly approaches so as to provide a genuine alternative to classical cognitivism. Section 1 reminds readers of the broad church character of the enactivism framework. Section 2 explicates how radical en...

Narrative practices have the potential to play a robust part in strategies for self-managing psychosocial well-being. Narrative therapy in particular seeks to empower groups and individuals, providing them with the resources and skills needed for positively improving their own well-being and coping with a wide range of life challenges. However, nar...

This paper motivates taking seriously the possibility that brains are basically protean: that they make use of neural structures in inventive, on-the-fly improvisations to suit circumstance and context. Accordingly, we should not always expect cognition to divide into functionally stable neural parts and pieces. We begin by reviewing recent work in...

Radically Enactive Cognition, REC, holds that not all forms of cognition are content involving and, especially, not root forms. According to radical enactivists, only minds that have mastered special kinds of socio-cultural practice are capable of content involving forms of cognition. This paper addresses criticisms that have been leveled at REC’s...

This article examines two important movements-narrative medicine and narrative therapy-that aim to put narrative practices at the heart of medicine and therapeutic practices. It exposes the core assumptions of these movements and identifies ways in which attention to those assumptions can benefit from philosophical clarification and further investi...

This article examines two important movements—narrative medicine and narrative therapy—that aim to put narrative practices at the heart of medicine and therapeutic practices. It exposes the core assumptions of these movements and identifies ways in which attention to those assumptions can benefit from philosophical clarification and further investi...

Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena -- perceiving, imagining, remembering -- can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik M...

Context: Neurophenomenology, as formulated by Varela, offers an approach to the science of consciousness that seeks to get beyond the hard problem of consciousness. There is much to admire in the practical approach to the science of consciousness that neurophenomenology advocates. > Problem: Even so, this article argues, the metaphysical commitment...

This paper introduces this special issue which is focused on its target paper - The Natural Origins of Content. The target paper has had a robust and considered set of fifteen replies; a literal A to Z of papers (from Abramova’s to Zawidzki’s). This extended introduction explains the background thinking and challenges that motivated the target arti...

A certain philosophical frame of mind holds that contentless imaginings are unimaginable, “inconceivable” (Shapiro 2014a, p. 214) - that it is simply not possible to imagine acts of imagining in the absence of representational content. Against this, this paper argues that there is no naturalistically respectable way to rule out the possibility of c...

Recent years have seen a growing interest among cognitive scientists in the role of the body and the environment in cognition. As a result, theoretical approaches which view cognition as shaped by factors that used to seem irrelevant to explaining the mind are quickly gaining currency.

We address some frequently encountered criticisms of Radical Embodied/Enactive Cognition. Contrary to the claims that the position is too radical, or not sufficiently so, we claim REC is just radical enough.

Readers beware! This book is other than it first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s latest philosophical offering is unlike anything that we have had from him to date. Its preface warns that the Tractatus is no textbook. This is an extreme understatement; really it is a deep puzzle—one that must be handled with great care. As the first lines signal there...

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It...

Colombo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2012) argues that we have compelling reasons to posit neural representations because doing so yields unique explanatory purchase in central cases of social norm compliance. We aim to show that there is no positive substance to Colombo’s plea—nothing that ought to move us to endorse representational...

I must admit to waiting with anticipation for the arrival of Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Although this was my first exposure to the work of Erik Myin, the second author, I was already familiar with prior work by Daniel Hutto. Five years ago, Hutto attended a conference at Clark University dedicated to discovering the futur...

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 acknowl...

This chapter examines what acceptance of Radical Enactive Cognition means for the now stagnating debate about the extent and boundaries of mind. It argues that basic minds are extensive and not merely extended if they are contentless. It demonstrates how REC decisively advances debates about whether minds extend, moving beyond traditional stalemate...

The Character of Consciousness. ChalmersDavid J.. Oxford University Press, New York, 2010, 624 pp., £65. £18.99. ISBN: 978-0-19-531111-2. ISBN: 978-0-19-531110-5 - Volume 87 Issue 2 - Daniel D. Hutto

This comment on Stueber's article clarifies the nature of the core disagreement between his approach to understanding reasons and mine. The purely philosophical nature of the dispute is highlighted. It is argued that understanding someone's narrative often suffices for understanding the person's reasons in ordinary cases. It is observed that Stuebe...

Although I feel for the plight of the great apes and other animals, my interest in the topic of this chapter is an outcome of curiosity-driven research that began with a quite different focus. My work on the nature of basic cognition and social cognition has its historical roots in questions and puzzles about beliefs, and related phenomena, such as...

Review - ConsciousnessHillChristopher S.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 260 + index pp., ISBN: 9780521125215 £18.99 ($29.99) (paperback); 9780521110228 £55.00 ($80.00) (hardback) - Volume 86 Issue 2 - Daniel D. Hutto

Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist th...

In the action-space account of color, an emphasis is laid on implicit knowledge when it comes to experience, and explanatory ambitions are expressed. If the knowledge claims are interpreted in a strong way, the action-space account becomes a form of conservative enactivism, which is a kind of cognitivism. Only if the knowledge claims are weakly int...

A distinctive part of our everyday adult way of making sense of one another involves making sense of actions performed for reasons. This practice, which has been the focus of intense scrutiny, frequently dons the somewhat unfortunate label ‘Folk Psychology’ (or FP) in the philosophical literature.1 It travels under many other names too: common-sens...

An argument that challenges the dominant "theory theory" and simulation theory approaches to folk psychology by claiming that our everyday understanding of intentional actions done for reasons is acquired by exposure to and engaging in specific kinds of narratives. Established wisdom in cognitive science holds that the everyday folk psychological a...

Psychologically normal adult humans make sense of intentional actions by trying to decide for which reason they were performed. This is a datum that requires our understanding. Although there have been interesting recent debates about how we should understand ‘reasons’, I will follow a long tradition and assume that, at a bare minimum, to act for a...

Our world is replete with narratives—narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. This can hardly be denied, certainly if by ‘narratives’ we have in mind only those of the purely discursive variety—i.e. those complex representations that relate and describe the course of some unique series of events, however humble, in a coherent b...

The human world is replete with narratives - narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provid...

Drawing heavily on Aristotle, Tabensky attempts to establish ‘an ethic that flows from the very structure of our being', but he also calls on Davidson\'s arguments about the essentially social character of rationality to shore up Aristotle\'s claim that we are essentially social beings. This much of his project, I argue is successful. However Taben...

What is the true worth of Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy? Opinions are strongly divided, with many resting on misreadings of his purpose. This book challenges ‘theoretical’ and ‘therapeutic’ interpretations, proposing that Wittgenstein saw clarification as the true end of philosophy, that his approach exemplifies critical philosophy.

Praetorius' book advocates a healthy review and reform of the basic assumptions of much general theorising in psychology. Her central concern is to supply reasons of principle to demarcate the psychological and stave off reductionism. She seeks to derive these results from a handful of principles that she holds must be accepted since they form the...

This paper argues against causalism about reasons in three stages. First, the paper investigates Professor Davidson's sophisticated version of the claim that we must understand reason-explanations as a kind of causal explanation to highlight the fact that this move does no explanatory work in telling us how we determine for which reasons we act. Se...

Professor Davidson's anomalous monism has been subject to the criticism that, despite advertisements to the contrary, if it were true mental properties would be epiphenomenal. To this Davidson has replied that his critics have misunderstood his views concerning the extensional nature of causal relations and the intensional character of causal expla...