Daniel D Hutto

• BA, MPhil, DPhil
• Professor at University of Wollongong

Concentrating on their treatment of folk psychology, this paper seeks to establish that, in the form advocated by its leading proponents, the Canberra project is presumptuous in certain key respects. Crucially, it presumes (1) that our everyday practices entail the existence of implicit folk theories; (2) that naturalists ought to be interested pri...

Enactivists should frame their positive project by adopting a Wittgensteinian point of view. The case is made in four steps. Fundamental issues on which enactivists and Wittgenstein apparently agree are identified (Section 1). Details are supplied about exactly where and why opposing intellectualist theories of mind go wrong (Section 2). Prominent...

This paper argues that fictionalism about folk psychology is ill motivated in any domain. First, there is no advantage in trying to vindicate folk psychology by treating the constructs of classical cognitivism – viz. subpersonal mental representations – as useful fictions as opposed to serious scientific posits. Second, there is neither need nor ju...

It is almost universally agreed that the main business of commonsense psychology is that of providing generally reliable predictions and explanations of the actions of others. In line with this, it is also generally assumed that we are normally at theoretical remove from others such that we are always ascribing causally efficacious mental states to...

Enactivists have made several forays into the domain of ethical thought over the past decades: their proposals vary in foci and ambition (Colombetti and Torrance in Phenomenol Cogn Sci 8:505–526, 2009, Fourlas and Cuffari in Topoi 41:355–371, 2022, as reported by Di Paolo and De Jaegher (Linguistic bodies: the continuity between life and language,...

Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work tak...

Clark and Chalmers' (1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of v...

Advocates of radical enactivism maintain that contentful cognition is kinky, and that we need a kinky explanation of its natural origins (Hutto & Satne 2017, Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism. MIT Press.). In advancing this idea, they maintain that there are qualitatively important cognitive differences between creatures capable...

In this chapter, we begin by explaining the concept of embodied cognition and the “4Es” and an embodied approach to social cognition known as interaction theory. Then, through an examination of work at three clinics, we show how these concepts are important in their application to various clinical settings. We conclude by discussing two innovative...

Radically enactive accounts of perceiving directly and diametrically oppose their representationalist rivals. This is true even of the most radical predictive processing theories of perception which embrace some enactivist assumptions yet retain some commitment to representationalism. Which framework should we prefer? This chapter seeks to make hea...

This paper will argue that intellectualism about skill—the contention that skilled performance is without exception guided by proposition knowledge—is fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualists about skill run into intractable theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical modes of presentati...

Relaxed naturalism and liberal naturalism both invite us to adopt a philosophy of nature that includes a range of non-scientific phenomena in its inventory while nevertheless keeping the supernatural at bay. This paper considers the question of how relaxed naturalism relates to liberal naturalism and what refinements are required if they are to suc...

This paper argues that radical enactivism (RE) offers a framework with the required nuance needed for understanding of the full range of the various forms of pretense. In particular, its multi-storey account of cognition, which holds that psychological attitudes can be both contentless and contentful, enables it to appropriately account for both th...

Experts translate the latest findings on embodied cognition from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body environmental interaction. If this supposition is correct, then...

Clarke and Beck rightly contend that the number sense allows us to directly perceive number. However, they unnecessarily assume a representationalist approach and incur a heavy theoretical cost by invoking “modes of presentation.” We suggest that the relevant evidence is better explained by adopting a radical enactivist approach that avoids charact...

This paper responds to Alva Noë’s general critique of Radical Enactivism. In particular, it responds to his claim that Radical Enactivism denies experience, presence and the world. We clarify Radical Enactivism’s actual arguments and positive commitments in this regard. Finally, we assess how Radical Enactvism stands up in comparison with Noë’s own...

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In sp...

Radically enactive accounts of perceiving directly and diametrically oppose their representationalist rivals. This is true even of the most radical predictive processing theories of perception which embrace some enactivist assumptions yet retain some commitment to representationalism. Which framework should we prefer? This chapter seeks to make hea...

Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items—e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on—in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cog...

The radically enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) holds that cognition is not always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations. Arguments for REC have assumed that its opponents defend a substantive notion of representation—a notion that entails the existence of content-carrying mental states. This paper consi...

Mental representation is one of the core theoretical constructs within cognitive science and, together with the introduction of the computer as a model for the mind, is responsible for enabling the “cognitive turn” in psychology and associated fields. Conceiving of cognitive processes, such as perception, motor control, and reasoning, as processes...

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter...

Mathematical cognition is widely regarded as the epitome of the kind of cognition that systematically eludes enactivist treatment. It is the parade example of abstract, disembodied cognition if ever there was one. As it is such an important test case, this paper focuses squarely on what Gallagher has to say about mathematical cognition in Enactivis...

Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutiona...

This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The st...

This paper explicates Wittgenstein's vision of our place in nature and shows in what ways it is unlike and more fruitful than the picture of nature promoted by exclusive scientific naturalists. Wittgenstein's vision of nature is bound up with and supports his signature view that the task of philosophy is distinctively descriptive rather than explan...

The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains cognition. Our analysis reveals that there is no compelling evidence or argument for thinking that brains compute. It makes the case for inverting the explanatory order proposed by the computational basis of cognition thesis. We give reasons to reverse th...

Chapter 8 challenges the standard assumption that all imagination must be representational by showing that it is easier to understand the most fundamental kind of imaginings in terms of perceptual re-enactments that are wholly interactive and non-contentful in character. Combining REC with Material Engagement Theory, MET, it is revealed how basic,...

Chapter 2 introduces REC’s Equal Partner Principle, according to which invoking neural, bodily, and environmental factors all make equally important contributions when it comes to explaining cognitive activity. In line with that principle, it is made clear how REC can accept that cognitive capacities depend on structural changes that occur inside o...

Chapter 3 introduces the contours of REC’s positive program for relating to and allying with other major theories of cognition. In these efforts it aims to provide analyses and arguments designed to sanitize, strengthen, and unify existing representational and antirepresentational offerings. This theoretical work takes the form of RECtification—a p...

Chapter 4 provides further examples of RECtification, this time with the aim of showing how REC can fruitfully ally with and strengthen two prominent nonrepresentational E-approaches to cognition—Autopoietic-Adaptive Enactivism and Ecological Dynamics. These examples of RECtification reveal REC’s capacity to marshal and combine powerful resources f...

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 Myin d...

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibi...

This chapter introduces the E-turn in cognitive science –the move to embrace enactive, embodied, extended and ecological views of cognition–and the empirical and theoretical considerations that spurred it on. It explains how E-approaches differ from classical forms of cognitivism: in particular the degree to which different E-approaches move away f...

Chapter 9 explicates REC’s duplex account of the many and varied forms of memory. As might be expected, REC is well suited for understanding procedural remembering. Yet, by defending a strong version of the Social Interactionist Theory it is shown how autobiographical remembering is best understood as rooted in narrative capacities. Thus autobiogra...

The epilogue takes a last look at the possibility that REC may be leaving out something explanatorily important because it says nothing about how the brain processes informational content. Focusing on a prominent case, it is demonstrated that REC has the resources to understand the groundbreaking research on positioning systems in rat brains. It is...

Chapter 6 sets out to show REC can allow for content-involving cognition in nature without itself falling foul of the Hard Problem of Content and without introducing unbridgeable evolutionary discontinuity or gaps in nature. Thus it crucially defuses critical concerns about REC’s NOC program in order to establish that it is a tenable way of explain...

Chapter 7 begins to puts REC positive story into action. It opens by questioning the value of appealing to a priori intuitions in trying to understand the character of perceiving. Focusing on explanatory concerns, it revisits Predictive Processing or PPC proposals about perceiving and defuses arguments that the explanatory punch of PPC requires cha...

Philosophy of psychiatry faces a tough choice between two competing ways of understanding mental disorders. The folk psychology (FP) view puts our everyday normative conceptual scheme in the driver’s seat – on the assumption that it, and it only, tells us what mental disorders are (1). Opposing this, the scientific image (SI) view (2, 3) holds that...

Memories have long been compared with archived items that can be faithfully retrieved by minds, as if they were the sorts of thing that exist in a kind of internal mental storehouse. Down the ages memories have often been conceived of as images — proxies of items encountered by the senses — which are received, sometimes suitably augmented, retained...

The arrival of embodied, enactive and extended accounts of minds has sparked interest in how such new thinking about minds might influence and reshape our thinking about the production and appreciation of art. This paper clarifies why radically enactive approaches to aesthetics ought to be favoured. This is achieved in three stages. First, a proper...

New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories...

Folk psychological practices are arguably the basis for our articulate ability to understand why people act as they do. This paper considers how social neuroscience could contribute to an explanation of the neural basis of folk psychology by understanding its relevant neural firing and wiring as a product of enculturation. Such a view is motivated...

People face many situations in which their emotions deeply intertwined with their ability to act intelligently in richly context sensitive ways. Western and Eastern philosophical traditions have long considered the development of emotional responsiveness in performance to be a matter of cultivating embodied virtues. Yet knowing how to cultivate emb...

On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of e...

New approaches in the philosophy of mind defend the idea that basic forms of cognition and human intersubjectivity are deeply and inextricably embodied and embedded. In its more extreme forms this approach to mind and cognition opposes the idea that cognition is always or primarily a matter of forming mental representations of that environment (Gal...

The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational-representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limit...

This paper reviews two main strategies for dealing with the threat posed by radically enactive/embodied cognition to traditional cognitive science. Both strategies invoke action oriented representations (AORs). They differ in emphasizing different features of AORs in their attempt to answer the REC threat – focusing on their contents and vehicles,...

A properly radical enactivism—one that eschews the idea that all mentality is necessarily contentful and representational—has better prospects of unifying psychology than does traditional cognitivism. This paper offers a five-step argument in support of this claim. The first section advances the view that a principled way of characterizing psycholo...

This paper begins by reminding the reader of the standard arguments that sceptics offer for doubting that mirror neurons could constitute any kind of action understanding (Section 2). It then outlines the usual response to these sceptical worries made by believers (Section 3). An attempt to put flesh on this idea in terms of what brains understand...

This chapter motivates the idea that the most basic kind of believing is a contentless attitude. It gives reasons for thinking that the most basic sort of belief — the sort that both we and other animals adopt toward situations — does not represent those situations in truth-evaluable ways. I call such attitudes pure intentional attitudes. They are...

Wittgenstein offers a grave assessment of the state of psychology — one that falls just short of complete condemnation. Taken seriously, it should be a cause of concern for anyone working in the discipline today. But, should it been taken seriously? Was Wittgenstein’s evaluation ever justified? More urgently, is it still an accurate portrayal of ps...

Any adequate account of emotion must accommodate the fact that emotions, even those of the most basic kind, exhibit intentionality as well as phenomenality. This article argues that a good place to start in providing such an account is by adjusting Prinz’s (2004) embodied appraisal theory (EAT) of emotions. EAT appeals to teleosemantics in order to...

Humans engage with the world and one another in sophisticated ways that (arguably) creatures lacking language cannot. Language (again, arguably) enables us to communicate meaningfully, to form contentful attitudes and intentions, and to design and execute plans so as to satisfy our needs and desires. Yet, for this to be so, a great deal that is not...

It is possible to pursue philosophy with a clarificatory end in mind. Doing philosophy in this mode neither reduces to simply engaging in therapy or theorizing. This paper defends the possibility of this distinctive kind of philosophical activity and gives an account of its product—non-theoretical insights—in an attempt to show that there exists a...

To the extent that psychologists are concerned to do more than collect raw data for possible interpretation, they cannot avoid interrogating the philosophical assumptions which inform their work. This paper argues that there is a vital need for conceptual clarification of many of the central topics studied by today's sciences of the mind. Yet, rath...

There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulate...

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10538100 Copyright Elsevier Inc. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2008.12.006 [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

The Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) is a recently conceived, late entrant into the contest of trying to understand the basis of our mature folk psychological abilities, those involving our capacity to explain ourselves and comprehend others in terms of reasons. This paper aims to clarify its content, importance and scientific plausibility by: d...

E‐approaches to the mind stress the embodied, embedded and enactive nature of mental phenomena. In their more radical, non‐representational variants these approaches offer innovative and powerful new ways of understanding fundamental modes of intersubjective social interaction: I‐approaches. While promising, E and I accounts have natural limits. In...

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...

Folk Psychological Practice 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...

What is central to our ability to interpret one another? A great deal of work in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, developmental psychology and a host of other disciplines assumes that, at root, interpersonal interpretation is accomplished through the employment of a 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, meaning an 'everyday', rath...

Much of the difficulty in assessing theories of consciousness stems from their advocates not supplying adequate or convincing characterisations of the phenomenon (or data) they hope to explain. Yet, to make any reasonable assessment this is precisely what is required, for it is not as if our ‘pre-theoretical’ intuitions are philosophically innocent...

The binary divide between traditional cognitivist and enactivist paradigms is tied to their respective commitments to understanding cognition as based on knowing that as opposed to knowing how. Using O'Regan's and Noë's landmark sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservativ...

This paper builds on the insights of Jerome Bruner by underlining the central importance of narratives explaining actions in terms of reasons, arguing that by giving due attention to the central roles that they play in our everyday understanding of others provides a better way of explicating the nature and source of that activity than does simulati...

In addressing the question “Do representations need reality?”, this paper attempts to show that a principled understanding of representations requires that they have objective, systematic content. It is claimed that there is an interesting form of nonconceptual, intentionality which is processed by non-systematic connectionist networks and has its...

The aim of this paper is to make sense of cases of apparent nonsense in the writings of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Against commentators such as Cora Diamond and James Conant, we argue that, in the case of Wittgenstein, recognising such a category of non- sense is necessary in order to understand the development of his thought. In the case of Kie...

This paper distinguishes three conceptual problems that attend philosophical accounts of consciousness. The first concerns the problem of properly characterizing the nature of consciousness itself, the second is the problem of making intelligible the relation between consciousness and the 'physical', and the third is the problem of creating the int...

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...

In the mid-nineties, Routledge brought out The Mechanical Mind. Authored by Tim Crane, this was a readable introduction, overview and rationale for approaching the philosophy of mind from a particular outlook. Specifically, it identified and defended the core and foundational assumptions that inform mainstream analytic philosophy of mind. The book...

1. The Ends and Methods of Philosophy Tradition has it that philosophy has the creditable and noble end of distinguishing appearance from reality, of getting at the true nature of things. Its purpose is to advance our knowledge concerning what is essential with respect to important matters. Although there have been powerful challenges to the idea t...