Abstract
Radical Enactivism holds that the best explanation of basic forms of cognition is provided without involving information of any sort. According to this view, the ability to perceive visual affordances should be accounted for in terms of extensional covariations between variables spanning the agent’s body and the environment. Contrary to Radical Enactivism, I argue that the intensional properties of cognition cannot be ignored, and that the way in which an agent represents the world has consequences on the explanation of basic sensorimotor abilities. To support this claim, I show that the perception of visual affordances is not segregated from higher forms of cognition; rather, it is modulated by the agent’s ability to recognize the semantic identity of the visual target. Accordingly, since the semantic recognition of an object involves a way of representing it under a certain description, it can be inferred that the perception of visual affordances cannot be accounted for without considering the intensional properties of cognition. This poses an explanatory issue for Radical Enactivism.
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Notes
It should be noted that, at least prima facie, this view resembles that of Gibson (1979), according to which action opportunities or affordances do not depend on the animal's categorization and intention to act (p. 134). However, it is important to note that the agreement between Gibson’s ecological psychology and RE concerns only the non-representational nature of internal cognition, whereas they diverge regarding the existence of environmental information. Notably, Gibson (1979) and his fellows (e.g., Turvey et al. 1981) have stated that the agent’s actions are guided by the information in the environment, but not in the brain, whereas radical enactivists deny any presence of information in the brain and environment. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this relevant distinction to my attention.
Mathematical tools of DST have been adopted in several naturalistic disciplines, including physics, biology, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology (e.g., Guastello and Gregson 2011).
It should be noted that this view involves endorsing a metaphysical approach to scientific explanation, according to which only metaphysically true statements can be genuine explanations (e.g. Psillos 2005).
This paper mainly focuses on the explanatory thesis underlying RE and does not address the HPC. In doing this, I agree with Chemero (2011), according to which, the explanatory and the ontological problems of RE can be addressed independently of one another.
It should be noted that, here I am not interested in taking a position on the vexed question of the penetrability of vision by semantic competences. For the sake of the present argument, it is enough to show that vision for action is significantly biased by higher categorization abilities. For the debate concerning the cognitive penetration of vision for action see for example Nanay (2013), Burnston (2016) and Toribio (2018).
Someone might be concerned with the use of reverse inference in cognitive neuroscience. Typically, cognitive neuroscientists have concluded that a psychological process is involved in an experimental task because a particular pattern of neural activation is elicited during the task. The main concern with reverse inference is that it is a fallacy when conceived as an instance of a conclusive reasoning such as a deduction. It should be noted, however, that reverse inference as intended here is a heuristic instrument that allows the formulation of empirical hypotheses. Contrary to the view that brain activation patterns are weak indicators of the presence of cognitive processes (e.g., Poldrack 2008, 2011; Fox and Friston 2012), the heuristic value of reverse inference can be secured by means of a suitable meta-analysis that complements it. Meta-analyses provide a fine-grained comparison among the available evidence concerning the correlation between neural events and psychological events associated with the execution of a specific task. Accordingly, reverse inference can be considered predictively reliable insofar as it is supported by a suitable meta-analysis. (e.g. Hutzler 2014; Nathan and Pinal 2017; Machery 2014). Notably, Sect. 4 of this paper presents a row meta-analysis of this sort. For more detailed meta-analyses concerning the interactions between semantic and visuomotor capacities, see for example Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti (2017), Briscoe and Schwenkler (2015), Brogaard (2011) and Schenk and McIntosh (2010).
In line with this view, Gadsby and Williams (2018) have recently argued that, at present, non-representational model of cognition cannot account for the evidence concerning the behavioral anomalies of patients suffering from anorexia nervosa. Differently, the same set of evidence can be accommodated within a representational framework by means of the notion of body schema (e.g., De Vignemont 2014).
This conclusion can be extended to other varieties of the enactivist view only insofar as they rely on a non-representational approach to vision for action. Notably, since evidence show that affordance perception is shaped by the agent’s categorization competences, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the interlocking between vision and action can be accounted for by attributing content and categorization abilities.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the audience of the biannual conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy held in September 2018, and Gabriele Ferretti for comments and suggestions. I’m also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for allowing me to improve the paper.
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Zipoli Caiani, S. Intensional biases in affordance perception: an explanatory issue for radical enactivism. Synthese 198 (Suppl 17), 4183–4203 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02049-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02049-w