Abstract
It is a well-established fact in representationalist cognitive science that concrete concepts influence human perception. In radical, anti-representationalist cognitive science, however, the case is far from clear. One reason for this is that proponents of Radical Enactivism (REC) yet have to clarify whether perceptual activity involving concepts is bound to rely on mental content or if it instantiates basic, contentfree cognition. The purpose of this paper is to show that concept-involving perception instantiates REC-style basic cognition. The paper begins by considering ‘cognitive projection’ as the term is introduced by Distributed Cognition research. Although being introduced as a means for exploring concept-based perception in non-representationalist terms, I argue that ‘cognitive projection’ comes with mentalist overtones and unclarities concerning its linguistic basis. With the purpose of overcoming these shortcomings, I unfold a REC-friendly reading of Wittgenstein’s writings on aspect perception, arguing that basic concept-involving perception is an instantiation of basic cognition. Concludingly, with the aim of ensuring compatibility, I make a connection between conceptual aspect perception and the REC notion of attentional anchors. The latter has been introduced to explore the role of material artefacts in the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational design but has, I submit, the potential for being extended to other practical contexts.
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Hutto and Myin (2013) introduce REC with the purpose of accounting for basic cognition in non-representationalist terms. However, it should be noted that they do not reject the possibility of contentful mentality in other, less basic types of cognitive activity. By contrast, REC recognizes that certain instances of careful planning involve content: “Without a doubt, some problems (indeed, perhaps whole classes of problems) are best addressed through advanced careful planning— planning of the sort that requires the rule-governed manipulation of truth-evaluable representations” (p. 40). In this connection, Hutto and Myin refer to the case of bomb defusals where trial and error-approaches - and, thus, strictly first-hand engagements with an explosive device - are unadvisable as they could easily yield fatal outcomes. Hutto and Myin follow up by connecting such acts of planning to our linguistic capacities, stating that “as natural language users, we humans are representation mongers of this sort and thus regularly adopt this basic strategy to solve problems. Our cultural heritage provides us with a store of represented knowledge— in many formats— that enables us to do so, successfully, under the sorts of conditions just mentioned. But it hardly follows that this type of cognitive engagement is the basis of, is required for, or is suitable for all sorts of tasks, always and everywhere” (p. 41). The final sentence stresses the difference between, on the one hand, REC which grants that certain kinds of cognition rely on the existence of content and, on the other, Cognition-Involving-Content approaches (e.g., teleosemantics, teleofunctionalism) which assume that cognition per definition (including REC-style basic cognition) is bound to be content-involving.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to clarify these two points.
Part of the reason for this is that concepts – here understood as word-meanings – fall on the content-side of a particular content-vehicle distinction; namely the form-meaning distinction foundational to mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language. Treating words as carriers of meaning is a no-go in the current paper’s anti-representationalist endeavors since this would conflict with REC’s basic point that basic minds are fundamentally contentless and, thus, incapable of ‘picking up’ or ‘consuming’ content.
This is indeed a general definition that doesn’t per se entail intellectualism. See Schroeder (2010: p. 355) for an anti-intellectualist account.
Frege’s commitments to mentalism is contested. See Green (1999) for a nuanced discussion.
There is much evidence showing that talk about the integration of basic and contentful cognition is explicitly considered as part of REC. With regards to perception, for instance, Hutto and Myin (2017) declare how their chapter 7 shows that “REC, when understood properly, can adequately explain how intramodal and intermodal forms of perceiving can interface and integrate with content-involving modes of perceiving without representational contents forming part of the basis for such explanations” (Hutto & Myin, 2017: p. xx-xxi). Thus, they conclude the said chapter by stating that “[REC] promotes no mysteries about how basic minds come into communion with content-involving attitudes, or about how these can interrelate and integrate without actually communicating…” (p. 176). Moreover, we also find mentioning of such integration in the case of imagining. Hutto and Myin extend Langland-Hassan’s (2015) account on different ‘hybrid imaginative attitudes’ which are formed when “basic imaginings are integrated with contentful attitudes” (Hutto & Myin, 2017: p. 188). Concludingly, they declare how their extension consists in assuming “that contentful attitudes scaffold contentless basic sensory images. This REC adjustment to the hybrid story ought not to threaten structural collapse. All that it requires is that it is possible for discursive components to frame noncontentful sensory images such that the resulting products of such a union is a single complex imaginative attitude which possesses content and correctness conditions” (p. 192-193 – my underlining).
Gauker (2017) makes a case against concepts in perception by pointing to their indeterminacy. He challengingly asks: “What is the conceptual content of your perception? Here are some candidates: That’s a chair. That’s a Windsor chair. That’s a wooden armchair. That’s a wooden piece of furniture. These contents contain various, different, general concepts, at various criss-crossing levels of generality. Personally, I do not see how I could decide between them, not even if the perception were mine.” (p. 766). Yet, there are at least three reasons why Gauker’s criticism doesn’t threaten a non-representationalist, pragmatist reading of Wittgenstein on aspect perception. First, in being contentfree and prepredicative, concept-based aspect perception isn’t propositional nor determinable as ‘contents.’ Thus, the ‘candidates’ mentioned by Gauker aren’t actual candidates. Second, Gauker criticism targets contentbased approaches and the basic assumption that perceivers must have a concept in mind during acts of perception. This also links to how he considers seeing an aspect to be all about overtly deciding what aspects to perceive conceptually. In aspect perception – understood as basic, prepredicative cognition – there is no room for making such overt decisions. Third, although it is possible to identify concrete conceptual meanings in Gauker’s example (e.g., chair, Windsor chair), it is crucial to bear in mind that the evocation of conceptual knowhow is relative to the perceiver’s habits and skills, concretely situated in relation to particular language games and, further, unfolds in concrete human socio-material practices. The timeless and decontextualized example of “your perception of a brown, wooden, Windsor armchair” omits crucial information about the practical context of the perception. Thus, in his counterexample, Gauker makes the un-Wittgensteinian move of presenting the perceiver as someone who stands over against the world while, in the fact, she is always-already engulfed in skillfully dealing with it.
It should be noted that Noë (2015) aims to offer a non-representationalist account on concept-based perception. On his view, concepts and sensorimotor skills belong to the same genus as they both amount to ‘skills of access.’ Thus, the concepts and skills differ in degree, not in kind. Noë pushes actionism as the thesis that “perception is the activity of exploring the environment making use of knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies” (Noë, 2015: p. 2). Yet, his anti-representationalist commitments are unclear. On the one hand, he bases his account on the explicit assumption that “perception is not a representation-building activity.” On the other hand, Noë rebuts this statement by submitting that we should not “deny the critical role of understanding and knowledge” (Noë, 2015: p. 2). Further, he stresses the continuity between basic sensorimotor knowledge and “’higher,’ more intellectual kinds of cognition such as thought and planning” (Noë, 2015: p. 1) which traditionally are said to involve representations (cf. my point above). Here, Noë’s approach can be challenged by the fact that it pushes the questionable conception of perceptual knowledge. For as Hutto and Myin (2013) point out, there is evidence suggesting that Sensorimotor Enactivism “remains significantly conservative” (Hutto & Myin, 2013: p. 24). One reason for this is that sensorimotor enactivists make appeal to ‘practical knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies’ – or following Ryle (2009): knowing how – by presenting this kind of knowledge as being intrinsically connected with assumptions, judgments and other overtly cognitive phenomena. Consequently, Hutto and Myin argue, it seems to follow that the sensorimotor enactivist conception of knowing how is based in a knowing that and, further, that “the nature and form of the knowledge in question might be grounded in a set of semantically contentful sub-personal rules and representations” (Hutto & Myin, 2013: p. 26). Although Noë (2015) does address the relation between knowing how and knowing that he nevertheless argues in favor of their conflation by stressing that they “commingle and cooperate” (Noë, 2015: p. 6). I take this to underline that Hutto and Myin’s criticism of Sensorimotor Enactivism is valid and that it can be extended to include Noë’s (2015) account.
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Gahrn-Andersen, R. Concrete Concepts in Basic Cognition. Philosophia 50, 1093–1116 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00448-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00448-x