Abstract
Radical Enactivism rejects representationalism but nonetheless allows the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as supervening on brain bound elements. In this paper, I argue that Radical Enactivism should reject the possibility of wholly brain-bound phenomenal experience. I propose a way of individuating perceptual experiences that does not depend on representationalism and raises a problem to the view defended by Hutto and Myin (Radicalizing Enactivism: basic minds without content. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012) according to which, with respect to phenomenality, it is possible to adopt a view that partly construes experience in terms of engagement with the environment. I argue that Radical Enactivism should change: either deny that the environment plays any role in an account of the phenomenal character or embrace the view that the phenomenal properties of experiences are at least partly constituted by the environment itself.
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Notes
See Nagel (1974) for the now famous formulation of phenomenal properties in terms of what it is like to have an experience.
Burge does not claim that perceptual psychology currently understands phenomenality. The claim, rather, is programmatic.
Burge attacks both disjunctivism about belief and disjunctivism about perception. I will ignore the differences in these attacks and talk only about the challenge made to views of perception. For a discussion of Burge´s view on disjunctivism about perception and belief, see Travis (2011). For a discussion of the different varieties of disjunctivism, their commonalities and differences, see Soteriou (2016).
“On a Relational View, the qualitative character of the experience is constituted by the qualitative character of the scene perceived. […] You characterize the experience they are having by saying which view they are enjoying. On the Relational picture, this is the same thing as describing the phenomenal character of their experiences.” (Campbell 2002, pp.114–116).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for feedback on this material from the audience at the conference Ways of Enaction at Fortaleza, Brazil, September 11–13, 2017, especially from Dan Hutto, Erik Myin and Glenda Satne. I am indebted for detailed and thorough comments to two very generous, anonymous reviewers at Synthese, to Anderson Pinzón for discussion on Enactivism, and to the philosophy department at the Universidad de la Sabana for granting me the time needed for this research
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Espejo-Serna, J.C. Against Radical Enactivism’s narrowmindedness about phenomenality. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 213–228 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02261-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02261-2