Abstract
Enactivism has influentially argued that the traditional intellectualist ‘act-content’ model of intentionality is insufficient both phenomenologically and naturalistically, and minds are built from world-involving bodily habits—thus, knowledge should be regarded as more of a skilled performance than an informational encoding. Radical enactivists have assumed that this insight must entail non-representationalism concerning at least basic minds. But what if it could be shown that representation is itself a form of skilled performance? I sketch the outline of such an account from the perspective of Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics, which theorises signs as habits of associating specific cues with appropriate acts and schemas of ensuing experience. Within this framework, I argue, a naturalistic account of propositional structure can be constructed which transcends the symbolic—and in some instances even the linguistic—sphere, and offers new insights regarding the Information Processing Challenge, and the Hard Problem of Content.
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Notes
‘Commodified’ is of course an economic metaphor. But it is arguably not out of place—and has previously been explicitly mobilised—in these philosophical debates. For example: “…information is a prime commodity, and when it is used in biological theorizing it is granted a kind of atomistic autonomy as it moves from place to place, is gathered, stored, imprinted, and translated…” (Oyama, 2000, p. 1, cited in Hutto, 2011a, p. 50).
They were being challenged even earlier in the pragmatist tradition, which it appears that Ryle may have covertly drawn on (Legg & Black, 2020).
See (Thompson, 2007, pp. 128–129) for a useful overview.
It should be noted that a somewhat more complex definitional picture of content is offered in (Hutto, 2011a, p. 54), where he appears to sketch more of a family resemblance account: “Content, it seems, is a bit like Christmas: it can come without truth conditions, without concepts, without intensionality (with an ‘s’), without semantics, without mentality….”.
It’s worth emphasising that not all enactivists are anti-representationalist. Others hold that representation survives in modified form, but must be understood as fundamentally ‘action-oriented’ (Clark, 2015, 2016; Noë 2004; Wheeler, 2005). This fundamental disagreement has led to a series of “representation wars” (Clark, 2015). My focus here, however, is on the anti-representationalist position of radical enactivism.
The qualifier ‘skilled’ is important here, because otherwise the concept of ‘performance’ might seem too mechanical, basic or repetitive to constitute a form of intelligence. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this point.
There is an interesting lineage in the background here—not irrelevant to this paper—insofar as Millikan was a student of Charles Morris, an early interpreter of Peirce’s semiotics for mainstream philosophy. Nöth argues, however, that both the scope of her semantics and her understanding of its teleology, were considerably narrower than Peirce’s (Nöth, 2014, pp. 186–188). This will be discussed further below in Sects. 5 and 6.
See also (Hutto, 2011a, p. 59).
References to Peirce’s Collected Papers are formatted as ‘CP’ followed by the book and remark number, as per convention in Peirce scholarship. I have added the date of Peirce’s authorship where possible.
A particularly comprehensive and clear early account is (Hookway, 1985).
An honourable exception here is (Fanaya, 2020). Although Fanaya does fine work connecting Peirce’s pragmatic account of meaning with enactivism, through emphasising their mutual “embodied dynamicism”, and resulting mind–body continuity, she does not explicitly analyse a hypothetical conditional structure as I do here. She does also push back against anti-representationalist tendencies in enactivism, although her target is autopoietic enactivism, rather than the radical enactivism discussed here.
Peirce’s terminology for this most basic distinction in his semiotics underwent significant evolution across his lifetime—from early days where he used ‘representation’ to mean ‘sign’ (as above) and ‘sign’ to mean ‘index’, to 1902 where he used ‘sign’ to designate specifically human semiosis, to 1905–1906 where he used ‘representation’ to mean ‘any sign not an index’. His understanding of representation also increasingly expanded into a broader metaphysical account of ‘mediation’ (Nöth, 2011). But despite these terminological shifts, Peirce’s claim that signification is an irreducibly triadic relation, and his distinction between iconic, indexical and symbolic functioning are remarkably stable throughout his career.
For a systematic overview of this fundamental triad in Peirce’s sign theory, see (Liszka, 1996).
For a discussion of the implications of this claim within formal logic, see (Legg, 2012).
Again, these ideas are discussed further in (Legg & Black, 2020).
It’s worth noting that Stjernfelt goes on to criticise some of Hurford’s work as psychologistic in the hard-fought sense of Frege and Peirce—for instance where Hurford states that the “…logico-linguistic enterprise is essentially psychological” (Hurford, 2007, p. 124, cited in Stjernfelt, 2014, p. 127).
I believe this quote puts to rest the two major objections which Segundo-Ortin and Hutto present as an explicit counter-argument to Williams and Colling’s piece—that icons do not inherently represent what they are taken to represent, and that they do not play a casual role in cognition in virtue of their content (Segundo-Ortin & Hutto, 2021, pp. S9–S10).
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In formulating the ideas of this paper, I’m indebted to workshops and discussions with Katsunori Miyahara, Glenda Satne, Ian Robertson, Daniel Hutto, Shaun Gallagher, Jack Reynolds, Marilyn Stendera and Ross Pain.
This article belongs to the topical collection "Minds in Skilled Performance", edited by Katsunori Miyahara, Ian Robertson and Michael Kirchhof.
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Legg, C. Discursive habits: a representationalist re-reading of teleosemiotics. Synthese 199, 14751–14768 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03442-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03442-8