Radical Enactive Cognitive Science and its Critics
REC and its Critics: in Lisbon
Nova University of Lisbon – 16th-17th October 2019
Nova University of Lisbon – 16th-17th October 2019
Venue: Auditório A14 (ALMNEG) Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campus de Campolide)
The conference will take place at the Colégio Almada Negreiros. This can be found at the Nova University of Lisboa campus here. The Colégio is the large building with towers at the top of the hill overlooking the campus
You can arrive at the Campolide campus from São Sebastião metro station. A possible route provided by Google Maps is here.
Programme
October, 16th
13.45.- 14.00 Intro to Workshop and Local Arrangements, Robert Clowes
14:00 -16:00 Dan Hutto & Erik Myin on The Challenge of and Challenges for REC
19:30 Dinner at Oh! Lacerda Av. de Berna 36, 1050-078 Lisboa
October, 17th
9.30 - 11.00 - Paweł Gładziejewski on How hard is the Hard Problem of Content, really?
11.00- 11.15 Coffee Break
11.15 - 12.45 - Tobias Schlicht on Representation vs. Intentionality
12.45- 13.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.20 - Klaus Gärtner on REC - From Knowledge to Phenomenality ... and back
Coffee Break 15.20 - 15.35
15.35 - 16.55 - Robert Clowes on REC and the Mechanisms of Representation
17.00 - 18.30 Dan Hutto & Erik Myin on The Future of REC
The conference will take place at the Colégio Almada Negreiros. This can be found at the Nova University of Lisboa campus here. The Colégio is the large building with towers at the top of the hill overlooking the campus
You can arrive at the Campolide campus from São Sebastião metro station. A possible route provided by Google Maps is here.
Programme
October, 16th
13.45.- 14.00 Intro to Workshop and Local Arrangements, Robert Clowes
14:00 -16:00 Dan Hutto & Erik Myin on The Challenge of and Challenges for REC
19:30 Dinner at Oh! Lacerda Av. de Berna 36, 1050-078 Lisboa
October, 17th
9.30 - 11.00 - Paweł Gładziejewski on How hard is the Hard Problem of Content, really?
11.00- 11.15 Coffee Break
11.15 - 12.45 - Tobias Schlicht on Representation vs. Intentionality
12.45- 13.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.20 - Klaus Gärtner on REC - From Knowledge to Phenomenality ... and back
Coffee Break 15.20 - 15.35
15.35 - 16.55 - Robert Clowes on REC and the Mechanisms of Representation
17.00 - 18.30 Dan Hutto & Erik Myin on The Future of REC
The Radical Enactive and Embodied account of Cognition (REC) has had an extraordinary impact and caused great controversy among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin’s co-authored books, Radicalizing Enactivism (2013) and Evolving Enactivism (2017), challenged the classic cognitivist conception of cognition which has enjoyed the status of the received view in the sciences of the mind since the 1960s. REC contests central aspects of the received view, especially, the intellectualist conception that the mind essentially represents and computes.
At its root, REC claims, cognition does not involve picking up and processing informational contents that are used, stored and reused to get cognitive work done. Rather the bulk of cognition does its work without the need for representation. Basic forms of cognition, REC claims, are fundamentally interactive, dynamic, relational and–most importantly–contentless. Yet REC also claims that some non-basic forms of cognition are content-involving in the sense that they have the additional, special feature of specifying satisfaction or correctness conditions. REC therefore poses new questions about how to understand cognition in the absence of representation, and new challenges over how and where representation enters the cognitive picture. The very idea that there might be basic and non-basic forms of cognition raises questions and comparisons with other E accounts of cognition as well as new debates about the nature of cognition and the role of representations within cognitive science.
This conference aims to interrogate key contemporary themes in the philosophy of mind and cognition around REC’s explanatory project, such as: Is a fundamental distinction between basic and non-basic forms sustainable? How are the various forms of cognition best modelled? What features of cognition are in play when we engage with the world in various cognitive tasks? Does cognition entail correctness conditions of any kind, even if they are not conceived of in representational terms? Do these features everywhere require representing the world as being a certain way? If they do, where does representation enter the picture? Where and when - if at all - should cognitive science make use of representation in its explanatory vocabulary? What are the benefits of realist or instrumentalist notions of representation within cognitive science? Are there different kinds of intentionality? If so, should we conceive of and explain them? How should we understand the relationship between intentionality and representation? Is any kind of intentionality the mark of the cognitive? How and where does content arise in the world? Is REC compatible with predictive processing accounts of cognition? Might predictive processing offer a new route out of the “representation wars”?
Workshop Organisers:
Robert Clowes - robertclowes@fcsh.unl.pt
Inês Hipólito – inesh@uow.edu.au
Local Organisation:
Robert Clowes
Gloria Andrada de Gregorio
https://mindandcognition.weebly.com/rec-and-its-critics.html
References
Hutto, D. D. and E. Myin (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content, MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D. and E. Myin (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content, MIT Press.
At its root, REC claims, cognition does not involve picking up and processing informational contents that are used, stored and reused to get cognitive work done. Rather the bulk of cognition does its work without the need for representation. Basic forms of cognition, REC claims, are fundamentally interactive, dynamic, relational and–most importantly–contentless. Yet REC also claims that some non-basic forms of cognition are content-involving in the sense that they have the additional, special feature of specifying satisfaction or correctness conditions. REC therefore poses new questions about how to understand cognition in the absence of representation, and new challenges over how and where representation enters the cognitive picture. The very idea that there might be basic and non-basic forms of cognition raises questions and comparisons with other E accounts of cognition as well as new debates about the nature of cognition and the role of representations within cognitive science.
This conference aims to interrogate key contemporary themes in the philosophy of mind and cognition around REC’s explanatory project, such as: Is a fundamental distinction between basic and non-basic forms sustainable? How are the various forms of cognition best modelled? What features of cognition are in play when we engage with the world in various cognitive tasks? Does cognition entail correctness conditions of any kind, even if they are not conceived of in representational terms? Do these features everywhere require representing the world as being a certain way? If they do, where does representation enter the picture? Where and when - if at all - should cognitive science make use of representation in its explanatory vocabulary? What are the benefits of realist or instrumentalist notions of representation within cognitive science? Are there different kinds of intentionality? If so, should we conceive of and explain them? How should we understand the relationship between intentionality and representation? Is any kind of intentionality the mark of the cognitive? How and where does content arise in the world? Is REC compatible with predictive processing accounts of cognition? Might predictive processing offer a new route out of the “representation wars”?
Workshop Organisers:
Robert Clowes - robertclowes@fcsh.unl.pt
Inês Hipólito – inesh@uow.edu.au
Local Organisation:
Robert Clowes
Gloria Andrada de Gregorio
https://mindandcognition.weebly.com/rec-and-its-critics.html
References
Hutto, D. D. and E. Myin (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content, MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D. and E. Myin (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content, MIT Press.
