Contentful Skills: Procedural Memory and the Representational Challenge to Non-Representational Cognition

Krystyna Bielecka (University of Warsaw), Marcin Miłkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences)

Contentful Skills: Procedural Memory and the Representational Challenge to Non-Representational Cognition is the first talk of the MLAG Seminars Series 2025–2026 (https://ifilosofia.up.pt/activities/mlag-seminars-series-2025-2026), featuring invited speakers Krystyna Bielecka (University of Białystok) and Marcin Miłkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences). The event takes place online on Thursday, OCTOBER 30, 13.00 (WET). Please join us on Microsoft Teams using the following details:

Meeting ID: 333 525 999 219 0
Passcode: DG7tU3tX

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

This paper argues that procedural memory, underpinning skills and habits, is inherently contentful. Drawing on standard philosophical accounts of intentionality, we demonstrate that procedural memory involves representational content characterized by a world-to-mind direction of fit and manifests in satisfaction conditions that guide skilled action. We justify our realism about this content through four convergent arguments: (1) conceptually, procedural memory's directive function requires satisfaction conditions; (2) empirically, procedural content is indispensable in explaining deficits such as apraxia; (3) functionally, it is crucial in models of motor control and error correction; and (4) cognitively, the semantic interface between verbal instruction and action presupposes shared satisfaction conditions. This analysis reveals that embodied skills are fundamentally governed by contentful states. Consequently, this challenges diverse anti-representationalist views within embodied cognition, enactivism, and the philosophy of memory (including Radical Enactivism's specific rejection of content-as-satisfaction conditions and views that treat procedural memory as contentless). Furthermore, frameworks like the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) appear functionally reliant on mechanisms equivalent to representation, suggesting their anti-representational stance is unstable. Recognising procedural memory's content offers a unified, explanatorily powerful framework for understanding embodied agency.