Hegel, Kepler, and the Science of Affordances

Dr Nikolai Alksnis (La Trobe University)

In Chemero’s (2009) attempt to propose an anti-computationalist theory of mind, he invokes the idea of Hegelian explanation: the drawing on irrelevant, a priori, information to justify an empirical claim. Just as Hegel used Plato’s ideas of perfection to conclude the number of planets in the solar system, for Chemero, the computationalists, and similar, are in danger of doing the same: bringing in the irrelevant abstract ideas to justify empirical facts about the mind and intelligence. A similar appeal to historical figures can be found by Chemero in partnership with Raja and Biener (2017). Here the idea is that the mechanists moves of Descartes, Kepler, and Newton better fit with the ecological approach of J.J. Gibson, then to the comptuationlism of Turing (1953) and later Fodor (1975, 2008). The issue is, such an analysis seems to leave little room for the abstract cognitive object favoured by Chemero, that of the affordance (Gibson 1977, 1979). By adapting Fodor’s explicitness principle (Fodor 1987) I will show the difficulties the theory of affordances has to be an explanatory part of the cognitive story. Furthermore, it will show how we can combine Chemero and Fodor’s critiques but in doing so, there seems to be little room for either the concept of mental representations, as supported by Fodor, or affordances, as favoured by Chemero.

Bio:

Dr. Nikolai Alksnis specialises in alternative theories of mind, making several contributions to the enactivist research project. This talk is a product of a recent trip to the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, where he also explored new ways to understand the nature of computation.