REC and its critics

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”?

Confirmed Speakers
Pawel Gładziejewski 
Tobias Schlicht
Erik Myin
Daniel D Hutto
Klaus Gaertner
Two additional slots will be available for contributed papers. Contributions addressing any of the questions above are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions by philosophers from groups who are underrepresented in the discipline. 
 
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Abstracts of max. 250 words should be sent to: 
[email protected] and [email protected]
With the subject: REC and its Critics
by September 30th (Updated)
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Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent out by 3rd October (Updated)
 
Organisers:
Robert Clowes - [email protected]
Inês Hipólito – [email protected]

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.