Abstract
Much recent work on cognition is characterized by an augmentation of the role of action coupled with an attenuation of the role of representation. This coupling is no accident. The appeal to action is seen either as a way of explaining representation or explaining it away. This paper argues that the appeal to action as a way of explaining, supplementing, or even supplanting, representation can lead to a serious dilemma. On the one hand, the concept of action to which we appeal cannot, on pain of circularity, be a representational concept. Such an appeal would presuppose representation and therefore can neither explain it nor explain it away. On the other hand, I shall argue, if the concept of action to which we appeal is not a representational one, there is every reason for supposing that it will not be the sort of thing that can explain, or supplement, let alone supplant, representation. The resulting dilemma, I shall argue, is not fatal. But avoiding it requires us to embrace a certain thesis about the nature of action, a thesis whose broad outline this paper delineates. Anyone who wishes to employ action as a way of explaining or explaining away representation should, I shall argue, take this conception of action very seriously indeed. I am going to discuss these issues with respect to a influential recent contribution to this debate: the sensorimotor or enactive model of perception developed by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë.
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Notes
Certain dynamicist accounts fit this profile. See, for example, van Gelder (1995).
This example of Mackay’s is cited and endorsed by O’Regan and Noë (2001: 945).
Hurley does not explicitly distinguish the two forms. Therefore, it s not clear if she would endorse the distinction I am going to draw. However, in my view, that there are at least two distinct forms of the myth is implicit in the distinct uses to which she puts the myth in Consciousness in Action. One use, for example, pertains to a certain mistaken interpretation of Wittgenstein’s appeal to the concept of practice, and this corresponds to what I am going to call the myth of the giving (1). Another use concerns the parallels between perception and action, in particular the ways these parallels emerge in the context of a neo-Kantian treatment of the unity of consciousness. This use of the myth corresponds to what I am going to call the myth of the giving (2).
For a wealth of empirical evidence in favour of the enactive approach, see O’Regan and Noë (2001).
This is not to say that it would count as a representation. To do that, it would also have to play an appropriate role in an agent’s psychology; a role typically captured by way of a causal or explanatory constraint on representation. My concern here, however, is with what makes something the sort of thing that could be about something else, or take something else as its content. That is, my concern is with what makes something representational and not with what makes it a representation. The former is all that is required to avoid the first horn of the dilemma.
Received wisdom tells you to ‘keep your eye on the ball’. This received wisdom is, in fact, physically impossible to follow.
For defence of this, see Rowlands (2006).
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Rowlands, M. Understanding the ‘active’ in ‘enactive’. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 427–443 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9075-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9075-x