Epilogue: Missing Information?

The epilogue takes a last look at the possibility that REC may be leaving out something explanatorily important because it says nothing about how the brain processes informational content. Focusing on a prominent case, it is demonstrated that REC has the resources to understand the groundbreaking research on positioning systems in rat brains. It is argued that rat brains can be informationally sensitive without processing informational content. No explanatory power is lost in adopting REC’s deflated explanation; but much is gained by doing so since it avoids the Hard Problem of Content. The chapter concludes by showing how REC’s proposed vision of neurodynamics is wholly compatible with its dynamical and extensive account of cognition; a vision of cognition that opens the door to broader lines of research in the cognitive sciences that taking into account the ways in which culture can permeate cognition.

Imagining

Chapter 8 challenges the standard assumption that all imagination must be representational by showing that it is easier to understand the most fundamental kind of imaginings in terms of perceptual re-enactments that are wholly interactive and non-contentful in character. Combining REC with Material Engagement Theory, MET, it is revealed how basic, non-contentful imaginings might acquire their anticipatory and interactional profiles through embodied engagements with worldly offerings. Building on Langland-Hassan’s analysis of imaginative attitudes, the chapter goes on to develop a REC friendly hybrid account of nonbasic imaginings. Accordingly, the specific content and correctness conditions of nonbasic, hybrid imaginative attitudes arise from a combination of contentless sensory imaginings and the surrounding contentful attitudes of imaginers. It is argued that such hybrid states of mind have the right properties for explaining the many and varied kinds of cognitive work that imaginings do for us in our daily lives.

From Revolution to Evolution

Chapter 3 introduces the contours of REC’s positive program for relating to and allying with other major theories of cognition. In these efforts it aims to provide analyses and arguments designed to sanitize, strengthen, and unify existing representational and antirepresentational offerings. This theoretical work takes the form of RECtification—a process through which the target accounts of cognition are radicalized by analysis and argument, rendering them REC-friendly. This chapter shows how this process works in action by targeting Predictive Processing accounts of Cognition, or PPC. Some theorists have already argued that it is fruitful to combine PPC with E-theories of cognition. Yet they continue subscribe to a cognitivist reading of PPC. This chapter shows how an alliance between PPC with E-theories of cognition can only be properly forged, by giving the central ideas of PPC a REC rendering. It also shows why this crucial adjustment to PPC avoids crippling problems. This reveals why allying with REC is independently well motivated and theoretically beneficial.

Perceiving

Chapter 7 begins to puts REC positive story into action. It opens by questioning the value of appealing to a priori intuitions in trying to understand the character of perceiving. Focusing on explanatory concerns, it revisits Predictive Processing or PPC proposals about perceiving and defuses arguments that the explanatory punch of PPC requires characterizing perceptual processes and products in representational terms. Instead the chapter shows how REC can successfully appropriate the main apparatus of PPC to explain perception. It demonstrates that mental representations are not needed to explain how intramodal and intermodal forms of perceiving integrate. The chapter concludes by showing how contentless forms of perceiving can connect with contentful attitudes, enabling us to make sense of a range of perceptual phenomena – including our capacity to attune to optical effects and the ways in which we respond to visual illusions.

Continuity: Kinks Not Breaks

Chapter 6 sets out to show REC can allow for content-involving cognition in nature without itself falling foul of the Hard Problem of Content and without introducing unbridgeable evolutionary discontinuity or gaps in nature. Thus it crucially defuses critical concerns about REC’s NOC program in order to establish that it is a tenable way of explaining the how content-involving cognition arose and arises naturally, and where content can be found in nature. It then lays out the broad outlines of REC’s proposed explanation for the Natural Origins of Content – its NOC program that draws on Neo-Pragmatist resources and advocates the adoption of a Relaxed as opposed to Strict Scientific Naturalism. It advances a multi-storey explanation, involving kinks not breaks. This explains how content-involving cognition could have arisen through the mastery of special socio-cultural practices, providing new resources but without changing the fundamental character of cognition. Its basic sketch of how the NOC program might be pursued paves the way for further research.

Ur-Intentionality: What’s It All About?

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibit a kind of basic intentionality. It does so by situating REC’s notion of Ur-intentionality within the larger history of attempts to explicate the notion of intentionality simpliciter, showing that there is conceptual space for and reason to believe in a nonrepresentational form of intentionality. The second part of the chapter provides a fresh analysis of how and why this most basic kind of intentionality can be best accounted for in naturalistic terms by means of a RECtified teleosemantics—one stripped of problematic semantic ambitions and put to different theoretical use, namely, that of explicating the most basic, nonsemantic forms of world-involving cognition.

RECtifying and REConnecting

Chapter 4 provides further examples of RECtification, this time with the aim of showing how REC can fruitfully ally with and strengthen two prominent nonrepresentational E-approaches to cognition—Autopoietic-Adaptive Enactivism and Ecological Dynamics. These examples of RECtification reveal REC’s capacity to marshal and combine powerful resources for explaining basic minds in naturalistic terms. The chapter concludes by discussing the need to show how to basic, contentless minds can meet contentful minds in REC terms – namely, to explicate how REConnecting is possible. Doing so is necessary in light of REC’s commitment to two ideas: that some cognition is content-involving and that organisms become capable of content-involving cognition by mastering special sociocultural practices.

Reasons to REConceive

Chapter 2 introduces REC’s Equal Partner Principle, according to which invoking neural, bodily, and environmental factors all make equally important contributions when it comes to explaining cognitive activity. In line with that principle, it is made clear how REC can accept that cognitive capacities depend on structural changes that occur inside organisms and their brains, without understanding such changes in information processing and representationalist terms. This chapter explicates the Hard Problem of Content, aka the HPC, as basis for a compelling argument for REC. The HPC is a seemingly intractable theoretical puzzle for defenders of unrestricted CIC. A straight solution to the HPC requires explaining how it is possible to get from informational foundations that are noncontentful to a theory of mental content using only the resources of a respectable explanatory naturalism that calls on the resources of the hard sciences. It is revealed how the need to deal with the HPC can be avoided by adopting REC’s revolutionary take on basic cognition, and why going this way has advantages over other possible ways of handling the HPC.

Revolution in Mind?

This chapter introduces the E-turn in cognitive science –the move to embrace enactive, embodied, extended and ecological views of cognition–and the empirical and theoretical considerations that spurred it on. It explains how E-approaches differ from classical forms of cognitivism: in particular the degree to which different E-approaches move away from the cognitivist commitments to representationalism, computationalism and mechanistic explanation. Against this backdrop, it becomes clear in which ways REC’s proposal is not just radically revisionary but revolutionary in spirit. The chapter also sets out the basic rules of naturalistic play, reminding the reader why attempts to dismiss REC by appeal to a priori intuitions about what is essential to cognition violate the methodological scruples of naturalism.

Remembering

Chapter 9 explicates REC’s duplex account of the many and varied forms of memory. As might be expected, REC is well suited for understanding procedural remembering. Yet, by defending a strong version of the Social Interactionist Theory it is shown how autobiographical remembering is best understood as rooted in narrative capacities. Thus autobiographical memory is a perfect example of a kind of cognition that depends on the mastery and exercise of discursive practices involving content. In defending this strong claim, REC draws on its account of contentless imaginings to how it is also possible to make sense of purely episodic forms of remembering that operate before and below the capacity to autobiographically narrate the past. In sum, this illustrates that REC has the resources to give a gapless account of all of the major varieties of remembering. The chapter concludes, motivated by empirical findings, by compelling a rethink of purely CIC views of the primary function of remembering.