l as p arTes s uMario
1. l as pruebas procesales
This chapter was devoted to discuss the problem of practical knowledge by considering the issue of selective responsiveness to stimuli (i.e. the Generalized Frame Problem) as a special case of this problem. I showed that both the EMH and the Enactive approach to cognition pay particular attention to practical knowledge, and they explain agents’ smooth engagement with their world by focusing on the concept of activity. Nevertheless, these two approaches to cognition disagree on the role played by internal representations in these practical engagements.
The EMH wants to preserve internal representations, and it reassesses them in order to make them matching an embodied, active, and extended approach to cognition. On the contrary, the Enactivist explanation wants to get rid of internal representational mechanisms endorsed by EMH.
In my discussion, I explained why I think that Clark’s account of selective responsiveness is not philosophically viable, and I did this by considering some objections to AORs. These ones showed that AORs do not fulfill some of the criteria necessary to talk about representations properly. Therefore I claimed that the use of a representational gloss in the case taken into account is unwarranted.
Moreover, I pointed out that the way Clark talks about AORs in his book Being there offers other reasons to think that the EMH is not as radical as one could think. The way this explanation deals with AORs show that the EMH is committed to an internalistic prejudice. Indeed, instead of describing the agent’s practical engagements with the world by stressing on practice itself, Clark’s explanation seems to consider practice as a derivative mode of cognition forerun by internal mechanisms, which seem to be considered to be the original core of cognitive processes. Furthermore, even if those mechanisms are said to be endowed with active features, the way they entail action is too weak. Indeed AORs have a conative power, but they are not actions in themselves.
Considered the problems Clark’s explanation entails, I tried to find a possible solution to the Generalized Frame Problem by looking at the way the enactive approach to cognition deals with selective responsiveness and contextual relevance. I claimed that this explanation is more viable than Clark’s one because it accounts for phenomenological experience, it is epistemically economic, it does not make use of an unwarranted epistemic posit (the concept of AOR), and it fits with experimental results from cognitive neurosciences.
Despite I am sympathetic with the enactive explanation, I also claimed that this approach to contextual relevance should be integrated in a broader explanatory framework, in order to make it stronger and more complete.
Indeed, despite explanations that cross ecological psychology with Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology acknowledge the importance of the socio-material world in episodes of selective responsiveness to affordances, they not develop this point further. This because they do not take into account in detail how certain structures of the environment display salient features in virtue of their constitution.
Therefore I suggested to integrate the enactive explanation within a semiotic explanatory framework inspired by Peirce’s thought. In particular, I suggested that cognitive niches can be seen as semiotic niches, and that saliences in semiotic niches can be interpreted as indexes.
Conceiving of relevant affordances as indexes is helpful for two reasons. Firs, at a general level, Peirce’s semiotic account of cognition is suitable to explain cognitive phenomena from an externalist perspective, and it does so by focusing on the concept of activity interpreted in a semiotic way. This is precisely what the non-representational explanation of selective responsiveness looked for.
Second, by focusing of semiotic features of cognitive niches, the theory can explain why some affordances matter and stand out more than others, paying attention not only to the agent’s abilities and concerns, but also to the other parts of the coupled system made of the organism and its cognitive niche.
Therefore, I suggest that this integrated account of the Generalized Frame Problem is able to provide a balanced, non-internalist, non-agent-bounded, and active explanation of adequate cognitive performances in context.
Moreover, this semiotic implementation of the enactive approach to cognition seems to be suitable to account for the mind as an extensive process, claim endorsed in Chapter I, and that, contrarily to the EMH, is not compatible with internalism at all (Hutto, Kirchhoff, Myin 2014: 4). According to this explanation, the mind should not be thought to be an internal capacity that just exploits external scaffolding, or that sometimes is instantiated by external resources. Extensive minds are always and already world-involving (Hutto, Myin 2013: 137).
Peircean semiotics, as showed in my discussion of selective contextual responsiveness, fosters this idea. This for two main reasons:
i) As “extensive enactivism” does (Hutto, Kirchhoff, Myin 2014; Hutto, Myin 2013), it gives an active account of cognitive processes, and it does so thanks to the concept of sign-action (semiosis). ii) It offers interesting conceptual tools (e.g. indexicality) to examine the
way the world is involved in cognitive practices. In this way it helps the enactive proposal to flesh out its conception of the mind as already world-involving, since it does not conceive of salient features
of the world as dependent on the agent’s concerns only, but rather as signs that stand out in virtue of their semiotic constitution.