Abstract
The issue of minimal cognition or basic mentality concerns the elementary ingredients of cognitive processes. Within the larger discourse of enactive and embodied cognition, a current of research has emerged endorsing the radical proposal that basic minds neither represent nor compute, and, moreover, that the cognitive processes peculiar to them tend heavily (if not constitutively) to be both world-involving and to incorporate extra-neural bodily factors. Such a stance removes certain obstacles to a naturalistic view of basic minds and, at the same time, is more consistent with the idea of there being a deep continuity between life and mind. Here I suggest that the phenomenological tradition has resources for bolstering the case for radicalism about basic minds. Although the classical phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger may be amenable to some form of representationalism, I propose a phenomenological corrective by appealing to the work of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. Levinas ardently criticizes the representationalism of early phenomenology and places in its stead a non-representational account of “sensibility.” Merleau-Ponty, in addition, with his theory of (non-semantic) sense gives us a way of understanding basic minds synergistically, in terms of the perceiving organism’s embodied interactions with its surroundings, in a way supportive of the radical idea that basic minds are self-organizing dynamical systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Sure enough, radical enactivists like Hutto have a favorable attitude toward their autopoietic enactivist cousins (2011).
- 2.
- 3.
I will use the phrase world-directedness instead of instead of intentional directedness due to the reticence of Heidegger and Levinas about the notion of intentionality.
- 4.
See Drummond and Embree (1992) for a variety of viewpoints on the issue.
- 5.
Though, that likely doesn’t entail for Husserl a wholesale commitment to the entire suite of vices characteristic classic GOFAI-style representationalism. See Yoshimi (2009).
- 6.
Despite these critical remarks, the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger are still full of valuable insights, even for the radical EEC project. See, e.g., Dotov et al. (2010). I think non-trivial amendments are needed to radicalize their theories of perception and understanding/interpretation, but those are amendments worth making. Elsewhere, I have made this case with respect to Husserl ’s phenomenology of perception (Bower 2014). I also think Heidegger ’s anti-representationalist interpreters have contributed helpfully to the same end .
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Bower, M. (2016). Radicalizing the Phenomenology of Basic Minds with Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. In: García-Valdecasas, M., Murillo, J., Barrett, N. (eds) Biology and Subjectivity. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30502-8_9
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