A twofold tale of one mind: revisiting REC's multi-storey story.

Synthese

Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Published: September 2020

AI Article Synopsis

  • The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition (REC) says that thinking is all about how well we perform skills.
  • REC divides thinking into two types: basic thinking and thinking that involves more complex ideas, which develop in a special way.
  • The paper discusses two main issues: how different minds work together during thinking and how human and animal thinking can be different, while explaining that both types of thinking are still forms of skilled performance.

Article Abstract

The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC's story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an "interface problem", according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC's view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC's notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550374PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02857-zDOI Listing

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