Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong Wollongong, NSW, Australia ; Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire Hatfield, UK.
2 papers in the library · 183 citations · publishing 2014-2018
Rejecting mental representation as the basis of cognition, radical enactive and embodied approaches challenge mainstream cognitive science. This paper argues that abandoning representationalism for pure empirical functionalism fails to provide a clear criterion for what counts as cognitive and lacks adequate ways to distinguish cognitive activity. It also contends that commonsense functionalism is undermined by how people actually use psychological concepts. Instead, the authors advocate for extensive enactivism, which differs from extended mind and distributed cognition theories by grounding cognition in embodied action without relying on internal representations.
Basic Emotion Theory (BET) has been central to affective science for decades, guiding research on facial expressions, neuroimaging, and evolutionary psychology. Philosophers have recently called for abandoning BET entirely. This paper defends BET against those criticisms, arguing that the theory should be retained. It also addresses concerns that BET's reliance on affect programs makes it outdated. The authors propose that with minor adjustments, BET can overcome these objections when reinterpreted through a radically enactive account of emotions. Rather than discarding BET, the paper shows how its core ideas can be revised and preserved, concluding that the revised BET remains a valuable framework.