A twofold tale of one mind: revisiting REC's multi-storey story.
Synthese January 1, 2021 Erik Myin, Jasper C. Van den Herik 34 citations
The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition (REC) holds that all cognition is skilled performance, but distinguishes basic cognition from content-involving cognition, claiming a developmental "kink" between them. Critics worry this creates an "interface problem"—how two minds could interact in the same activity—and an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. The authors argue that REC's emphasis on sociocultural practices resolves the interface problem by showing content-involving cognition requires specific practices. They clarify REC's notion of content to justify marking basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind, while maintaining both are forms of skilled performance, though genuinely different forms.