Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin argue that basic minds should be understood without appeal to mental content, representation, or internal symbolic models. Their central claim is that much cognition does not consist in manipulating representations of the world, but in embodied, situated, and dynamically unfolding interaction with environmental affordances. This position, which they call Radical Enactive or Embodied Cognition, rejects the thesis that cognition necessarily involves content. For Hutto and Myin, activities such as catching a leaf, navigating terrain, tracking another’s gaze, or perceiving objects are not best explained by internal representational processing, but by the organism’s skilful engagement with its surroundings. They distinguish their radical view from conservative enactivism, which still preserves content by relocating representational vehicles into the body or environment. The key case is basic perception: even human visual experience, they suggest, may be intentionally directed and phenomenally significant without being inherently contentful. Their critique of informational content is especially important, since they argue that covariance alone cannot constitute content and therefore cannot naturalise representation. The conclusion is not that all cognition is contentless; language-based and socially scaffolded thought may involve content. Rather, basic minds are fundamentally extensive, embodied, and practical before they become representational.
URBANISM MEETS ART