Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content

Abstract

Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage and the support and amplification of those control structures through external resources. Cranes (as Dennett calls them) became increasingly important in the explanation of systematically successful action. These more complex representational engines coevolved with selection to detect and respond to the control structures of others. Since much of that selection was driven by the advantages of cooperation and coordination, in part these control structures were co-opted as external signals and guarantees, in cooperation and coordination. As the time depth of cooperation and co-ordination extended, these public signals of belief and intent acquired secondary functions, as mechanisms to stabilise and structure control systems, making humans not just more transparent to one another at a time, but more predictable over time. Mindshaping, not just mindreading, became increasingly important in our lineage.

Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention

“…As discussed above, a number of theorists of embodied cognition have criticized the view that intersubjective interactions require that human beings be endowed with the capacity for mind-reading, opting instead for an explanation in terms of embodied practices and coupling ( Gallagher, 2001 , 2008 ; Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009 ). Although we readily grant the importance of such embodied coping for basic minds on which more elaborate cognition can be scaffolded, we advocate a middle ground that posits both embodied contentless abilities and more contentful mindreading abilities ( Michael et al, 2014 ; Tomasello, 2014 ; Sterelny, 2015 ; Veissière, in review). Indeed, the framework we have proposed, which posits predictive processing hierarchies apt to engage with both natural and conventional information and affordances, can accommodate both modes of cognition.…”

“…The ‘landscape’ of affordances is the total ensemble of available affordances for a population in a given environment. This landscape corresponds to what evolutionary theorists in biology and anthropology call a ‘niche’ ( Odling-Smee et al, 2003 ; Sterelny, 2007 , 2015 ; Wilson and Clark, 2009 ; Fuentes, 2014 ). A niche is a position in an ecosystem that affords an organism the resources it needs to survive.…”

“…Patterned practices are specific ways of doing joint activities in domain-specific material-discursive environments ( Roepstorff et al, 2010 ). Echoing recent work on the natural origin of semantic content ( Hutto and Satne, 2015 ; Sterelny, 2015 ), we hypothesize that such ontologies, as socially shared and embodied expectations, come to be acquired by the individual agent through their participative immersion in specific patterned practices available in multi-agent, symbolically and linguistically mediated forms of social life.…”

“…On the radical enactivist account, content-involving forms of intentionality emerge in the context of certain cultural practices in human forms of life ( Hutto and Satne, 2015 ). Many of these practices involve multi-agent situations in which proper engagement requires forms of implicit perspective-taking and perspective-sharing ( Sterelny, 2015 ). In some cases, such practices can involve explicit ‘mindreading’ as well, that is, inferring the beliefs, intentions, and desires of other agents as such ( Michael et al, 2014 ).…”

“…As recent multi-systems account of social cognition have shown, however, situations involving novel cues or too many orders of intentionality will often trigger ‘higher’ cognitive resources and compel humans to think about other people’s intentions as such ( Michael et al, 2014 ). Engagement with affordances in the human niche also often requires ‘mindshaping,’ as our interpretation of other agents’ intentional profiles in turn shapes those same profiles through interpersonal loops ( Sterelny, 2007 , 2015 ; Zawidzki, 2013 ). Perspective-taking can be implicit and embodied in that organisms can act on situations by leveraging minimal models that encode information about other agents and their behavior without entailing the presence of semantic content (i.e., having satisfaction conditions).…”