Thursday, July 25, 2013

CIC action vs REC embodied action



Enactivists inspired by its original formulation invoke the notion of “embodied action” even when describing mental activity that doesn’t involve content or representations of any kind. For intellectualists this makes no sense, since for them nothing qualifies as an action proper unless it is produced by or otherwise connected to contentful states of mind of some sort. Thus, when enactivists speak of “embodied action” and their intellectual opponents talk of “action,” they are not operating with the same notion of action. There is a chance that when this semantic confusion is cleared up the relevant philosophical work might be divvied up so that REC and restricted CIC complement each other. 
Yes, all this sounds right.  
But this envisaged rapprochement between REC and restricted CIC is not in the cards as long as intellectualist extremists continue to demand that any bout of activity counts as mindful only if it is connected with contentful states of mind. As long as that commitment is in place, CIC is unrestricted and logically excludes REC.
But, this seems hasty to me.  Why can't the rapprochement be that CIC keeps what it means by "action" and REC folks tell us what they mean by "embodied action" so we can be clear not to confuse the two?    Then we might begin to examine evidence for the two theories.

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