Radically enactive high cognition

I advance the Radically Enactive Cognition (REC) program by developing Hutto & Satne’s (2015) and Hutto & Myin’s (2017) idea that contentful cognition emerges through sociocultural activities, which require a contentless form of intentionality. Proponents of REC then face a functional challenge: what is the function of higher cognitive skills, given the empirical findings that engaging in higher-cognitive activities is not correlated with cognitive amelioration (Kornblith, 2012)? I answer that functional challenge by arguing that higher cognition is an adaptive tool of the social systems we are embedded in, therefore, it is not necessarily aimed at achieving better cognitive states. In order to do so, I suggest interpreting key insights from autopoietic enactivism through REC lenses

Knowing How One Knows

In this paper, I argue that knowledge is dimly luminous. That is: if a person knows that p, she knows how she knows that p. The argument depends on a safety-based account of propositional knowledge, which is salient in Williamson’s critique of the ‘KK’ principle. I combine that account with non-intellectualism about knowledge-how – according to which, if a person knows how to φ, then in nearly all nearby possible worlds in which she φes in the same way as in the actual world, she only φes successfully. Thus, the possession of first-order propositional knowledge implies secondorder practical knowledge, and this can be iterated. Because of the assumed nonintellectualism about know-how, dim luminosity does not imply bright luminosity about knowledge, which is expressed by the traditional KK principle. I conclude by considering some potential counterexamples to the view that knowledge is dimly luminous

Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality

Based on Pritchard’s distinction (2012, 2016) between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds, and on how those grounds bear on the elimination of skeptical possibilities, I present the dream argument as a moderate skeptical possibility that can be reasonably motivated. In order to block the dream argument skeptical conclusion, I present a version of phenomenological disjunctivism based on Noë’s actionist account of perceptual consciousness (2012). This suggests that perceptual knowledge is rationally grounded because it is a form of embodied achievement – what I call embodied rationality –, which offers a way of dissolving the pseudo-problem of epistemic immodesty, namely, the seemingly counterintuitive thesis that one can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a radical skeptical scenario

Non-fixation for Biased Activated Random Walks

We prove that the model of Activated Random Walks on Z^d with biased jump distribution does not fixate for any positive density, if the sleep rate is small enough, as well as for any finite sleep rate, if the density is close enough to 1. The proof uses a new criterion for non-fixation. We provide a pathwise construction of the process, of independent interest, used in the proof of this non-fixation criterion

Stability of the Greedy Algorithm on the Circle

We consider a single-server system with service stations in each point of the circle. Customers arrive after exponential times at uniformly-distributed locations. The server moves at finite speed and adopts a greedy routing mechanism. It was conjectured by Coffman and Gilbert in~1987 that the service rate exceeding the arrival rate is a sufficient condition for the system to be positive recurrent, for any value of the speed. In this paper we show that the conjecture holds true

An Enactive-Ecological Approach to Information and Uncertainty

Information is a central notion for cognitive sciences and neurosciences, but there is no agreement on what it means for a cognitive system to acquire information about its surroundings. In this paper, we approximate three influential views on information: the one at play in ecological psychology, which is sometimes called information for action; the notion of information as covariance as developed by some enactivists, and the idea of information as minimization of uncertainty as presented by Shannon. Our main thesis is that information for action can be construed as covariant information, and that learning to perceive covariant information is a matter of minimizing uncertainty through skilled performance. We argue that the agent’s cognitive system conveys information for acting in an environment by minimizing uncertainty about how to achieve her intended goals in that environment. We conclude by reviewing empirical findings that support our view and by showing how direct learning, seen as instance of ecological rationality at work, is how mere possibilities for action are turned into embodied know-how. Finally, we indicate the affinity between direct learning and sense-making activity