Unsupervised learning and the natural origins of content

In this paper I evaluate the prospects and limitations of radical enactivism as recently developed by Hutto and Myin (henceforth, “H&M”) (2017). According to radical enactivism, cognition does not essentially involve content and admits explanations on a semantic level only as far as it is scaffolded with social and linguistic practices. Numerous authors argued this view to be indefensible because H&M’s objections against semantic accounts of basic minds are flawed and they fail to provide a positive research program for cognitive science. I investigate these concerns focusing on H&M’s criticism of predictive processing account of cognition (dubbed Bootstrap Hell argument) and their own account of the emergence of content (the Natural Origins of Content). My claim is that H&M fail in both of these fronts, which cast a shadow of doubt on whether radical enactivism is a philosophically and empirically interesting approach at all