Debunking enactivism: a critical notice of Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin's Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content

This is the accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis.Radicalizing Enactivism is a fun book. Its high spirits and gleeful bad-boy antics are a much-needed antidote to the cheerlessness of much academic philosophy. But it achieves very little. It mounts a heavy attack on the theory of content, but this attack feels disjointed, a bit like throwing everything they can find at their opponent, with little regard for a coherent positive account. Well-known theories that, on the face of it, demand representational content are ignored. The kind of theory that is invoked is not followed through beyond what is needed for the performance of an isolated environmental task, with no hint of what might be needed in an autonomous organism that must balance conflicting goals. It is, in short, a tunnel-visioned venture that provides at best sporadic insight into extremely localized problems