Against Radical Enactivism’s narrowmindedness about phenomenality

Abstract

Radical Enactivism rejects representationalism but nonetheless allows the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as supervening on brain bound elements. In this paper, I argue that Radical Enactivism should reject the possibility of wholly brain-bound phenomenal experience. I propose a way of individuating perceptual experiences that does not depend on representationalism and raises a problem to the view defended by Hutto and Myin (Radicalizing Enactivism: basic minds without content. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012) according to which, with respect to phenomenality, it is possible to adopt a view that partly construes experience in terms of engagement with the environment. I argue that Radical Enactivism should change: either deny that the environment plays any role in an account of the phenomenal character or embrace the view that the phenomenal properties of experiences are at least partly constituted by the environment itself.