Daniel D. Hutto
Born and raised in New York, I finished my undergraduate degree as a study abroad student in St Andrews, Scotland where my maternal roots lie. I returned to New York to teach fourth grade in the Bronx for a year in order to fund my MPhil in Logic and Metaphysics. I then carried on my doctoral work in York, England. We, my wife and three boys, lived in England for over 20 years. Australia is our new home since I took up the position of Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong, Australia in 2014. Previously I worked at the University of Hertfordshire since 1993, where I served as Professor of Philosophical Psychology from 2002 and led the Philosophy unit from 1999 to 2005.
My research is a sustained attempt to understand human nature in a way which respects natural science but which nevertheless rejects the impersonal metaphysics of contemporary naturalism. My recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. I am best known for promoting thoroughly non-representational accounts of enactive and embodied cognition, and for having developed a hypothesis which claims that engaging with narratives, understood as public artefacts, plays a critical role in underpinning distinctively human forms of cognition.
Reaching beyond philosophy, I have often been invited to speak at conferences and expert meetings aimed at anthropologists, clinical psychiatrists/therapists, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.
I am called upon regularly to provide assessments for major research bodies worldwide. For example, I have done so for the European Research Council (ERC); Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK); the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH, USA). Since migrating to Australia I have served for various terms on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, and once Chaired its Humanities and Creative Arts Panel.
Phone: +61 (0)2 4221 3987
Address: School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts University of Wollongong,
NSW 2522, Australia
My research is a sustained attempt to understand human nature in a way which respects natural science but which nevertheless rejects the impersonal metaphysics of contemporary naturalism. My recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. I am best known for promoting thoroughly non-representational accounts of enactive and embodied cognition, and for having developed a hypothesis which claims that engaging with narratives, understood as public artefacts, plays a critical role in underpinning distinctively human forms of cognition.
Reaching beyond philosophy, I have often been invited to speak at conferences and expert meetings aimed at anthropologists, clinical psychiatrists/therapists, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.
I am called upon regularly to provide assessments for major research bodies worldwide. For example, I have done so for the European Research Council (ERC); Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK); the National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH, USA). Since migrating to Australia I have served for various terms on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, and once Chaired its Humanities and Creative Arts Panel.
Phone: +61 (0)2 4221 3987
Address: School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts University of Wollongong,
NSW 2522, Australia
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (35)
Uploads
Books by Daniel D. Hutto
Hutto calls this developmental proposal the narrative practice hypothesis (NPH). Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons (that is, folk psychological narratives) supply children with both the basic structure of folk psychology and the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice. In making a strong case for the as yet underexamined idea that our understanding of reasons may be socioculturally grounded, Hutto not only advances and explicates the claims of the NPH, but he also challenges certain widely held assumptions. For example, he targets the idea that the primary function of folk psychology is to enable us to predict the behaviors of others. In this way, Folk Psychological Narratives both clears conceptual space around the dominant approaches for an alternative and offers a groundbreaking proposal.
This book also appears as a triple issue of the Journal Consciousness Studies, Vol. 16, no. 6-8, June/August 2009
Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex, UK
View SWIF Book forum with precis, commentaries and replies - link below.
Contributors include: Donald Davidson, Tom Sorrell, T. L. S. Sprigge, Phillip Ferreira, Paul Coates, Daniel Hutto.
Papers by Daniel D. Hutto
fundamentally different ways. It is a hallmark of cognitivism to seek to
identify some independent component that puts the memory – the
what’s remembered – into acts of remembering. Such a component is
variably characterized as: a stored memory, a stored content, or stored
information. Accordingly, and on this basis, cognitivists seek to distinguish
memories from acts of remembering. This paper raises doubts about the
very idea that we can make sense of the real, independent existence of
stored memory contents or stored memory information and, in its place,
motivates adoption of a radically enactivist approach to understanding
various acts of remembering.
thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and defend its core thesis. The extended mind thesis states that under certain (specialized and particular) conditions cognitive processes may be constituted by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. The extended mind thesis is part of a larger family of theoretical frameworks such as embodied cognition, distributed cognition, and various versions of enactivism (Gallagher 2018; Hutchins 1995; Varela et al. 1991; Di Paolo 2009; Hutto & Myin 2013, 2017). In this paper we revive and clarify the commitments of Radical Enactivism’s Extensive Enactivism, compare it to alternatives, and provide new
arguments and analyses for preferring it over what is on offer from other members of the extended-distributed-enactive family of positions.
been adequately done; and, finally, offers some correctives and clarifications to get us started on developing a satisfactory philosophy of persons.
Hutto calls this developmental proposal the narrative practice hypothesis (NPH). Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons (that is, folk psychological narratives) supply children with both the basic structure of folk psychology and the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice. In making a strong case for the as yet underexamined idea that our understanding of reasons may be socioculturally grounded, Hutto not only advances and explicates the claims of the NPH, but he also challenges certain widely held assumptions. For example, he targets the idea that the primary function of folk psychology is to enable us to predict the behaviors of others. In this way, Folk Psychological Narratives both clears conceptual space around the dominant approaches for an alternative and offers a groundbreaking proposal.
This book also appears as a triple issue of the Journal Consciousness Studies, Vol. 16, no. 6-8, June/August 2009
Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex, UK
View SWIF Book forum with precis, commentaries and replies - link below.
Contributors include: Donald Davidson, Tom Sorrell, T. L. S. Sprigge, Phillip Ferreira, Paul Coates, Daniel Hutto.
fundamentally different ways. It is a hallmark of cognitivism to seek to
identify some independent component that puts the memory – the
what’s remembered – into acts of remembering. Such a component is
variably characterized as: a stored memory, a stored content, or stored
information. Accordingly, and on this basis, cognitivists seek to distinguish
memories from acts of remembering. This paper raises doubts about the
very idea that we can make sense of the real, independent existence of
stored memory contents or stored memory information and, in its place,
motivates adoption of a radically enactivist approach to understanding
various acts of remembering.
thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and defend its core thesis. The extended mind thesis states that under certain (specialized and particular) conditions cognitive processes may be constituted by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. The extended mind thesis is part of a larger family of theoretical frameworks such as embodied cognition, distributed cognition, and various versions of enactivism (Gallagher 2018; Hutchins 1995; Varela et al. 1991; Di Paolo 2009; Hutto & Myin 2013, 2017). In this paper we revive and clarify the commitments of Radical Enactivism’s Extensive Enactivism, compare it to alternatives, and provide new
arguments and analyses for preferring it over what is on offer from other members of the extended-distributed-enactive family of positions.
been adequately done; and, finally, offers some correctives and clarifications to get us started on developing a satisfactory philosophy of persons.
To understand mentality, however complex and sophisticated it may be, it is necessary to appreciate how living beings dynamically interact with their environments. From an enactivist perspective, there is no prospect of understanding minds without reference to such interactions because interactions are taken to lie at the heart of mentality in all of its varied forms.
Since 1991, enactivism has attracted interest and attention from academics and practitioners in many fields, and it is a well-established framework for thinking about and investigating mind and cognition. It has been articulated into several recognizably distinct varieties distinguished by their specific commitments. Some versions of enactivism, such as those put forward by Thompson and Di Paolo and others, focus on expanding and developing the core ideas of the original formulation of enactivism advanced by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. Other versions of enactivism, such as sensorimotor knowledge enactivism and radical enactivism incorporate other ideas and influences in their articulation of enactivism, sometimes leaving aside and sometimes challenging the core assumptions of the original version of enactivism.
performance is without guided exception guided by proposition knowledge — is
fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualism about skill run into intractable
theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical
modes of presentation. It then examines a proposed solution by Carlotta Pavese which seeks to identify practical modes of presentation with motor representations as that guide skilled sensorimotor action. We argued that this proposed identification is problematic on empirical and theoretically grounds, and – as such – it fails to deliver on its explanatory promises. In the final analysis, it will be argued that intellectualism about skill is, in any case, superfluous when it comes to accounting for the aspects of skilled performance it purports to explain.
This short piece explains: the big idea behind this movement; how it is inspired by empirical findings; why it matters; and what questions the field will face in the future. It focuses on the stronger and weaker ways that different E-approaches understand cognition as depending deeply on the dynamic ways in which cognizers use their bodies to engage with wider world.
In this lecture Professor Hutto introduces the idea that this remarkable ability is essentially a skill in producing and consuming a special sort of narrative, acquired by engaging in storytelling practices. As Waterhouse’s A Tale from the Decameron (1916) reminds us beautifully, narrative practices have been at the heart of human society throughout our history. Dan defended the stronger claim that they might be absolutely central for stimulating important aspects of our social understanding and noted that, if true, it excludes the prospect that this crucial ability is one which is built-in to members of our species. Knowing the answer matters, fundamentally, when it comes to deciding which therapies are the most promising and appropriate for treating certain mental health disorders and which sorts of educational opportunities should be provided for younger children. Equally, it matters when thinking about whether and how we, as adults, might improve abilities to understand ourselves and others.
If these arguments are accepted then questions loom large about how non-contentful gestures interact with, influence and may have helped to make possible contentful speech and thought. In my concluding remarks I take up the last issue – suggesting that our non-verbal ancestors’ first communions may have depended upon mimetic capacities and embodied intersubjective engagements in which gestures played a central role but while ‘theory of mind’ abilities played none at all. Further, I expound reasons for thinking that this same proposal offers an adequate and theoretically well-motivated way of understanding how human children manage to take their first steps into more sophisticated linguistic and narrative practices.
On the assumption that action understanding requires mental attribution it follows that mirroring is not any kind of action understanding.
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2006) reject this conclusion. They maintain that mirror neurons play the central role in our ground floor capacity for action understanding. They believe that there is a quite distinctive, non-folk psychological, kind of action understanding. They claim that although “we can use our higher cognitive faculties to reflect on what we have perceived and infer –the intentions, expectations, or motivations of others that would provide us with a reason for their acts ... our brain is able to understand these latter immediately on the basis of our motor competence alone, without the need for any kind of reasoning” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. xi). These authors insist that the immediate understanding of the acts of others is sui generis - neither a form of mentalizing nor based upon it (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p.131). Might there be a quite different and more fundamental kind of action understanding that is sponsored by the activity of mirror neurons alone? This paper explores this possibility.
The school is open to all researchers within cognitive science (Ph.D. students and persons who already have a doctorate). The number of available places is limited. If necessary, a certain preference of admission will be given to Ph.D. students. Participation and travel will be paid by the Swedish Graduate School in Cognitive Science, SweCog.
Place: Marston Hill, Mullsjö
Time: 14-20 August, 2011.
Dead line for application: May 10, 2011
Program
The program contains a mixture of lectures, workshops and hands-on assignments. This year we will have a special focus on research methods, and (computer) tools for analysis of research data. Participants are encouraged to bring their own data, problems, suggestions for discussion of methods etc. for exchange of ideas and advice.
Active participation in the program can, if your advisor agrees, be the basis for a graduate course in the theory of cognitive science.
Lecture 1: Basic Minds
There is a tradition for thinking about the nature of mind that is alive and well in many quarters of Anglophone philosophy of mind and cognitive science. That tradition – which finds succor in orthodox, standard or classical cognitive science – takes it as read that “the manipulation and use of representations is the primary job of the mind” (Dretske 1995, p. xiv). This commitment is the defining feature of what I will call intellectualism. Unqualified, intellectualism about the mind is the view that mentality, always and everywhere, entails the existence of contentful mental representations. Accordingly, even the phenomenal characters of experiences are assumed to reduce to, or are exhausted by, representational properties of mental states; absolutely nothing mental escapes the representationalist net. Simply stated, the intellectualist credo is: no mentality without representation.
In opposition to intellectualism, there has been a anti-representationalist turn in cognitive science. This is associated with the rise of enactivism and its associated ideas that minds are embodied, embedded and extensive. This lecture lays out more and less radical versions of both intellectualism and enactivism to reveal that these frameworks are only incompatible when advanced in their uncompromising and most extreme versions – or when they conflict over the explanation of some or other specific domain. Coming off the fence, I will provide reasons for thinking that a radical enactivism may be true of the basic nature of minds. The implication this has for cognitive science will be examined.
Lecture 2: Scaffolded Minds
Sterelny (2010) recently advanced the Scaffolded Mind Hypothesis (SMH). It holds that some “human cognitive capacities both depend on and have been transformed by environmental resources” (p. 472). This lecture explicates and defends a special case of this hypothesis - one concerning the cognitive underpinnings of our 'theory of mind' or folk psychological abilities. Building on a de-intellectualized characterization of what basic human interpersonal relations involve, it is argued that familiarity with traditions, institutions, roles and local norms play a large part in moulding our everyday expectations and ground much human interpersonal relating (Gallagher and Hutto 2008). In the human case, it is conjectured that the mastery of more sophisticated social practices, involving pretence, conversation and narratives, make different kinds of interpersonal relating and ways of understanding others possible. Highlighting this, Bruner (1990) argues convincingly that folk psychology is an instrument of culture. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) is an advance on Bruner’s idea. It shows why that proposal deserves a place at the table in current debates about the basis of our folk psychological abilities (Hutto 2008). The NPH says that our high level capacity for making sense of others is normally acquired through engagement in narrative practices. It is by engaging in narrative practices (in which the participants jointly attend to stories about people who act for reasons) that children gradually come to see the connections between mental states and thereby acquire their full-fledged folk psychological competence. This occurs over the course of later childhood, especially from age five years onwards. Through participating in narrative practices children gradually come by an articulate understanding of intentional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, hopes, and their possible relations.
The NPH will be pitted against more traditional rivals – standard variants Theory Theory (TT) and Simulation Theory (ST) – that argue for the existence of biologically inherited representational device to do the relevant explanatory work. The NPH recognizes that folk psychology is a highly structured, conceptually based, competence. But it assumes that it is an environmentally scaffolded competence and, hence, implies that it does not have a wholly internal, neural basis. The methodological implications the NPH has for investigating the basis of our folk psychological capacity will be explored. This if a first step in understanding the implications of the SMH should it turn out to be true more generally.