Dan Hutto: Enactive and narrative practices - how and why they matter to clinical practice

The cognitive revolution deposed behaviourist thinking (in both philosophy and psychology) and licensed a return to active theorising about mental states and their place in nature. Promoting representational and computational theories of mind, many researchers in diverse fields have assumed that the content-ful properties of such mental states play critical causal roles in computational processes enabling intelligent activity. But serious philosophical problems have been identified with these proposals. Coupled with this, non-representationalist approaches in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science - enactive, embodied approaches - have emerged and are growing in popularity. These developments suggest that a serious re-think about the nature of minds is now underway. Against this backdrop, this presentation examines some important implications that radically embodied/enactive and narrative-based accounts of cognition may have, practically, for clinical and other forms of therapy.