Reconceiving rationality: situating rationality into radically enactive cognition

Hello and welcome everyone. This is Active Inference Guest Stream 28.1. It's October 14th, 2022. Today we are going to be hearing and discussing Reconceiving Rationality by Giovanni Rola. So Giovanni, thank you so much for joining. Very much looking forward to this presentation and discussion. So off to you. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. It was a pleasure to receive your invitation a couple of months ago and I am delighted to be here to have this opportunity to discuss my work. As per your request, our suggestion, I am presenting this paper I wrote a couple of years ago and as we were talking the backstage, I have, I've changed my mind a few times and I'm going to make this clear during the presentation since I published that paper. But it is a pleasure nonetheless to have the chance to present this view here and to share it with the world. So I'm very happy. So we'll be talking about Reconceiving Rationality and Contentless Cognition. Then I'll present my view, which I called radically inactive rationality, and say a few words about agency and proficient interaction and reasoning and rationality. I'll close with a couple of objections. The first one being that whatever I'm presenting here is too liberal, in a way, excessively liberal. It encompasses too much. And the second objection, which I think is the one that may interest you the most is whether it is in fact compatible with predictive processing or predictive coding, which is of course in the vicinity. It's near the, of course, central to active inference. So here is the, here is the, sorry, the, my initial thoughts on the matter is that traditionally the very orthodox view on rationality assumes to the most of my knowledge, it's an assumption really that rationality must entail reasoning. That for instance, a belief B and an action A are rational if and only if there is the reasoning that underwrites the B or A. So, and of course, it's just not any reasoning. The reasoning in question must taccord with certain certain formal benchmarks such as classical logic or probability reasoning or heuristics. So believe in and acting rationally according to this traditional view require meeting certain formal standards. And this, as I said, it seems to me to be largely an assumption about what it means to be rational about defining rationality in terms of reasoning. So if rationality requires reasoning, and if reasoning involves the evaluation of beliefs against certain formal benchmarks, then rationality implies contentful cognition. Where content, I take it to be minimally having accuracy conditions, being capable of being right or wrong, or in a more weightier notion being true or false. So the idea here is that rationality necessarily involves content. It involves beliefs, reasoning, and the comparison or... Sorry. Sorry. It's about to update right now. It's about to update. Sorry, there was a pop-up in my window over here. So that would be, I think, the standard view on rationality. And if it is so that rationality necessarily involves content, it is a good fit with classical cognitivism or cognitivism in general, which is the view that cognition necessarily involves representational content, at the very least. For some cognitivists, of course, it might involve also conceptual content, but at the very least, representational content, which has accuracy conditions. But this classical view is not so good, does not provide a so good fit with radical inactive and embodied cognition, which I am here thinking not specifically on radical inactivism by Vuto and Mien in the recent books. But I think it also challenges other views that are not presented as radically inactive, but of course they share some core tenets with radical inactivism. We would call them radically embodied views of cognitivism, such as the views presented by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Burman and Barania in Sensory Mother Life. You also have Gallagher's variety of an activism in his 2017 book and also the view by Tony…