The Radical Enactivist and Ecological Enterprise of Getting Rid of (or Taming) Perceptual Illusions

Abstract

Some anti-representational approaches to cognition have become increasingly popular, and many of their proponents see them as promising a new paradigm for cognitive science. In this paper, I focus on two of those approaches to argue that they do not contain a proper explanation of perceptual illusions—and that perhaps they cannot provide it. My claim will be that, without an adequate treatment of such a common perceptual phenomenon, they can hardly be seen as part of a new paradigm. I begin by describing the context in which these approaches arose and developed, while in the second part I present three treatments of perceptual illusions coming from the approaches at issue. The third part makes a detour about the notion of perceptual illusion, as the assessment of these explanations of illusions seems to require it. Then, the fourth part is devoted to evaluating these explanations of illusions, discussing the introduction of normative language, appeal to notions as “situation-dependent” property, and whether a proposed definition of illusion fits our current comprehension of them, as well as the rejection of inferences from unfitting behavior that seem abductively legitimate. There I argue that those accounts of perceptual illusions fail to achieve their aim.