ANU Sschool of History Graduate Student Lachlan Walmsley's paper; Please Explain – Radical Enactivism’s Explanatory Debt, has been short-listed for the Australia Association of Philosophy's Postgraduate Presentation Prize.

From 2015 the AAP offers a $500 prize for the best paper presented by a postgraduate student at annual Conference. The prize is offered to encourage postgraduates to present at the Conference, and to recognise the philosophical contributions from excellent Australasian postgraduate students.

Please Explain – Radical Enactivism’s Explanatory Debt:

Radical Enactivism (Hutto & Myin 2013) is a position in the philosophy of cognitive science that aims to displace representationalism, the dominant position in cognitive science for the last 50-60 years. To accomplishing this aim, radical enactivism must provide an alternative explanation of cognition. Radical enactivism offers two alternative explanations of cognition. The first I call the dynamical explanation and the second I call the historical explanation. The mechanists have given us reasons for doubting that the first alternative makes for a good explanation (e.g. (Kaplan 2015; Kaplan & Bechtel 2011). The historical explanation does not hit the right explanatory target without the introduction of a proximate mechanism, but the proximate mechanisms suggested by radical enactivism are associationist mechanisms, the limitations of which led to the intial widespread endorsement of representationalism. Therefore, radical enactivism cannot displace representationalism in cognitive science.