Contentful skills: Procedural memory and the representational challenge to non‐representational cognition
Procedural memory—the system underlying skills and habits—is inherently contentful. We argue, drawing on standard accounts of intentionality, that it exhibits a world‐to‐mind direction of fit and is governed by satisfaction conditions that normatively guide skilled action. Four convergent arguments support this: the conceptual structure of procedural memory's directive function; the phenomenon of misrepresentation in apraxia; the constitutive role of contentful goal states in motor control models; and the semantic interface between verbal instruction and action. This challenges anti‐representationalist accounts in embodied cognition and philosophy of memory—including radical enactivism and the skilled intentionality framework—and supports a unified representationalist framework for embodied agency.
Authors
- Marcin Miłkowski (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7646-5742)
- Krystyna Bielecka (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8341-8335)
Institutions
- Institute of Philosophy (HU)
- Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (PL)
- Polish Academy of Sciences (PL)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Mind & Language
- Published
- 2026-07-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.70057
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 8.63