It Just Doesn't Feel Right: OCD and the 'Scaling Up' Problem

The 'scaling up' objection says non-representational ecological-enactive accounts will be unable to explain 'representation hungry' cognition. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) presents a paradigmatic instance of this objection, marked as it is by 'representation hungry' obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior organized around them. In this paper I provide an ecological-enactive account of OCD, thereby demonstrating non-representational frameworks can 'scale up' to explain 'representation hungry' cognition. First, I outline a non-representational account of mind- a predictive processing operationalization of Sean Kelly's theory of perception. This account explains the 'tensions' and 'pulls' which guide and constrain our action-oriented and affect-laden perceptual 'grip' upon the world to be underwritten by an imperative to minimize prediction error. I then argue that OCD is best understood as 'grip gone awry'- malformed predictive models signal inappropriately high error, and this results in extremely strong 'tensions' and 'pulls' which prescribe (allostatic) actions. Thus, I arrive at the idea that OCD is primarily constituted by 'not just right' feelings caused by high error signaling. Finally, I explain that this account provides a causal explanation of the non-representationalexistential feelingfundamental to OCD. Compulsions are considered manifestations of non-representational grip responsive to this feeling, whilst obsessions are explained to play a meta-role in the condition, being formulated by subjects in a bid to make their 'not just right' feeling intelligible. I explain that the meta-role obsessions play makes their representational status largely irrelevant to OCD, and so leave this an open question. Consequently, I provide a non-representational account of OCD, thereby demonstrating that ecological-enactive approaches can respond to the 'scaling up' objection.