4E approaches to affective technology tend to focus on how ‘users’ manage their situated affectivity, analogously to how they help themselves cognitively through epistemic actions or using artefacts and scaffolding. Here I focus on cases where the function of affective technology is to exploit or manipulate the agent engaging with it. My opening example is the cigarette, where technological refinements have harmfully transformed the affective process of consuming nicotine. I proceed to develop case studies of two very different but also (...) harmful affective technologies. Casinos and electronic gambling machines deploy computationally intensive scaffolding to shape the onset and continuation of gambling episodes. High-heeled shoes affectively engineer wearers’ relationships to their own embodied capacities and are predominantly expected to be worn by women. I conclude with a discussion of the need for study of affective technology to focus other-directed applications, some of which will serve competing or antagonistic interests. (shrink)

The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (1) embodied artifacts, (2) perceptual artifacts, (3) cognitive artifacts, and (4) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and (...) so some artifacts are members of more than one category. I also identify some of the techniques (or skills) we use when interacting with artifacts. Identifying these categories of artifacts and techniques allows us to map the landscape of relations between embodied minds and the artifactual world. Second, having identified categories of artifacts and techniques, this essay then outlines some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts, focussing on neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and personalisation algorithms nudging their users towards particular epistemic paths of information consumption. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing (...) on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

“I don’t want to create painful shoes, but it is not my job to create something comfortable.” – Christian Louboutin. (in Alexander, 2012) Pain is an essential part of the grooming process, and that...

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts (...) constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations. (shrink)

In connecting embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition with affectivity and emotions, the framework of “situated affectivity” has recently emerged. This framework emphasizes the interactions between the emoter and the environment in the unfolding of our affective lives (Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Griffiths and Scarantino 2009; Piredda 2022; Stephan and Walter 2020). In the last decades, there has also been a growing interest in the philosophical analysis of technology and artifacts (Houkes and Vermaas 2010; Margolis and Laurence 2007; Preston (...) 2022). The aim of this special issue is to foster the interaction between philosophical reflections on affectivity and those on technology, further developing this fruitful borderland (Clowes et al. 2021; Colombetti 2020; Fasoli 2018; Krueger and Osler 2019; Heersmink 2018; Piredda and Candiotto 2019; Piredda 2020; Viola 2021). -/- . (shrink)

Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first wave or second wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation).However, in a considerable number of cases, everyday smartphone use is task-unrelated. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smart-phone use (Marty-Dugas (...) et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020).Given the prevalence of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of task-unrelated smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli, Kane, Smallwood, et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics. (shrink)

Affordances are standardly understood as perceived possibilities for interaction. What is afforded is in turn regarded as dependent on the properties of a body and its environment. Human bodies are nearly ubiquitously clothed, and clothing can change the capabilities of bodies. We argue that when clothing does this, it should be regarded as an affordance transforming technology. Clothing receives passing attention in remarks by Gibson, and some empirical work in ecological psychology uses worn items as experimental manipulations. We argue that (...) the effects of clothing should be a central topic of investigation. We further show how the notion of clothing as an affordance transforming technology allows ecological psychology to accommodate feminist insights about the restrictive or oppressive nature of some gendered clothing norms. We aim to show that if ecological psychology is to be a general framework for thinking about human perception and activity, then it should consider clothing, because of the differences it can make to what is afforded. It should do so critically because the ways that clothing transforms affordances are sometimes discriminating in that what people are expected to wear and what differences that makes aren’t independent of how they’re classified in systems of power and oppression. (shrink)

For several decades, research on situated cognition and affectivity has neglected cases in which environmental features in the niche have a negative impact on agents’ cognitive and affective wellbeing. Recently, however, a new research cluster has emerged that explores how things, technologies, and organisational systems across corporate, healthcare, and educational sectors wrongfully harm certain kinds of agents. This article contributes to this research cluster by integrating work on negative niche construction, structural oppression, enculturation, and self-narration. It thereby offers a new (...) perspective on the negative, structurally oppressive impact of the socio-culturally shaped niche on enculturated self-narration. The main argument is that master plots, understood as narrative arrangements that dominate in the socio-culturally shaped niche, contribute to the structural oppression of enculturated self-narrators with systematically undermined socio-cultural identities. An analysis of the influence of pronatalist master plotting on enculturated self-narration serves to illustrate and strengthen the overall argument. (shrink)

Self-narration, many philosophers assume, makes important contributions to our mental lives. Two views on self-narration can be distinguished. On the internalistic view, self-narration unfolds in the secluded mind and does not require overt communication. On the situated view, self-narration often depends on the conversational interaction with an interlocutor. The situated view has many advantages over its internalistic rival, including theoretical consistency and empirical plausibility. Yet, research on situated conversational self-narration has been shaped by a harmony bias, which consists in the (...) tacit assumption that interlocutors contribute to self-narration in ways that are beneficial and supportive, rather than malicious and harmful. This paper seeks to mitigate the harmony bias by considering the phenomenon of gaslighting, which is characterized by an interlocutor’s erosion of someone’s sense of epistemic and moral competence. In cases of narrative gaslighting, this erosion proceeds by maliciously interfering with the self-narrator’s mnemonic, interpretational, and conceptual abilities. Bringing together research on situated self-narration and gaslighting for the first time, it will be argued that the emerging account of narrative gaslighting has important implications for both. (shrink)

The narratives we have about ourselves are important for our sense of who we are. However, our narratives are influenced, even manipulated, by the people and environments we interact with, impacting our self-understanding. This can lead to narratives that are limited, even harmful. In this paper, I explore how our narrative agency is constrained, to greater and lesser degrees, through a process I call ‘narrative railroading’. Bringing together work on narratives and 4E cognition, I specifically explore how using features of (...) our socio-material environments to support and construct our narratives does not simply offer up possibilities for creating more reliable and accurate self-narratives (Heersmink 2020) but can lead to increasingly tight narrative railroading. To illustrate this idea, I analyse how digital technologies do not neutrally distribute our narratives but dynamically shape and mould narrative agency in ways that can restrict our self-understanding with potentially harmful consequences. As such, I argue that we need to recognise that digital devices not only support narratives but work as powerful narrative devices, shaping and propagating the kinds of narratives that we self-ascribe and act in accordance with. (shrink)

In this text, I discuss the role that a range of habits in affluent societies play in upholding as well as masking an unsustainable status quo. I show that enactivism, as a philosophical approach to the embodied and embedded mind, offers resources for bringing into focus and critically interrogating suchhabits of affluenceand the environments enabling them. I do this in the context of a critical theory ofthe unfelt in society: the systematic production of lacunae of emotive concern in social collectives. (...) The lack of proportionate affective and practical responses to the ecological crisis epitomizes this. The article starts with considerations on societal unfeeling, then reviews key elements of enactive approaches to habit, before a fuller picture of habits of affluence is developed, informed by Brand’s and Wissen’s concept of theimperial mode of living. Finally, two dimensions of habits of affluence are discussed in some detail, which will help flesh out a thematically expanded, politically engaged version of enactivism. (shrink)

During live sporting events, fans often create intense atmospheres in stadiums, expressing support for their own local players and discouragement for the opposition. Crowd hostility directed at opposition players surprisingly elicits contrasting reactions across different sports. Tennis players, for example, have reported that hostile crowds are hurtful and disrespectful, whereas footballers often praise and encourage such hostility. What explains this tension? Why are hostile atmospheres considered wrong for some athletes, and not for others? We argue that creating hostile atmospheres for (...) opposition players functions as a form of hostile affective scaffolding, as it scaffolds affective states in such a way that harms the interests of the opposition athletes, while promoting the interests of fans. These hostile atmospheres wrong the scaffolded insofar they constitute a form of recognition disrespect, and to the extent that they violate the formal rules and conventional norms internal to the sporting practices. Although the focus is on the sporting context, our analysis reveals significant implications for a more nuanced understanding of what hostile scaffolding is, and how we should understand its normativity. The existing literature views hostile scaffolding as constituted by a setback to the overall interests of the scaffolded, and that the wrong-making feature of this scaffolding is necessarily explained by harm. Instead, we argue that hostile scaffolding should be understood as hostile relative to a set of interests that an agent has, not just their overall interests, and that the wrong-making features of hostile scaffolding are not limited to harms. (shrink)

This article examines multicultural classrooms through the selective permeability model, which posits that individuals encounter different action possibilities or affordances in the same setting. The goal is to illuminate how educational environments may support some students while disadvantaging others, thereby causing situated cognitive harm. The article proceeds in several parts. First, it explores selective permeability in relation to what Gibson describes as “positive” and “negative” affordances, articulating how these polarities can change depending on a person’s cultural background. Second, it integrates (...) insights from cultural psychology, such as the influence of regional geography and city design on behavior-constraining cultural norms. These norms can productively funnel actions and learning. Yet when a student’s cultural norms clash with tacit classroom prescriptions, the situation can be analogous to arriving at a rink with rollerblades only to be placed on ice: the learner confronts action limiting negative affordances and undergoes situated cognitive harm. Third, the article presents qualitative and quantitative data that clarify how culture moderates what students find helpful or hindering. Notably, incongruent norms are not always detrimental; under certain circumstances, they can serve as a catalyst for growth. (shrink)

This paper brings the concept of affective scaffolding to bear on a much-debated controversy: the expanding use of psy- chiatric medications to treat an increasingly broad range of human discontents. ‘Affective scaffolding’ refers to the variety of ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena. Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological underpinnings (...) of distress and suffering to change how we feel. The paper develops an account of psychiatric drug use as affective scaffolding and examines how psychiatrization – the complex social process through which psychiatry comes to influence more and more domains of human life – impacts this form of scaffolding. I propose that psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage an expanding array of affective experiences. In some cases, I argue, this results in bad pharmaceutical scaffolding. Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding emerges when an agent is influenced to select and rely upon psychiatric drugs in attempts to exert individual control over distress and suffering where (1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and (2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the agent's affective needs and interests. (shrink)

Debates in 4E and scaffolded cognition have been centered on cases in which human cognitive or affective capacities are enhanced through technology. Recently some authors have noted that this may not always be the case: the technologies and environment around us can negatively impact cognitive and affective abilities. In the first part, I elaborate on this change of perspective in the debate. In the second part, I discuss a case of technology scaffolding maladaptive psychological processes. More in detail, I will (...) focus on the role of smartphones in scaffolding ruminative processes. To illustrate this claim, I introduce four core features of rumination and discuss how they may be supported by problematic smartphone use in light of existing evidence. (shrink)

Recent years have seen increased interest among 4E cognition scholars in physical disability, leading to the development of the EE-model of disability. This paper contributes to the literature on disability and 4E cognition in three key ways. First, it examines the relationship between the EE-model and social constructivist views that address the bodily reality of disablement, highlighting commonalities and distinctions. Second, it critiques the EE-model’s focus on individual strategies for expanding disabled persons’ affordance landscapes, arguing that disability policy should integrate (...) insights from both the EE-model and social constructivist approaches. Finally, it assesses the EE-model against the 'dogma of harmony'. We argue that while the EE-model’s focus on active human-environment collaboration is valuable, it can inadvertently perpetuate this dogma. We contend that integrating certain social constructivist insights can help the EE-model avoid the dogma of harmony. (shrink)

For countless citizens in the United States, guns are objects of personal attachment that provide strong feelings of power and security. I argue that a key reason for such tight affective bonds is that, under certain conditions, guns become integrated into their owners’ embodied experience. To flesh out this view, I explain (a) how firearms, as material artifacts, can become a part of the feeling body and (b) how this integration impacts one’s experience of self, others, and the world. I (...) first apply the distinction between body-incorporation and body-extension by De Preester and Tsakiris (Phenomenol Cogn Sci 8:307–319, 2009) to delineate how guns can (and cannot) be integrated into lived bodies. I then introduce Ihde's (Technology and the life world: from garden to earth, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990) notion of embodiment relations to elaborate on the key experiential features of technologically extended bodies and complement the previous, sensorimotor-centric accounts of bodily extension with Colombetti's (Phenomenology for the twenty-first century, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016) concept of affective incorporation. With this theoretical framework in place, I proceed to examine the motives and affective dynamics involved in the incorporation of guns, the practices by which this incorporation is constituted, and its impact on gun carriers’ habitual comportment. In doing so, I identify two notable contradictions: first, between a desire for the power afforded by firearms and the lack in oneself that this power implies, and second, between one’s seemingly beneficial feelings of confidence/safety and potentially harmful transformations in one’s perceptions of threat. To conclude, I discuss how my analysis challenges current theorization on technologically extended bodies and consider its relevance for ongoing debates over gun policy. (shrink)

This is the editorial introduction to a collection that "aims to bring together work about the varied harms caused or aggravated by external cognitive and affective factors, and what we can do about them. Taking a situated perspective on these harms involves going beyond thinking of them as merely involving negative causal stimuli to the real internal cognitive processes. We encourage submission of original papers advancing our understanding of the harms. Since people aren’t passive victims, we also welcome work on (...) the ways that we can respond to these harms." The introduction itself does not have an abstract. (shrink)

In the wake of recent advancements in the field of AI, this paper investigates the impact of recommender systems and generative models on human decisional and creative autonomy. For this purpose, we adopt Dennett’s conception of autonomy as self-control. We show that recommender systems can play a double role in relation to decisional autonomy: as information filter, they can augment self-control in decision-making, but also act as mechanisms of remote control that clamp degrees of freedom. As for generative models in (...) AI, we show that they can be seen as a powerful system of selection and suggestion (similar to standard recommender systems) but also as an instrument for information production. We suggest that the latter perspective opens new possibilities in terms of creative autonomy. Additionally, for both systems we propose a distinction between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” mechanisms and effects. Through Dennett’s theory of self-control, this paper offers new insights into the relation between AI and human autonomy by framing it in terms of remote or self-control and by addressing the impact of generative models on creative autonomy. (shrink)

This text maps out a territory for political philosophy of mind, with emphasis on habit, affect and an expanded notion of the social niche. We first survey the historical development of classic philosophy of mind towards the articulation of political philosophy of mind and discuss further influences for the field. We then outline commitments to relationality, dynamism, and emergence, to adopt a post-cognitivist view of cognition as embodied and situated, as ongoing dynamic interaction with the environment. We propose to move (...) beyond the user/resource framework dominant in extended mind approaches and to surpass what Jesper Aagaard calls the “dogma of harmony” prevalent in 4E approaches. Moving beyond the individual subject, towards situated agents shaped by institutional procedures, social domains and subjectification practices, we highlight the role of affect and habit in processes of societal mind-shaping. We propose a critical methodology: inverting key concepts from philosophy of mind to bring out their ambivalent standing amidst oppressive and exploitative social structures, thereby expanding the purview of the socio-material niches in which cognitive and affective capacities are developed and expressed. We discuss work on habit in the enactivist and pragmatist traditions to put our method of concept inversion and niche expansion to work. The article is meant to be an introduction and invitation to join an emerging scholarly effort at the intersection of philosophy of mind, 4E cognitive science and social as well as political philosophy. (shrink)

Cognitive scaffolding is typically conceptualized in terms of environmental design which serves to offload, facilitate, or enhance the cognitive capacities of interacting agents. Recent contributions to the literature on scaffolding have noted that environmental design might likewise scaffold cognition in ways that undermine the interests of interactant agents—giving rise to notions of problematic or hostile scaffolding. Given the pervasiveness of social and technological scaffolding in contemporary life, the importance of understanding and assessing its effects can hardly be overstated. At the (...) same time, however, the very pervasiveness of scaffolding raises a challenge to the current criteria for evaluating its effects by comparison with agents’ interests. This is because human agents and their interests alike are themselves the results of various forms of social and technological scaffolding. This paper explores the relationship between scaffolding and the formation of agents along with their interests, as well as the implications of this relationship for evaluating scaffolding as being hostile, neutral, or beneficial. I will argue that the formative aspect of scaffolding imparts a degree of uncertainty to evaluations of scaffolding based on agents’ interests. I will then demonstrate the relevance of the formative aspect of scaffolding in evaluating and assessing the potentially pernicious effects of contemporary social and technological scaffolding focusing on the examples of servitization marketing models and social and vocational digital infrastructures. (shrink)

From a 4E cognition framework, this article compares earlier cultural and technologically mediated expert practices with contemporary use of digital technology. I discuss two case studies. First, the art of memory, where I look at how medieval monks constructed memory palaces inside their minds to enable creative thinking and how Renaissance thinker Giulio Camillo built on this tradition to create a complex machine to think. The second example is of literary writing, where I look at how writers engage with the (...) materiality of language and the writing material, creating new cognitive opportunities. Finally, I compare these earlier practices with contemporary digital technology, discussing both continuous and novel aspects. First, I examine how all practices engineer the cognitive surroundings of its practitioners to enable new cognitive possibilities. However, this comparative work also allows me to spot a worrisome novelty in digital technology. In many cases, the goals of such technology are contrary to those of its users. Drawing on discussions both outside and inside the 4E framework, I argue that digital technology introduces economic agency into our minds. I suggest that when we extend our minds in the digital ecology, we allow powerful economic actors to shape the direction of our cognitive lives in ways that are contrary to our own goals. Finally, I argue, building on the case studies, that my discussion might point to a new and more pragmatic approach to these issues. (shrink)

In this paper, we use the recent appearance of LLMs and GPT-equipped robotics to raise questions about the nature of semantic meaning and how this relates to issues concerning artificially-conscious machines. To do so, we explore how a phenomenology constructed out of the association of qualia (defined as somatically-experienced sense data) and situated within a 4e enactivist program gives rise to intentional behavior. We argue that a robot without such a phenomenology is semantically empty and, thus, cannot be conscious in (...) any way resembling human consciousness. Finally, we use this platform to address and supplement widely-discussed concerns regarding the dangers of attempting to produce artificially-conscious machines. (shrink)

According to constructive empiricists, accepting a scientific theory involves belief only that it is true of the observable world, where observability is defined in terms of what is detectable by the unaided senses. On this view, scientific instruments are machines that generate new observable data, but this data need not be interpreted as providing access to a realm of phenomena beyond what is revealed by the senses. A recent challenge to the constructive empiricist account of instruments appeals to the extended (...) mind thesis, according to which cognitive processes are sometimes constituted not just by brain activity, but can extend into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. If this is right, scientific instruments may, in the right circumstances, literally become part of our perceptual processes. In this article, I examine this extended perception argument, and I find that it fails for the vast majority of scientific instruments. Even if the extended mind thesis is accepted, the constructive empiricist can draw a line between observables and unobservables that makes very few concessions to the realist. (shrink)

The field of distributed cognition has been accused of being overly concerned with the “dogma of harmony,” valuing smoothness and success and neglecting moments of failure, contingency, noise, and chaos. This paper examines this proposition through a historical case study. Performances, whether theatrical or cinematic, depend upon deploying powerful cognitive, affective and symbolic technologies, tools that can that at times elude or escape full control. I ask whether the use of such technologies—including verbal, gestural, visual (lighting, cinematic technologies such as (...) the close-up and montage); aural (song, music, score); material (costumes, props)—can at times work against the aims and interests of both creators and audiences. My case study is the question of chauvinism and pro-war sentiment in productions of Henry V. (shrink)

This paper interprets Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting (1972) through the concept of cognitive scaffolding in order to analyse the relationship between hunter and hunting dog as a form of inter-species distributed cognitive system. In recreational hunting, the hunter and the dog engage in a reciprocal process of mutual cognitive scaffolding that transforms both their capacities. It is further argued that this scaffolding also serves as a means of affective regulation, and that it is the affective rather than the (...) cognitive features of the system that point to the function of the scaffolding. Namely, the production of an affective state in the hunter. We detail the ways in which the cognitive and affective features of the scaffold operate and interrelate. We then explore the role of the game-animal in the affective functioning of the scaffold and consider that the hunter-dog system might represent a harmful form of scaffolding. (shrink)

Scaffolding interactions are typically portrayed optimistically within 4E frameworks of cognition. In this paper, we argue that this “dogma of harmony” has also influenced research on scaffolding interactions during development. Specifically, we show how some scaffolding interactions aimed at supporting task execution and skill acquisition in early childhood can inadvertently lead to detrimental effects on learners’ wellbeing, understood in terms of what individuals are capable of achieving rather than through the resources they possess. To characterise these effects, we propose a (...) model that highlights the manifold ways in which individual differences interact with scaffolds’ features during developmental processes. Using this model, we discuss two types of maladaptive scenarios: those where the scaffolds are efficient to various degrees depending on _inter_-individual differences, and those where scaffolds’ efficiency is tied to particular timeframes depending on _intra_-individual differences. The upshot of this discussion is that, to challenge the harmony dogma, more inclusive education policies should not only consider scaffolds’ efficiency but also determine whether individuals can adequately transform their use into valuable opportunities for their learning across contexts and timescales. (shrink)

The influential social model understands disability in terms of oppression instantiated in a material environment that disables bodily impaired people. Many of the demands of disability activists for what we might call equal material access have since been satisfied. Yet oppression of subtler psychological and emotional forms persists for many disabled people. We will argue that the results of these psychosocial forms of oppression is that scaffolding which was set up to provide access to disabled people may become disabling. We (...) introduce the concept of “disabling scaffolding” to refer to environmental structures that inhibit the disabled person’s abilities because of social structures of intersubjective and material oppression. We borrow Iris Marion Young’s concept of “inhibited intentionality” to describe the effects of oppression, which come to operate “from within” the disabled person, deeply affecting the person’s experience of the body as an “I-can”. Disabling scaffolding is a consequence of material and intersubjective oppression that leads to inhibited intentionality, gradually leading to a pathologization of the disabled person’s embodiment. (shrink)

The capacity to distinguish reliable or rationally believable claims from a huge pool of views available within the public arena has never been as critical an issue as it is today. We live in a world full of bizarre, unwarranted beliefs and conspiracy theories, some of which may seem, at least on the face of it, quite well justified. Moreover, some of them may even turn out to be true. This poses a significant social-epistemological as well as practical problem. Here (...) I propose to single out a group of beliefs known as confined truths. These are true beliefs belonging to a pathological question-answer system. The paper first provisionally articulates this idea and then makes the case for an ecological account of questioning and answering, thought of as social pursuits made possible by the capacity for problematization. The latter shall be characterized as part of cognitive engineering or niche construction. In the final part of the paper, various possible dysfunctionalities of the social/ecological pursuit of problematization are elicited and suitable examples thereof are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Recent work within the tradition of 4E cognitive science and philosophy of mind has drawn attention to the ways that our technological, material, and social environments can act as hostile, oppressive, and harmful scaffolding. These accounts push back against a perceived optimistic bias in the wider literature, whereby, according to the critics, our engagements with technology are painted as taking place on our terms, to our benefit, in ways uncomplicated by political realities. This article enters into that conversation, and aims (...) to highlight a specific form of threat from emerging technology: the threat of the ‘techno-wanton. ’ Drawing on classic work on personhood by Harry Frankfurt, I argue that emerging forms of adaptive technology threaten to degrade the depth and reflexivity of our economy of preferences. Techno-wantonness is a wanton-like state of diminished agency and personhood, whereby adaptive technology facilitates the wanton satisfaction of shallow preferences and the weakening of higher order volition. I argue that the concept of ‘mind invasion’, within the context of the hostile scaffolding literature has been applied too broadly, to the detriment of our analysis, and argue that the notion of ‘techno-wantonness’ should replace ‘mind invasion’ in regard to a specific class of case. In short, the new concept allows for a more subtle distinction between scaffolding impinging on an unwilling mind and technology that panders to the preferences of initially often very willing users. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection between the extended mind thesis and transhumanism, with a particular focus on how technology may influence, alter, or enhance human cognitive abilities. The extended mind thesis posits that external elements can become integral components of cognitive processes. Drawing on this notion, the paper contends that transhumanism adopts such perspective in advocating for the possibility of cognitive enhancement. In this sense, it assesses whether technology can truly improve cognitive function or whether it might, instead, induce a (...) specific type of ignorance by diminishing cognitive phenomenology—the lived, experiential dimension of mental processes or the phenomenal aspect of cognitive consciousness. The assumption that cognitive technologies inherently enhance independent mental performance is challenged, with the argument that overreliance on technology may impair the ability to execute cognitive tasks autonomously. The analysis concludes that the integration of technological artifacts with human cognition can indeed lead to a specific form of ignorance by compromising cognitive phenomenology. It also suggests that such ignorance signals that the excessive use of technology may undermine the ability to perform cognitive tasks independently. These two conclusions invite reconsideration of the transhumanist claim that technology can improve human cognition. -/- El artículo explora la intersección entre la tesis de la mente extendida y el transhumanismo, enfocándose, específicamente, en cómo las tecnologías pueden influir, alterar o expandir nuestras capacidades y habilidades cognitivas. A través de un análisis de la tesis de la mente extendida, que propone que algunos elementos externos pueden formar parte constitutiva de nuestros procesos cognitivos, se argumenta que el transhumanismo adopta dicha tesis al tratar el asunto del mejoramiento cognitivo, y se examina si la tecnología puede realmente mejorar nuestras capacidades mentales, o si, por el contrario, podría inducir a un tipo específico de ignorancia al hacernos perder la fenomenología cognitiva, es decir, la vivencia de nuestros procesos mentales o el aspecto fenoménico de nuestra conciencia cognitiva. Se cuestiona, además, si el acoplamiento con tecnologías cognitivas disminuiría nuestra capacidad de realizar tareas mentales de forma autónoma, sugiriendo que una dependencia excesiva de la tecnología podría reducir nuestra habilidad para realizar procesos cognitivos sin ayuda de artefactos tecnológicos. Luego del análisis, el artículo concluye que, efectivamente, nuestro acoplamiento con artefactos tecnológicos puede conducirnos a un tipo específico de ignorancia al eliminar nuestra fenomenología cognitiva. También determina que dicha ignorancia es síntoma de que el uso excesivo de tecnologías puede despojarnos de nuestra habilidad de realizar tareas cognitivas sin asistencia tecnológica. Estas dos conclusiones deberían minar, o al menos replantear, las aspiraciones transhumanistas acerca del mejoramiento tecnológico de nuestra mente. (shrink)