Naturalistic philosophers rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for different purposes. Yet this article shows how processes of literature search and review are likely to be affected by widespread and systematic biases. A solution to this problem is offered here. Whilst the tradition of systematic reviews of literature from scientific disciplines has been neglected in philosophy, systematic reviews are important tools that minimize bias in literature search and review and allow for greater reproducibility and (...) transparency. If naturalistic philosophers wish to reduce bias in their research, they should then supplement their traditional tools for literature search and review by including systematic methodologies. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s theory of the structure and dynamics of consciousness has much to offer contemporary theorizing about consciousness and its basis in the embodied brain. On Gurwitsch’s account, as we develop it, the field of consciousness has a variable sized focus or "theme" of attention surrounded by a structured periphery of inattentional contents. As the field evolves, its contents change their status, sometimes smoothly, sometimes abruptly. Inner thoughts, a sense of one’s body, and the physical environment are dominant field contents. (...) These ideas can be linked with (and help unify) contemporary theories about the neural correlates of consciousness, inattention, the small world structure of the brain, meta-stable dynamics, embodied cognition, and predictive coding in the brain. (shrink)

This comment argues that appraisals result from the almost incessant predictive activity of the awake brain, using its incoming and stored information. It explores how appraisal operates when it does. It argues that the analysis of the processes that lead to appraisals currently is still at an early stage.

This article investigates the agency of the architecture of the Temple of Apollo at Claros and its cognitive impact on the ritual of divination. In the comparison with Delphi, Claros represents a peculiar example of how architecture evolved to suit and shape at the same time the ritual it was hosting. The paper starts with the analysis of the exteriors of the building, highlighting the choice of the Doric style dictated by the desire of being associated to Delphi. A further (...) analysis of the internal layout gives the author a chance of describing the cognitive inputs that the peculiar structure sent to the ancient mind. Specifically, the paper studies how the narrow tunnels made of black marble that turned seven times and the underground cave like adyton created a situation of sensory confusion in the mind of the seekers and the oracle that found themselves prone to detect agencies in the surrounding space and specifically to identify the agent with Apollo. (shrink)

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

Generalized anxiety disorder is among the world’s most prevalent psychiatric disorders and often manifests as persistent and difficult to control apprehension. Despite its prevalence, there is no integrative, formal model of how anxiety and anxiety disorders arise. Here, we offer a perspective derived from the free energy principle; one that shares similarities with established constructs such as learned helplessness. Our account is simple: anxiety can be formalized as learned uncertainty. A biological system, having had persistent uncertainty in its past, will (...) expect uncertainty in its future, irrespective of whether uncertainty truly persists. Despite our account’s intuitive simplicity—which can be illustrated with the mere flip of a coin—it is grounded within the free energy principle and hence situates the formation of anxiety within a broader explanatory framework of biological self-organization and self-evidencing. We conclude that, through conceptualizing anxiety within a framework of working generative models, our perspective might afford novel approaches in the clinical treatment of anxiety and its key symptoms. (shrink)

This article will provide a unifying perspective on perception and cognition via the route of linguistic representations of emotion. Linguistic representations of emotions provide a fertile ground for explorations into the nature and form of integration of perception and cognition because emotion has facets of both perceptual and cognitive processes. In particular, this article shows that certain types of linguistic representations of emotion allow for the integration of perception and cognition through a series of steps and operations in cognitive systems, (...) whereas certain other linguistic representations of emotion are not so representationally structured as to permit the unity of perception and cognition. It turns out that the types of linguistic representations of emotion that readily permit the desired unity of perception and cognition are exactly those that are linguistically encoded emotive representations of everyday objects, events, and things around us. It is these ordinary objects, events and things that provide the scaffolding for task-dependent or goal-oriented activities of cognitive systems including autonomous systems. In this way, cognitive systems can be saliently tuned to the outer world by being motivated and also subtly governed by emotion-driven representations. This helps not only tie together perceptual and cognitive processes via the interface between language and emotive representations, but also reveal the limits of emotive representations in amalgamating perceptual and cognitive processes in cognitive systems. (shrink)

Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is nonrepresentational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the best kind of nonrepresentational explanation will look like, yet they agree on one central point: instead of focusing solely on factors interior to an agent, an important aspect of cognition (...) is found in the link or coupling between an agent and the external world. This link is fluid, dynamic, and active in a variety of ways, and we do not need to add any internal extra something in the perception-action-cognition process. At the same time, even devout defenders of ecological psychology and enactivism recognize that plenty happens inside an agent during cognition. In particular, no one denies that the brain plays an important role. What, then, is the role of the brain if it’s not in the game of representing the environment? One possible option is to describe the brain as a resonant organ instead of a representational organ. In this paper we consider the history of resonance in more detail. Particular focus will be placed on two different sets of approaches that have developed the concept of resonance: a representational reading of resonance and a nonrepresentational, dynamic account of resonance. We then apply these accounts to a case study on music performance, specifically in the context of standard tonal jazz. From this application, we propose that a nonrepresentational resonance account consistent with both enactivism and ecological psychology is a viable way of explaining jazz performance. We conclude with future considerations on research regarding the brain as a resonant organ. (shrink)

Whole brain failure constitutes the diagnostic criterion for death determination in most clinical settings across the globe. Yet the conceptual foundation for its adoption was slow to emerge, has evoked extensive scientific debate since inception, underwent policy revision, and remains contentious in praxis even today. Complications result from the need to relate a unitary construal of the death event with an adequate account of organismal integration and that of the human organism in particular. Advances in the neuroscience of higher human (...) faculties, such as the self, personal identity, and consciousness, and dynamical philosophy of science accounts, however, are yielding a portrait of higher order global integration shared between body and brain. Such conceptual models of integration challenge a praxis relying exclusively on a neurological criterion for death. (shrink)

Predictive processing and its apparent commitment to explaining cognition in terms of Bayesian inference over hierarchical generative models seems to flatly contradict the pragmatist conception of mind and experience. Against this, I argue that this appearance results from philosophical overlays at odd with the science itself, and that the two frameworks are in fact well-poised for mutually beneficial theoretical exchange. Specifically, I argue: first, that predictive processing illuminates pragmatism’s commitment to both the primacy of pragmatic coping in accounts of the (...) mind and the profound organism-relativity of experience; second, that this pragmatic, “narcissistic” character of prediction error minimization undermines its ability to explain the distinctive normativity of intentionality; and third, that predictive processing therefore mandates an extra-neural account of intentional content of exactly the sort that pragmatism’s communitarian vision of human thought can provide. (shrink)

In this review, we deal with two central questions of consciousness how and why, and we outline their possible future development. The question how refers to the empirical endeavor to reveal the neural correlates and mechanisms that form consciousness. On the other hand, the question why generally refers to the “hard problem” of consciousness, which claims that empirical science will always fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question why is there conscious experience at all. Unfortunately, the hard problem (...) of consciousness will probably never completely disappear because it will always have its most committed supporters. However, there is a good chance that its weight and importance will be highly reduced by empirically tackling consciousness in the near future. We expect that future empirical endeavor of consciousness will be based on a unifying brain theory and will answer the question as to what is the function of conscious experience, which will in turn replace the implications of the hard problem. The candidate of such a unifying brain theory is predictive coding, which will have to explain both perceptual consciousness and conscious mind-wandering in order to become the truly unifying theory of brain functioning. (shrink)

Many have argued that early visual processing is encapsulated from the influence of higher-level goals, expectations, and knowledge of the world. Here we confront the main arguments offered in support of such a view, showing that they are unpersuasive. We also present evidence of top–down influences on early vision, emphasizing data from cognitive neuroscience. Our conclusion is that encapsulation is not a defining feature of visual processing. But we take this conclusion to be quite modest in scope, readily incorporated into (...) mainstream vision science. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss an intriguing and relatively little studied symptomatic expression of schizophrenia known as experiences of activity in which patients form the delusion that they can control some external events by the sole means of their mind. I argue that experiences of activity result from patients being prone to aberrantly infer causal relations between unrelated events in a retrospective way owing to widespread predictive deficits. Moreover, I suggest that such deficits may, in addition, lead to an aberrant (...) intentional binding effect i.e., the subjective compression of the temporal interval between an intentional action and its external effects. In particular, it might be that patient’s thoughts are bound to the external events they aimed to control producing, arguably, a temporal contiguity between these two components. Such temporal contiguity would reinforce or sustain the feeling that the patient mind is directly causally efficient. (shrink)

Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involving, and isn’t realist because it emphasizes the agent’s role in shaping the world through our own historical, bodily activity. More generally, I argue that the question (...) itself assumes a reified, abstract notion of perception. This introduces a wedge between organism and environment that is incompatible with enactivism’s view of organism and environment as mutually constitutive. This problematizes the intermediate position between realist and idealist extremes as has traditionally been argued for in enactivism. I also touch on the ethical implications of this question, and how enactivism provides a promising path to grapple with the contradiction of the objective, shared space and our individual, historically shaped encounters with it. In sum, I suggest it is time for enactivism to go off the beaten path, and lay its own path in walking again. (shrink)

Three online mouse cursor-tracking experiments investigated predictive sentence processing at speed. Participants viewed visual arrays with objects like a bike and kite while hearing predictive sentences like, “What the man will ride, which is shown on this page, is the bike,” or non-predictive sentences like, “What the man will spot, which is shown on this page, is the bike.” Based on the selectional restrictions of “ride” (i.e., vs. “spot”), participants made mouse cursor movements to the bike before hearing the noun (...) “bike.” Compellingly, this effect was observed at speech rates of ∼3 (Experiment 1), ∼6 (Experiment 2), and ∼9 (Experiment 3) syllables/s. While prior research suggests striking limits on prediction, these results highlight temporal dynamics that may impact comprehenders’ ability to preactivate information when hearing impressively rapid speech. Implications for theories of sentence processing are discussed. (shrink)

Cognition and emotion exert a powerful influence on human behavior. Based on cognitive psychology and organizational behavior theory, this paper examines the role of cognition and emotion in participative budgeting and corporate performance using a questionnaire survey. The questionnaires were sent to 345 listed companies in China. The results support the hypothesis that human cognition and emotion have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between participative budgeting and corporate performance. Cognition and emotion can promote the effect of participative budgeting (...) on corporate performance. Furthermore, according to the theory of artificial intelligence, this paper designs an AI-based cognition and emotion identification system. This system can help managers identify the budget participants’ cognitive and emotional states and undertake the interventions necessary to improving corporate performance. (shrink)

There are serious theoretical problems with the free-energy principle model, which are shown in the current article. We discuss the proposed model's inability to account for culturally emergent normativities, and point out the foundational issues that we claim this inability stems from.

On a widely held view, episodes of inner speech provide at least one way in which we become conscious of our thoughts. However, it can be argued, on the one hand, that consciousness of thoughts in virtue of inner speech presupposes interpretation of the simulated speech. On the other hand, the need for such self-interpretation seems to clash with distinctive first-personal characteristics that we would normally ascribe to consciousness of one’s own thoughts: a special reliability; a lack of conscious ambiguity (...) and incomprehensibility; and a sense of causal agency. I try to resolve this puzzle by proposing an account for the requisite self-interpretation of inner speech in terms of Bayesian probabilistic inference. Drawing on “perceptual loop” accounts of speech control, I argue that such interpretive probabilistic inferences are used for the control of inner speech, and that as a consequence of this function, they are biased toward the correct interpretations. I conclude by showing how this model can explain the first-personal characteristics of consciousness of one’s own thoughts. In the case of the sense of causal agency, the resulting explanation yields novel accounts for “audible thoughts” and thought insertion. (shrink)

The paper is a comment on distributed cognition treated as an approach to the study of all cognition. This account is presented by E. Hutchins in the article “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition” (2014), as well as in other works.

In line with Allen Newell's challenge to develop complete cognitive architectures, and motivated by a recent proposal for a unifying subsymbolic computational theory of cognition, we introduce the cognitive control architecture SEMLINCS. SEMLINCS models the development of an embodied cognitive agent that learns discrete production rule-like structures from its own, autonomously gathered, continuous sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, the agent uses the developing knowledge to plan and control environmental interactions in a versatile, goal-directed, and self-motivated manner. Thus, in contrast to several well-known (...) symbolic cognitive architectures, SEMLINCS is not provided with production rules and the involved symbols, but it learns them. In this paper, the actual implementation of SEMLINCS causes learning and self-motivated, autonomous behavioral control of the game figure Mario in a clone of the computer game Super Mario Bros. Our evaluations highlight the successful development of behavioral versatility as well as the learning of suitable production rules and the involved symbols from sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, knowledge- and motivation-dependent individualizations of the agents’ behavioral tendencies are shown. Finally, interaction sequences can be planned on the sensorimotor-grounded production rule level. Current limitations directly point toward the need for several further enhancements, which may be integrated into SEMLINCS in the near future. Overall, SEMLINCS may be viewed as an architecture that allows the functional and computational modeling of embodied cognitive development, whereby the current main focus lies on the development of production rules from sensorimotor experiences. (shrink)

Which is my body and how do I distinguish it from the bodies of others, or from objects in the surrounding environment? The perception of our own body and more particularly our sense of body ownership is taken for granted. Nevertheless experimental findings from body ownership illusions (BOIs), show that under specific multisensory conditions, we can experience artificial body parts or fake bodies as our own body parts or body respectively. The aim of the present paper is to discuss how (...) and why BOIs are induced. We review several experimental findings concerning the spatial, temporal and semantic principles of crossmodal stimuli that have been applied to induce BOIs. On the basis of these principles, we discuss theoretical approaches concerning the underlying mechanism of BOIs. We propose a conceptualization based on Bayesian causal inference for addressing how our nervous system could infer whether an object belongs to our own body, using multisensory, sensorimotor and semantic information, and we discuss how this can account for several experimental findings. Finally, we point to neural network models as an implementational framework within which the computational problem behind BOIs could be addressed in the future. (shrink)

Tension and suspense are powerful emotional experiences that occur in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., in music, film, literature, and everyday life). The omnipresence of tension experiences suggests that they build on very basic cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, the psychological underpinnings of tension experiences remain largely unexplained, and tension and suspense are rarely discussed from a general, domain-independent perspective. In this paper, we argue that tension experiences in different contexts (e.g., musical tension or suspense in a movie) build (...) on the same underlying psychological processes. We discuss key components of tension experiences and propose a domain-independent model of tension and suspense. According to this model, tension experiences originate from states of conflict, instability, dissonance, or uncertainty that trigger predictive processes directed at future events of emotional significance. We also discuss possible neural mechanisms underlying experiences of tension. The model provides a theoretical framework that can inform future empirical research on tension phenomena. (shrink)

Sensorimotor psychology studies the mental processes that control goal-directed bodily motion. Recently, sensorimotor psychologists have provided empirically successful Bayesian models of motor control. These models describe how the motor system uses sensory input to select motor commands that promote goals set by high-level cognition. I highlight the impressive explanatory benefits offered by Bayesian models of motor control. I argue that our current best models assign explanatory centrality to a robust notion of mental representation. I deploy my analysis to defend intentional (...) realism, to rebut eliminativism and instrumentalism regarding mental representation, and to explore the relation between intentionality and normativity. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 277-306, December 2015.

We welcome the proposal to use forward models to understand predictive processes in language processing. However, Pickering & Garrod (P&G) miss the opportunity to provide a strong framework for future work. Forward models need to be pursued in the context of learning. This naturally leads to questions about what prediction error these models aim to minimize.

A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature ofautismis difficulty with socialcommunication. We take the position that communication is a two-way,intersubjectivephenomenon—as described by thedouble empathy problem—and offer uprelevance theory(a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) as a means of explaining such communication difficulties. Based on a set of proposed heuristics for successful and rapid interpretation of intended meaning, relevance theory positions communication as contingent on shared—and, importantly,mutuallyrecognized—“relevance.” Given that autistic and non-autistic people may have sometimes markedly different embodied experiences of the world, we (...) argue that what is most salient to each interlocutor may be mismatched. Relevance theory would predict that where this salient information is not (mutually) recognized or adjusted for, mutual understanding may be more effortful to achieve. This paper presents the findings from a small-scale, linguistic ethnographic study of autistic communication featuring eight core autistic participants. Each core autistic participant engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with: (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner; (2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions. Mutual understanding was unexpectedly high across all types of conversation pairings. In conversations involving two autistic participants, flow, rapport and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased and in three instances, autistic interlocutors appeared to experience improvements in their individual communicative competence contrasted with their other conversations. The findings have the potential to guide future thinking about how, in practical terms, communication between autistic and non-autistic people in both personal and public settings might be improved. (shrink)