This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

The authors favor a “color realism” theory that considers colors to be physical properties residing in objects that reflect, emit, or transmit light. It is opposed to the theory that colors are sensations or visual experiences. This commentary suggests that both theories are correct, and that context usually indicates which of these dual aspects is being considered.

We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this “inner life” of thought? Is conscious thought necessarily carried out in language? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. Thus it would seem that thought must be independent of, and in some sense prior to, the speech that expresses it. (...) He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that exists independently of linguistic expression, and that this inner life rightly deserves the label “thought”. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on postphenomenology and material engagement theory to consider the material and emergent character of sociality in Homo faber. I approach this through the context of the bow and arrow, which is a technology that has received recent attention in cognitive archeology as a proxy for assessing criteria that made early human cognition distinct from that of other hominins. Through an ethnographic case study, I scrutinize the forms of knowledge that are required to use the technology (...) in the dynamic field of environmental practices that constitute the hunt. I demonstrate that the learning of the skill is a transformational process where beginners develop self and intentionality by attuning subjective capacities for sensory awareness and creative responsiveness. Through mutual participation, the bow and arrow aligns disposition and rapport among those whose life processes are shaped by the skill. As a mechanism of shared experience, the bow and arrow generates a community can together perceive and act creatively in an impermanent world. Through these observations, I argue that early human sociality was built not on a pre-evolved capacity for symbolic representation but on technical experience, and I consider important questions this raises about the nature of evolutionary processes at work in the development of communities through time. (shrink)

From the perspective of ecological psychology, perception and action are not separate, linear, and mechanistic processes that refer to the immediate present. Rather, they are reciprocal and continuous and refer to the impending future. Therefore, from the perspective of ecological psychology, delays in perception and action are impossible, and delay compensation mechanisms are unnecessary.

Review of the book Między humanistyką a przyrodoznawstwem. Od podstaw psychologii do eksperymentalnej psychologii klinicznej [Between humanities and natural science. From basics of psychology to experimental clinical psychology] including a collection of works by Andrzej Lewicki, as well as an introduction to them.

Artykuł stanowi przegląd recenzyjny książki Victora Kaptelinina Affordances and Design, w której omówiono koncepcję afordancji w interakcji człowiek–komputer. Adresowany do polskiego czytelnika, umożliwia mu zorientowanie się w podstawowych relacjach i różnicach między filozofią i psychologią ekologiczną a teoriami projektowania, głównie na przykładzie pionierskiej propozycji Jamesa Gibsona i koncepcji Donalda Normana, w pewnym odniesieniu do szerszego kontekstu.

The promises of nanotechnology have been framed by a variety of metaphors, that not only channel the attention of the public, orient the questions asked by researchers, and convey epistemic choices closely linked to ethical preferences. In particular, the image of the ‘therapeutic missile’ commonly used to present targeted drug delivery devices emphasizes precision, control, surveillance and efficiency. Such values are highly praised in the current context of crisis of pharmaceutical innovation where military metaphors foster a general mobilization of resources (...) from multiple fields of cutting-edge research. The missile metaphor, reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘magic bullet’, has framed the problem in simple terms: how to deliver the right dose in the right place at the right moment? Chemists, physicists and engineers who design multi-functional devices operating in vitro can think in such terms, as long as the devices are not actually operating through the messy environment of the body. A close look at what has been done and what remains to be done suggests that the metaphor of the “therapeutic missile” is neither sufficient, nor even necessary. Recent developments in nanomedicine suggest that therapeutic efficacy cannot be obtained without negotiating with the biological milieu and taking advantage of what it affords. An ‘oikological’ approach seems more appropriate, more heuristic and more promising than the popular missile. It is based on the view of organism as an oikos that has to be carefully managed. The dispositions of nanocapsules have to be coupled with the affordances of the environment. As it requires dealing with nanoparticles as relational entities (defined by their potential for interactions) rather than as stable substances (defined by intrinsic properties) this metaphor eventually might well change research priorities in nanotechnology in general. (shrink)

Glenberg's account falls short in several respects. Besides requiring clearer explication of basic concepts, his account fails to recognize the autonomous nature of perception. His account of what is remembered, and its description, is too static. His strictures against connectionist modeling might be overcome by combining the notions of psychological space and principled learning in an embodied and situated network.

Summary By introducing the concept of “invariants”, Koffka endowed perceptual psychology with a flexible theoretical tool, which is suitable for representing vision situations in which a definite part of the stimulus pattern is relevant but not sufficient to determine a corresponding part of the perceived scene. He characterised his “invariance principle” as a principle conclusively breaking free from the “old constancy hypothesis”, which rigidly surmised point-to-point relations between stimulus and perceptual properties. In this paper, we explain the basic terms and (...) assumptions implicit in Koffka’s concept, by representing them in a set-theoretic framework. Then, we highlight various aspects and implications of the concept in terms of answers to six separate questions: forms of invariants, heuristic paths to them, what is invariant in an invariant, roots of conditional indeterminacy, variability vs. indeterminacy, and overcoming of the indeterminacy. Lastly, we illustrate the lasting value and theoretical power of the concept, by showing that Koffka’s insights relating to it do occur in modern perceptual psychology and by highlighting its role in a model of perceptual transparency. (shrink)

According to ecological psychology, animals perceive not just the qualities of things in their environment, but their affordances: in James Gibson’s words, ’what things furnish, for good or ill’. I propose a metaphysics for affordances that fits into a contemporary anti-Humean metaphysics of powers or potentialities. The goal is to connect two debates, one in the philosophy of perception and one in metaphysics, that stand to gain much from each other.

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging paradigm of value-sensitive design. We explore the difficulties developers face when designing information technology for trust and show how our (...) analysis in conjunction with existing engineering design methods provides means to address these difficulties. Our main case concerns a concrete problem in the economic domain, namely the transfer of control from customs agencies to companies. Control of individual items is increasingly untenable and is replaced by control on the level of companies aimed at determining whether companies can be trusted to be in control of their business and to be in compliance with applicable regulations. This transfer sets the task for companies to establish this trust by means of information technology systems. We argue that this trust can be achieved by taking into account philosophical analyses of trust and by including both parties in the trust relationship as clients for whom the information technology systems are to be designed. (shrink)

A commentary on a target article by Alison Gopnik (1993) How we know our minds: the illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Focusing on evidence of how children acquire a theory of mind, this commentary argues that there are internal inconsistencies in theories that both argue for the functional role of conscious experiences and the irreducibility of those experiences to third-person viewable information processing.

ABSTRACTPrevious work has shown that a stooped posture may activate negative mood. Extending this work, the present experiments examine how stooped body posture influences recovery from pre-existing negative mood. In Experiment 1, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a negative or neutral mood induction, after which participants were instructed to take either a stooped, straight, or control posture while writing down their thoughts. Stooped posture led to less mood recovery in the negative mood condition, and more negative mood in (...) the neutral mood condition. Furthermore, stooped posture led to more negative thoughts overall compared to straight or control postures. In Experiment 2, all participants underwent a negative mood induction, after which half received cognitive reappraisal instructions and half received no instructions. Mood-congruent cognitions were assessed through autobiographical memory recall. Again, stooped position led to less mood recovery. Notably, this was independent of regulation instruction. These findings demonstrate for the first time that posture plays an important role in recovering from negative mood. (shrink)