Do the physical facts of the viewed environment account for the ordinary experiences we have of that environment? According to standard philosophical views, distal facts do account for our experiences, a phenomenon explained by appeal to perceptual constancy, the phenomenal stability of objects and environmental properties notwithstanding physical changes in proximal stimulation. This essay reviews a significant but neglected research tradition in experimental psychology according to which percepts systematically do not correspond to mind-independent distal facts. Instead, stability of percept values (...) comes in degrees, and physical facts about the viewed environment alone do not account for our ordinary experiences of the world. I conclude that more attention to descriptive research in psychophysics is warranted if what is sought is a philosophical theory of the nature of our perceptual relation with the world. (shrink)

One of the central pillars of Vygotsky’s contribution to social science is his concept of mediation: the process through which the social and the individual mutually shape each other. His rich, complex and challenging texts focus on a nuanced notion of mediation that was not necessarily visible to those active in the command-and-control climate of the Stalinist era. The article focuses on this notion of the lack of visibility in mediation.

This chapter will explore the dynamics of power underpinning ethical issues within smart cities via a new paradigm derived from Systems Theory. The smart city is an expression of technology as a socio-technical system. The vision of the smart city contains a deep fusion of many different technical systems into a single integrated “ambient intelligence”. ETICA Project, 2010, p. 102). Citizens of the smart city will not experience a succession of different technologies, but a single intelligent and responsive environment through (...) which they move. Analysis of such an environment requires a framework which transcends traditional ontologically-based models in order to accommodate this deep fusion. This chapter will outline a framework based on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Luhmann’s treatment of society as an autopoetic system. We shall use this framework to map the influence of relevant factors on ethical issues, irrespective of their composition or type. For example, under this treatment, both human praxis and technical design can be viewed as comparable tools of domination. This chapter will provide a framework for the analysis of relations between any elements of the smart city, ranging from top-level urban management processes down to individual device operations. While we will illustrate the use of this schema through examination of ethical issues arising from power dynamics within the smart city, it is intended that this example will demonstrate the wider utility of the model in general. (shrink)

Decision-making is a complex action requiring efficient information processing. Specifically, in movement in which performance efficiency depends on reaction time, e.g., open-loop controlled movements, these processes may play a crucial role. Information processing includes three distinct stages, stimulus identification, response selection, and response programming. Mainly, response selection may play a substantial contribution to the reaction time and appropriate decision making. The duration of this stage depends on the number of possible choices an individual has to “screen” to make a proper (...) decision. Given that reaction time is crucial in many sports, the possibilities of reducing it through practice are very tempting. The information processing and its relationship to the manner an individual is practicing are discussed. Especially the variability of practice issues will be explored. In variable practice conditions, an individual has to react to one or more stimuli and has to produce one of the many variations of the same movement or different movements they learned. One has to identify a stimulus appropriately and has to select a response optimally, i.e., choosing from as few choices as possible to reduce the reaction time. On the other hand, in constant practice conditions, an individual can be exposed to one or many stimuli. Still, there is only one variation of the movement that can be executed in the presence of a learned stimulus. Based on the information processing theory and the results of the research focusing on variability of practice, I discuss how the practice conditions may affect reaction time and, as a result, the decision-making process. I conceptually frame the possible implications of practice conditions on decision making related to information processing. In this review, a possible mechanism and relationship between practice conditions and decision-making are presented. Future research directions are presented. (shrink)

Researchers in the life sciences often make uniqueness attributions; about branching events generating new species, the developmental processes generating novel traits and the distinctive cultural selection pressures faced by hominins. Yet since uniqueness implies non-recurrence, such attributions come freighted with epistemic consequences. Drawing on the work of Aviezer Tucker, we show that a common reaction to uniqueness attributions is pessimism: both about the strength of candidate explanations as well as the ability to even generate such explanations. Looking at two case (...) studies—elephant trunks and human teaching—we develop a more optimistic account. As we argue, uniqueness attributions are revisable claims about the availability of several different kinds of comparators. Yet even as researchers investigate the availability of such comparators, they are able to mobilize complex sets of empirical and theoretical tools. Rather than hindering scientific investigation, then, we argue that uniqueness attributions often spur the generation of a range of epistemic goods. (shrink)

Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace-based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, (...) we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well-developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them. (shrink)

Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. (...) Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs—including educational ones—are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do. (shrink)

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies (...) implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

Though there are many challenges to Ekman’s thesis that there are basic emotions with universal corresponding facial expressions, our main criticism revolves around the extent to which grounding situations alter how people read faces. To that end, we recruit testifying experimental studies that show identical faces expressing varying emotions when contextualized differently. Rather than dismissing these as illusions, we start with the position—generally favored by embodied thinkers—that situations are primary: they are where specifiable and hence knowable properties first show up. (...) We further argue that situationally inflected emotional expressions are informationally meaningful. We reject the idea that reading expressions is primarily about ascertaining internal mental states, arguing instead that people are registering overall situations when looking at faces. However, if mind is understood as a situated phenomenon that extends into active ecological frames, then one can still argue that mindreading is going on. Although we do not claim isolated things like cliffs or cars have agency, we speculate networked systems with cliffs, people, cars, bears, etc., collectively function with intentionality, more so if advancing a robust situated mind thesis, contra figures like Dennett who argue that people over-impute mind to things. Our position has practical implications insofar as it casts doubts on recent attempts to develop AI systems that extract emotional intent out of facial expressions since many of these systems are grounded on Ekman’s basic view. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one that (...) coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent. Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reabsorption of each (...) critical to that of the other and executed in the same place: Tahrir. Pro-military factions have created the pretense that they were for the revolution by altering the square and structures around it. Furthermore, the square has remained open to the public, but ceased to be inviting. This relates to post-revolutionary alterations that psychologically repel entry. I consider these changes in light of affordance theory, value sensitive design research and especially the defensible space model, arguing that Tahrir Square has been symbolically cordoned and closed. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving (...) expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action. Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances. This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks. Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner. These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them. With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions. (shrink)

Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...) go in the opposite direction too, as when depression coincides with energy-depletion, and hence objectively strenuous situations in which things look farther away because they are (accurately anticipated to be) harder to reach. These examples partly encapsulate what predictive processing theorists call “active inference,” yet with differences. In the first case, actions fruitfully obviate predictions rather than fulfilling them. In the second, mental models do not dysregulate bodily processes, making coping harder. Instead, problems (e.g., personal obstacles, gastric illness) deplete energy, eliciting a depressive and adaptive slow-down. Some predictive proponents apply correspondence criteria when alleging mismatches between internal models and the world, while incongruously asserting that the brain did not evolve to see things veridically, but to execute actions. An alternative is to adopt pluralistic, pragmatic epistemologies suited to the complexity of mind. The upshot is that mental outlooks can depart from the norm without epistemically being distorted and that mismatches between anticipatory worries and outcomes, when they actually exist, can be a measure of adaptive and epistemic success. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson is well known for defining information by stating “In fact what we mean by information – the elementary unit of information – is a difference which makes a difference…” This conceptual perspective has the merit of simplicity and generality. Simplicity, in addressing the complexity of information. Generality, in seeking applicability to any and every field of human experience. The purpose of this paper is to focus the applicability of this conceptual approach by Bateson and use it to perform (...) a calculation of taking the difference between two grey-level digital images that are shifted one relative to the other. The digital images take the place of the field of view that a human being would have access through her sense of vision at two different spatial/temporal instances. The results show that it is possible to highlight the edges of the objects under scrutiny, as well as to highlight other differences within the object. Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference” would seem to provide a first step in the elusive meaning making process of humans. (shrink)

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains, but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains (...) represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making. (shrink)

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...) containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

Classical cognitive science has been characterized by an association with the computational theory of mind. Although this association has produced highly significant results, it has also limited the scope of scientific psychology. In this paper, we analyse the limits of the specific kind of computational model represented by the Chomskian-Fodorian tradition in the study of mind and language. In our opinion, the adhesion to the principle of formality imposed by this specific computational model has motivated the exclusion of consciousness in (...) the reflection on language and, consequently, has led to the inability to account for some aspects of language functioning at the processing level of discourse. The aim of this article is to restore the role of consciousness in discourse comprehension and production processes. Specifically, we argue that the ability to produce and understand discourses is based on individuals’ capacity for navigation in space and time. We will show that the space–time orientation is guaranteed by the projection of the self, which involves a special kind of consciousness. (shrink)

What are the affordances of artifacts? One view is that the affordances of artifacts, just as the affordances of natural objects, pertain to possible ways in which they can be manipulated. Another view maintains that, given that artifacts are sociocultural objects, their affordances pertain primarily to their culturally-derived function. Whereas some have tried to provide a unifying notion of affordance to capture both aspects, here I argue that they should be kept separate. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between (...) standard affordances, which concern the function of artifacts, and ad-hoc affordances, which refer to how artifacts are manipulated. I then argue for the neuropsychological plausibility of such a distinction, linking it to the dissociation between function knowledge and manipulation knowledge. Finally, I defend the equal status of these forms of knowledge and, hence, of standard and ad-hoc affordances, and I show that this has some implications for the debate on the role of motor processes in the conceptual knowledge of artifacts. (shrink)

Theories of the representation of specific kinetic and spatiotem-poral features of movement range from the explicit assertion that temporal aspects of movement are not represented to the idea that they are represented and that they have neurophysiological correlates. Jeannerod's thesis is that mental and visual images have common mechanisms and that there is a link between the image to move and the mechanisms involved with movement. The target article takes the position that certain parameters are coded in motor representations but (...) that the duration of an action is not one of them. This position is based on the work of Gottlieb et al. and of Decety et al.. Both these studies are worth considering in detail. In Note 1, Jeannerod suggests that: “in time-constrained tasks subjects control the amplitude parameter of force impulses, whereas in spatially constrained tasks the duration of the force impulse is affected by accuracy demands.” This is not exactly correct. Excitation pulse intensity is modulated both in tasks that require spatial and those that require temporal accuracy. Excitation pulse duration is modulated for changes in movement distance and inertial load. If subjects are required to be very accurate spatially, they will move at less than maximum speed for a given distance and this is achieved by lower levels of excitation intensity. (shrink)

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)