Purpose: This, the second part of a two-part paper, describes how the concerns of enactive cognitive science have been realized in actual research: methodological issues, proposed explanatory mechanisms and models, some of the potential as both a theoretical and applied science, and several of the major open research questions. Findings: Despite some skepticism about "mechanisms" in constructivist literature, enactive cognitive science attempts to develop cognitive formalisms and models. Such techniques as feedback loops, self-organization, autocatalytic networks, and dynamical systems modeling are (...) used to develop alternatives to cognitivist models. A number of technical similarities are starting to emerge in the different models being proposed. Research Implications: The need to resolve the interplay between autonomy and coupling with the environment suggests the need for further technical research. And the reintroduction of first-person concerns into cognitive science raises some questions of method, particularly with regard to the relationship between first-person experience, neuroscience, and methods of description, analysis, and explanation. Results to date suggest that insights from enactive cognitive science could lead to innovations in the design of artifacts. (shrink)

In contemporary human and social sciences, it has become almost a commonplace to attribute to objects and artefacts the features of personhood and subjectivity. In the last decades, significant attempts have been made, in different disciplines, to show how things and material realities have the power to act upon the world and to transform human cognition as well as social processes. In order to describe the transformative power of things, scholars have then recurred to the semantic sphere of action and (...) will, to stop seeing agency anthropocentrically as a solely human property, by recognizing to inanimate entities, if not intention and desire, at least the role of social «agents» or «actors». By focusing on the recourse to the notion of «agency», I will single out some of the internal tensions that still inhabit this scientific trend, and, by drawing on the notion of «performativity», introduced by J.L. Austin and developed by Judith Butler, I will suggest a way to develop further the entanglement between material culture and the construction of identity. (shrink)

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. To illustrate this (...) process I will take advantage of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical interactions with the externalized semiotic materiality suitably stocked in the environment. Hence, minds are material, “extended” and artificial in themselves. A considerable part of human abductive thinking is occurring through an activity consisting in a kind of reification in the external environment and a subsequent re-projection and reinterpretation through new configurations of neural networks and chemical processes. I also illustrate how this activity takes advantage of hybrid representations and how it can nicely account for various processes of creative and selective abduction, bringing up the question of how multimodal aspects involving a full range of sensory modalities are important in hypothetical reasoning. (shrink)

To help consider why some groups solve problems successfully but others do not, this article introduces a framework for analyzing sequences of group members' actions. The dimensions of evaluation of the previous action , knowledge content , and invitational form organize twenty-seven individual actions, each with specific functions and conditions of use. Evaluations, repetitions and invitational forms link actions together to create coherent social interactions, and thereby serve as possible quantitative measures of collaboration quality. Specific individual action also helps constitute (...) specific social interactions. Six types of social interactions that occur during group problem-solving are organized by problem knowledge distribution and degree of cooperation . This framework's mutually exclusive categories and multi-function individual actions allow statistical analyses of many group interactions both in their entirety and infine detail. (shrink)

In this paper the role of images in argumentative settings is analyzed from a cognitive angle. In particular, the proposal of this paper is to see visual argumentation as a specific form of extended and distributed cognition. In order to develop this idea, some of Wittgenstein’s insights are used to put evidence produced by research on temporal-spatial reasoning processes into philosophical perspective. Some contemporary argumentative analyses of visual argumentation are also discussed using commercial and political examples. The paper finishes with (...) the notion of collective minds in order to specify the general idea of arguing with images as extended cognition. (shrink)

Cooperation can evolve in the context of cognitive activities such as perception, attention, memory, and decision making, in addition to physical activities such as hunting, gathering, warfare, and childcare. The social insects are well known to cooperate on both physical and cognitive tasks, but the idea of cognitive cooperation in humans has not received widespread attention or systematic study. The traditional psychological literature often gives the impression that groups are dysfunctional cognitive units, while evolutionary psychologists have so far studied cognition (...) primarily at the individual level. We present two experiments that demonstrate the superiority of thinking in groups, but only for tasks that are sufficiently challenging to exceed the capacity of individuals. One of the experiments is in a brain-storming format, where advantages of real groups over nominal groups have been notoriously difficult to demonstrate. Cognitive cooperation might often operate beneath conscious awareness and take place without the need for overt training, as evolutionary psychologists have stressed for individual-level cognitive adaptations. In general, cognitive cooperation should be a central subject in human evolutionary psychology, as it already is in the study of the social insects. (shrink)

Discussing the workings of technology in care as aesthetic rather than as ethical or epistemological interventions focusses on how technologies engage in and change relations between those involved. Such an aesthetic study opens up a repertoire to address values that are abundant in care, but are as yet hardly theorized. Kamphof studies the problem that sensor technology reveals things about the elderly patients without the patients being aware of this. I suggest improvement of these relations may be considered in aesthetic (...) terms, for instance by developing the affective quality of people’s technological relationships. (shrink)

Cet article examine, du point de vue de la socio-économie, comment consommateurs et producteurs s'y prennent pour gérer leurs « embarras du choix » respectifs (diversité de l'offre et de la concurrence d'un côté, difficulté à choisir entre produits similaires de l'autre). En reprenant la métaphore de l'âne de Buridan, qui hésite entre deux quantité de nourriture identiques, l'auteur montre d'une part que le problème du consommateur consiste souvent à convertir l'idée générale qu'il se fait du produit en choix de (...) telle ou telle de ses occurrences particulières, et d'autre part que la gestion moderne vise précisément à « équiper » la décision du consommateur pour le sortir de l'embarras du choix entre produits similaires. Nos choix de consommation individuels apparaissent ainsi comme le fruit d'un arbitrage récurrent, complexe et difficilement prévisible entre notre désir d'effectuer des choix libres et/ou pertinents (s'en remettre à soi-même), et notre souci de ne pas consacrer un temps et un effort excessifs à la sélection des produits (accepter les dispositifs du prêt-à-choisir). (shrink)

In this special issue we explore practices of scientific inquiry into human populations in Latin America in order to generate new insights into the complex historical and sociopolitical dynamics that have made certain human groups integral to the production of scientific knowledge in and about the region. In important contributions, other scholars have shown that the science of human difference is racist and all too often has been a mediator of development ideologies. To further unpack these arguments we focus attention (...) on the complex interaction between scientists and the populations they study. We explore cases from across the fields of evolutionary biology, demography, epidemiology... (shrink)