Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first multidisciplinary discussion of the topic of organism-environment (...) interaction. It brings together scholars from history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology to discuss the common focus of their work: entangled life, or the complex interaction of organisms and environments. (shrink)

Abstract This essay explores what it means to be human in an age of infomedia. Appropriating Niklas Luhmann's systems theory/media theory in dialogue with other resources, I propose a post-Luhmannian paradigm of (1) extended media/meaning that conceives the world as world multimedia systems processing variegated meanings, and (2) an embodied, contextualized soft posthumanist anthropology that conceives the human as emergent collective phenomena of distinct meaning making by body-mind-society-technology media couplings. I argue: (1) Homo sapiens is Homo medialis distinct with mediatic (...) communication that emerged to cope with contingencies. (2) Evolution is the mediatization/codification of the world that culminated with the outcome of Homo medialis uniquely equipped to process transcendent meanings and to mediatize the world via diverse media—Mediatized Co-Mediatizer or Codified Co-Codifier. (3) This anthropic universe is possibly the most “meaningful” (full of meaning possibilities) of all possible worlds. (4) Social fragmentation could be an optimization; science-and-religion is an infomedium optimizing religion's manifest and science’ latent observation of divine manifestations. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from developmental psychology and anthropology points out that the human mind is predisposed to conceptualize the world in particular, species-specific ways. These cognitive predispositions lead to universal human commonsense views, often referred to as folk theories. Nevertheless, humans can transgress these views – i.e. they can contradict them with alternative descriptions, they perceive as more accurate – as exemplified in modern sciences. In this paper, I enquire about the cognitive faculties underlying such transgressions. I claim that there are (...) three faculties enabling us to part with these universal commonsense views of the world imposed by our nature. The first is our ability to represent representations – i.e. to form metarepresentations. The second is our ability to produce alternative representations both by explaining a familiar subject matter in terms of the principles governing different conceptual domains than the one that we are predisposed to apply to the subject matter and by directing our mind to new subject matters (for which we have no predisposed conceptual grasp), understanding them in terms of familiar domains. The third, finally, is our ability to give these representations an epistemic orientation. Key words: Human cognition, Domain-specific knowledge systems, Cognitive predispositions, Folk theories, Cognitive flexibility, Human – nonhuman distinction. (shrink)

Experiential knowledge is not often associated with research and organized inquiry, and even less often with the rigour of debating and honing research methods and methodology. However, many researchers in art and design and related fields perceive experiential knowledge or tacit knowledge as an integral part of their practice. The editorial article for the special issue on "Research Practice in Art and Design: Experiential Knowledge and Organised Inquiry" explores how research can recognise the relationship between creative practice, experience, and knowledge (...) generation in art and design in order to develop relevant approaches to organised inquiry. This discussion provides the backdrop against which the different articles of this special issue are introduced. The first section, "Experiential Knowledge and Organised Inquiry" addresses issues of integration and communication of experiential and tacit knowledge within the context of organised inquiry. The second section, "Experiential Knowledge in Doctoral Research" examines research practice options within doctoral research in art and design. (shrink)

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously (...) the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. (shrink)

Western philosophy has been greatly influenced by visual metaphors. Knowing something has commonly, yet implicitly, been conceptualized as seeing something clearly, learning has been framed as being visually exposed to something, and the mind has been understood as a ‘mirror of nature’. A whole ‘epistemology of the eye’ has been at work, which has had significant practical implications, not least in educational contexts. One way to characterize John Dewey’s pragmatism is to see it as an attempt to replace the epistemology (...) of the eye with an epistemology of the hand. This article develops the epistemology of the hand on three levels: A level of embodiment and metaphors, of craftsmanship and social practices, and of schooling and education. (shrink)

Paradoxically, explorers of the territory of consciousness seem to be studying consciousness out of existence, from inside the field of "consciousness studies". How? Through their love of the phenomenon/process, they have developed powerful single models or lenses through which to understand consciousness. But in doing so, they also seek to destroy the other /equally useful/ lenses. Our opportunity lies in halting the vendettas and cross-speakings/cross-fire. The imploration is to stop the dichotomous thinking and pernicious reification of single models, and instead (...) search for divisions of labor, complementarities, and legitimate redescriptions among the various extant models. In other words, what would happen if we reimagined the conceptual classifications of the various models of consciousness, classifications based on general philosophical dichotomies (e.g., representational/non-representational and individualist/non-individualist), as a variety of compatible and even complementary perspectives on the same complex phenomenon and process? What would happen if rather than dig in our heels vis-à-vis our favorite theory of consciousness, at the exclusion of all the others, we saw our perceived enemy as an actual, indeed necessary, friend-in-waiting? What would it take to see a battlefield as a collaborative opportunity, to see a promising pluralism rather than an endless state space of conflict? (shrink)

Recent work in neurophilosophy has either made reference to the work of John Dewey or independently developed positions similar to it. I review these developments in order first to show that Dewey was indeed doing neurophilosophy well before the Churchlands and others, thereby preceding many other mid-twentieth century European philosophers’ views on cognition to whom many present day philosophers refer (e.g., Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). I also show that Dewey’s work provides useful tools for evading or overcoming many issues in contemporary neurophilosophy (...) and philosophy of mind. In this introductory review, I distinguish between three waves among neurophilosophers that revolve around the import of evolution and the degree of brain-centrism. Throughout, I emphasize and elaborate upon Dewey’s dynamic view of mind and consciousness. I conclude by introducing the consciousness-as-cooking metaphor as an alternative to both the consciousness-as-digestion and consciousness-as-dancing metaphors. Neurophilosophical pragmatism—or neuropragmatism—recognizes the import of evolutionary and cognitive neurobiology for developing a science of mind and consciousness. However, as the cooking metaphor illustrates, a science of mind and consciousness cannot rely on the brain alone—just as explaining cooking entails more than understanding the gut—and therefore must establish continuity with cultural activities and their respective fields of inquiry. Neuropragmatism advances a new and promising perspective on how to reconcile the scientific and manifest images of humanity as well as how to reconstruct the relationship between science and the humanities. (shrink)

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...) of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs. These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words, the point of departure for these theories is that thoughts of dogs are about dogs because dogs (...) cause the mental representations of dogs. (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)

The goal of this article is to offer a new model for the study of ocularization in film grounded in the semiotic pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce. We first present a literature overview addressing the state of research regarding the theorization of ocularization in film studies. Second, we discuss Peirce’s three universal categories (Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) on which our model will be based. Third, we argue how the theme of ocularization in film, as outlined in the first part, can (...) be theorized anew through these categories. This will result in the introduction of a nine-field matrix that will allow us to systemize all kinds of instances of subjectivity in cinema. Lastly, we will demonstrate the empirical usefulness of this model by illustrating each of the matrix’ nine categories through a discussion of Steven Soderbergh’s film Kimi (2022). (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper (...) is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (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)

How does emancipation from social oppression work and unfold? The paper is an attempt to deal with this question from an aesthetic point of view. By drawing on pragmatist resources, and more precisely on John Dewey’s aesthetic theory and on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, I discuss the critical and transformative potential of a special kind of aesthetic experience, namely ‘aecsthetic experience’. The paper unfolds in three steps: First, I introduce Iris Marion Young’s account of social oppression, (...) which fits particularly well with the framework of the ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1). I show then, in contrast to an established interpretation, how the protagonist of Gilman’s story makes an experience of liberation from oppression (2). Finally, I reconstruct Dewey’s role in my interpretation of this feminist classic, and I suggest what a Deweyan account might learn from it (3). (shrink)

Embodied cognition: assumptions, theses and challenges: The paper aims at providing a concise presentation of the concept of embodied cognition that emerged in the cognitive sciences a few decades ago and has gained great popularity among empirically and philosophically informed researchers. The term “embodied cognition” is used by the author in two senses. The narrow sense implies that the body plays an important role in the process of cognition. In the broad sense “embodied cognition” is to characterize the general tendency (...) within cognitive science which finds its articulation in the 4E perspective on cognition. The working hypothesis of the 4E perspective is that cognition depends on the characteristics of the agent’s body and its interaction with the physical and social environment. It emphasizes that cognition is: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended. After reconstructing the key concepts and basic assumptions the author offers a brief appraisal of the views under discussion. He claims that the characteristics of such a trend are incomplete and not homogeneity since the perspective encompasses at least a few related and partly overlapping views on cognition. The author concludes that “embodied cognition” serves as a label for a variety of research programs within cognitive science rather than a strictly defined and well-established research tradition or a new paradigm. (shrink)

This article examines the reasons early Confucians offer to support the belief that clothing is formative of its wearer’s character, as well as the arguments other early Chinese texts raise to object to it. It focuses on early Confucian discourses about three representative items of clothing, including the cap used in the coming-of-age ceremony, the accessories made by jade, and a style of clothing named shenyi 深衣. These cases demonstrate that, in early Confucian thought, clothing is said to be able (...) to shape the wearer’s character by registering in the wearer its moral symbolism with both psychological-cognitive and bodily means. While this emphasis on symbolism also invites objections that undermine the normative status early Confucians want to ascribe to a specific style of clothing, their discourses still enrich the current understanding of Confucian self-cultivation, in terms of both its method and goals. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction. Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers’ emotions, I attempt to broaden the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emotions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion. In doing so, I also explore the (...) somatic dimension of reading fiction. (shrink)

The concept and the main stakeholders of E-learning ecosystem are investigated at the article. University is regarded as a center of such ecosystem due to skilled knowledge providers and technical equipment availability. Studying different cases authors prove that higher educational institution plays a driver role in different projects, especially social start-up projects. Different models of partnership between universities and other stakeholders are considered. In authors’ opinion, one of the most perspective collaborative projects are in frame of “students – schoolchildren” due (...) to effective knowledge transfer. Such kind of cooperation can fill the gap between school and university education. Particularly the framework of e-learning project in financial literacy for orphans totally prepared and executed by students is considered. The ICT tools are very actively used in these initiatives aiming to develop high demanded skills as critical thinking, creativity and complex problem solving. As a result, schoolchildren are receiving a toolkit for basic data analysis, developing own business plan and adopting evidencebased decisions. The authors prove that E-learning projects are able to improve both information and financial literacy and also increase the level of inclusivity into education of weak and socially unprotected children from orphanages. The article will be useful for the representatives from universities, orphanages, companies who eager to boost the level of their social responsibility. The aim of the research is to reveal different types of cooperation under social projects between higher educational institutions and other stakeholders, using wide range of ICT e-learning tools as well. In addition, to develop a set of recommendations to the universities of collaboration roadmap. (shrink)

‘Public moods’ are often referred to in laymen’s accounts of public reactions to social events, yet the concept has rarely been invoked by social scientists. Taking public moods seriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the moods of individuals as a means of exploring the moods of the public. To be in a certain mood is to attune oneself to the situation in which one finds oneself. Our mood is the report we give on the (...) state of our attunement. A public mood can either be understood as the mood of a certain age, the mood of an audience which jointly attends to a public performance, or the bonding which takes places between bodies which are in close physical proximity to each other. It is in the public mood that emotions, thoughts and plans for action arise. (shrink)

Cross-cultural dialogue between the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy and the classical pragmatist tradition in American philosophy can help educators to clarify aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. This dialogue can contribute to meeting an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the way in which ecological perception becomes relevant to moral deliberation. The first section of this chapter explores relational thinking in the Kyoto School and American (...) pragmatism to help develop, in the second section, a concept of ecological imagination. A fine-tuned ecological imagination is a capacity we already count on in our best environmental writers, educators, scientists, and policy analysts. Moral deliberation enlists imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” The final section draws from the foregoing to clarify some appropriate aims for contemporary moral education. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue about the relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded, a finely aware ecological imagination can make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy. (shrink)

Investigamos o problema da continuidade entre (1) cognições básicas e (2) complexas, especificamente em relação à linguagem. Nossa hipótese é a de que visões contemporâneas da linguagem não inviabilizam necessariamente a abordagem bottom-up ― abordagens tipicamente enativistas. Primeiro apresentamos a posição de Daniel Hutto e Erik Myin (2013, 2017), representantes do Radically Enactive Cognition (REC), a qual assume o desafio da continuidade e identifica na linguagem o critério para uma distinção de tipo entre (1) e (2). Em seguida, estabelecemos a (...) posição Wittgensteiniana defendida por Moyal-Sharrock (2019), na qual a linguagem seria apenas mais uma habilidade de possível desenvolvimento para (1) e (2). Haveria, portanto, somente uma distinção de grau , não de tipo. Por mais que a avaliação de Moyal-Sharrock seja interessante no sentido de que parece evitar um ceticismo de continuidade (identificado por ela no REC), também encontramos problemas em sua visão. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to argue that Kant’s aesthetic ideas can help us to overcome cognitive limitations that we often experience in our attempts to articulate the meaning of abstract concepts. I claim that aesthetic ideas, as expressed in works of art, have a cognitive dimension in that they reveal the introspective, emotional, and affective aspects that appear to be central to the content of abstract phenomena.

This paper formulates a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice that relies for its support on two main things: The unity Dewey ascribed to all intelligent practices (including artistic practice) and The observation that many aspects of the work of performing artists of Dewey’s time include features (“dramatic rehearsal,” action, interaction and habit development) that are part of Dewey’s characterization of the moral life. This does not deny the deep import that Dewey ascribed to aesthetic experience (both in art and (...) in life), but it does suggest that we might use his theory of ethical practice in conjunction with his theory of art as experience in order to create a more robust and unified Deweyan theory of what the performing artist does. (shrink)

The delusory quest for disembodiment, against which the quest for re-embodiment is reacting, is characteristic of macroparasites who live off the work, products and lives of others. The quest for disembodiment that characterizes modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, echoes in a more extreme form the delusions on which medieval civilization was based where the military aristocracy and the clergy, defining themselves through the ideal forms of Neo-Platonic Christianity, despised nature, the peasantry and in the case of the clergy, women. (...) This argument is used to expose and reveal the oppressive and ecologically destructive drive underlying the aspirations of the dominant classes in the modern/postmodern world to disembodiment, whether this be seen as the quest to be unbounded by time and place, to be free of dependence on labour and natural resources, to be free of the humdrum of everyday life by entering ‘virtual’ worlds, or, as with post-humanists, to overcome the limits of the body by fusing with technology. These modern and postmodern forms of the quest for disembodiment, it is suggested, now threaten civilization, the future of humanity and most terrestrial life. This analysis is used to clarify the liberating mission of the grand narrative for re-embodiment, exemplified by the quest for Inclusive Democracy, Earth Democracy, Ecological Civilization, or for an Ecozoic Age. The grand narrative of the Age of Re-embodiments is shown to be inseparable from the struggle for truth, justice and liberty as central to real democracy empowering people to augment rather than undermine the conditions for life. (shrink)

Meaning in life is too important not to study systematically, but doing so is made difficult by conceptual indeterminacy. An approach to meaning that is promising but, indeed, conceptually vague is Jonathan Haidt’s ‘cross-level coherence’ account. In order to remove the vagueness, I propose a concept of ‘good fit’ that a) captures central aspects of meaning as it is discussed in the literature; b) brings the subject of meaning under the survey of the dynamicist or ‘embodied-embedded’ philosophy of cognition; and (...) c) allows the theoretical discussion on meaning to become more focused and systematic. The article addresses two apparent problems with the idea of ‘good fit,’ namely the fact that both challenges and relations of an agent with the outside world are central to meaning. It is finally pointed out which implications adopting the concept of ‘good fit’ instead of ‘meaning’ would have. (shrink)

In the United States, running as a leisure activity continues to grow in popularity. Healthism can explain some of this popularity, but it does not explain ultradistance running. Motivations for running can be seen through the framework of the Kantian beautiful and the sublime. Beauty arises through extrinsic motivation and relates to an economy of form, while the sublime arises through intrinsic motivation and relates to confronting the challenge of infinity. The commercial, casual, and competitive aspects of distance running correspond (...) to the beautiful, while its wilderness, serious, ultradistance aspects correspond to the sublime. This framework is used to explain the resistance of ultrarunning to the would-be detrimental effects of commodification, as well as ultrarunning’s ‘wild turn.’. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The ‘images’ used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, cognitive and (...) emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual origins — synaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance — embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences. (shrink)

This article looks at three historical efforts to coordinate the scientific study of biological and cultural aspects of human consciousness into a single comprehensive theory of human development that includes the evolution of the human body, cultural evolution and personal development: specifically, the research programs of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky and Albert Bandura. The lack of historical relations between these similar efforts is striking, and suggests that the effort to promote cultural and personal sources of consciousness arises as a natural (...) foil to an overemphasis on the biological basis of consciousness, sometimes associated with biological determinism. (shrink)

These papers are based on a Symposium at the COGSCI Conference in 2010. 1. Naturalizing the Mammalian Mind 2. Modularity in Cognitive Psychology and Affective Neuroscience 3. Affective Neuroscience and the Philosophy of Self 4. Affective Neuroscience and Law.

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

From the late 1950s until 1975, cognition was understood mainly as disembodied symbol manipulation in cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the nascent field of Cognitive Science. The idea of embodied cognition entered the field of Cognitive Linguistics at its beginning in 1975. Since then, cognitive linguists, working with neuroscientists, computer scientists, and experimental psychologists, have been developing a neural theory of thought and language (NTTL). Central to NTTL are the following ideas: (a) we think with our brains, that is, (...) thought is physical and is carried out by functional neural circuitry; (b) what makes thought meaningful are the ways those neural circuits are connected to the body and characterize embodied experience; (c) so-called abstract ideas are embodied in this way as well, as is language. Experimental results in embodied cognition are seen not only as confirming NTTL but also explained via NTTL, mostly via the neural theory of conceptual metaphor. Left behind more than three decades ago is the old idea that cognition uses the abstract manipulation of disembodied symbols that are meaningless in themselves but that somehow constitute internal “representations of external reality” without serious mediation by the body and brain. This article uniquely explains the connections between embodied cognition results since that time and results from cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, computational modeling, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

This paper presents an analysis of emotional and affectively toned discourse in biomedical engineering researchers’ accounts of their problem solving practices. Drawing from our interviews with scientists in two laboratories, we examine three classes of expression: explicit, figurative and metaphorical, and attributions of emotion to objects and artifacts important to laboratory practice. We consider the overall function of expressions in the particular problem solving contexts described. We argue that affective processes are engaged in problem solving, not as simply tacked onto (...) reasoning but as integral to it. The examples we present illustrate the close relation of emotion to problem solving and experimentation; they also implicate social and cultural dimensions of emotion expression. The analysis underscores a need to consider emotional expression to be intimately and importantly tied to the cognitive achievements and social negotiations of laboratory practices. (shrink)

The theoretical and moral bedrock of Western colonialism has been its claim to “universalism.” Central to this universalism is a Cartesian dualism in which only the disembodied mind has access to the universal, and the body, as a mere particular, does not. This paper (Part 1) and the following paper (Part 2) propose an alternative model of “universalism” as the totality of interactions between embodied particulars. This model of “universalism” is based on the relationship between the classical Chinese philosophical concepts (...) of “feeling” (qing, 情), interaction (gan, 感), and the unimpeded free-flow (tong, 通) that results. This Chinese model of universalism is ultimately based on the organicist metaphysics of life that understands meaning and order to be the result of organic interaction between bodies. this paper will show how the dominant Chinese tradition understood the universal as a result of the sympathetic interaction between embodied particulars. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

While art and science still functioned side-by-side during the Renaissance, their methods and perspectives diverged during the nineteenth century, creating a still enduring separation between the "two cultures". Recently, artists and scientists again collaborate more frequently, as promoted most radically by the ArtScience movement. This approach aims at a true synthesis between the intuitive, imaginative methods of art and the rational, rule-governed methods of science. To prepare the grounds for a theoretical synthesis, this paper surveys the fundamental commonalities and differences (...) between science and art. Science and art are united in their creative investigation, where coherence, pattern or meaning play a vital role in the development of concepts, while relying on concrete representations to experiment with the resulting insights. On the other hand, according to the standard conception, science seeks an understanding that is universal, objective and unambiguous, while art focuses on unique, subjective and open-ended experiences. Both offer prospect and coherence, mystery and complexity, albeit with science preferring the former and art, the latter. The paper concludes with some examples of artscience works that combine all these aspects. (shrink)

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of aspects of (...) themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time. (shrink)

This paper aims at gaining a better understanding of the inherent paradoxes within sustainability discourses by investigating its basic assumptions. Drawing on a study of the metaphoric references operative in moral language, we reveal the predominance of the ‘well-being = wealth’ construct, which may explain the dominance of the ‘business case’ cognitive frame in sustainability discourses. We incorporate economic well-being variables within a philosophical model of becoming well :221–231, 2005), highlighting the way in which these variables consistently articulate a combination (...) of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ concerns. We then compare this broad understanding of well-being with the metaphors operative in the sustainable development discourse and argue that the sustainability discourse has fallen prey to an overemphasis on the ‘business case’. We proceed to draw on Georges Bataille to challenge the predominance of these value priorities and to explore which mindshifts are required to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what is needed to enable ‘sustainable development’. (shrink)