A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia (...) is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the (...) cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research. (shrink)

Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis. These things and (...) spaces often play an ineliminable role in shaping what we feel and how we feel it; when we interact with them, they contribute ongoing feedback that " scaffolds " the character and temporal development of our affective experiences. However, in some psychopathological conditions, the ability to access to these things and spaces becomes disturbed. Individuals not only lose certain forms of access to the practical significance of the built environment but also to its ​ regulative​ significance, too — and the stability and organization of their affective life is compromised. In developing this view, we discuss core concepts like " affordance spaces " , " scaffolding " , and " incorporation ". We apply these concepts to two case studies, severe depression and schizophrenia, and we show why these cases support our main claim. We conclude by briefly considering implications of this view for developing intervention and treatment strategies. (shrink)

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a ‘user/resource model’ tends to channel attention (...) away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much ‘mind extension’ than ‘mind invasion’: affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today’s corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a ‘hack’ of employees’ subjectivity. (shrink)

In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these wrongs by (...) drawing on resources from recent work in situated affectivity. I will argue that public statues can be understood as affective artifacts and that this can both help us understand both the deep affective wrongs caused by public statues and offer a possible explanation as to why some people are so strongly opposed to their removal. (shrink)

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional (...) consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

I offer a preliminary defense of the hypothesis of extended emotions (HEE). After discussing some taxonomic considerations, I specify two ways of parsing HEE: the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions (HEBE), and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions (HEEE). I argue that, while both HEBE and HEEE are empirically plausible, only HEEE covers instances of genuinely extended emotions. After introducing some further distinctions, I support one form of HEEE by appealing to different streams of empirical research—particularly work on music and (...) emotion regulation. However, I register skepticism about a second and more radical form of HEEE. (shrink)

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emo- tions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue (...) that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

It has been twenty years since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind.” In the present article I review the development of the extended mind hypothesis across what some proponents have defined as three theoretical “waves.” From first‐wave extended mind theory, based on the parity principle, to second‐wave complementarity, to the third wave, characterized as an uneasy integration of predictive processing and enactivist dynamics, extended mind theorists have faced and solved a number of problems along the way. The fact that (...) the hypothesis continues to spark debate and to generate both new insights and new objections suggests that it continues to play a productive role in contemporary philosophy of mind. (shrink)

One of humans’ distinctive cognitive abilities is that they develop an array of capacities through an enculturation process. In “Cognition as a Social Skill,” Sally points to one of the dangers associated with enculturation: ideological oppression. To conceptualize how such oppression takes root, Haslanager appeals to notions of mindshaping and social coordination, whereby people participate in oppressive social practices unthinkingly or even willingly. Arguably, an appeal to mindshaping provides a new kind of argument, grounded in philosophy of mind, which supports (...) the claims that feminist and anti-racist want to defend. However, some theorists worry that Haslanger’s account does not shed much light on how individuals could exert their agency to resist oppression. I argue that enactivist conceptions of mindshaping and habit can help us to make sense of the power of social influences and how they have the potential to both enable and undermine cognition and agency. This moves us toward increased understanding of the workings of social oppression—distinguishing between constructive and enabling forms of heteronomy, and overdetermining and pernicious modes that lead to atrophied moral cognition and a narrowing of the field of affordances. (shrink)

Remembering and forgetting are the two poles of the memory system. Consequently, any approach to memory should be able to explain both remembering and forgetting in order to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of the memory system. Can an enactive approach to memory processes do so? In this article I propose a possible way to provide a positive answer to this question. In line with some current enactive approaches to memory, I suggest that forgetting –similarly to remembering– might be (...) constituted within an embodied and active process. Within this process, some simulation and re-enactment paths would acquire more relevance than others. This acquired relevance would make the activation of other paths of recall less likely, thus preventing the memory system from engaging in some episodic simulations. These changes in the likelihood of activation of some paths of recall –the forgotten ones– can be accounted for in an enactive fashion by studying both “internal” and “external” re-enactment and simulation paths. With regard to the latter, I propose to examine the process of forgetting by considering the engagement and affective relation of an embodied agent with her field of affordances. I suggest that, in the case of emotion-laden memories, the agent’s decoupling from some affordances of the environment might contribute to the process of forgetting, in that it would reduce the agent’s opportunities for situated episodic simulations. (shrink)

In “Flourish,” Martin Seligman maintained that the elements of well-being consist of “PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.” Although the question of what constitutes human flourishing or psychological well-being has remained a topic of continued debate among scholars, it has recently been argued in the literature that a paradigmatic or prototypical case of human psychological well-being would largely manifest most or all of the aforementioned PERMA factors. Further, in “A Neuroscientific Perspective on Music Therapy,” Stefan Koelsch also suggested (...) that “Music therapy can have effects that improve the psychological and physiological health of individuals,” so it seems plausible that engaging in practices of music can positively contribute to one living a more optimally flourishing life with greater psychological well-being. However, recent studies on music practice and participation have not yet been reviewed and integrated under the PERMA framework from positive psychology to further explore and explicate this possibility. This article therefore contributes to extant work by reviewing recent research on psychological well-being and music to offer support for the claim that music practice and participation can positively contribute to one living a flourishing life by positively influencing their emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. (shrink)

This paper argues that the question, ‘where are virtues?’ demands a response from virtue theorists. Despite the polarizing nature of debates about the relevance of empirical work in psychology for virtue theory, I first show that there is widespread agreement about the underlying structure of virtue. Namely, that virtues are comprised of cognitive and affective processes. Next, I show that there are well-developed arguments that cognitive processes can extend beyond the agent. Then, I show that there are similarly well-developed arguments (...) that affective processes can extend beyond the agent. I then introduce three cases to establish that these cognitive and affective processes are relevantly similar to the cognitive and affective processes countenanced by plausible theories of virtue. Finally, I conclude that virtue theorists must abandon default internalism, the view that the cognitive and affective processes comprising virtues are internal to the agent. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it is misleading to regard the brain as the physical basis or “core machinery” of moods. First, empirical evidence shows that brain activity not only influences, but is in turn influenced by, physical activity taking place in other parts of the organism. It is therefore not clear why the core machinery of moods ought to be restricted to the brain. I propose, instead, that moods should be conceived as embodied, i.e., their physical basis should (...) be enlarged so as to comprise not just brain but also bodily processes. Second, I emphasise that moods are also situated in the world. By this I do not simply mean that moods are influenced by the world, but that they are complexly interrelated with it, in at least three different ways: they are shaped by cultural values and norms; they are materially and intersubjectively “scaffolded”; and they can even “experientially incorporate” parts of the world, i.e., include the experience of parts of the world as part of oneself. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E (...) accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise, we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis claims that mental states need not be confined to the brain or even the biological borders of the subject. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have in recent years debated the plausibility of this thesis, growing an immense body of literature. Yet despite its many supporters, there have been relatively few attempts to apply the thesis to religious studies, particularly studies of religious cognition. In this essay, I indicate how various dimensions of religious cognition might be thought of (...) as extended. In particular, I focus on the mutually-supporting relationship between religious cognition and material culture: the many things we use to organize and enact our religious practices and beliefs, from relics and rituals to songs and holy spaces. As we’ll see, taking the extended mind thesis seriously suggests that an investigation of religious material culture is, simultaneously, an investigation of religious cognition. (shrink)

Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Segal 1989). Music cognition is an area in the (...) cognitive sciences that has received little attention from philosophers, though it has relatively recently been thrown into the externalist spotlight (Cochrane 2008, Kruger 2014, Kersten forthcoming). Given that individualism can be thought of as a kind of paradigm for research on cognition, we provide a brief overview of the field of music cognition and individualistic tendencies within the field (sections 2 and 3) before turning to consider externalist alternatives to individualistic paradigms (section 4-5) and then arguing for a qualified form of externalism about music cognition (section 6). (shrink)

In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is (...) two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said “mental acts” requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified. (shrink)

This paper utilizes the enactivist notion of ‘sense-making’ to discuss the nature of depression and examine some implications for treatment. As I understand it, sensemaking is fully embodied, fundamentally affective, and thoroughly embedded in a social environment. I begin by presenting an enactivist conceptualization of affective intentionality and describing how this general mode of intentional directedness to the world is disrupted in cases of major depressive disorder. Next, I utilize this enactivist framework to unpack the notion of ‘temporal desituatedness,’ and (...) maintain that the characteristic symptoms of depression result from a disruption to the future-directed structure of affective intentionality. This can be conceptualized as a loss of “online intelligence” and a shrinking of the field of affordances. Then, I argue that two of the standard modes of treatments for depression, medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, are not fully sufficient means of restoring online intelligence, and that these limitations stem partly from the approaches’ implicit commitment to a brain-bound, overly cognitivist view of the mind. I recommend expressive arts interventions such as dance-movement therapy and music therapy as important supplementary treatment methods that deserve further consideration. Insofar as they revitalize subjects’ bodies and emotions, cultivate an openness to the future, and promote self-insight and social synchrony, these treatment modes not only reflect key insights of enactivism, but also offer great potential for lasting healing. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and surprise. Analyzing this material through the lens of passive syntheses helps explain these experiences, as well as the sense of subject–object fusion that occurs in some (...) of the most intense forms of aesthetic experience. These analyses are then contrasted with a potentially contradicting take on aesthetic experience from a recent trend in cognitive science, namely enactive aesthetics, which insists on the active subjective construction and sense-making of aesthetic experience. Finally we show that the two positions are in fact compatible. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish closer connections and spur dialogue between philosophers working on 4E cognition and aestheticians. In part, the aim is to offer a critical overview of the ways 4E research might inform our understandings of the arts. Yet it is also partly to flag some potential art-specific challenges to some of the theses found within the 4E literature. I start by examining the strongest extant claims regarding art and active externalism, and argue that it is hard to (...) see either how active externalism could square with our actual appreciative practices or that its explanatory value could be sufficient to pressure us to revise radically those practices. Furthermore, I argue, rejecting active externalism seems necessary to acknowledge adequately the important ways in which artistic creation often involves the application of embodied know-how or the execution of embodied skills. For this reason, I argue, embodied approaches to cognition are better positioned to complement and inform the humanistic methods traditionally employed in philosophical aesthetics and art theory. However, I conclude on a moderately sceptical note: the challenge still outstanding for these approaches is to yield new understandings of our artistic practices that have not been gleaned through traditional humanistic inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a set of exceptional aesthetic experiences that remove us from our pragmatic everyday life and involve a specific type of unaffordability. I then extend this notion of unaffordability to experiences of awe and its relation to the sublime. My analysis is guided by considerations of the phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach that supports an affordance-based accounts of aesthetic experience. I review some recent neurophenomenological studies of the experience of awe, and I then sketch out a phenomenology (...) of awe as it approaches the sublime. (shrink)

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. (...) Barandiaran’s enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational. (shrink)

During live sporting events, fans often create intense atmospheres in stadiums, expressing support for their own local players and discouragement for the opposition. Crowd hostility directed at opposition players surprisingly elicits contrasting reactions across different sports. Tennis players, for example, have reported that hostile crowds are hurtful and disrespectful, whereas footballers often praise and encourage such hostility. What explains this tension? Why are hostile atmospheres considered wrong for some athletes, and not for others? We argue that creating hostile atmospheres for (...) opposition players functions as a form of hostile affective scaffolding, as it scaffolds affective states in such a way that harms the interests of the opposition athletes, while promoting the interests of fans. These hostile atmospheres wrong the scaffolded insofar they constitute a form of recognition disrespect, and to the extent that they violate the formal rules and conventional norms internal to the sporting practices. Although the focus is on the sporting context, our analysis reveals significant implications for a more nuanced understanding of what hostile scaffolding is, and how we should understand its normativity. The existing literature views hostile scaffolding as constituted by a setback to the overall interests of the scaffolded, and that the wrong-making feature of this scaffolding is necessarily explained by harm. Instead, we argue that hostile scaffolding should be understood as hostile relative to a set of interests that an agent has, not just their overall interests, and that the wrong-making features of hostile scaffolding are not limited to harms. (shrink)

What Kyselo calls the “body-social problem” concerns whether to individuate the human self in terms of its bodily aspects or social aspects. In her view, either approach risks privileging one dimension while reducing the other to a mere contextual element. However, she proposes that principles from enactivism can help us to find a middle ground and solve the body-social problem. Here Kyselo looks to the notions of “needful freedom” and "individuation through and from a world" and extends them from the (...) realm of biological individuation to an individuation in terms of social interactions. However, I will argue that because Kyselo’s solution to the body-social problem downplays the role of the living body, it actually is in tension with the enactivist framework. First, while enactivism places the living body at the center of selfhood and subjectivity, Kyselo’s account treats the living body as mere means and mediator. Second, her claim that the self is socially enacted and individuated is in tension with the enactivist conception of autonomous agency, which centers on the autonomous organization of the living body. However, suppose we grant Kyselo’s claim that we are necessarily social beings, but claim that the mind of a minded human animal constitutively extends to the limits of its living organismic body, but no further. My proposed “life shaping” thesis says that the self is not just essentially embodied, but also partially causally determined or shaped by social interactions, and thoroughly influenced by social norms and values. The life shaping thesis can explain how the self is individuated biologically, in terms of the autonomous organization of the living body, but nonetheless deeply embedded in the social world. (shrink)

Whilst arguing for sounds as repeatable objects does not seem suitable to our auditory experience, considering them as events can then help us understand some of their main features. In this sense, sounds are events happening to material objects; they have a beginning and an end; they are ephemeral entities that we cannot grasp as ordinary objects. Nevertheless, supporters of event theory usually focus on the autonomous status that sounds manifest from the things in the world. Conversely, when we hear (...) sounds, we hear what and where they are sounding even in those theories that I will call detached-sound theories; in hearing them we hear how different materials create different sounds. Within the different positions of the event theory to pure-event or acousmatic proposal, the importance and role that the material has in the creation of diverse sounds does not always seem to be recognized. In this paper, I therefore aim to show how the materiality of resonating bodies and objects is given in all forms of auditory experience, not until analyzed the differences between object and event accounts in the philosophy of sound. (shrink)

How can imitation lead to free musical expression? This article explores the role of auditory imitation in jazz. Even though many renowned jazz musicians have assessed the method of imitating recorded music, no systematic study has hitherto explored how the method prepares for aural jazz improvisation. The article picks up an assumption presented by Berliner (1994), suggesting that learning jazz by aural imitation is “just like” learning a mother tongue. The article studies three potential stages in the method, comparing with (...) imitative, rhythmic, multimodal, and protosymbolic behavior of infant perception (building on the works of Stern, Trevarthen, and Merleau-Ponty). The demonstrations of the aural-imitation method draw on pedagogic experiences accumulated since 1979 in the Jazz Program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. By analyzing structures of behavior suggested by the method, the article indicates key traits that render aural jazz improvisation possible, such as a fundamental sense of rhythm, formation of symbolic behavior, joint musical attention, and the facility to “hear via the other.” In conclusion, we critically address a frequent theoretical model describing musical improvisation as a synthesis of discrete elements or building blocks. (shrink)

Work on situated cognition and affectivity holds that cognitive and affective processes always occur within, depend upon, and, perhaps, are even partially constituted by the surrounding social and environmental contexts. What some philosophers call a ‘mental institution’ consists of various tools and technologies that help people to solve a particular problem and scaffold their cognitive and affective processes in various ways. Examples include legal systems, scientific practice, and educational systems. I propose that insofar as it centers around technology and involves (...) a particular set of rules, practices, and shared expectations, the online learning environment can be understood as a mental institution. It shapes not only what and how students learn, but also how they understand the value and fundamental aims of learning. I argue that insofar as this mental institution both reflects and perpetuates neoliberal aims and values, it is in danger of limiting students’ communicative abilities and soliciting them to view higher education in distorted, limiting ways. (shrink)

Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, (...) and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as primary (...) resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. (shrink)

I respond to Kersten’s criticism in his article “Music and Cognitive Extension” of my approach to the musically extended emotional mind in Krueger (2014). I specify how we manipulate—and in so doing, integrate with—music when, as active listeners, we become part of a musically extended cognitive system. I also indicate how Kersten’s account might be enriched by paying closer attention to the way that music functions as an environmental artifact for emotion regulation.

Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a pervasive sense of disembodiment. The body is experienced as an external machine that needs to be controlled with explicit intentional commands, which in turn leads to severe difficulties in interacting with the world in a fluid and intuitive manner. In consequence, there is a characteristic dissociality: Others become problems to be solved by intellectual effort and no longer present opportunities for spontaneous interpersonal alignment. This dissociality goes (...) hand in hand with a progressive loss of the socially extended mind, which normally affords opportunities for co-regulation of cognitive and affective processes. However, at times people with schizophrenia report that they are confronted by the opposite of this dissociality, namely an unusual fluidity of the self-other boundary as expressed in experiences of ambiguous body boundaries, intrusions, and even merging with others. Here the person has not lost access to the socially extended mind but has instead become lost in it, possibly due to a weakened sense of self. We argue that this neglected aspect of schizophrenic social dysfunction can be usefully approached via the concept of genuine intersubjectivity: We normally participate in a shared experience with another person by implicitly co-regulating how our interaction unfolds. This co-regulation integrates our respective experience’s dynamical bases into one interpersonal process and gives the interaction an ambiguous second-person character. The upshot is that reports of abnormal self-other fluidity are not indicative of hallucinations without any basis in reality, but of a heightened sensitivity and vulnerability to processes of interpersonal alignment and mutual incorporation that form the normal basis of social life. We conclude by discussing implications of this view for both the science of consciousness as well as approaches to intervention and therapy. (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists from the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Loughnane guides the reader through the complexities and innovations of Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of artistic expression and their rarely explored concepts of faith. The intricacies of both philosophers' views are illuminated by analyses of artists, including Cézanne, Sesshū, Rodin, Hasegawa, and other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history, who enact a radical (...) form of expression that Loughnane calls the practice of "motor-perceptual faith." He argues that the artist's motor-perceptual body, as poetically articulated in Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's early works, enacts a form of faith that can be parsed in the final writings of both philosophers. The concept of faith is enlarged through its enactment by the artist, while the concept of artistic expression is broadened by casting it as a motor-perceptual conception of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting new intercultural reading of these philosophers' writings that opens up under-explored areas of their projects. It forms an important conceptual bridge between the two, while challenging distinctions between art, philosophy, and religion, and ultimately philosophy East and West. (shrink)

This paper investigates the phenomenological status of musical affordances through a Gadamerian focus on human communication. With an extra emphasis on Reybrouck’s much-cited affordance-driven theory, I locate fundamental premises in the affordance concept. By initiating a dialogue with Gadamer’s perspective, I suggest a slight yet important shift of perspective that allows us to see an autonomous, transformative, and intrinsically active ‘ideality’ potentially emerging in music. In the final section, I try to demonstrate how Gadamer’s perspective is supported by recent empirical (...) studies on communicative musicality and child development, and allows us to see how protoversions of the transformative ‘ideality’ are already present at the beginning of human life. (shrink)

In an increasingly technology-textured environment, smart, intelligent and responsive technology has moved onto the body of many individuals. Mobile phones, smart watches and wearable activity trackers are just some of the technologies that are guiding, nudging, monitoring and reminding individuals in their day-to-day lives. These devices are designed to enhance and support their human users, however, there is a lack of attention to the unintended consequences, the technology non-neutrality and the darker sides of becoming human-tech hybrids. Using the extended mind (...) theory and agential intra-action, we aim at exploring how human-technology hybrids gain collective skills and how these are put to use; how agency is expressed and how this affects the interactions; and what the darker sides are of being a human-technology hybrid. Using a qualitative method, we analyze the experiences of using a wearable activity tracker, with a specific focus on how the tracker and the individual solve tasks, share competences, develop new skills and negotiate for agency and autonomy. We contribute with new insight on human-tech hybridity and present a concept referred to as the agency pendulum, reflecting the dynamism of agency. Finally, we demonstrate how the extended mind theory and agential intra-action as a combined theoretical lens can be used to explore human-tech hybridity. (shrink)

This article proposes a communicative, imitative, and reflective account of musical learning and expertise. It starts from an affirmative yet critical reading of Høffding and collaborators, notably their idea of a musical arch, meant to bridge distinctions between low-level procedural enactment and high-level reflective cognition. While we embrace much of their analysis, we argue that they uphold tensions between these levels. Drawing on recent enactivist thought, phenomenological and hermeneutic resources, and developmental psychology, we propose a ‘linguistic turn’ that allows us (...) to situate the enactive body in what has been called an ‘original communication-situation’. The original communication-situation encompasses procedural proto-linguistic behaviour and a reflexive level of linguistic co-intentionality procedurally coupled with other bodies. From this perspective, musical co-creation within the normative space of the musical arch is a dialectical actualization of vertical and horizontal experience, reflecting transformative accomplishments of symbolic bodies within a linguistic field of participatory sense-making. The normative space of musical performance is the result of emergent features of music as embodied social practice. (shrink)

How can imitation lead to free musical expression? This article explores the role of auditory imitation in jazz. Even though many renowned jazz musicians have assessed the method of imitating recorded music, no systematic study has hitherto explored how the method prepares for aural jazz improvisation. The article picks up an assumption presented by Berliner (1994), suggesting that learning jazz by aural imitation is “just like” learning a mother tongue. The article studies three potential stages in the method, comparing with (...) imitative, rhythmic, multimodal, and protosymbolic behavior of infant perception (building on the works of Stern, Trevarthen, and Merleau-Ponty). The demonstrations of the aural-imitation method draw on pedagogic experiences accumulated since 1979 in the Jazz Program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. By analyzing structures of behavior suggested by the method, the article indicates key traits that render aural jazz improvisation possible, such as a fundamental sense of rhythm, formation of symbolic behavior, joint musical attention, and the facility to “hear via the other.” In conclusion, we critically address a frequent theoretical model describing musical improvisation as a synthesis of discrete elements or building blocks. (shrink)

Sense of agency refers to the ability to influence one’s functioning and environment, relating to self-efficacy and wellbeing. In youth, agency may be challenged by external demands or redefinition of self-image. Music, having heightened relevance for the young, has been argued to provide feelings of self-agency for them. Yet, there is little empirical research on how music impacts adolescents’ daily sense of agency. The current study investigated whether music listening influences adolescents’ perceived agency in everyday life and which individual and (...) contextual determinants would explain such an influence. Participants were 44 adolescents (48% female, 36% with training in music, mean age 14), recruited through local schools. The mobile Experience Sampling app MuPsych was used to collect brief self-reports of personal music listening experiences during daily life. This method assessed the change in the listener’s perceived control over both their emotional states (Internal Agency), and their external environment (External Agency), over five minutes of music listening. Also measured were changes in mood states, and contextual variables (social situation, concurrent activity, and reason for listening). The impact of music on the sense of agency was analyzed using multilevel structural equation modelling. There was no general increase of agency across all music episodes, but agency fluctuations were determined by specific individual and contextual factors. Music training predicted increases in both internal and external agency during music listening, and external agency increased more for male participants. Certain context features such as listening alone, paying attention to music, and listening for enjoyment were related to greater increases in agency. Increases in agency significantly correlated with increases in mood valence. Our findings confirmed the plasticity and situational embeddedness of the sense of agency. Music indeed can support agency, but the impact is dependent on specific individual and contextual factors. Sense of agency can be seen as a health resource and significant part of youth development, and current findings provide new insight into when and by whom such affordance is likely to be employed. (shrink)

A recent paradigm shift in music research has allowed scholars to examine the macro- and micro-processes taking place within musical performance and underlying cognitive processes. Tying in with phenomenological theories of embodied perception and cognition, this paper focuses on bodily musical activity relevant to the acquisition of instrumental musical skills—the process of learning music. Dynamic interaction with musical instruments, accompanied by the interplay of action and passion, involves body image and body schema, whose status oscillates in different phases of the (...) acquisition of instrumental musical skills; this interaction allows humans to direct attention from their bodily states—the proximal—to the quality of musical sounds and a unity of musical experience—the distal. It is thus argued that shaping music by means of playing a musical instrument can be conceived of as an embodied process, of understanding the forms of one’s own experience as related to the musical world that is created by one’s bodily activity. (shrink)

Enactivism has much to offer to moral, social and political philosophy through giving a new perspective on existing ethical problems and improving our understanding of morally ambiguous behaviours. I illustrate this through the case of self-injury, a common problematic behaviour which has so far received little philosophical attention. My aim in this paper has been to use ideas from enactivism in order to explore self-injury without assuming a priori that it is morally or socially wrong under all circumstances, seeking to (...) establish a less implicitly value-laden analysis. Enactivism can help us in making this behaviour more intelligible and contextualising it through examining the relations of individual embodied action and social practices with the help of enactivist theories of habits and affordances. (shrink)

“4E” approaches in cognitive science see mind as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. They observe that we routinely “offload” part of our thinking onto body and world. Recently, 4E theorists have turned to music cognition: from work on music perception and musical emotions, to improvisation and music education. I continue this trend. I argue that music — like other tools and technologies — is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. And via this offloading, music can (at least potentially) scaffold various (...) forms of thought, experience, and behavior. To develop this idea, I consider the “material” and “worldmaking” character of music, and I apply these considerations to two cases studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement. Second, horror offers ways in which the experience of grief can be (...) contained and regulated and, in doing so, may offer psychological benefits for the bereaved. While our focus will be squarely on film, much of what we say applies to other media. (shrink)