I address the problem of caring for our body-mind through neuropragmatism, cybernetics, and Larry Hickman’s work on John Dewey and the philosophy of technology. The problems of body-mind health are related to Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis. I address this crisis by drawing on Jay Schulkin’s conception of viability as the creative tension between stability and precarity. From this, I extend body-mind health to questions of democracy, leading to the proposal of body-mind-world as an elaboration of neuropragmatism’s evolutionary and ecological (...) conception of experience as Œ and Hickman’s distinction between the merely valued nature-as-nature and the valuable nature-as-culture. I conclude with a reimagination of creative democracy as a moral ideal for dealing with the care crisis. (shrink)

Central to Dewey’s treatment of the nervous system throughout his work is its import for ameliorative action. Dewey’s theory of mentation has its origins in his early thought in which he draws on contemporary physics and biology to incorporate the nascent understanding of the nervous system. This interdisciplinary approach continues through his career. After selectively reviewing Dewey’s remarks about brains and nervous systems, I apply his ameliorative theory of mind and brain to our contemporary situation in which our digital devices (...) work against the energetic focusing that Dewey saw as integral to healthy nervous system function. I consider the threat of what Tschaepe calls dopamine democracy and reflect on whether neuropragmatism is able to meet that challenge. (shrink)

John Dewey, as Sidney Hook characterized him, was the philosopher of science and freedom. Dewey, as Larry Hickman has demonstrated, was also a philosopher of technology. And, as most people familiar with Dewey know, he was a philosopher of education and democracy. The complex of technology, science, freedom, education and democracy requires re-examination, not only because of our contemporary cultural political situation but also because of our growing insights into the human condition thanks to the technosciences of life, especially human (...) life. Dewey’s philosophical method of reconstruction, equipped with insights from evolutionary neuroscience and ecological psychology, offers means of reconceiving and thus reevaluating our conception of tools and technology within our cultural context. I begin to take up Mark Tschaepe’s challenge to neuropragmatism to counter what he calls “dopamine democracy” – Plato’s critique of democracy resurrected in neural garb coupled with a critical examination of how social media and other so-called “smart” technologies undermine healthy democratic life. Central to this neuropragmatist approach are cultural affordances – opportunities for action humans have created initially for specific purposes and later retrofitted for other ends-in-view. Dewey’s reconstruction – as method as well as the reconstruction of technology, science, freedom, education and democracy as an entangled complex – is thus imagined as our best strategy for achieving the culture of creative democracy. (shrink)

Title - Gender in distributed cognitive systems: Possible conceptualizations. Abstract - There is a mismatch between social and biological approaches in the studies on sex and gender. Neurofeminist researchers critically examine gendered impacts of research in neuroscience and cognitive science, as well as develop more adequate and gender‑appropriate neuroscientific studies. However, they still seem to be focused on the brain and its relationship with the environment. Moreover, there are a little ‘science‑phobic’ feminist approaches based on actor‑network theory, and social science (...) and technology studies. In this context, I would like to suggest another account of gender. My account is not centered on individual selves, minds or brains, but it is based on concept of distributed cognitive system and cultural ecosystem developed in the cognitive science. The potential integrational role of the approach seems worthy of attention. On the one hand, there are no contradictions between more important assumptions of distributed cognition theory and social studies. On the other hand, it is not necessarily limited to human beings and their minds. I pay particular attention to distinction between the distributed cognition theory and the extended mind theory. Ones of the most important elements of the ‘gender‑sensitive’ distributed system are artifacts and their affordances, most of all — cultural and canonical ones. In this light, the gender relations seem not only distributed, but also able to be designed. (shrink)

Enactivist approaches claim that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. An ongoing challenge for these approaches is the problem of accounting for normativity while avoiding overly reductionist outcomes. This article examines a few proposed solutions, including agent-environment dynamics, participatory sense-making, radical enactivism, the skillful intentionality framework, and enactivist cultural psychology. It argues that good examples of enacted normativity are gestures of appreciation/disapproval performed in the aesthetic domain. Both Wittgenstein and Dewey explore this issue (...) and their ideas could be productively worked upon in an enactive account. (shrink)