Situated affectivity investigates how natural, material, and social environmental structures, so-called ‘scaffolds,’ influence our affective life. Initially, the debate focused on user-resource-interactions, i.e., on cases where individuals (‘users’) actively structure the environment (‘resource’) in beneficial ways, setting up scaffolds that allow them to solve routine problems, modify their means of coping with challenges, or avail themselves of new affective competences. More recently, cases of mind invasion have captured philosophers’ attention where the ways others structure the environment affect, or invade, people’s (...) minds, typically without their awareness and with harmful consequences. This paper contributes to recent discussions about the variety of phenomena that can count as ‘scaffolded affectivity’ in general and ‘scaffolded affective harm’ in particular. It also addresses the emerging question of how harmful affective scaffolds can come to have a grip on people’s minds, despite their detrimental consequences. We first disentangle some misconceptions and illustrate how diverse (harmful) affective scaffolds can be. In contrast to recent approaches that have characterized scaffolds in largely descriptive terms, we then identify factors that can help explain why a given scaffold is effective in modifying people’s minds. We also try to shed light on why some agents and some social structures are especially likely to experience or cause scaffolded affective harm, respectively, by arguing that user-resource-interactions and mind invasions are not independent, but intimately intertwined and mutually reinforcing, especially in the digital domain. We conclude with a speculative suggestion for further research. (shrink)

Cognitive scaffolding is typically conceptualized in terms of environmental design which serves to offload, facilitate, or enhance the cognitive capacities of interacting agents. Recent contributions to the literature on scaffolding have noted that environmental design might likewise scaffold cognition in ways that undermine the interests of interactant agents—giving rise to notions of problematic or hostile scaffolding. Given the pervasiveness of social and technological scaffolding in contemporary life, the importance of understanding and assessing its effects can hardly be overstated. At the (...) same time, however, the very pervasiveness of scaffolding raises a challenge to the current criteria for evaluating its effects by comparison with agents’ interests. This is because human agents and their interests alike are themselves the results of various forms of social and technological scaffolding. This paper explores the relationship between scaffolding and the formation of agents along with their interests, as well as the implications of this relationship for evaluating scaffolding as being hostile, neutral, or beneficial. I will argue that the formative aspect of scaffolding imparts a degree of uncertainty to evaluations of scaffolding based on agents’ interests. I will then demonstrate the relevance of the formative aspect of scaffolding in evaluating and assessing the potentially pernicious effects of contemporary social and technological scaffolding focusing on the examples of servitization marketing models and social and vocational digital infrastructures. (shrink)

This paper brings the concept of affective scaffolding to bear on a much-debated controversy: the expanding use of psy- chiatric medications to treat an increasingly broad range of human discontents. ‘Affective scaffolding’ refers to the variety of ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena. Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological underpinnings (...) of distress and suffering to change how we feel. The paper develops an account of psychiatric drug use as affective scaffolding and examines how psychiatrization – the complex social process through which psychiatry comes to influence more and more domains of human life – impacts this form of scaffolding. I propose that psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage an expanding array of affective experiences. In some cases, I argue, this results in bad pharmaceutical scaffolding. Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding emerges when an agent is influenced to select and rely upon psychiatric drugs in attempts to exert individual control over distress and suffering where (1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and (2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the agent's affective needs and interests. (shrink)

The narratives we have about ourselves are important for our sense of who we are. However, our narratives are influenced, even manipulated, by the people and environments we interact with, impacting our self-understanding. This can lead to narratives that are limited, even harmful. In this paper, I explore how our narrative agency is constrained, to greater and lesser degrees, through a process I call ‘narrative railroading’. Bringing together work on narratives and 4E cognition, I specifically explore how using features of (...) our socio-material environments to support and construct our narratives does not simply offer up possibilities for creating more reliable and accurate self-narratives (Heersmink 2020 ) but can lead to increasingly tight narrative railroading. To illustrate this idea, I analyse how digital technologies do not neutrally distribute our narratives but dynamically shape and mould narrative agency in ways that can restrict our self-understanding, with potentially harmful consequences. As such, I argue that we need to recognise that digital devices not only support narratives but work as powerful narrative devices, shaping and propagating the kinds of narratives that we self-ascribe and act in accordance with. (shrink)

Debates in 4E and scaffolded cognition have been centered on cases in which human cognitive or affective capacities are enhanced through technology. Recently some authors have noted that this may not always be the case: the technologies and environment around us can negatively impact cognitive and affective abilities. In the first part, I elaborate on this change of perspective in the debate. In the second part, I discuss a case of technology scaffolding maladaptive psychological processes. More in detail, I will (...) focus on the role of smartphones in scaffolding ruminative processes. To illustrate this claim, I introduce four core features of rumination and discuss how they may be supported by problematic smartphone use in light of existing evidence. (shrink)

Most adults spend multiple hours per week online, including on social media, and many treat social media as a news source. This has led to concerns about the trustworthiness of such media, and cert...

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)

Self-narration, many philosophers assume, makes important contributions to our mental lives. Two views on self-narration can be distinguished. On the internalistic view, self-narration unfolds in the secluded mind and does not require overt communication. On the situated view, self-narration often depends on the conversational interaction with an interlocutor. The situated view has many advantages over its internalistic rival, including theoretical consistency and empirical plausibility. Yet, research on situated conversational self-narration has been shaped by a harmony bias, which consists in the (...) tacit assumption that interlocutors contribute to self-narration in ways that are beneficial and supportive, rather than malicious and harmful. This paper seeks to mitigate the harmony bias by considering the phenomenon of gaslighting, which is characterized by an interlocutor’s erosion of someone’s sense of epistemic and moral competence. In cases of narrative gaslighting, this erosion proceeds by maliciously interfering with the self-narrator’s mnemonic, interpretational, and conceptual abilities. Bringing together research on situated self-narration and gaslighting for the first time, it will be argued that the emerging account of narrative gaslighting has important implications for both. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing (...) on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

Research in the philosophy of addiction commonly explores how agency is impacted in addiction by focusing on moments of apparent loss of control over addictive behavior and seeking to explain how such moments result from the effects of psychoactive substance use on cognition and volition. Recently, Glackin et al. (2021) have suggested that agency in addiction can be helpfully analyzed using the concept of affordances. They argue that addicted agents experience addiction-related affordances, such as action possibilities relating to drugs, drug (...) paraphernalia, and drug-related activities, as aberrantly salient motivations for action. Building on this approach, we present a novel two-tiered affordance model of addiction. In doing so, we suggest that what is significant about the addicted person’s world is not simply what affordances are experienced as salient, but also the way in which the addicted person’s world is shaped by a dominant concern. It is not only that addiction-related affordances become more prominent as addiction progresses but that one’s plurality of concerns become monopolized by and funneled through addiction. Our model endorses Glackin et al.’s idea that addiction-related affordances become aberrantly salient, while proposing why they become and remain so. This way of viewing agency in addiction also brings to light important implications for recovery and treatment. For, if an addicted person adopts a new, even “socially approved”, dominant concern, there is a risk that the shape of addiction is preserved, even though the content changes, leaving an individual at the risk of addiction substitution or relapse. (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)

4E approaches to affective technology tend to focus on how ‘users’ manage their situated affectivity, analogously to how they help themselves cognitively through epistemic actions or using artefacts and scaffolding. Here I focus on cases where the function of affective technology is to exploit or manipulate the agent engaging with it. My opening example is the cigarette, where technological refinements have harmfully transformed the affective process of consuming nicotine. I proceed to develop case studies of two very different but also (...) harmful affective technologies. Casinos and electronic gambling machines deploy computationally intensive scaffolding to shape the onset and continuation of gambling episodes. High-heeled shoes affectively engineer wearers’ relationships to their own embodied capacities and are predominantly expected to be worn by women. I conclude with a discussion of the need for study of affective technology to focus other-directed applications, some of which will serve competing or antagonistic interests. (shrink)

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

Amid the growing interest in the relationship between technology and human flourishing, philosophical perfectionism can serve as a fruitful lens through which to normatively evaluate technology. This paper offers an analytic framework that explains the relationship between technology and flourishing by way of innate human capacities. According to perfectionism, our human flourishing is determined by how well we exercise our human capacities to know, create, be sociable, use our bodies and exercise the will, by engaging in activities that ultimately produce (...) valuable output. The paper introduces technology affordances to this framework, to show how affordances enable or restrict the exercise of human capacities, thereby impacting levels of human flourishing. One implication of this analysis is that it highlights how technology affordances can cause the privation (absence) of flourishing, by impoverishing capacities. The upshot is that privation may bring about robustly bad unflourishing, especially given that technology and its affordances have the power to degrade the human capacities in the long run. By linking how human capacities are shaped by affordances, we can achieve a better understanding of the ethical implications of technology on human flourishing. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have developed accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding to describe the contribution of environmental resources to the realization of mental abilities. However, an integrative account, which captures scaffolding relations in general terms and across domains, is currently lacking. To close this gap, this paper proposes a pattern theory of scaffolding. According to this theory, the functional and causal role of an environmental resource for an individual agent or a group of agents concerning a mental ability in (...) a situational context can be specified by multiple conditions that a scaffold can satisfy. On this view, scaffolds can be described in terms of patterns of relevance-weighted, gradually satisfied scaffolding conditions. The resulting theory will be applied to cases of mathematical cognition to demonstrate its plausibility and feasibility. The pattern theory of scaffolding, it will be shown, has important implications for research on embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. (shrink)

There is growing philosophical interest in “affective injustice”: injustice faced by individuals specifically in their capacity as affective beings. Current debates tend to focus on affective injustice at the psychological level. In this paper, I argue that the built environment can be a vehicle for affective injustice — specifically, what Wildman et al. (2022) term “affective powerlessness”. I use resources from ecological psychology to develop this claim. I consider two cases where certain kinds of bodies are, either intentionally or unintentionally, (...) deprived of access to goods affording the development and maintenance of their subjective well-being: hostile architecture and masking practices in autism. This deprivation, I argue further, leads to a significant weakening and diminishment of their spatial agency, hinders their well-being, and in so doing gives rise to a pervasive experience of affective powerlessness. By drawing attention to these themes, I show that an ecological approach helpfully supplements existing approaches. It highlights how affective injustice can emerge via the way bodies are positioned in space, and the central role that built environments play in determining this positioning. (shrink)

Niche construction theory highlights the active role of organisms in modifying their environment. A subset of these modifications is the developmental niche, which concerns ecological, epistemic, social and symbolic legacies inherited by organisms as resources that scaffold their developmental processes. Since in this theory development is a situated process that takes place in a culturally structured environment, we may reasonably ask if implicit cultural biases may, in some cases, be responsible for maladaptive developmental niches. In this paper we wish to (...) argue for an affirmative answer. In order to do so, we first propose to conceptualize implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits, and then proceed to show that these habits are at least partially responsible for maladaptive developmental niches of children with Down syndrome and autism. With this framework we thus hope to bring together two fields of research that haven’t been explicitly connected: implicit bias and niche construction theory. Linking these two theories may bring benefits both to implicit bias researchers, who can extend this concept to characterize other sets of processes as biased, as well as to niche construction theorists, who will have a useful theoretical tool to diagnose maladaptive features of niches brought about by sociocultural biases. (shrink)

Affordances are standardly understood as perceived possibilities for interaction. What is afforded is in turn regarded as dependent on the properties of a body and its environment. Human bodies are nearly ubiquitously clothed, and clothing can change the capabilities of bodies. We argue that when clothing does this, it should be regarded as an affordance transforming technology. Clothing receives passing attention in remarks by Gibson, and some empirical work in ecological psychology uses worn items as experimental manipulations. We argue that (...) the effects of clothing should be a central topic of investigation. We further show how the notion of clothing as an affordance transforming technology allows ecological psychology to accommodate feminist insights about the restrictive or oppressive nature of some gendered clothing norms. We aim to show that if ecological psychology is to be a general framework for thinking about human perception and activity, then it should consider clothing, because of the differences it can make to what is afforded. It should do so critically because the ways that clothing transforms affordances are sometimes discriminating in that what people are expected to wear and what differences that makes aren’t independent of how they’re classified in systems of power and oppression. (shrink)

The field of distributed cognition has been accused of being overly concerned with the “dogma of harmony,” valuing smoothness and success and neglecting moments of failure, contingency, noise, and chaos. This paper examines this proposition through a historical case study. Performances, whether theatrical or cinematic, depend upon deploying powerful cognitive, affective and symbolic technologies, tools that can that at times elude or escape full control. I ask whether the use of such technologies—including verbal, gestural, visual (lighting, cinematic technologies such as (...) the close-up and montage); aural (song, music, score); material (costumes, props)—can at times work against the aims and interests of both creators and audiences. My case study is the question of chauvinism and pro-war sentiment in productions of Henry V. (shrink)

The biological notion of niche construction is used to conceptualize human-environment relations outside of the biological realm. If the relations between the environmental features and an organism are modified by organismic activity, we have an instance of niche construction. When the modifications are harmful to the organism, niche construction theory speaks of negative niche construction. When applied in biology, these concepts work well. However, when applied to human life, as is commonly done outside of the biological realm, it needs refinement, (...) or so I argue. Current research seems to be insufficiently aware that we need to establish what the goals and abilities of the organism are, because niches are defined by the relevance and availability of the environmental features to the organism. To establish these, we have to use empirically informed generalizations to get to a notion of a typical organism, with typical goals and typical abilities. Such an organism will inhabit, maintain, or construct a typical niche, which may or may not be its preferable niche. For many organisms, typicality can basically be derived from biology, but establishing human goals and abilities is much harder. Recognizing the essential role of goals and abilities allows us to come to a clearer analysis of human niche construction, and the positivity or negativity niches cause for individuals who are typical, and for those whom are not. (shrink)

This text maps out a territory for political philosophy of mind, with emphasis on habit, affect and an expanded notion of the social niche. We first survey the historical development of classic philosophy of mind towards the articulation of political philosophy of mind and discuss further influences for the field. We then outline commitments to relationality, dynamism, and emergence, to adopt a post-cognitivist view of cognition as embodied and situated, as ongoing dynamic interaction with the environment. We propose to move (...) beyond the user/resource framework dominant in extended mind approaches and to surpass what Jesper Aagaard calls the “dogma of harmony” prevalent in 4E approaches. Moving beyond the individual subject, towards situated agents shaped by institutional procedures, social domains and subjectification practices, we highlight the role of affect and habit in processes of societal mind-shaping. We propose a critical methodology: inverting key concepts from philosophy of mind to bring out their ambivalent standing amidst oppressive and exploitative social structures, thereby expanding the purview of the socio-material niches in which cognitive and affective capacities are developed and expressed. We discuss work on habit in the enactivist and pragmatist traditions to put our method of concept inversion and niche expansion to work. The article is meant to be an introduction and invitation to join an emerging scholarly effort at the intersection of philosophy of mind, 4E cognitive science and social as well as political philosophy. (shrink)

For several decades, research on situated cognition and affectivity has neglected cases in which environmental features in the niche have a negative impact on agents’ cognitive and affective wellbeing. Recently, however, a new research cluster has emerged that explores how things, technologies, and organisational systems across corporate, healthcare, and educational sectors wrongfully harm certain kinds of agents. This article contributes to this research cluster by integrating work on negative niche construction, structural oppression, enculturation, and self-narration. It thereby offers a new (...) perspective on the negative, structurally oppressive impact of the socio-culturally shaped niche on enculturated self-narration. The main argument is that master plots, understood as narrative arrangements that dominate in the socio-culturally shaped niche, contribute to the structural oppression of enculturated self-narrators with systematically undermined socio-cultural identities. An analysis of the influence of pronatalist master plotting on enculturated self-narration serves to illustrate and strengthen the overall argument. (shrink)

“I don’t want to create painful shoes, but it is not my job to create something comfortable.” – Christian Louboutin. (in Alexander, 2012) Pain is an essential part of the grooming process, and that...

In this paper we introduce the concept of attentional scaffolds and show the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, both functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. The first section establishes the groundwork for the concept of attentional scaffolds and draws parallels to the mechanics of slot machines, to argue that social media platforms aim to capture users’ attention to maximize engagement through a system of intermittent rewards. The second section shifts focus to the interplay between emotions and attention, revealing (...) how online attentional capture through emotionally triggering stimuli leads to distraction. The final section elucidates the collective implications of scaffolding attention through social media platforms. The examination of phenomena such as emotional contagion and the emergence of group emotions underscores the transition from individual experiences to shared collective outcomes. Employing online moral outrage as a case study, we illustrate how negative emotions serve as scaffolds for individuals’ attention, propagate within social groups, and give rise to collective attitudes. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to psychiatry have recently argued for an understanding of psychiatric conditions based within relational interactions between individuals and their environments. A central motivation for these enactive approaches is the goal of social integration: the integration of a naturalistic approach to psychiatric conditions with their broader sociocultural dimensions. One possible issue, however, is whether appeals to the autonomy and authenticity of relationally constituted enactive individuals can provide a means of adjudicating between harmful and beneficial social constraints upon individual behaviour. (...) This paper seeks to provide enactive approaches to psychiatry with a possible means of evaluating normative influences of social contexts beyond direct interactions with relationally constituted individuals. Some of the most significant influences of the sociocultural dimension of psychiatric conditions consist not in direct interaction with individuals, but in setting the terms for interactions and interactants alike. Insofar as some social influences precede and predefine dyadic relations between individuals and their social context, these cannot be accounted for as features of interactions, but must be assessed as independent structures of the sociocultural dimension. I will provide one potential means for enactive models to assess social norms using Canguilhem’s distinction between health and pathology. I will argue that Canguilhem’s conceptualization of health in terms of adaptive normative structure provides a potential tool for social integration which strongly complements enactive approaches to psychiatry. (shrink)

A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people’s ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular problematic quasi-Cartesian picture of the human body, the human mind, what it means for these to function well, and the role (...) of technology in promoting such functioning, animate our Western sociotechnical imagination. This picture, I show, shapes the sociotechnical niches we inhabit in an _ableist_ manner, perniciously legislating which body-minds have access to a rich world of affordances and are seen as agential and valuable. Because the ableist quasi-Cartesian commitments animating our Western sociotechnical imagination are problematic and pervasive, I argue that exposing and reimagining these commitments should be a prime focal point of those working at the intersection of science, technology, and human values. I present insights from enactive 4E cognition and critical disability studies as fruitful resources for such much-needed reimagining. I also make the case, more provocatively but also more tentatively, that the ableist view of bodily and minded well- functioning animating our Cartesian Western sociotechnical imagination is not only damaging to embodied minds who deviate from the presumed norm, creating inaccessible worlds for some of us; it is in fact a threat to human and planetary flourishing at large. (shrink)

Environmental scaffolding refers to the ways in which agents make use of features of the environment to augment and enhance their cognitive behavior. Recent discussion on the notion of affective scaffolding extends this perspective to investigate how agents’ affective states are supported by environmental scaffolds. This paper builds on such discussion by exploring how elements of nature, such as forests, oceans, and gardens, function as affective scaffolds. Empirical research demonstrates that the presence of natural elements has a positive impact on (...) health and wellbeing, as well as a modulatory effect on stress response mechanisms. I argue that there are specific characteristics to these types of scaffolds which can be surveyed to shed philosophical light on this research. I suggest that natural environments scaffold our affective lives by enabling, enhancing, and promoting a specific bodily affective profile characterized by restorativeness and immersion attentiveness. An analysis of this scaffolding can aid in understanding the relationship between nature and affect, in turn identifying a new application for the scaffolded mind framework. (shrink)

The capacity to distinguish reliable or rationally believable claims from a huge pool of views available within the public arena has never been as critical an issue as it is today. We live in a world full of bizarre, unwarranted beliefs and conspiracy theories, some of which may seem, at least on the face of it, quite well justified. Moreover, some of them may even turn out to be true. This poses a significant social-epistemological as well as practical problem. Here (...) I propose to single out a group of beliefs known as confined truths. These are true beliefs belonging to a pathological question-answer system. The paper first provisionally articulates this idea and then makes the case for an ecological account of questioning and answering, thought of as social pursuits made possible by the capacity for problematization. The latter shall be characterized as part of cognitive engineering or niche construction. In the final part of the paper, various possible dysfunctionalities of the social/ecological pursuit of problematization are elicited and suitable examples thereof are briefly discussed. (shrink)

For countless citizens in the United States, guns are objects of personal attachment that provide strong feelings of power and security. I argue that a key reason for such tight affective bonds is that, under certain conditions, guns become integrated into their owners’ embodied experience. To flesh out this view, I explain (a) how firearms, as material artifacts, can become a part of the feeling body and (b) how this integration impacts one’s experience of self, others, and the world. I (...) first apply the distinction between body-incorporation and body-extension by De Preester and Tsakiris (Phenomenol Cogn Sci 8:307–319, 2009) to delineate how guns can (and cannot) be integrated into lived bodies. I then introduce Ihde's (Technology and the life world: from garden to earth, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990) notion of embodiment relations to elaborate on the key experiential features of technologically extended bodies and complement the previous, sensorimotor-centric accounts of bodily extension with Colombetti's (Phenomenology for the twenty-first century, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016) concept of affective incorporation. With this theoretical framework in place, I proceed to examine the motives and affective dynamics involved in the incorporation of guns, the practices by which this incorporation is constituted, and its impact on gun carriers’ habitual comportment. In doing so, I identify two notable contradictions: first, between a desire for the power afforded by firearms and the lack in oneself that this power implies, and second, between one’s seemingly beneficial feelings of confidence/safety and potentially harmful transformations in one’s perceptions of threat. To conclude, I discuss how my analysis challenges current theorization on technologically extended bodies and consider its relevance for ongoing debates over gun policy. (shrink)