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)

Experiential imagination consists in an imaginative projection that aims at simulating the experiences one would undergo in different circumstances. It has been traditionally thought to play a role in how we build our lives, engage with other agents, and appreciate art. Although some philosophers have recently expressed doubts over the capacity of experiential imagination to offer insight into the perspective of someone other than our present-selves, experiential imagination remains a much sought-after tool. This paper substantiates pessimism about the epistemological value (...) of these uses of experiential imagination by developing an embodied approach. Our thesis is that experiential imagination is _robustly embodied_ because the _sociohistorically situated_ body makes an irreducible contribution to the imaginative project, and that, as such, it is constrained by who we are as _concrete_ agents. We argue that experiential imagination is an embodied, virtual exploration of imagined scenarios that depends on our situated history of sensorimotor and affective interactions. We conclude that experiential imagination is much more limited than commonly acknowledged, as it can hardly be divorced from who we are and where we have been. (shrink)

Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offered by a concrete situation. The concept of situated normativity has so far primarily been discussed in the context (...) of skilled unreflective action. In this paper, we aim to explore and sketch the role of the concept of situated normativity in characterising more reflective forms of normativity. The goal of the paper is two-fold: first, by showing more reflective forms of normativity to be continuous with unreflective situated normativity, we bring these reflective forms into the reach of embodied accounts of cognition; and second, by extending the concept of situated normativity, new light is thrown on questions regarding reflective forms of cognition. We show that sociomaterial aspects of situations are crucial for understanding more reflective forms of normativity. We also shed light on the important question of how explicit rules can compel people to behave in particular ways. (shrink)

One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)

This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line (...) of criticism from other objections raised against the use of imaginative procedures in phenomenology and by showing how this line of questioning departs from the core philosophical debates concerning imaginabilitiy and unimaginability in the Kantian tradition. Further on, the paper offers an in-depth interpretation of the aforementioned ethnomethodological claim in order not only to outline its methodological implications for phenomenology, but also to show that it involves possible key insights for understanding interaction, which phenomenology needs to take into account despite its eidetic scope. (shrink)

Most crises of knowledge stem from lack of information. The current crisis of romantic knowledge stems from the opposite reason: too much information. The abundance of romantic information is the main reason for this crisis, making the romantic realm more complex, diverse and flexible than ever. In recent times, there has become a significantly greater emphasis on romantic ignorance. Romantic abundance facilitates finding a romantic (and sexual) partner, but is an obstacle for initiating and maintaining enduring, profound romantic relationships. A (...) major optimal tool for overcoming these difficulties is a combination of intuition and deliberate thinking. The abundance of romantic information does not make adequate knowledge easy to obtain, and conversely has created a far more complex minefield to navigate. Nevertheless, our contemporary society has enabled the most flourishing romantic environment in the history of love. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the skilled performance of rock climbing through the framework of Embodied and Enacted Cognitive Science. It introduces a notion of enactive planning that is part of one mindful activity of ongoing responsiveness to the affordances of the wall. The paper takes two distinct planning activities involved in rock climbing—route-reading and visualizing—and clarifies them through the enactivist and ecological concepts of nested affordances, prospecting, recalibrating, marking, and corporeal imaginings, as well as Rylean concept of heeding. The paper shows (...) that an enactive approach to planning can make sense of both the planning done in preparation of the climb, and re-planning done during the mindful performance, without invoking additional cognitive architectures. (shrink)