Any adequate account of emotion must accommodate the fact that emotions, even those of the most basic kind, exhibit intentionality as well as phenomenality. This article argues that a good place to start in providing such an account is by adjusting Prinz’s (2004) embodied appraisal theory (EAT) of emotions. EAT appeals to teleosemantics in order to account for the world-directed content of embodied appraisals. Although the central idea behind EAT is essentially along the right lines, as it stands Prinz’s proposal (...) needs tweaking in a number of ways. This article focuses on one—the need to free it from its dependence on teleosemantics. EAT, so modified, becomes compatible with a truly enactivist understanding of basic emotions. (shrink)

E-approaches to the mind stress the embodied, embedded and enactive nature of mental phenomena. In their more radical, non-representational variants these approaches offer innovative and powerful new ways of understanding fundamental modes of intersubjective social interaction: I-approaches. While promising, E and I accounts have natural limits. In particular, they are unable to explain human competence in making sense of reasons for actions in folk-psychological terms. In this paper I outline the core features of the 'Narrative Practice Hypothesis' (NPH), showing how (...) it might take up that burden in a way which complements non-representationalist E and I accounts. I conclude by addressing a new-order eliminativist challenge from Ratcliffe that questions, inter alia, the very idea that there is anything like a well-defined folk-psychological competence that needs explaining, thereby rendering the NPH otiose. Additionally, I respond to Ratcliffe's claim that the relevant structures needed for the development of that competence do not reveal themselves in relevant narratives, rendering the NPH's developmental story impossible. (shrink)

The binary divide between traditional cognitivist and enactivist paradigms is tied to their respective commitments to understanding cognition as based on knowing that as opposed to knowing how. Using O’Regan’s and No¨e’s landmark sensorimotor contingency theory of perceptual experience as a foil, I demonstrate how easy it is to fall into conservative thinking. Although their account is advertised as decidedly ‘skill-based’, on close inspection it shows itself to be riddled with suppositions threatening to reduce it to a rules-and-representations approach. To (...) remain properly enactivist it must be purged of such commitments and indeed all commitment to mediating knowledge: it must embrace a more radical enactivism. (shrink)

On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those that are more radically embodied. This paper provides an (...) account of the acquisition of embodied expertise, and explanation of the choking effect, from the most radically enactive, embodied perspective, spelling out some of its practical implications and addressing some possible philosophical challenges. Specifically, we propose: an explanation of how skills can be acquired on the basis of ecological dynamics; and a non-linear pedagogy that takes into account how contentful representations might scaffold skill acquisition from a radically enactive perspective. (shrink)

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather (...) than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular. (shrink)

The distinguishing feature of enactivist cognitive science is arguably its commitment to non-reductionism and its philosophical allegiance to first-person approaches, like phenomenology. The guiding theme of this article is that a theoretically mature enactivism is bound to be humanistic in its articulation, and only by becoming more humanistic can enactivism more fully embody the non-reductionist spirit that lay at its foundation. Our explanatory task is thus to bring forth such an articulation by advancing an enactivist theory of human personality. To (...) this end, we synthesize core concepts from cognitive science, personality theory, and phenomenological philosophy in order to develop an Enactivist Big-5 Theory of personality. According to EB5T, personality traits are dispositional tendencies for how we come to optimally grip our distinctly human worlds. Individual differences in personality are therefore reflective of stylistic differences in optimal gripping tendencies between human beings. EB5T affords a non-reductionist understanding of the immanent teleology of the autopoietically embodied human mind as a kind of full-scale optimal gripping process that is achieved along five major dimensions of personality. To the degree that these dimensions are universal, therefore, we argue that our theory offers a viable path forward in advancing enactivist cognitive science beyond the life of a cell and into the mind of a person, a longstanding hope and ambition held by proponents of the enactive approach. (shrink)

This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners’ worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that sustain learners. It is, in many respects, a composite theory that represents work from various disciplines. This ‘naturalized epistemology’ conceives a world of fact inevitably imbued with the values that our own structural histories guarantee (...) us observers, whether acknowledged or not within our reflective awareness. These values, however, are not simple sets of preferences, for they are constituted in our individual learning histories that, for good or bad, influence the course of future learning. This conservational element of our condition is only half the story, however. The more radical aspect resides in the expansionary capacity of embodied observers to change, to enact worlds that are not pre‐given but, rather, brought forth by learners as observers and describers. Furthermore, embodied learning seeks a grounding for understanding in the often‐unexplored epistemological terrain between positivist absolutism or its mirrored polar opposite, postmodern nihilism. Its epistemological stance derives from its ontology, which is grounded in the profound obviousness that ‘everything said is said by someone’. (shrink)

From the standpoint of an intercultural communication trainer in an exploration mode, the author starts by analyzing and evaluating two Third Culture models in order to sort out their contributions to practically improving intercultural communicative performance with the stranger. In his exploration he strives to move from competence to performance by shifting the focus of the abstract potential of competence to the body as an experiencing organism and its environment, the point in a situation where performance takes place. Along his (...) path he also discovers interfaces with related discussions. All of these interfaces together the author found are internally commensurable with each other. (shrink)

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...) entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that social cognition reduces to mental representation and social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in. The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions and, the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation. (shrink)

When someone masters a skill, their performance looks to us like second nature: it looks as if their actions are smoothly performed without explicit, knowledge-driven, online monitoring of their performance. Contemporary computational models in motor control theory, however, are instructionist: that is, they cast skillful performance as a knowledge-driven process. Optimal motor control theory, as representative par excellence of such approaches, casts skillful performance as an instruction, instantiated in the brain, that needs to be executed—a motor command. This paper aims (...) to show the limitations of such instructionist approaches to skillful performance. We specifically address the question of whether the assumption of control-theoretic models is warranted. The first section of this paper examines the instructionist assumption, according to which skillful performance consists of the execution of theoretical instructions harnessed in motor representations. The second and third sections characterize the implementation of motor representations as motor commands, with a special focus on formulations from OMCT. The final sections of this paper examine predictive coding and active inference—behavioral modeling frameworks that descend, but are distinct, from OMCT—and argue that the instructionist, control-theoretic assumptions are ill-motivated in light of new developments in active inference. (shrink)

Who Needs Stories if You Can Get the Data? ISPs in the Era of Big Number Crunching Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 371-390 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0041-8 Authors Mireille Hildebrandt, Institute of Computer and Information Sciences (ICIS), Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 4.

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming that–influenced by tacit (...) knowledge and the task at hand–textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body, text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading. (shrink)

This discussion note does three things: it explains the notion of ‘legal protection by design’ in relation to data-driven infrastructures that form the backbone of our new ‘onlife world’, it explains how the notion of ‘by design’ relates to the relational nature of what an environment affords its inhabitants, referring to the work of James Gibson, and it explains how this affects our understanding of human capabilities in relation to the affordances of changing environments. Finally, this brief note argues that (...) ‘safer by design’ in the case of nanotechnology will require legal protection by design to make sure that human capabilities are reinvented and sustained in nano-technical environments. (shrink)

The health benefits of practising mindfulness are well documented, yet the phenomenological mechanisms of such practice remain under-theorised from both ontogenetic and social perspectives. By leveraging an enactive perspective on selfhood, these lacunae can be addressed: firstly, it is argued that proper understanding of mindfulness – and the health benefits that mindfulness practices seek – relies on recognising the socio-embodied nature of the self; consequently, occasions in which the therapeutic need for mindfulness are most pressing will be shown to be (...) inextricably tied to socio-embodied fluctuations across different stages of life. What emerges is a phenomenological understanding of mindfulness as allowing one to dwell in the sensuous density of the present and, through this, remain connected to the social world of open possibilities. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kyselo argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: “the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self” ). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of (...) self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a re-conception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kyselo argues that an enactive approach to selfhood can overcome ‘the body-social problem’: “the question for philosophy of cognitive science about how bodily and social aspects figure in the individuation of the human individual self” ). Kyselo’s claim is that we should conceive of the human self as a socially enacted phenomenon that is bodily mediated. Whilst there is much to be praised about this claim, I will demonstrate in this paper that such a conception of (...) self ultimately leads to a strained interpretation of how bodily and social processes are related. To this end, I will begin the paper by elucidating the body-social problem as it appears in modern cognitive science and then expounding Kyselo’s solution, which relies on a novel interpretation of Jonas’s concept of needful freedom. In response to this solution, I will highlight two problems which Kyselo’s account cannot overcome in its current state. I will argue that a more satisfactory solution to the body-social problem involves a re-conception of the human body as irrevocably socially constituted and the human social world as irrevocably bodily constituted. On this view, even the most minimal sense of selfhood cannot privilege either bodily or social processes; instead, the two are ontologically entwined such that humans are biosocial selves. (shrink)

Four previous papers in this journal have discussed the role of Brain-Computer Interfaces in the lives of Locked-In Syndrome patients in terms of the four “E” frameworks for cognition – extended, embedded, embodied, and enactive cognition. This paper argues that in the light of more recent literature on these 4E frameworks, none of the four papers has taken quite the right approach to deciding which, if any, of the E frameworks is the best one for the job. More specifically, I (...) argue for an approach that is pragmatist rather than purely metaphysical, pluralist rather than monist, and perhaps most importantly, local to particular research programmes, rather than about BCIs in general. The paper will outline this approach, then illustrate it with reference to a particular research programme which tackles the issue of BCI communication for patients in Complete Locked-In Syndrome. (shrink)

Research in phenomenology has benefitted from using exceptional cases from pathology and expertise. But exactly how are we to generate and apply knowledge from such cases to the phenomenological domain? As researchers of cerebral palsy and musical absorption, we together answer the how question by pointing to the resource of the qualitative interview. Using the qualitative interview is a direct response to Varela’s call for better pragmatics in the methodology of phenomenology and cognitive science and Gallagher’s suggestion for phenomenology to (...) develop its methodology and outsource its tasks. We agree with their proposals, but want to develop them further by discussing and proposing a general framework that can integrate research paradigms of the well-established disciplines of phenomenological philosophy and qualitative science. We give this the working title, a “phenomenological interview”. First we describe the what of the interview, that is the nature of the interview in which one encounters another subject and generates knowledge of a given experience together with this other subject. In the second part, we qualify why it is worthwhile making the time-consuming effort to engage in a phenomenological interview. In the third and fourth parts, we in general terms discuss how to conduct the interview and the subsequent phenomenological analysis, by discussing the pragmatics of Vermersch’s and Petitmengin’s “Explicitation Interview”. (shrink)

The paper defends the position that phenomenological interviews can provide a rich source of knowledge and that they are in no principled way less reliable or less valid than quantitative or experimental methods in general. It responds to several skeptic objections such as those raised against introspection, those targeting the unreliability of episodic memory, and those claiming that interviews cannot address the psychological, cognitive and biological correlates of experience. It argues that the skeptic must either heed the methodological and epistemological (...) justification of the phenomenological interview provided, or embrace a more fundamental skepticism, a “deep mistrust”, in which scientific discourse can have no recourse to conscious processes as explananda, with ensuing dire consequences for our conception of science. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance the thesis that music-making can be advantageously understood as an exploratory phenomenon. While music-making is certainly about aesthetic expression, from a phenomenological, cognitive, and even evolutionary perspective, it more importantly concerns structured explorations of the world around us, our minds, and our bodies. Our thesis is based on an enactive and phenomenological analysis of three cases: the first concerns the study of infants involved in early musical activities, and the two latter are phenomenologically inspired interviews (...) with an expert jazz improviser, and members of a prominent string quartet. Across these examples, we find that music-making involves a dual intentionality - one oriented towards the exploration of the sonic, material, and social environment, and one oriented toward the self, including the exploration of bodily awareness and reflective mental states. In enactivist terms, exploration is a fundamental way of making sense of oneself as coupled with the world. Understanding music-making as a pre-eminent case of exploration helps us explicate and appreciate the developmental, sensorimotor, and more advanced cognitive resources that exist in music-making activities. (shrink)

The commentators do not contest the target article's claim that there is no compelling evidence of theory of mind in primates, and recent empirical studies further support this view. If primates lack theory of mind, they may still have other behavior control mechanisms that are adaptive in complex social environments. The Somatic Marker Mechanism (SMM) is a candidate, but the SMM hypothesis postulates a much weaker effect of natural selection on social cognition than the theory of mind hypothesis (on inputs (...) to cognitive mechanisms, not on the mechanisms themselves), and there is currently no evidence that it is specific to social stimuli or to primates. “Two Guesser” training would make the goggles test too chauvinistic, and in its current form the goggles problem could not be solved by physical matching because, while wearing goggles, an individual cannot see itself seeing. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the (...) history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

Researchers in the enactivist tradition have recently argued that social interaction can constitute social cognition, rather than simply serve as the context for social cognition. They contend that a focus on social interaction corrects the overemphasis on mechanisms inside the individual in the explanation of social cognition. I critically assess enactivism’s claims about the explanatory role of social interaction in social cognition. After sketching the enactivist approach to cognition in general and social cognition in particular, I identify problems with an (...) enactivist taxonomy of roles for social interaction in the explanation of social cognition (contextual, enabling, and constitutive). In particular, I show that this enactivist taxonomy does not clearly distinguish between enabling conditions and constitutive elements, which would make them in danger of committing the coupling-constitution fallacy found in some attempts to extend cognition. I explore resources enactivism has to more clearly demarcate constitutive parts of a cognitive system, but identify problems in applying them to some of the main cases of social cognition enactivists characterize as being constituted by social interaction. I offer the mechanistic approach to explanation as an alternative that captures much of what enactivists want to say about the relations between social and individual levels, but views social interactions from the perspective of embedded cognition rather than as being constitutive of social cognition. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Extended Synthesis, ecological information, and biosemiotics are complementary approaches whose engagement will help us explain the organism-environment interaction at the cognitive level. The Extended Synthesis, through niche construction theory, can explain the organism-environment interaction at an evolutionary level because niche construction is a process guided by information. We believe that the best account that defines information at this level is the one offered by biosemiotics and, within all kinds of biosemiotic information available, we believe that (...) ecological information is the best candidate for making sense of the organism-environment relation at the cognitive level. This entanglement of biosemiotics, ecological information and the Extended Synthesis is promising for understanding the multidimensional character of the organism-environment reciprocity as well as the relation between evolution, cognition, and meaning. (shrink)

One of the major divergences between dynamical systems theory and symbolism lies in their views on the role of representation in cognition. From the perspective of development, the cognitive development could be divided into three levels: sensorimotor, imagery representation and linguistic representation. It is claimed that representation is not a sufficient condition though it is necessary for cognition. However, it does not mean that the authors agree with the notion of strong coupling in dynamicism that completely rejects representation.

Mimicry is common among animals, plants, and other kingdoms of life. Humans in late capitalism, however, have devised an unique method of mimicking the signs that trigger evolutionarily-programmed instincts of their own species in order to manipulate them. Marketing and advertising are the most pervasive and sophisticated forms of known human mimicry, deliberately hijacking our instincts in order to select on the basis of one dimension only: profit. But marketing and advertising also strangely undermine their form of mimicry, deceiving both (...) the intended targets and the signaler simultaneously. Human forms of mimicry have the regular consequence of deceiving the imitator, reducing meta-cognitive awareness of the act and intentions surrounding such deception. Therefore, the deceiver in the end deceives himself as well as intended targets. Drawing on scholarship applying Niko Tinbergen’s ethological discovery of supernormal stimuli in animals to humans, this article analyzes sophisticated mass mimicry in contemporary culture, in both intended and unintended forms. (shrink)

Over the last ten years, „Theory U″, written by C.O. Scharmer in 2007, has earned broad international recognition. However, critical reviews of its grounding in social sciences and philosophy have been rare. After a brief introduction to Theory U this article examines its methodic approach in the context of its references to the universal history of Toynbee, and epistemological sources in the works of Nietzsche, Capra, Varela, Husserl, and Steiner. The investigation of Theory U’s historical and philosophical grounding comes to (...) the conclusion that it is evidently falling short of adequately capturing real world complexity and does not match widely accepted academic standards. Despite its evident deficiencies, Theory U deserves the merit of uniquely embracing non conventional schools of thought beyond the mainstream literature on leadership theories. (shrink)

Current debates in neuroethics engage with extremely diverse technologies, for some of which it is a point of contention whether they should be a topic for neuroethics at all. In this article, I will evaluate extended mind theory’s claim of being able to define the scope of neuroethics’ domain as well as determining the extension of an individual’s mind via its so-called trust and glue criteria. I argue that a) extending the domain of neuroethics by this manoeuvre endangers the theoretical (...) consistency of neuroethics and b) the current state of the trust and glue criteria can introduce a bias towards overstating the relevance which representational devices have in characterising the field of neuroethics as compared to other technologies which are clearly of neuroethical relevance. As a remedy, I suggest a modification of the trust and glue criteria and a broader conception of cognition. (shrink)

Phenomenology’s return to lived experience and “to the things themselves” is often contrasted with the synthesized perspective of science and its “view from nowhere.” The extensive use of neuropsychological case reports in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, however, suggests that the relationship between phenomenology and science is more complex than a sheer opposition, and a fruitful one for the praxis of medicine. Here, I propose a new reading of how Merleau-Ponty justifies his use of Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein’s reports on (...) Johann Schneider for his phenomenology of embodied perception. I argue that for Merleau-Ponty these neuropsychological case reports represent a coherent deformation of the intercorporeally expressed existence of Schneider that through speech fall again onto the common ground of perception, thereby allowing Merleau-Ponty to understand, in the equivalent sense delivered by language, Schneider’s total being and fundamental illness. I then discuss what Merleau-Ponty’s method implies for a phenomenological praxis of medicine, and for the role of science in this praxis. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine Shaun Gallagher’s project of “naturalizing” phenomenology with the cognitive sciences: front-loaded phenomenology. While we think it is a productive proposal, we argue that Gallagher does not employ genetic phenomenological methods in his execution of FLP. We show that without such methods, FLP’s attempt to locate neurological correlates of conscious experience is not yet adequate. We demonstrate this by analyzing Gallagher’s critique of cognitive neuropsychologist Christopher Frith’s functional explanation of schizophrenic symptoms. In “constraining” Gallagher’s FLP program, (...) we discuss what genetic phenomenological method is and why FLP ought to embrace it. We also indicate what types of structures a genetically modified FLP will consider, and how such an approach would affect the manner in which potential neurological correlates of conscious experience are conceptually understood and experimentally investigated. (shrink)

Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical (...) sites where Claude Shannon’s information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Joseph McElroy’s Plus, in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making. (shrink)

In recent years the cognitive science community has witnessed the rise of a new, dynamical approach to cognition. This approach entails a framework in which cognition and behavior are taken to result from complex dynamical interactions between brain, body, and environment. The advent of the dynamical approach is grounded in a dissatisfaction with the classical computational view of cognition. A particularly strong claim has been that cognitive systems do not rely on internal representations and computations. Focusing on this claim, we (...) take as a starting point a question recently raised by Cliff and Noble: " if evolution did produce a design that used internal representations, how would we recognize it?" (Knowledge-based vision and simple visual machines, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 352 , 1165-1175, 1997). We will argue that cognitive science lacks a proper operationalization of the notion of representation, and therefore is unable to fruitfully discuss whether a particular system has representations or not. A basic method to detect representations in a physical system, grounded in isomorphism, turns out to be quite unconstrained. We will look at a practical example of this problem by examining the debate on whether or not van Gelder's (What might cognition be, if not computation? Journal of Philosophy, 92 , 345-381, 1995) controversial example of the Watt Governor is representational. We will conclude that cognitive science, as of yet, has no empirically applicable means to answer Cliff and Noble's question unequivocally. This makes the recent representationalism vs. anti-representationalism debate a debate for the sake of appearance. (shrink)

The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: a philosophical journey into the brain, Paul M. Churchland. Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1995 ISBN: 0–262–03244–4Cognition in the wild, Edwin Hutchins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 0–262–08231–4Dimensions of creativity, Margaret A. Boden, (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–02368–7Contemplating minds: a forum for Artificial Intelligence, William J. Clancey, Stephen W. Smoliar & Mark J. Stefik (Eds) Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–53119–4Passion and reason: making sense of (...) our emotions, Richard S. Lazarus & Bernice N. Lazarus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0–19–508757–7Mental reality, Galen Strawson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–19352–3The body and the self, Jose Luis Bermudez, Anthony Marcel & Naomi Eilan (Eds) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0–262–02386–5. (shrink)

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach, brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two pronged analysis. I first use Barker’s behavior setting theory to describe the publically accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatio-temporal structure with (...) several interdependent behavior-milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting’s standing pattern of behavior. (shrink)

Tony Chemero advances the radical thesis that cognition and consciousness are actually the same thing. I question this conclusion. Even if we are the brain–body environmental synergies that Chemero and others claim, we will not be able to conclude that consciousness is just cognition because this view actually expands cognition beyond being the sort of natural kind upon which to hook phenomenal experience. Identifying consciousness with cognition either means consciousness exists at multiple levels of organization in the universe, or more (...) work needs to be done to delineate conscious cognition from other synergies. Still, while radical embodied cognition does not solve any of the hard problems associated with consciousness, this perspective allows useful insights concerning phenomenal experience. Moreover, recent neuropsychological research in action selection and projection can help us refine notions of consciousness from this embodied perspective. (shrink)

(1997). Semantic fields and meaning: A bridge between mind and matter. World Futures: Vol. 48, The Concept of Collective Consiousness: Research Perspectives, pp. 161-170.

This paper is my commentary on Raymond Tallis’ book Freedom: An Impossible Reality (2021). Tallis argues that the laws described by science are dependent on human agency which extracts them from nature. Consequently, human agency cannot be explained as an effect of natural laws. I agree with Tallis’ main argument and I appreciate that he helps us understand the systematic importance of a human-scale breadth of view regarding any theoretical investigation. In the main part of the paper, I critically comment (...) on Tallis’ interpretation of several more loosely associated topics from a phenomenological perspective. Firstly, I reconsider Tallis’ account of intentionality as a factor that opens a distance between the cognizer and the world. Whereas Tallis emphasizes that agency requisitions aspects of the world to achieve its goals, I point out that agency does not determine the meaning of things unidirectionally and independently of all context. A self-controlled agency is provisionally reached through a process of ‘deindexicalization’ of our passive intentional capacities, that is, by creating and maintaining new, different worldly contexts. Subsequently, I analyze Tallis’ description of our intentional relation to spatiotemporally distant possibilities. In my view, Tallis underestimates the extent to which our intentional relation to possibilities is pre-reflexive and pre-predicative and hence independent of propositional attitudes. Finally, I consider Tallis’ interpretation of nature and show that it is deeply influenced by the sciences of nature. In contrast, I argue that agency can be properly described only if we understand it as an intervention in a lifeworld already imbued with sense, not merely a physical or material nature. (shrink)