Papers addressing the role which human motivation plays in a wide range of specialties including clinical psychology, internal medicine, sports psychology, ...

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given (...) so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as (...) that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

The purpose of the paper is to outline the particular interpretation of systems thinking developed at the University of Bristol over the last 30 years. The importance of process and uncertainty are central themes. Put at its simplest, systems thinking is joined-up thinking. It is getting the right information to the right people at the right time for the right purpose in the right form and in the right way. The three ideas at the heart of delivering systems thinking are (...) thinking in layers, thinking in connected loops and thinking about new processes. Everything has life cycle and hence is a process – but one that is set in the context of a system containing other connected processes – some at higher and some at lower levels of definition. All processes have attributes that are characterised using why, how, who, what, where, when. There is a need to integrate hard and soft systems. This requires us to be very clear about the meaning and usage of the terms subjective and objective when we argue that engineering judgement is both valid and important. It is argued that truth is to knowledge as the inverse of risk is to action. The three attributes of uncertainty are stated as FIR – fuzziness, incompleteness and randomness. Robustness and its inverse, vulnerability, are crucial, though often ignored. Systems thinking is not simply an engineering approach; rather it is a philosophy for solving many practical problems such as joined-up government, social work, dealing with climate change and terrorism. Finally it is argued that our journey to 2030 requires us to adopt an evolutionary observational approach using systems thinking. (shrink)

Sense of agency refers to the sense of initiating and controlling actions in order to influence events in the outside world. Recently, a distinction between implicit and explicit aspects of sense of agency has been proposed, analogous to distinctions found in other areas of cognition, notably learning. However, there is yet no strong evidence supporting separable implicit and explicit components of sense of agency. The so-called ‘Perruchet paradigm’ offers one of the few convincing demonstrations of separable implicit and explicit learning (...) systems. We adopted this approach to evaluate the implicit–explicit distinction in the context of a simple task in which outcomes were probabilistically caused by actions. In line with our initial predictions, we found evidence of a dissociation. We discuss the implications of this result for theories of sense of agency. (shrink)

Sense of agency refers to the sense of initiating and controlling actions in order to influence events in the outside world. Recently, a distinction between implicit and explicit aspects of sense of agency has been proposed, analogous to distinctions found in other areas of cognition, notably learning. However, there is yet no strong evidence supporting separable implicit and explicit components of sense of agency. The so-called ‘Perruchet paradigm’ offers one of the few convincing demonstrations of separable implicit and explicit learning (...) systems. We adopted this approach to evaluate the implicit–explicit distinction in the context of a simple task in which outcomes were probabilistically caused by actions. In line with our initial predictions, we found evidence of a dissociation. We discuss the implications of this result for theories of sense of agency. (shrink)