Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so (...) that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.V. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 48-59.

In this paper I argue against Brandom's two-ply theory of action. For Brandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitment and then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is social because the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferred in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments and a non-rational capacity to reliably (...) respond to these commitments, we should see action as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practically and a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward this alternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom's rationalist brand of Pragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as social not only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills. (shrink)

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, (...) it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better. (shrink)

This paper discusses two perspectives, each of which recognises the importance of environmental resources in enhancing and amplifying our cognitive capacity. One is the Clark–Chalmers model, extended further by Clark and others. The other derives from niche construction models of evolution, models which emphasise the role of active agency in enhancing the adaptive fit between agent and world. In the human case, much niche construction is epistemic: making cognitive tools and assembling other informational resources that support and scaffold intelligent action. (...) I shall argue that extended mind cases are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding, and while the extended mind picture is not false, the niche construction model is a more helpful framework for understanding human action. (shrink)