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89General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognitionSynthese 196 (12): 5231-5251. 2019.In this paper, we address the question of how an agent can guide its behavior with respect to aspects of the sociomaterial environment that are not sensorily present. A simple example is how an animal can relate to a food source while only sensing a pheromone, or how an agent can relate to beer, while only the refrigerator is directly sensorily present. Certain cases in which something is absent have been characterized by others as requiring ‘higher’ cognition. An example of this is how during t…Read more
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86Worlds Apart? Reassessing von Uexküll’s Umwelt in Embodied Cognition with Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty, and DeleuzeJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 28 (1): 1-26. 2020.Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864-1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives tha…Read more
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80Embodiment and EnactivismIn Benjamin D. Young & Carolyn Dicey Jennings (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, Routledge. 2021.Typically, we think of the brain as responsible for cognition. But the brain is, importantly, embedded in a body—a body that moves around and interacts with features of the environment. What role, then, does the body play in cognition? Some philosophers would argue that it has no significant role in determining how we think about cognitive processing. But others argue that the body is fundamental to cognition, because the body is deeply involved with cognitive processes such as acting and percei…Read more
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71What would it take for an artificial agent to be treated as having moral value? As a first step toward answering this question, we ask what it would take for an artificial agent to be capable of the sort of autonomous, adaptive social behavior that is characteristic of the animals that humans interact with. We propose that this sort of capacity is best measured by what we call the Embodied Turing Test. The Embodied Turing test is a test in which intelligence is operationally defined in terms of …Read more
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66Affordances and Intentionality: Reply to RobertsJournal of Mind and Behavior 30 (4): 301. 2009.In this essay we respond to some criticisms of the guidance theory of representation offered by Tom Roberts. We argue that although Roberts’ criticisms miss their mark, he raises the important issue of the relationship between affordances and the action-oriented representations proposed by the guidance theory. Affordances play a prominent role in the anti-representationalist accounts offered by theorists of embodied cognition and ecological psychology, and the guidance theory is motivated in par…Read more
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66Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind Franklin and Marshall College Lancaster, PA 17604-3003 USA<sub></sub>
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62Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Extended CognitionIn Matthias Jung & Roman Madzia (eds.), Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Intersubjectivity to Symbolic Articulation, De Gruyter. pp. 57-72. 2016.
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60The animal-environment systemIn Y. Coello & M. H. Fischer (eds.), Foundations of Embodied Cognition: Volume 1: Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment, Routledge. pp. 59-74. 2016.Embodied cognition is a well-established and increasingly influential branch of the cognitive, neural, and psychological sciences. Unlike embodied cognition, extended cognition is not as well-established or influential. Our goal is to defend the idea that if cognition is truly embodied, then it is embodied in systems, and if it is embodied in systems, then it extends beyond animal boundaries. In order to demonstrate this, we situate the idea of extended cognitive systems in a historical context.…Read more
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59Creating Time: Social Collaboration in Music ImprovisationTopics in Cognitive Science 10 (1): 95-119. 2018.Musical improvisation is a natural case of human pattern formation, and Walton and colleagues investigate the way that different contextual constraints affect patterns of improvisation and their aesthetic quality. The authors find that coordination patterns are more diversified between two musicians when the musical space in which to improvise is relatively more constrained. They also find that listeners experience more diversified, complementary patterns between musicians as more enjoyable and …Read more
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58A Stroll Through The Worlds Of Animats And Humans: Review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again by Andy Clark (review)PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 4. 1998.Every few years Andy Clark writes a book designed to help philosophers of mind get up to speed with the most recent developments in cognitive science. In his first two such books, Microcognition (1989) and Associative Engines (1993), Clark introduced the then-cutting-edge field of connectionist networks. In his newest one, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997), he once again provides a concise, readable introduction to the state of the art. This time, though, Clark has…Read more
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51Radical embodiment in two directionsSynthese 198 (Suppl 9): 2175-2190. 2018.Radical embodied cognitive science is split into two camps: the ecological approach and the enactive approach. We propose that these two approaches can be brought together into a productive synthesis. The key is to recognize that the two approaches are pursuing different but complementary types of explanation. Both approaches seek to explain behavior in terms of the animal–environment relation, but they start at opposite ends. Ecological psychologists pursue an ontological strategy. They begin b…Read more
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51In a way that is rarely even attempted, and even more rarely actually pulled off, Susan Hurley, in her book Consciousness in Action, brings scientific ideas into contact with mainstream philosophy. It is not at all unusual for empirical results from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience to be raised in discussion of issues in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind--Dennett and the Churchlands, for example, have been doing so for years. But Hurley attempts to draw empirical result…Read more
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48Several articles have recently appeared arguing that there really are no viable alternatives to mechanistic explanation in the biological sciences. This claim is meant to hold both in principle and in practice. The basic claim is that any explanation of a particular feature of a biological system, including dynamical explanations, must ultimately be grounded in mechanistic explanation. There are several variations on this theme, some stronger and some weaker. In order to avoid equivocation and m…Read more
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47With the most profound misgivings. Interview with Anthony P. ChemeroAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (2): 17-27. 2012.An overview of: "Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell. Understanding the feel of consciousness".
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46Thomas Stoffregen's "Affordances and Events" makes many points that are forgotten all too often--if they are realized at all--by adherents to the ecological perspective in psychology. He is to be applauded for this. But he compiles these points to make a very strong and very sweeping claim about the validity of a broad swath of research that is done by ecological psychologists. In particular, he argues for the following conclusion: "More generally, I have suggested that events may not be perceiv…Read more
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45Against Smallism And LocalismStudies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 41 (1): 9-23. 2015.The question whether cognition ever extends beyond the head is widely considered to be an empirical issue. And yet, all the evidence amassed in recent years has not sufficed to settle the debate. In this paper we suggest that this is because the debate is not really an empirical one, but rather a matter of definition. Traditional cognitive science can be identified as wedded to the ideals of “smallism” and “localism”. We criticize these ideals and articulate a case in favor of extended cognition…Read more
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43Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”Synthese 198 (Suppl 1): 115-136. 2019.A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instan…Read more
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42Editorial Introduction: Consciousness Unbound: Going Beyond the BrainJournal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4): 6-15. 2015.
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42Empirical Evidence for Extended Cognitive SystemsCognitive Science 45 (11). 2021.Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.
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38Reconsidering perceptual constancyPhilosophical Psychology 35 (7): 1057-1071. 2022.The world shows some degree of invariance, and we perceive this invariance despite a lot of variation generated locally by our movements, changes in illumination, and the way in which our sense organs react to stimulation. Generally, philosophy and psychology each explain our perception of invariance through the notion of ‘perceptual constancy’. According to the traditional definition, perceptual constancies are capacities to perceive the objective (i.e., perceiver- and context-independent) loca…Read more
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35Interaction-Dominant Dynamics and Extended EmbodimentConstructivist Foundations 9 (1): 88-89. 2013.Open peer commentary on the article “Investigating Extended Embodiment Using a Computational Model and Human Experimentation” by Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka & Takashi Ikegami. Upshot: First, we comment on a potential weakness highlighted by the use of self-reporting in the human-coupled windmill experiment as described in the target article. Second, we suggest that the authors treat their windmill models as soft-assembled dynamical systems. This would allow them to investigate extended body schem…Read more
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33Phenomenology: An IntroductionPolity. 2015.This comprehensive new book introduces the core history of phenomenology and assesses its relevance to contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. From critiques of artificial intelligence research programs to ongoing work on embodiment and enactivism, the authors trace how phenomenology has produced a valuable framework for analyzing cognition and perception, whose impact on contemporary psychological and scientific research, and philosophical debates continues to grow. …Read more
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33What the Jeweller’s Hand Tells the Jeweller’s Brain: Tool Use, Creativity and Embodied CognitionPhilosophy and Technology 32 (2): 283-302. 2019.The notion that human activity can be characterised in terms of dynamic systems is a well-established alternative to motor schema approaches. Key to a dynamic systems approach is the idea that a system seeks to achieve stable states in the face of perturbation. While such an approach can apply to physical activity, it can be challenging to accept that dynamic systems also describe cognitive activity. In this paper, we argue that creativity, which could be construed as a ‘cognitive’ activity par …Read more
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32A recent set of experiments of ours supported the notion of a transition in experience from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-tohand proposed by phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger. They were also an experimental demonstration of an extended cognitive system. We generated and then temporarily disrupted an interaction- dominant system that spans a human participant, a computer mouse, and a task performed on the computer screen. Our claim that this system was interaction dominant was base…Read more
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30Thinking with other mindsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.We applaud the ambition of Veissière et al.'s account of cultural learning, and the attempt to ground higher order thinking in embodied theory. However, the account is limited by loose terminology, and by its commitment to a view of the child learner as inference-maker. Vygotsky offers a more powerful view of cultural learning, one that is fully compatible with embodiment.
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28The emperor has no blanket!Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.While we applaud Bruineberg et al.'s analysis of the differences between Markov blankets and Friston blankets, we think it is not carried out to its ultimate consequences. There are reasons to think that, once Friston blankets are accepted as a theoretical construct, they do not do the work proponents of free energy principle (FEP) attribute to them. The emperor is indeed naked.
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24Punctuation equilibrium and optimization: An a-life modelD. Blank (Ed.) Proceedings of the 2000 Midwest Ai and Cognitive Society Conference. forthcoming.
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21In Favor of ImproprietyConstructivist Foundations 15 (3): 213-216. 2020.Heras-Escribano argues against the normative character of affordances from a framework that relies on a Wittgensteinian notion of normativity and the incompatibility of direct perception, …
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
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Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |