Shaun Gallagher

In a series of lectures on Ethical Know-How, Francisco Varela explains that he is venturing 'into the territory of ethical thought ... Ethics is a new terrain for me, and what I have to say here must be taken in the sphere of adventure more than anything else'. On this adventure Varela is very much influenced by Hubert Dreyfus and his analysis of expertise. Similar to the way that Dreyfus attempts to formulate an ethical theory derived from his analysis of expertise, Varela attempts to do this based on his enactive principles. I'll argue that, despite being inspired by Dreyfus' account of expert practice and embodied coping, and retaining the term 'ethical expertise, Varela offered important correctives to the specific limitations that can be found in Dreyfus's view. I'll also argue that we can resolve some tensions in Varela's account, and extend it to include a skillful form of deliberation that can play an important role in setting up environments or even rules of society, which through the enactive reciprocity of relations between agentive organism and environment, can facilitate our actions and make us who we are.

Based on a qualitative study about expert musicianship, this paper distinguishes three ways of interacting by putting them in relation to the sense of agency. Following Pacherie, it highlights that the phenomenology of shared agency undergoes a drastic transformation when musicians establish a sense of we-agency. In particular, the musicians conceive of the performance as one single action towards which they experience an epistemic privileged access. The implications of these results for a theory of collective intentionality are discussed by addressing two general questions: When several individuals share an intention, does this fact secure plural self-knowledge? And is it possible to have non-observational knowledge about a collective action? It is claimed that the results drawn from the study about expert musicianship supports negative answers to both questions.

Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions.

The stated aim of cryptocurrencies is to free the monetary system from the need to trust financial intermediaries, by relying on incentive design and technology. Many descriptive studies, however, have questioned cryptocurrencies’ delivery on the promise of trustlessness. This paper promotes a normative analysis of trust in cryptocurrencies by discussing (i) whether trust is in principle eliminable, and (ii) whether trustlessness is in itself a desirable goal. These issues are closely related, we argue, to the further issue of what kind of institutions cryptocurrencies represent. We discuss the cognitive functions played by cryptocurrencies through the lens of the “extended mind” hypothesis in the philosophy of mind and hence conceive of cryptocurrencies as mind-extending institutions. As the models of institutional mind extension differ in the fiduciary bond they assume exists between individuals and institutional resources, we compare the reliance-based model of “scaffolding institutions” with the trust-based model of “cognitive institutions,” showing that the ineliminability and desirability of trust lead to seeing cryptocurrencies as instances of the latter. In the end, our discussion suggests that trust is a necessary component of cryptocurrencies’ cognitive functions and its promotion helps to perform such cognitive functions more effectively and sustainably.

We argue that theory-of-mind (ToM) approaches, such as “theory theory” and “simulation theory”, are both problematic and not needed. They account for neither our primary and pervasive way of engaging with others nor the true basis of our folk psychological understanding, even when narrowly construed. Developmental evidence shows that young infants are capable of grasping the purposeful intentions of others through the perception of bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions etc. Trevarthen’s notion of primary intersubjectivity can provide a theoretical framework for understanding these capabilities and his notion of secondary intersubjectivity shows the importance of pragmatic contexts for infants starting around one year of age. The recent neuroscience of resonance systems (i.e., mirror neurons, shared representations) also supports this view. These ideas are worked out in the context of an embodied “Interaction Theory” of social cognition. Still, for more sophisticated intersubjective interactions in older children and adults, one might argue that some form of ToM is required. This thought is defused by appeal to narrative competency and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (or NPH). We propose that repeated encounters with narratives of a distinctive kind is the normal route through which children acquire an understanding of the forms and norms that enable them to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. A potential objection to this hypothesis is that it presupposes ToM abilities. Interaction Theory is deployed once again to answer this by providing an alternative approach to understanding basic narrative competency and its development.

In this paper we attempt to advance the enactive discourse on perception by highlighting the role of bodily affects as prenoetic constraints on perceptual experience. Enactivists argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies (as in Noë 2004) are important contributions to the enactive account. Yet this is an incomplete story since sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. Before directly addressing the issue of affect in perception, we explain our peculiar, low-level conception of affect as a form of world-involving intentionality that modulates (minimally) bodily behavior without necessarily possessing informational value of any kind. We then address the deficiency concerning affect in enactive accounts of perception by examining some exemplary forms of bodily affect that constrain perception. We show that bodily affect significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our contact with the world in our perceptually operative attentive outlook, in a kind of perceptual interest or investment, and in social perception.

The Self and its Disorders develops a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach to the formulation of an “integrative” perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or strictly on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience and builds on a perspective that understands self as a self-pattern—a pattern of processes that include bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive-psychological, reflective, narrative, intersubjective, ecological, and normative factors. It provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of self-pattern, framed in terms of dynamical organization. It then draws on phenomenological, developmental, clinical, and experimental evidence to propose a method for studying the effects of psychopathologies on the self-pattern, and includes discussions of network theory, predictive processing models, and the role of narrative. This book explores the hypothesis that psychiatric disorders are self-disorders, and includes specific discussions of schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, borderline personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and autism spectrum disorder, as well as traumatic effects of torture and solitary confinement. Other topics include diagnostic classification, symptom overlap, and transdiagnostic complexity. Several chapters explore a variety of philosophical issues that relate to therapeutic approaches, including deep brain stimulation, meditation-based interventions, and the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

This essay introduces the 40th Annual Spindel Conference special issue on relational autonomy and collective intentionality. Autonomy is often discussed in contexts of individual intention formation and moral decision making. When we consider collective intention formation and the decision-making practices of institutions, a number of questions can be raised: How does the individual autonomy of participants affect the collective process? How do such collective processes modulate the autonomy of the individuals involved? How do institutional decisions and practices affect individual autonomy more generally—in what way do they enhance or undermine autonomy? Is there a significant difference in how we answer these questions if we already think of autonomy as relational rather than in a traditional individualistic way?

Play is a frequent and relevant activity during childhood, and developmental psychologists agree that it offers a unique window on development. Play, however, remains a fuzzy concept, and difficulties persist in its definition, often leading to obstacles in building and comparing experimental studies. This may be due to widespread tendencies to define play by referring to non-observable inner states, to consider playing something that occurs in the head rather than in-the-world and to overreliance on developmental stages. Enactive approaches to child play have instead recently stressed the importance of play contexts, considering child play an activity in-the-world rather than a mental state, thereby de-intellectualizing play and pretense. Along these lines, in this paper the authors propose a novel approach to the definition of play types by considering the roles of organism, environment, and task constraints, within the framework of Material Engagement Theory. Focusing on the material world surrounding the child and the interactions which characterize play, we critically review the strategy of resorting to non-observable categories in the study of play, and we propose a new model (the Kaleidoscope Model) for play analysis.

Phenomenology involves a first‐person approach to consciousness. Husserl initiated phenomenology as a transcendental investigation in opposition to naturalism. It includes a methodologically guided analysis of intentionality as the primary characteristic of consciousness. Phenomenology also addresses the issue of the phenomenal character of consciousness tied to the notion of pre‐reflective self‐awareness, to embodiment, and to variations in intentional structures. It also offers a detailed analysis of the temporal nature of consciousness which helps to explain not only how one can have a coherent experience of an object, but also how the subject of experience – a pre‐reflective self – can maintain identity over time. Husserl and later phenomenologists, like Merleau‐Ponty, emphasized the embodied nature of consciousness in a way that foreshadowed recent enactivist accounts.

This chapter summarizes Husserl's phenomenology of time consciousness and situates it in the larger context of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century considerations about the psychology of temporal experience. Then, in an attempt to place it in a more contemporary context, it suggests an enactive interpretation of this phenomenology, first by extending Husserl's analysis of consciousness to bodily action, and, second, by considering the rethinking of the notion of primal impression suggested by Husserl himself. The intrinsic temporality, found in bodily movement and action, manifests itself at both the sub‐personal and the personal levels of analysis. For Husserl, only because there is a Präsenzzeit, a temporally extended conscious act, can there be something like a specious present, a temporally extended sensed content.

In this paper, we first review recent arguments about the direct perception of the intentions and emotions of others, emphasizing the role of embodied interaction. We then consider a possible objection to the direct perception hypothesis from social psychology, related to phenomena like ‘dehumanization’ and ‘implicit racial bias’, which manifest themselves on a basic bodily level. On the background of such data, one might object that social perception cannot be direct since it depends on and can in fact be interrupted by a set of cultural beliefs. We argue, however, that far from threatening the idea of direct perception, these findings clearly contradict the idea of hardwired theory of mind modules. More generally, we suggest that in order to further the understanding of social cognition we must take seriously insights about in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena, all of which are currently neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In spite of the relatively open communicative processes which, on many accounts, are posited between hierarchical levels of the cognitive system in order to facilitate the minimization of prediction errors, perceptual illusions seemingly allow prediction errors to rule. Even if, at the top, we have reliable and secure knowledge that the lines in the MLI are equal, or that the rubber hand in the RHI is not our hand, the system seems unable to correct for sensory errors that form the illusion. We argue that the standard PEM explanation based on a short-circuiting principle doesn’t work. This is the idea that where there are general statistical regularities in the environment there is a kind of short circuiting such that relevant priors are relegated to lower-level processing so that information from higher levels is not exchanged (Ogilvie and Carruthers, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7:721–742, 2016), or is not as precise as it should be (Hohwy, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Such solutions (without convincing explanation) violate the idea of open communication and/or they over-discount the reliable and secure knowledge that is in the system. We propose an alternative, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) solution. We argue that PEM fails to take into account the ‘structural resistance’ introduced by material and cultural factors in the broader cognitive system.

The full scope of enactivist approaches to cognition includes not only a focus on sensory-motor contingencies and physical affordances for action, but also an emphasis on affective factors of embodiment and intersubjective affordances for social interaction. This strong conception of embodied cognition calls for a new way to think about the role of the brain in the larger system of brain-body-environment. We ask whether recent work on predictive coding offers a way to think about brain function in an enactive system, and we suggest that a positive answer is possible if we interpret predictive coding in a more enactive way, i.e., as involved in the organism’s dynamic adjustments to its environment.

After a brief review of different definitions and types of loneliness I offer an analysis of the concept of existential loneliness and its philosophical background. In contrast to the interpersonal aspects of other types of loneliness, existential loneliness has been characterized as an intrapersonal default state of incommunicability or profound aloneness, part of or based on a fundamental ontological or transcendental structure in human existence. There are both conceptual and practical issues with the notion of existential loneliness, with implications for psychotherapy. I offer a critical approach, and argue that there is no good philosophical basis for this conception of existential loneliness, and that although loneliness can be existential in some respect, it typically manifests itself in interpersonal contexts, and should not be considered a fundamental ontological structure of human existence.

I trace back the relation between phenomenology and pragmatism from contemporary discussions about a pragmatic turn in embodied-enactive cognitive science to the earliest associations between the phenomenologies of Husserl and Peirce. I argue against the claim that there has been a pragmatic turn per se in either phenomenology or cognitive science. Pragmatism, and a form of phenomenological pragmatism had already been informing debates in cognitive science from the very beginning. On the one hand, the recent phenomenological and pragmatic emphases in embodied-enactive cognitive science represent more of a phenomenological turn in cognitive science than a pragmatic turn. On the other hand, since various versions of phenomenology were already operating in cognitive science, even if they were operating in opposition to the establishment view, embodied-enactive views do not involve a phenomenological turn. It may be better to say that such views continue and build upon the phenomenology and pragmatism that had been informing ongoing debates in the study of the mind. Not only can we trace a close connection between phenomenology and pragmatism all the way back to the beginnings of these philosophical approaches, they continue to operate in a dialectical fashion throughout their history.

In this paper we consider the importance of trust, in the context of economic institutions, and specifically with respect to questions about market mechanisms and the role of social interactions. We review recent advances in institutional economics closely tied to developments in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, involving extended and enactive cognition. We argue that the analysis of different conceptions of institutional mind extension, in Denzau and North’s shared mental models, Clark’s extended mind, and a more enactive approach that emphasizes the importance of social interaction and personal relationships, can benefit from Kathrine Hawley’s distinction between reliability and trust. Institutional arrangements based solely on the reliability of impersonal mechanisms can lead to a variety of social pathologies and, at the extreme, a form of cognitive atrophy, all of which can undermine the sustainability of institutions. Even if trust comes with risks and some degree of unpredictability, it turns out to be a necessary glue-like ingredient in the constitution of social institutions.