Shaun Gallagher

I want to explore one small corner of the concept of mental causality. It’s the corner where discussions about mind-body interactions and epiphenomenalism take place. My basic contention is that these discussions are framed in the wrong terms because they are infected by a mind-body dualism which defines the question of mental causality in a classic or standard way: How does a mental event cause my body to do what it does? Setting the question in this way has consequences for ongoing interdisciplinary (psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical) discussions of mental causation, as well as free will, and for our understanding of what we mean by a sense of agency for action. These concepts, in turn, have much to do with our understanding of what goes wrong in certain instances of psychopathology. I’ll try to get to this issue in the final part of my paper. Let me first set the historical scene of what I am calling this standard way of understanding the problem of mental causality.

This special issue of Janus Head explores a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions of the theme, the situated body. The body, of course, is always situated in so far as it is a living and experiencing body. Being situated in this sense is different from simply being located someplace in the way a non-living, non-experiencing object is located. That the body is always situated involves certain kinds of physical and social interactions, and it means that experience is always both physically and socially situated. The interesting question is not only how this works (what precisely it means to be situated), but whether and how the answer to that question changes from one situation to another. It seems reasonable to say that the body is situated differently in different situations, and that this difference may not be simply a difference in the situational content but a difference in how the body processes being situated precisely because the circumstances are so different. The question is not just about differences in situations, but differences in situatedness. Is it possible that the body is X-situated (in terms of its situatedness) in the task of solving a mathematical problem, but is Y-situated when it is engaged in dancing with another person? And if, as seems obvious, there are significant physiological and experiential differences involved in being in these different situations, are some of these differences due to being X-situated, for example, rather than Y-situated? This collection of essays gathers together investigations of the situated body that address such variations in what it means to be situated. These investigations cross theory and practice, expression and performance and interweave disciplines and practices such as philosophical anthropology, cognitive science, phenomenology, architecture and painting, and artistic performances like dance and music. They describe the body as an experiencing enactive agent embedded in various pragmatic and social circumstances, the body as rigidly circumscribed in art and science, and the body as extended into its environment through the high technology that is more and more defining our experiences and our relationships..

The concept of a socially extended mind suggests that our cognitive processes are extended not simply by the various tools and technologies we use, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions and, more systematically, by institutions that, like tools and technologies, enable and sometimes constitute our cognitive processes. In this article we explore the potential of this concept to facilitate the development of a critical neuroscience. We explicate the concept of cognitive institution and suggest that science itself is a good example. Science, through various practices and rules, shapes our cognitive activity so as to constitute a certain type of knowledge, packaged with relevant skills and techniques. To develop this example, we focus on neuroscience, its cultural impact, and the various institutional entanglements that complicate its influence on reframing conceptions of self and subjectivity, and on defining what questions count as important and what kind of answers will be valued.

Hidden away in the remote corners of one of the largest parts of Husserl's Kˆrper, if we can use that word to translate Corpus, there is ein Leib , an animate body of text that reverberates not only with some of Husserl's other little known texts, but also with some of the most recent discoveries in neuroscience. These texts suggest a theory of intersubjectivity, or what psychologists term social cognition. Let me start with a proviso: whether Husserl ever fully settled on this theory is completely open to interpretation. Accordingly, I will leave it to Husserlian scholars to determine whether this is a position that Husserl actually or ultimately embraces, either in the years 1906 through 1913 when he writes some of these texts, or later when he writes other related texts. The texts in question are from Husserl's early years and they are rather tentative and reactive in nature, since he was just beginning to think of these problems, and he was responding to proposals put forward by Lipps and Meinung. That's also why I claim that these texts suggest a theory of social cognition rather than anything like a pure phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Husserl was trying to work out ways to counter the theories of Lipps and Meinung, and his reflections, I think, should count as phenomenologically informed theory.