David Spurrett

More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested epistemologists. We agree that world-representing states won’t pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead of belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the Environmental Complexity Thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (‘internal’ or ‘external’) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tokening expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated state, they can increase the rate at which the ‘right thing’ is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states. Preferences, even incomplete and noisy sets of them, are a fuel for success that will tend to be favoured when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when the organisms have complex behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs.

Abstract4E approaches to affective technology tend to focus on how ‘users’ manage their situated affectivity, analogously to how they help themselves cognitively through epistemic actions or using artefacts and scaffolding. Here I focus on cases where the function of affective technology is to exploit or manipulate the agent engaging with it. My opening example is the cigarette, where technological refinements have harmfully transformed the affective process of consuming nicotine. I proceed to develop case studies of two very different but also harmful affective technologies. Casinos and electronic gambling machines deploy computationally intensive scaffolding to shape the onset and continuation of gambling episodes. High-heeled shoes affectively engineer wearers’ relationships to their own embodied capacities and are predominantly expected to be worn by women. I conclude with a discussion of the need for study of affective technology to focus other-directed applications, some of which will serve competing or antagonistic interests.

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]

Affordances are standardly understood as perceived possibilities for interaction. What is afforded is in turn regarded as dependent on the properties of a body and its environment. Human bodies are nearly ubiquitously clothed, and clothing can change the capabilities of bodies. We argue that when clothing does this, it should be regarded as an affordance transforming technology. Clothing receives passing attention in remarks by Gibson, and some empirical work in ecological psychology uses worn items as experimental manipulations. We argue that the effects of clothing should be a central topic of investigation. We further show how the notion of clothing as an affordance transforming technology allows ecological psychology to accommodate feminist insights about the restrictive or oppressive nature of some gendered clothing norms. We aim to show that if ecological psychology is to be a general framework for thinking about human perception and activity, then it should consider clothing, because of the differences it can make to what is afforded. It should do so critically because the ways that clothing transforms affordances are sometimes discriminating in that what people are expected to wear and what differences that makes aren’t independent of how they’re classified in systems of power and oppression.

Arguments that cognition or minds can be extended regularly invoke an analogy with Dawkins’ argument that phenotypes can be extended. I argue that there are two neglected ways in which those two boundary-breaking theses are complementary. Much of the argument of The Extended Phenotype concerns parasite phenotypes expressed in the behaviour of host organisms. But the options Dawkins considers for this extended manipulation are cognitively internalist. If we view cognition as extended, we can recognise a wider range of vulnerabilities for exploitation. On the other hand, the analogies drawn with Dawkins almost always emphasise the benefit to the individual agent in being cognitively extended. Taking Dawkins’ concerns about manipulation and exploitation more seriously leads to a more contested, less optimistic picture of extended cognition and minds. This second line of thinking follows Sterelny’s lead, but I argue that hostility presents worse and more pervasive problems that he allows.

This inaugural lecture was delivered at the Howard College Campus of UKZN on 2 April 2008. In it I do three things. First I sketch some arguments in favour of a naturalist conception of philosophy. The conclusions that I’m after are that philosophy is not an autonomous enterprise, so that it had better be continuous with scientific enquiry if it is to get anywhere. A supplementary claim I defend briefly is that the natural and social sciences should be viewed as more integrated than they usually are. Second, I offer some reasons for rejecting all identifiable forms of social constructivism about knowledge. Finally, I say something about what ‘African Scholarship’ might mean, given the preceding considerations. There I briefly defend the claim that there is no epistemically interesting sense in which there is such a thing as African knowledge

More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary accounts of the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values available actions given discriminated states of world and agent. The argument is an application of the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected utilities can, under specified general conditions, be a powerful design solution to the problem of efficiently allocating the capacities of an agent. Preferences are for efficient action selection, and count as a ‘fuel for success’ in the sense urged by Godfrey-Smith for true beliefs. They will tend to be favoured by selection when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when organisms have large behavioural repertoires with heterogeneous returns and costs.The rationale suggested here is conditional, especially on contingencies in what design options are available to selection and on trade-offs associated with the costs of generating and processing representations of value. The unqualified efficiency rationale for preferences suggests that organisms should represent expected utilities in a comprehensive and consistent way, but none of them do. In the final stages of the paper I consider some of the ways design trade-offs compromise the implementation of preferences in organisms that have them.

[A slightly revised version of this paper has been accepted by the BJPS] More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary scenarios accounting for the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values of discriminated states, available actions, or action-state pairings. The argument is an application the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected utilities can, under specified general conditions, be a powerful design solution to the problem of allocating the capacities of an agent in an efficient way. Preferences are for efficient action selection, and are a ‘fuel for success’ in the sense urged by Godfrey-Smith for true beliefs. They will tend to be favoured by selection when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when organisms have rich behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs.   The rationale suggested here is conditional, especially on contingencies in what design options are available to selection and on trade-offs associated with the costs of generating and processing representations of value. The unqualified efficiency rationale for preferences suggests that organisms should represent expected utilities in a comprehensive and consistent way, but none of them do. In the final stages of the paper I consider some of the ways in which design trade-offs compromise the implementation of preferences in organisms that have them.

There is an enduring tension in thinking about the architecture of systems that select behaviours, including evolved organisms. One line of reasoning supports convergence in control systems and conversion of the values of all options into a common currency, in part because this seems the best or only way of trading off costs and benefits associated with outcomes of varying types. A competing consideration supports parallelism or other forms of fragmentation, because of inefficiencies associated with integration, and suspicion towards general-purpose cognitive systems. In addition, recent neuroscience has given particular attention to the question of how partly independent ‘habit based’ and ‘planning based’ decision-systems might interact. The issues here are, at least in part, a special case of the more general integration versus parallelism tension. This tension provides a useful framework for thinking about the implementation of different kinds of sensitivity to risks of various types, the variety of mechanisms by means of which risk sensitivity might be modulated, and how risk might be traded off against other components of value or disincentive. I describe the tension, briefly survey some of the relevant empirical evidence, and conclude with tentative observations on the topic of risk.

The status of fundamental laws is an important issue when deciding between the three broad ontological options of fundamentalism (of which the thesis that physics is complete is typically a sub-type), emergentism, and disorder or promiscuous realism. Cartwright’s assault on fundamental laws which argues that such laws do not, and cannot, typically state the facts, and hence cannot be used to support belief in a fundamental ontological order, is discussed in this context. A case is made in defence of a moderate form of fundamentalism, which leaves open the possibility of emergentism, but sets itself against the view that our best ontology is disordered. The argument, taking its cue from Bhaskar, relies on a consideration of the epistemic status of experiments, and the question of the possible generality of knowledge gained in unusual or controlled environments.

This paper concerns the question of how to specify what is to count as physical for the purposes of debates concerning either physicalism or the completeness of physics. I argue that what is needed from an account of the physical depends primarily on the particular issue at stake, and that the demand for a general a priori specification of the physical is misplaced. A number of attempts to say what should be counted as physical are defended from recent attacks by Chris Daly, and a specific proposal due to David Papineau developed and extended. I argue that this approach is more than suitable for the debates for which it is intended.

Sterelny (2003) develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that belief-like states are natural elaborations of simpler control systems, called detection systems, which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states exhibit robust tracking (sensitivity to multiple environmental states), and response breadth (occasioning a wider range of behaviours). The development of robust tracking and response-breadth depend partly on properties of the informational environment. In a transparent environment the functional relevance of states of the world is directly detectable. Outside transparent environments, selection can favour decoupled representations. Sterelny maintains that these arguments do not generalise to desire. Unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism, he argues, are selected for transparency. Parts of a single organism gain nothing from deceiving one another, but gain significantly from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny’s reasons for saying that his treatment of belief does not generalise to motivation (desires, or preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the motivational salience of external states suggests possible gains for systematic tracking of outcome values in any system in which selection has driven the production of belief-like states.

A recurring claim in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the values of different available options are represented. There is striking variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety of ways, some of them incompatible. This topic deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons. Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological coincidence because most of the claims are competing explanations either of manifest pattern in choices, or of order in the processes producing choice. We can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. There are, finally, seriously opposed positions about the relationships between the pattern facts and the process facts. There are philosophical positions both favouring and opposing a common currency. But direct consideration of the abstract relationships between claims about common currencies across scientific settings, and the arguments for and against these claims, is relatively rare. There is, though, much of philosophical interest to be found here

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact.