•  5
    Assistive Technology as Affective Scaffolding
    with Laura Candiotto
    Topoi 1-10. forthcoming.
    In this paper, we argue that the affective experience that permeates the employment of Assistive Technology (AT) in special needs education is crucial for the integration of AT. “AT integration” generally means the fluid and automatic employment of AT for fulfilling certain tasks. Pritchard et al. ( 2021 ) have proposed a more specific conceptualisation of AT integration by saying that AT is integrated when it is part of the user’s cognitive character. By discussing their proposal, we argue that…Read more
  •  4
    What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to generate a sense of th…Read more
  •  252
    Confucius and the varifocal stance
    with Karyn Lai
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    We put the bifocal stance theory (BST) into dialogue with the Confucian approach to ritual. The aim of the commentary is two-fold: To draw on BST to provide an explanatory framework for a Confucian approach to social learning and, while doing so, to show how Chinese (Confucian) philosophy can contribute to debates in cultural evolution. In response to: Jagiello, R., Heyes, C., & Whitehouse, H. (2022). Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain …Read more
  •  125
    Beyond Acting-With: Places as Agents?
    Constructivist Foundations 17 (3): 201-202. 2022.
    Stapleton M. (2022) Beyond acting-with: Places as agents? Constructivist Foundations 17(3): 201–202. Commentary on Laura Candiotto: Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature • I argue that Candiotto's account of loving presumes participating-with a system, rather than acting-with a system. I explore the implication of this: that to love a place we must understand places as agents.
  •  154
    Pain as the Performative Body
    Constructivist Foundations 17 (2): 156-158. 2022.
    Commentary on Smrdu M. (2022) Kaleidoscope of pain: What and how do you see through it. Constructivist Foundations 17(2): 136–147. I unpack Smrdu’s kaleidoscope metaphor, putting it into dialogue with enactive work on the performative body in order to cash out how it can capture the qualitative differences of the experience of chronic pain.
  •  379
    Enacting education
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (5): 887-913. 2020.
    Education can transform our cognitive world. Recent use of enactivist and enactivist-friendly work to propose understanding transformational learning in terms of affective reframing is a promising first step to understanding how we can have or inculcate transformational learning in different ways without relying on meta-cognition. Building on this work, I argue that to fully capture the kind of perspectival changes that occur in transformational learning we need to further distinguish between wa…Read more
  •  400
    What we know is enabled and constrained by what we are. Extended and enactive approaches to cognitive science explore the ways in which our embodiment enables us to relate to the world. On these accounts, rather than being merely represented in the brain, the world and our activity in it plays an on-going role in our perceptual and cognitive processes. In this chapter I outline some of the key influences on extended and enactive philosophy and cognitive science in order to generate a sense of th…Read more
  •  242
    Transaction or Transformation: Why do Philosophy in Prisons?
    with Dave Ward
    Journal of Prison Education and Reentry 7 (2): 214-226. 2021.
    Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists…Read more
  •  226
    Le emozione
    In Massimo Marraffa & Alfredo Paternoster (eds.), Scienze Cognitive: Un'introduzione Filosofica, . pp. 161-180. 2011.
    A chapter on emotion, translated into Italian by Massimo Marraffa for the book 'Scienze Cognitive: Un'introduzione Filosofica'. Published in 2011.
  •  31
    Micro-phenomenological Measures and Mechanisms
    Constructivist Foundations 16 (2): 234-236. 2021.
    I explore three questions that concern the micro-phenomenological part of the study, which I take to be a novel addition to the psychologist’s toolkit. What is it exactly that the micro-…
  •  219
    How the Body Narrows the Interaction with the Environment
    with Marcello Costantini
    In Yann Coello & Martin Fischer (eds.), Foundations of embodied cognition: Perceptual and emotional embodiment., . pp. 181-197. 2015.
    Embodiment matters to perception and action. Beyond the triviality that, under normal circumstances, we need a body in order to perceive the world and act in it, our particular embodiment, right here, right now, both enables and constrains our perception of possibilities for action. In this chapter, we provide empirical support for the idea that the structural and morphological features of the body can narrow the set of our possible interactions with the environment by shaping the way we perceiv…Read more
  •  216
    Putting Autopoietic Bodies Under Pressure
    Adaptive Behavior 28 (1): 45-46. 2020.
    This commentary puts pressure on the “resistance to dissipation” criterion for Villalobos and Razeto-Barry’s conception of “autopoietic bodies.” It argues that resistance to dissipation can only be assessed against the backdrop of certain background conditions. If this is right then it is no longer so clear that systems not considered as autopoietic bodies but merely as autopoietic systems do not fulfill the requirements of being an autopoietic body.
  •  172
    Leaky Levels and the Case for Proper Embodiment
    In G. Etzelmüller & C. Tewes (eds.), Embodiment in Evolution and Culture. pp. 17-30. 2016.
    In this chapter I present the thesis of Proper Embodiment: the claim that (at least some of) the details of our physiology matter to cognition and consciousness in a fundamental way. This thesis is composed of two sub-claims: (1) if we are to design, build, or evolve artificial systems that are cognitive in the way that we are, these systems will have to be internally embodied, and (2) the exploitation of the particular internal embodiment that allows systems to evolve solutions with greatly dec…Read more
  •  5626
    We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinning…Read more
  •  494
    Review of Van Norden's 'Classical Chinese for Everyone' from the perspective of a learner and non-specialist teacher of Chinese Philosophy.
  •  1269
    Andy Clark and his Critics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    In this volume, a range of high-profile researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and empirical cognitive science, critically engage with Clark's work across the themes of: Extended, Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Affective Minds; Natural Born Cyborgs; and Perception, Action, and Prediction. Daniel Dennett provides a foreword on the significance of Clark's work, and Clark replies to each section of the book, thus advancing current literature with original contributio…Read more
  •  582
    This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis. We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making . We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2) the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.
  •  403
    Proper embodiment: the role of the body in affect and cognition
    Dissertation, University of Edinburgh. 2011.
    Embodied cognitive science has argued that cognition is embodied principally in virtue of grossmorphological and sensorimotor features. This thesis argues that cognition is also internally embodied in affective and fine-grained physiological features whose transformative roles remain mostly unnoticed in contemporary cognitive science. I call this ‘proper embodiment’. I approach this larger subject by examining various emotion theories in philosophy and psychology. These tend to emphasise one of …Read more
  •  35
    Enactivism Embraces Ecological Psychology
    Constructivist Foundations 11 (2): 325-327. 2016.
    Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: The authors of the target article seem on the one hand to want to reprimand enactivists for not embracing ecological psychology, and on the other, to criticise them for taking on board some - but not all - of the principles of ecological psychology. In this commentary, I argue that the claim that enactivists have not embraced ecological psych…Read more
  •  1744
    Following the philosophy of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if d…Read more
  •  33
    Ethical Considerations Regarding the Use of Social Robots in the Fourth Age
    with Catrin Misselhorn and Ulrike Pompe
    Geropsych 26 (2): 121-133. 2013.
    The debate about the use of robots in the care of older adults has often been dominated by either overly optimistic visions (coming particularly from Japan), in which robots are seamlessly incorporated into society thereby enhancing quality of life for everyone; or by extremely pessimistic scenarios that paint such a future as horrifying. We reject this dichotomy and argue for a more differentiated ethical evaluation of the possibilities and risks involved with the use of social robots. In a cri…Read more
  •  662
    Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we c…Read more
  •  1371
    Steps to a "Properly Embodied" Cognitive Science
    Cognitive Systems Research 22 (June): 1-11. 2013.
    Cognitive systems research has predominantly been guided by the historical distinction between emotion and cognition, and has focused its efforts on modelling the “cognitive” aspects of behaviour. While this initially meant modelling only the control system of cognitive creatures, with the advent of “embodied” cognitive science this expanded to also modelling the interactions between the control system and the external environment. What did not seem to change with this embodiment revolution, how…Read more
  •  1167
    Feeling the strain: Predicting the third dimension of core affect
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (3): 166-167. 2012.
    This commentary (1) raises the question about the possible conflation of core affect with the neural representation of interoceptive changes in regard to whether biological value is subpersonal or must be experienced, and (2) proposes that Wundt’s third dimension of core affect – strain-relaxation – can be accounted for in the target model under a generalised predictive model of attention.
  •  837
    Upshot: Colombetti’s book is a contribution to the literature of at least three intellectual communities within philosophy and the cognitive sciences: affective science, embodiment, and enactivism. Despite the emphasis on embodiment over the past ten to fifteen years, and the resurgence of interest in emotion in the mid-to-late twentieth century, affect nevertheless remains underrepresented in the philosophy of mind and cognition, even in the embodiment and enactive communities. In her book, Col…Read more