Witold M. Wachowski

The organization of the cyclical open-air festival Night of Culture in Lublin in cooperation with a research group works on two levels. The first is the level of an offer of experiences and reflections for the audience of the Night of Culture. The second is the level of research – social and other – on the design, implementation and effects of the first level. On both levels, a phenomenon plays an important role that can be described from the perspective of cognitive ecology with the term "affordance." A systematic analysis of this can lead to the third level: a meta-analysis of the street festival under discussion. I will not undertake such a complex task in this text, which is partly a review and then a "report", but I will make a brief reconstruction of the conceptual and design work of the Affordances Activity, in which I participated significantly and regularly, as well as will consider the stage of the production of designed objects and their subsequent operation during this year's (2023) edition of the Night of Culture, in which a group of volunteers (students of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University) played an important role. Remarks of the aforementioned meta-research dimension of the project constitute a wide margin of the article.

Artykuł ten jest recenzją książki Mechanizmy predykcyjne i ich normatywność, skoncentrowaną na trzech zakresach tej publikacji. Pierwszy zakres obejmuje kontekst wydawniczy, czyli kwestię zapotrzebowania na taką pracę, biorąc pod uwagę język publikacji, jej dostępność itd. Drugi zakres dotyczy akademickiego potencjału tej książki jako obszernego opracowania koncepcji przetwarzania predykcyjnego. Trzeci zakres natomiast wiąże się z główną ambicją Autora książki i jednocześnie najbardziej wymagającym wątkiem tej pracy, jako studium problemu normatywności w ujęciu koncepcji przetwarzania predykcyjnego i wyjaśniania (neo)mechanistycznego.

W artykule rozważa się, na ile normatywność jest usytuowana w ludzkich ekosystemach biologicznych i kulturowych, z naciskiem na rolę artefaktów. Podstawowe pytanie dotyczy tego, czy afordancje – różnie konceptualizowane – mogą mieć charakter normatywny. Tekst krótko wprowadza do ekologii poznawczej oraz psychologii ekologicznej, po czym przedstawia możliwość zastosowania klasycznej teorii afordancji do normatywności wraz z krytyką, a następnie – próbę modyfikacji tego ujęcia przez odwołanie się do afordancji społecznych i kulturowych. Przegląd ten i płynące z niego wnioski uzupełniono oryginalną propozycją wzbogacenia badań nad normatywnością afordancji o analizę ich struktur oraz roli projektowania interakcji człowiek–artefakt.

Cognitive ecology as a research tradition in cognitive science: The article presents cognitive ecology as a research tradition in cognitive science, under which studies on embodied cognition and various forms of situated cognition are conducted. At the same time, the basic heuristic of cognitive ecology and its relationship to methodological individualism are identified. The paper includes the history of the concept of “cognitive ecology”, historical approaches preceding this research tradition, as well as an outline of contemporary research related to it. At the end of the article, the role of the ecological heuristic is summarized.

Artykuł ten jest recenzją książki „Mechanizmy predykcyjne i ich normatywność”, skoncentrowaną na trzech zakresach tej publikacji. Pierwszy zakres obejmuje kontekst wydawniczy, czyli kwestię zapotrzebowania na taką pracę, biorąc pod uwagę język publikacji, jej dostępności itd. Drugi zakres dotyczy akademickiego potencjału tej książki jako obszernego opracowania koncepcji przetwarzania predykcyjnego. Trzeci zakres natomiast wiąże się z główną ambicją Autora książki i jednocześnie najbardziej wymagającym wątkiem tej pracy, jako studium problemu normatywności w ujęciu koncepcji przetwarzania predykcyjnego i wyjaśniania (neo)mechanistycznego.

My basic research question – well beyond the scope of this book – is what the relationships between cognitive processes and cultural structures and practices are. Here, I get closer to answering this question in the following five steps: (1) I present cognitive ecology as a research tradition in cognitive science, characteristic of the approaches to wide cognition, i.e., embodied, embedded, extended, ecological psychology, enactivism, etc. (2) I distinguish two dimensions of the distributed cognition approach: as a theoretical framework and as a task model, focusing on the former. This distinction has so far eluded cognitive science theorists, and this approach has not been sufficiently analysed as a potential theory of cognitive science in general and the basis for its integration, being reduced to the dimension of the task model. (3) I discuss approaches in research on interactions in distributed cognitive systems, focusing more on the notion of external representations, and mostly on the notion of affordance. When assessing the potential of the latter, I look for consistency in what is crucial for understanding the interactions, between ecological psychology and design research. (4) I analyze the up to now underestimated potential of the distributed cognition approach in the dispute over the bounds of cognitive processes. (5) I identify and assess the analogies between the distributed cognition approach and the neo-mechanistic model of explanation that has become popular in cognitive science, and indicate possible benefits for the integration of the latter. As one can see, I am not trying to fully answer the question about the relationship between cognition and culture, but rather assess to what extent cognitive science in its current form is capable of.

Without an exaggeration we can adapt an expression “from a manifesto to progress” as a motto for neurophenomenology. As the manifesto can serve an article: “Neurophenomenology – a methodological remedy for the hard problem”. The aim of the research program initiated by the late Francisco Varela was to naturalize phenomenology in the frame of neurobiology, and to apply it to the different areas of theory and practice in science and philosophy. It meets certain challenges like the explanatory gap or the problem of clarity and credibility of the subjective reports.

There can be seen a strong relationship between mental activity and physical experience in the field of communication. Cognitive linguistics underlines the linguistic ubiquity of metaphor, which engages physicality, embodiment and manipulation, even in regard to abstract concepts. The model of metaphor that seems to be particularly interesting for its creativeness and provocation, is characterized by the general name: Mental Activity is Manipulation. To introduce its clear example I suggest to refer to representative works of Buddhist literature instead of the colloquial speech. The metaphors present in Buddhist literature are reduced to the pure manipulation of simple objects, without ambiguity, transcendence or mysticism. The highest form of mental activity is like eating porridge and washing up the cup afterwards.

This study aims to show the socio-cognitive engineering of the pickpocket craft from the point of view of cognitive ecology. Being a pickpocket has a wider, existential status; studying it goes beyond the field of cognitive sciences. My ambitions are more modest: I try to show that the question about what it is like to be someone like a pickpocket is also a question about the cognitive structure of his or her activity space. In this light, I analyze some aspects of the reality presented in the movie Pickpocket by Robert Bresson. From the ecological point of view, scenes from the old movie present pickpocketing techniques in the context of the opportunities and constraints of a given environment. I claim that studies like this require integrating certain conceptual tools, like distributed cognition approach, ecological psychology, and cognitive studies of design.