Diversity Reading List

Embodied approaches to the mind can be thought of as views and theses that engage in a dialogue with conceptions of the mind that disregard the role played by the body. To introduce this dialogue, the first session takes on a historical perspective. The proposal is to read some sections of Katalin Farkas’s “The boundaries of the mind” where she introduces a Cartesian internalism to which various philosophers in the 20th and 21st century have objected. The focus is on responses that come from a naturalistic perspective and, more specifically, from theses on the extended and embodied character of the mind. Given that there are several approaches that join embodied cognition in its rejection of the traditional conception of the mind, the second text proposed for this week is “Situated Cognition” by Miriam Solomon, where she focuses on the various ways in which cognition and knowledge depend on the body and the environment. The third text by Dave Ward and Mog Stapleton is a suggestion to further understand the various views that pertain to 4EA approaches to cognition. The guiding questions focus on Farkas’s and Solomon’s papers.

This week focuses on enactivism and its conception of cognition and normativity. Embodied cognition is closely associated with enactivism, a view of cognition that takes this to be continuous with life. Embodiment is, for enactivism, a central feature of cognition. In their paper, Evan Thompson and Mog Stapleton distinguish enactivism from the thesis of the extended mind. To do so, they provide a helpful overview of the central concepts of enactivism and, more specifically, of the concept of sense-making. This paper serves as a good basis to understand some of the concepts that will become important for other weeks, as well as to understand the enactivist understanding of cognition. By characterising cognition as sense-making, enactivism emphasizes that the normative character of cognition arises from the interactions between the agent and the environment, and has biological normativity at its basis. This last point is also explored by Laura Mojica who argues for the continuity between biological, cognitive and social normativity. To do so, she draws on Wittgenstein’s considerations on public norms, and engages with the debate on the naturalization of content. Thus showing how enactivism can further contribute to this debate. The suggested reading is Chapter 8 of The Embodied Mind, where Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch present their view of embodied cognition and enactivism. They start off from a reconstruction of some of the main ideas within cognitivism to then turn to their proposal of embodied cognition where they take cognition to arise from the sensorimotor interactions between an agent and its environment. They take colour as a case study to show that colour can only be understood considering the relation between the perceiver and the world.

This week focuses on enactive accounts of perception. In one of the readings of the previous week it is noted that for enactivism cognition can be described as sensorimotor interaction. Similar ideas can be found in other views within 4EA approaches which emphasize the continuity between perception, action, and cognition. In their paper, Nivedita Gangopadhyay and Julian Kiverstein discuss a couple of different conceptions of perception found in enactivism: Susan Hurley’s and Alva Noë & Kevin O’Regan’s. In this discussion, they advance arguments to show that perception is inseparable from cognition and action. This paper will be helpful to further understand the conception of the mind that is at play in the embodied cognition program, as well as to understand the relation between perception, cognition, and action. While many discussions on perception focus on vision, the paper by Becky Millar advances a sensorimotor view of chemical senses. This paper not only focuses on senses that aren’t typically discussed, but also addresses some concerns that arise for enactivist views of perception. The suggested paper is by Susan Hurley. Here she presents a criticism to the classical view of cognition and introduces the two-level interdependence view on the relation between action and perception. This is one of the views discussed by Gangopadhyay and Kiverstein.

This week focuses on social cognition and on the intersubjective aspects of knowledge and cognition that follow from some embodied accounts of cognition. Within the context of enactivism, some have applied the concept of sense-making to social cognition. To do so, they advance the concept of participatory sense-making to account for our capacity to understand each other (see, De Jaegher, H. & Di Paolo, E., (2007), “Participatory sense-making” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences). In her paper, Hanne De Jaegher applies this notion of participatory sense-making to what she calls human knowledge. For her, human knowledge is at the basis of many activities that have an epistemic component that goes unnoticed and is central to it (e.g., dementia care). To capture and articulate this epistemic component, De Jaegher draws on participatory sense-making understood as the coordination between two or more autonomous agents. This paper allows for an articulation of social cognition as participatory sense-making. It also allows for the identification of intersubjective aspects of knowledge, and the epistemic aspects of many intersubjective activities. The second essential reading, the paper by Cuffari et al., further expands on the notion of participatory sense-making. It also shows how enactivism can account for language by characterising it as a form of sense-making and showing that it plays a central role in social coordination. The suggested reading is “Participatory Sense-Making” by Hanne De Jagher and Ezequiel Di Paolo. In this paper, they introduce the concept of participatory sense-making to provide an enactivist account on social understanding. This is the view on which De Jagher and Cuffari et al. draw in the essential readings.

This week turns to conceptions of the self that grant a central role the embodied and situated aspects of cognition. In the first paper, Catriona Mackenzie discusses the embodied dimension of self-narratives. She defends the view that these are constituted against the background of embodiment. To make her case, Mackenzie draws on discussions on embodiment and the self that lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and phenomenology. The second paper, by Miriam Kyselo, discusses pluralistic views of the self that seek to do justice to the many dimensions that constitute it. Kyselo brings forward a tension that arises between views that emphasize the bodily constitution of the self and those that emphasize the social constitution. To address this tension, she draws on the enactive concept of autonomy. This allows her to articulate how these two dimensions of the self interact. The suggested readings is a paper by Nick Brancazio where she discusses the role of gender in the ways we perceive our interactions with the world. In this paper, she articulates the self in terms of agency to show that the self is always embodied and embedded.

This week focuses on discussions on affective phenomena and the extended, enactive mind. The first recommended reading is by Giovanna Colombetti where she defends the idea that affective phenomena can be extended. Rather than drawing on the extended mind, however, she draws on enactivism and the continuity between mind and life. The idea of affectivity extending into the environment is also explored in the paper by Giulia Piredda, where she articulates the concept of affective artifacts. These discussions have become relevant to discuss not only the role of environmental elements in our mental and cognitive life, but also on the role political and social artifacts might play in them. The suggested paper is a chapter by Lisa F. Barrett that provides an overview of the history of the theorizing about emotions and the role of embodied theories within it.

The next five weeks turn to the contributions to and from embodied cognition and debates that focus on traditionally marginalized and undertheorized topics in philosophy. To introduce these readings, the first week engages with two texts that put some pressure on these contributions. The first paper, by Victoria Pitts-Taylor, goes back to an idea found in Miriam Solomon’s text: that situated cognition encompasses both proposals in situated cognitive science and situated epistemology. Pitts-Taylor agrees with Solomon to some extent, but argues that some aspects of embodiment and situatedness and left out of the discussion on embodiment that is at play in cognitive science. Donna Haraway’s text, in turn, proposes the myth of the cyborg as a way of articulating the situation of woman in the last part of the XXth century. Her proposal can be helpful to further articulate the questions that remain open when thinking about embodiment from a situated perspective, as well as the dichotomies that should be surpassed. The suggested reading by Anya Daly takes a closer look at the interaction between enactivism and feminism. According to Daly, enactivism can provide feminism with a metaphysical grounding that does justice to its moral and political concerns.

This week looks into two discussions on gender, sex, and the body that are concerned with questions about the boundaries of the body, and the relation between embodied agents and their environment. In the first paper, Saray Ayala and Nadya Vasilyeva advance a concept of extended sex. The draw on the extended cognition thesis to argue that sex can be extended into the environment in a way that allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between male and female. They argue that this process of extension should be recognized as one form of biological construction. In this way, their paper further contributes to the articulation of the extended mind. Alejandra Martínez Quintero and Hanne De Jaegher, in turn, provide an enactive analysis of pregnancy. They argue that pregnancy should be understood as the relation between three autonomous systems, the mother, the foetus, and pregnancy itself. In pregnancy, foetus and mother engage in a relation of sense-making, and both participate in the processes of individuation. The suggested reading is the paper by Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a girl”, where she proposes that our spatial and motor experience is shaped by gender. This phenomenological analysis has been central to the understanding of the role played by gender on our embodied experiences.

This week turns to contributions to debates on disability from theses of embodied and extended cognition. The first paper, by Zoe Drayson and Andy Clark, discusses the various ways in which extending the cognitive machinery beyond the brain can change the way we think about cognitive disabilities, as well as its diagnosis and treatment. They also turn to the way in which the debate on models of disability can change in virtue of these theses. The second paper, by Catriona Mackenzie and Jackie L. Scully, focus on moral imagination, more specifically. They are interested in showing the limitations of this capacity when it comes to moral judgments that are concerned with the quality of life of individuals who are differently embodied from us. To make this claim, they draw on the claim that imagination is embodied. The suggested reading turns to psychiatry to propose a enactivist model that encompasses the various dimensions that constitute psychiatric disorders. To this end, de Haan discusses the various models of disorders that have been proposed in this context.

This week focuses on embodied cognition and education. The first paper, by Michelle Maiese, provides a brief overview on transformative learning and proposes a enactive articulation of it. For Maiese, transformative learning involves a change in one’s affective framing, constituted by beliefs and habits of mind in which cognition and affection are deeply intertwined. Drawing on her proposal, Mog Stapleton analyses a case study of philosophy in prisons. She argues that the modelled applied in this case allowed for transformative learning due to its particular ritualistic. These papers show how theses on embodied cognition can enrich both the education theory and practice. They also show, however, how certain reflections and practices in education can allow the re-articulation of concepts that are central in philosophy of mind such as perspective-taking. The proposed reading by Melina Gastelum (in Spanish) draws on 4E approaches to cognition to propose an intercultural approach to education given the focus of these approaches on embodied practices.