De Jaegher, Hanne. Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology
2019, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20(5), pp. 847-870
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Added by: Maria Jimena Clavel VazquezAbstract:
In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged - or even engaging - epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren's idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower's being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other.Comment : available in this BlueprintDebus, Dorothea. Mental Time Travel: Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future, and the Particularity of Events2014, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (3):333-350-
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist
Abstract: The present paper offers a philosophical discussion of phenomena which in the empirical literature have recently been subsumed under the concept of 'mental time travel'. More precisely, the paper considers differences and similarities between two cases of 'mental time travel', recollective memories ('R-memories') of past events on the one hand, and sensory imaginations ('S-imaginations') of future events on the other. It develops and defends the claim that, because a subject who R-remembers a past event is experientially aware of a past particular event, while a subject who S-imagines a future event could not possibly be experientially aware of a future particular event, R-memories of past events and S-imaginations of future events are ultimately mental occurrences of two different kinds.Comment : This paper is concerned with both metaphysics and cognitive science. It could be used to raise questions about how we imagine future events involving ourselves and other people, and how this is similar or dissimilar to how we remember events. It could be used together with papers in cognitive neuroscience investigating the brain areas active in imagination and memory, most likely in a third or fourth year module.Dick, Stephanie. AfterMath: The Work of Proof in the Age of Human–Machine Collaboration2011, Isis, 102(3): 494-505.-
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Added by: Fenner Stanley TanswellAbstract:
During the 1970s and 1980s, a team of Automated Theorem Proving researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago developed the Automated Reasoning Assistant, or AURA, to assist human users in the search for mathematical proofs. The resulting hybrid humans+AURA system developed the capacity to make novel contributions to pure mathematics by very untraditional means. This essay traces how these unconventional contributions were made and made possible through negotiations between the humans and the AURA at Argonne and the transformation in mathematical intuition they produced. At play in these negotiations were experimental practices, nonhumans, and nonmathematical modes of knowing. This story invites an earnest engagement between historians of mathematics and scholars in the history of science and science studies interested in experimental practice, material culture, and the roles of nonhumans in knowledge making.Comment (from this Blueprint): Dick traces the history of the AURA automated reasoning assistant in the 1970s and 80s, arguing that the introduction of the computer system led to novel contributions to mathematics by unconventional means. Dick’s emphasis is on the AURA system as changing the material culture of mathematics, and thereby leading to collaboration and even negotiations between the mathematicians and the computer system.Dissanayake, Ellen. Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions2001, Substance 30 (1/2):85.-
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag Uidhir
Introduction: Along with the vital abilities to cry and to suckle, human neonates are born with remarkable capacities that predispose them for social interaction with others. For example, newborns prefer human faces and human voices to any other sight or sound (Johnson et al. 1991, 11). They can imitate face, mouth, and hand movements and respond appropriately to another person's emotional expressions of sadness, fear, and surprise. It is perhaps less well known that at birth, infants can also estimate and anticipate intervals of time and temporal sequences (DeCasper and Carstens 1980). They can remember these temporal patterns and categorize them in both time and space, and in terms of affect and arousal (Beebe, Lachman and Jaffe 1997). By six weeks of age, these innate perceptual and cognitive abilities permit normal infants to engage in complex communicative interchanges with adult partners--the playful behavior that is commonly or colloquially called "babytalk."Drayson, Zoe. Extended cognition and the metaphysics of mind2010, Cognitive Systems Research 11 (4):367-377.-
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Juan R. Loaiza
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between several ideas about the mind and cognition. The hypothesis of extended cognition claims that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head, that elements of the world around us can actually become parts of our cognitive systems. It has recently been suggested that the hypothesis of extended cognition is entailed by one of the foremost philosophical positions on the nature of the mind: functionalism, the thesis that mental states are defined by their functional relations rather than by their physical constituents. Furthermore, it has been claimed that functionalism entails a version of extended cognition which is sufficiently radical as to be obviously false. I survey the debate and propose several ways of avoiding this conclusion, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing the hypothesis of extended cognition from the related notion of the extended mind.Comment : This text provides a helpful overview of the thesis of the extended mind and its relation to functionalism. It can be used as a central reading in an intermediate or advanced undergraduate course on philosophy of mind.Drayson, Zoe. What is Action-Oriented Perception?2017, in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 15th International Congress (College Publications, 2017).-
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Simon Prosser
Abstract: Contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on perception often focuses on the relationship between perception and action, emphasizing the ways in which perception can be understood as geared towards action or ‘action-oriented’. In this paper I provide a framework within which to classify approaches to action-oriented perception, and I highlight important differences between the distinct approaches. I show how talk of perception as action-oriented can be applied to the evolutionary history of perception, neural or psychological perceptual mechanisms, the semantic content or phenomenal character of perceptual states, or to the metaphysical nature of perception. I argue that there are no straightforward inferences from one kind of action-oriented perception to another. Using this framework and its insights, I then explore the notion of action-oriented perceptual representation which plays a key role in some approaches to embodied cognitive science. I argue that the concept of action-oriented representation proposed by Clark and Wheeler is less straightforward than it might seem, because it seems to require both that the mechanisms of perceptual representation are action-oriented and that the content of these perceptual representations are action-oriented. Given that neither of these claims can be derived from the other, proponents of action-oriented representation owe us separate justification for each claim. I will argue that such justifications are not forthcoming in the literature, and that attempts to reconstruct them run into trouble: the sorts of arguments offered for the representational mechanisms being action-oriented seem to undermine the sorts of arguments offered for the representational content being action-oriented, and vice-versa.
Comment : Useful background reading concerning perception and action; cover enactivism, but also other perception/action issuesEgan, Frances. Representationalism2012, In Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, OUP, 250-272.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Abstract: Representationalism, in its most widely accepted form, is the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are to be understood as representational capacities. This chapter distinguishes several distinct theses that go by the name "representationalism," focusing on the view that is most prevalent in cogntive science. It also discusses some objections to the view and attempts to clarify the role that representational content plays in cognitive models that make use of the notion of representation.Comment : A very good overview of representationalism. Suitable for a preliminary introduction to the topic.Egan, Frances. Computational models: a modest role for content2010, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41(3): 253-259.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Abstract: The computational theory of mind construes the mind as an information-processor and cognitive capacities as essentially representational capacities. Proponents of the view claim a central role for representational content in computational models of these capacities. In this paper I argue that the standard view of the role of representational content in computational models is mistaken; I argue that representational content is to be understood as a gloss on the computational characterization of a cognitive process.Comment : Good paper about the relation of representation and content to computation. Best suited to higher-level courses on the subject.Egan, Frances. Folk psychology and cognitive architecture1995, Philosophy of Science 62(2): 179-96.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Abstract: It has recently been argued that the success of the connectionist program in cognitive science would threaten folk psychology. I articulate and defend a "minimalist" construal of folk psychology that comports well with empirical evidence on the folk understanding of belief and is compatible with even the most radical developments in cognitive science.Comment : A good defense of folk psychology. Would be a good inclusion in a course on philosophy of mind/philosophy of cognitive science to show that scepticism need not be taken to extremes.Farkas, Katalin. The Boundaries of the Mind2017, In Amy Kind (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 6. New York: Routledge, pp. 256-279-
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Added by: Maria Jimena Clavel VazquezAbstract:
The subject of mental processes or mental states is usually assumed to be an individual, and hence the boundaries of mental features - in a strict or metaphorical sense - are naturally regarded as reaching no further than the boundaries of the individual. This chapter addresses various philosophical developments in the 20th and 21st century that questioned this natural assumption. I will frame this discussion by first presenting a historically influential commitment to the individualistic nature of the mental in Descartes' theory. I identify various elements in the Cartesian conception of the mind that were subsequently criticized and rejected by various externalist theories, advocates of the extended mind hypothesis and defenders of embodied cognition. Then I will indicate the main trends in these critiques.Comment : available in this BlueprintCan’t find it?Contribute the texts you think should be here and we’ll add them soon!
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