Diversity Reading List

Abstract: What colour does a white wall look in the pinkish light of the late afternoon? What shape does a circular table look when you are standing next to it? These questions seem simple enough, but philosophers disagree sharply about them. In this paper, I attempt to provide a new approach to these questions, based on the idea that perception modifies our epistemic dispositions regarding specific environmental objects. I shall argue that by determining which object is involved in this way, we can determine the subject of visual predication. This enables us to parcel out visual features to different visual objects in a way that enables us to reconcile conflicting philosophical intuitions.

Abstract:
McWeeny and Maitra motivate the adoption of a feminist perspective in contemporary debates within the philosophy of mind to further illuminate the nature of conscious experience. They argue that the adoption of a feminist perspective leads to the implementation of a more nuanced investigation of the mind, one that avoids a conceptualization of the mind as a "uniform" concept across beings or groups, and instead, considers the role of the body and different societal contexts. In philosophy of mind, when thinking about "the mind", we are usually prompted to think about the mind as a universal thing, as something that we all (humans) have. Moreover, when exploring and investigating what makes the mind to be what it is ( i.e. which are the intrinsic and special features or consciousness), traditionally, we have been encouraged to think about certain properties of the mind that are universal and can be attributed to anyone. McWeeny and Maitra argue that this mainstream methodology in philosophy of mind is a simplistic one. Not only it overlooks the many inter and intrapersonal nuances of each individual's "mind", but also the impact of social constructs, such as gender, race, and class, in our understanding of what the mind is, and who has a mind.

Abstract:
Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies - law-like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensorimotor approach, and in doing so offer the beginnings of a sensorimotor account of the chemical senses.

Abstract:
The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their responses in terms of what is better or worse to maintain their own precarious identity. Thus, normative behavior emerges from living organisms. Under this basic understanding of normativity as self-maintenance, autopoietic enactivism defends a continuity between biological, cognitive, and social norms. The self-maintenance of an agent’s sensorimotor identity establishes the cognitive norms that regulate its behavior, and the self-maintenance of its social identity determines the social norms. However, there is no clear explanation of how individuals, who by their very constitution are primarily moved to interact with the world under the norm of self-maintenance, could interact with the world driven by non-individual norms. Furthermore, understanding all normativity as self-maintenance makes it unclear how agents establish genuine social interactions and acquire habits that have no implication for their constitution as individuals. So, to face these challenges, I propose an alternative notion of normativity grounded on a Wittgensteinian, action-oriented, and pragmatic conception of meaning that distinguishes between an agent with a normative point of view and external normative criteria. I defend that a normative phenomenon is an interaction that is established by an individual point of view as defined by autopoietic enactivism and that is part of a self-maintaining system. The latter establishes the external normative criteria to evaluate the interaction, and it may or may not coincide with the identity of the interacting agent. Separating external normative criteria from the self-constitution of the interactant agent not only solves the challenge but potentially explains the situated and relational character of agency.

Abstract:
In this paper I would like to propose the notion of "affective artifact", building on an analogy with theories of cognitive artifacts (cf. Casati 2017; Fasoli 2018; Heersmink, 2013, 2016; Hutchins 1999) and referring to the development of a situated affective science (cf. Colombetti 2014; Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Colombetti and Roberts 2015; Griffiths and Scarantino 2009). Affective artifacts are tentatively defined as objects that have the capacity to alter the affective condition of an agent, and that in some cases play an important role in defining that agent's self.The notion of affective artifacts will be presented by means of examples supported by empirical findings, by discussing a tentative definition and classification, and by considering several related but differing notions (cf. Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Heersmink 2018). Within the framework of situated affectivity, the notion of affective artifacts will represent a further step in the enterprise of understanding how the environment helps us scaffold our affective processes. I will conclude that affective artifacts play a key role in the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of technology and in the debate about the self.

Abstract:
Philosophers tend to take very sophisticated and culture bound emotions as their paradigms for emotion in general. So Gilbert Ryle discusses an interest in symbolic logic; William Lyons discusses being awestruck by the beauty of a golden eagle; Patricia Greenspan talks about being warily suspicious of an insurance salesman; and Robert Gordon talks about being embar rassed about the publicity for one's wedding.' Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to stick to very different examples; several of them have studied the startle reaction as an example of an emo tion, a suggestion most philosophers would consider laughable. I shall argue that startle does belong on the spectrum of emotional response, and that indeed, if we abstract from the startle response, we can come up with a useful model of emotional response in general.

Abstract:
Sometimes our emotions change straightaway when we learn that what we believed is not true. The grieving husband recovers when he learns that, because she missed her plane, his wife did not die in the fatal plane crash. But often changes in emotions do not appropriately follow changes in belief. Their tenacity, their inertia, suggests that there is akrasia of the emotions; it reveals the complex structure of their intentionality.'

Abstract:
This chapter provides a structured overview of work on situated cognition. The main fields in which situated cognition is studied - cognitive science, feminist epistemology, and science studies - are unnecessarily isolated from one another. Cognition is always situated. It is always concretely instantiated in one way or another. There are no disembodied cognitive achievements. The situated cognition literature details the ways in which cognition can be instantiated and, instead of abstracting what is in common to all cognition, explores the epistemic significance of particular routes to cognitive accomplishment. The phenomena of situated cognition have been described in several disciplines. Cognitive scientists have described the ways in which representation of the world, learning, memory, planning, action, and linguistic meaning are embedded in the environment, tools, social arrangements, and configurations of the human body. The situated cognition approaches have in common the rejection of the ideas that cognition is individualistic, general, abstract, symbolic, explicit, language based, and located in the brain as mediator between sensory input and action output.

Abstract: Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition.

Abstract: Most people think of themselves as pretty good at understanding others' beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions. Accurate mindreading is an impressive cognitive feat, and for this reason the philosophical literature on mindreading has focused exclusively on explaining such successes. However, as it turns out, we regularly make mindreading mistakes. Understanding when and how mind misreading occurs is crucial for a complete account of mindreading. In this paper, I examine the conditions under which mind misreading occurs. I argue that these patterns of mind misreading shed light on the limits of mindreading, reveal new perspectives on how mindreading works, and have implications for social epistemology.