Browsing by Subject "Embodied cognition"

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    A professional guide to explanation. commentary on “A methodological problem of choice for 4E research”
    (Springer, 2023) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    On the face of it, the perspective that Casper puts forward in his paper (Chap. 2) and the one I offer in mine (Chap. 4)are completely at odds with each other. He sees the current diversity of explanations, theories and methods in embodied cognitive science as problematic and calling for some kind of integration, whereas I defend an extreme pluralist stance and don’t see the diversity as a problem. Not only that, but while he argues for coordination between the disparate approaches, I propose that expecting such coordination is in many cases unrealistic and moreover that, even when it’s possible, it might be counterproductive. The straightforward thing to do now would be for me to double down and use this space to try to show why I’m right and Casper is wrong. But I don’t think he’s wrong. He and I do disagree, but I don’t think it’s that sort of disagreement where only one side can be right and the other must be wrong. In particular, I don’t think that focusing on the different conclusions he and I draw in our respective chapters is a fruitful way to understand the nature of our disagreement. My goal in this commentary will be to explain why. I don’t know if Casper will agree with my assessment or not, but I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t—in fact, as I will suggest, this would make perfect sense given what I propose in my chapter. Still, my hope is that, by clarifying how (from my perspective) our different views relate to each other, I can help some readers better appreciate both his proposal and mine.
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    A theory of resonance: towards an ecological cognitive architecture
    (Springer, 2018-03) Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    This paper presents a blueprint for an ecological cognitive architecture. Ecological psychology, I contend, must be complemented with a story about the role of the CNS in perception, action, and cognition. To arrive at such a story while staying true to the tenets of ecological psychology, it will be necessary to flesh out the central metaphor according to which the animal perceives its environment by ‘resonating’ to information in energy patterns: what is needed is a theory of resonance. I offer here the two main elements of such a theory: a framework (Anderson’s neural reuse) and a methodology (multi-scale fractal DST).
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    Doing without levels
    (University of Toronto, 2023) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    Philosophical discussions about agency at different levels—the subpersonal and the suprapersonal levels, or the micro and the macro levels more generally—are characterized by robust, if sometimes implicit, assumptions about individuality and mind, as much as by assumptions about the leveling in question. This essay takes as its starting point the perspective of radical embodied cognitive science, and explores the implications that an embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective on cognition has for how we think about agency. As I propose, this perspective motivates a fundamental shift: by offering a level-neutral understanding of ‘doing,’ the embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective shows that we can do without levels in philosophically understanding agency.
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    Ecological Psychology
    (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Raja Galián, Vicente; Filosofía
    Ecological psychology is one of the main alternative theories of perception and action available in the contemporary literature. This Element explores and analyzes its most relevant ideas, concepts, methods, and experimental results. It discusses the historical roots of the ecological approach. The Element then analyzes the works of the two main founders of ecological psychology: James and Eleanor Gibson. It also explores the development of ecological psychology since the 1980s until nowadays. Finally, the Element identifies and evaluates the future of the ecological approach to perception and action.
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    Explanatory diversity and embodied cognitive science: reflexivity motivates pluralism
    (Springer, 2023) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    Explanatory diversity is a salient feature of the sciences of the mind, where different projects focus on neural, psychological, cognitive, social or other explanations. The same happens within embodied cognitive science, where ecological, enactive, dynamical, phenomenological and other approaches differ from each other in their explanations of the embodied mind. As traditionally conceived, explanatory diversity is philosophically problematic, fueling debates about whether the different explanations are competing, compatible, or tangential. In contrast, this paper takes the perspective of embodied cognitive science as its starting point and accordingly approaches explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenomenon to be understood. Recent work has explored how the view of cognition as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cognitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagreements. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explanations as disembodied entities that compete with one another, and instead thinking in terms of different explanatory styles as embodied practices of explaining, many of which might be legitimate and warranted independently of whether and how the explanations themselves relate to one another.
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    Extended skill learning
    (Frontiers Media, 2020-08-14) Baggs, Edward; Raja Galián, Vicente; Anderson, Michael L.; Filosofía
    Within the ecological and enactive approaches in cognitive science, a tension exists in how the process of skill learning is understood. Skill learning can be understood in a narrow sense, as a process of bodily change over time, or in an extended sense, as a change in the structure of the animal–environment system. We propose to resolve this tension by rejecting the first understanding in favor of the second. We thus defend an extended approach to skill learning. An extended understanding of skill learning views bodily changes as being embedded in a larger process of interaction between the organism and specific structures in the environment. Such an extended approach is committed to the claims that (1) the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding skill learning is not the body but the activity and (2) learning consists in the establishment and adaptive organization of enabling constraints on that activity. We focus on two example cases: maintaining upright posture and walking. In both cases, environmental structures play a constitutive role in the activity throughout learning, but the specific environmental structures that are involved in the activity change over time. At an early stage, the child makes use of an environmental “support”—for example, holding onto furniture to maintain upright posture. Later, once further constraints have been established, the child is able to let go of the furniture and remain upright. We argue that adopting an extended understanding of skill learning offers a promising strategy for unifying ecological and enactive approaches and can also potentially ground a radically embodied approach to higher cognition.
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    Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”
    (Springer, 2019-11-21) Raja Galián, Vicente; Chemero, Anthony; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology.