Browsing by Subject "Enactivism"
Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- PublicationOpen AccessAgency from a radical embodied standpoint: an ecologial-enactive proposal(Frontiers Media, 2020-06-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; FilosofíaExplaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency.
- PublicationOpen AccessAre plants cognitive? A reply to Adams(Elsevier, 2018-12-06) Segundo-Ortin, Miguel; Calvo, Paco; FilosofíaAccording to F. Adams [this journal, vol. 68, 2018] cognition cannot be realized in plants or bacteria. In his view, plants and bacteria respond to the here-and-now in a hardwired, inflexible manner, and are therefore incapable of cognitive activity. This article takes issue with the pursuit of plant cognition from the perspective of an empirically informed philosophy of plant neurobiology. As we argue, empirical evidence shows, contra Adams, that plant behavior is in many ways analogous to animal behavior. This renders plants suitable to be described as cognitive agents in a non-metaphorical way. Sections two to four review the arguments offered by Adams in light of scientific evidence on plant adaptive behavior, decision-making, anticipation, as well as learning and memory. Section five introduces the ‘phyto-nervous’ system of plants. To conclude, section six resituates the quest for plant cognition into a broader approach in cognitive science, as represented by enactive and ecological schools of thought. Overall, we aim to motivate the idea that plants may be considered genuine cognitive agents. Our hope is to help propel public awareness and discussion of plant intelligence once appropriately stripped of anthropocentric preconceptions of the sort that Adams’ position appears to exemplify.
- PublicationOpen AccessDistal engagement: intentions in perceptionBrancazio, Nick; Segundo Ortin, Miguel; FilosofíaNon-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of longterm planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecologicalenactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representationhungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a nonrepresentational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating prereflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use.
- PublicationOpen AccessEnactivismo y valoración. Cómo superar la querella entre teorías somáticas y cognitivas de las emociones(Universidad de Murcia. Servicio de Publicaciones, ) Melamed, Andrea F.En este trabajo me propongo mostrar que es posible abordar el fenómeno emocional atendiendo especialmente a los focos de conflicto entre cognitivistas y no cognitivistas pero poniendo en duda el marco a partir del cuál se han erigido. El recorrido que propongo apunta a establecer una nueva manera de abordar el antagonismo entre enfoques somáticos y cognitivos de las emociones, que tanta influencia ha tenido sobre la investigación de las emociones, a la luz de uno de los mayores problemas que enfrenta el enfoque somático: el problema de la variabilidad. Buscaré mostrar cómo ciertos conceptos adquieren nuevo significado en el marco postcognitivista y permiten dar nuevas (y mejores) respuestas a viejos problemas en lo que respecta a los fenómenos emocionales.
- PublicationOpen AccessExtended skill learning(Frontiers Media, 2020-08-14) Baggs, Edward; Raja Galián, Vicente; Anderson, Michael L.; FilosofíaWithin 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.
- PublicationOpen AccessReading comprehension as embodied action: exploratory findings on nonlinear eye movement dynamics and comprehension of scientific texts(Cognitive Science Society, 2023) Bammel, Moritz; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; FilosofíaReading comprehension is often conceptualized in terms of the internal processing of linguistic information and construction of accurate mental representations. In contrast, an ecological-enactive approach rejects this internalist focus and instead emphasizes the dynamic process of reader-text coupling in which eye movements play a constitutive role. In this study, we employed recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and eye movement dynamics, based on eye-tracking data from the Potsdam Textbook Corpus recorded from beginners and experts reading scientific texts, followed by comprehension questionnaires. Moreover, we compared the findings from RQA to classical eye movement measures (number of fixations, mean fixation duration, regression fixation proportion). The results indicated that classical eye movement measures did not predict reading comprehension reliably, whereas recurrences in gaze steps were reliably associated with reading comprehension proficiency. Contrary to our original hypothesis, experts showed more irregular, rather than more regular, eye movement dynamics, and these were linked to more proficient reading comprehension. In line with previous research on naturalistic reading using nonlinear methods, the present findings suggest that reading comprehension is best understood as emerging from interaction-dominant coordination processes.
- PublicationOpen AccessScientific practice as ecological-enactive co-construction(Springer, 2023-06-22) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; van Es, Thomas; Hipolito, Ines; FilosofíaPhilosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”
- PublicationRestrictedThe Point is to Change the World: Enactivist Reflexivity Motivates Resisting the Utopian vs. Scientific Distinction(2023) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; FilosofíaThe distinction Meyer and Brancazio offer between utopian and scientific projects within enactivism is a helpful addition to the more well-established differentiation between enactivist strands. However, I propose that the distinction works well only as an interpretive lens for looking at enactivism from the outside. In contrast, considered “from the inside” or in light of enactivist commitments, enactivism has good reasons to challenge the currently dominant assumptions about science and philosophy that underlie the distinction.