What is the difference between knowing someone and acknowledging them? Is it possible to want to be acknowledged while remaining unknown? And if one’s desire to know another person is too consuming, can this foreclose the possibility of acknowledgment? Cavell argues that we sometimes avoid the ethical problem of acknowledgment by (mis)conceiving our relations with others in terms of knowledge and that this epistemic misconception can actually amount to a form of ethical harm. I show that Polanski’s Chinatown helps us (...) understand the difference between knowing and acknowledging and that Cavell’s concepts help us better appreciate Chinatown. (shrink)

The usual way with scepticism is to formulate a problem in connection with the external world and then apply this to other minds. Drawing on work by Stanley Cavell and Richard Moran, I argue that the sceptic misses an important difference in our concepts of mind and of body, and that this is reflected in the sceptic’s formulation of a problem regarding other minds. I suggest that an understanding of this important conceptual difference is also missing from the work of (...) those who attempt to reply to (dismiss, or ignore) the sceptic. In this connection I discuss both inferential and perceptual accounts of our knowledge of other minds. I identify an error in these accounts that may be thought to arise from a lack of understanding of the important conceptual difference here, and then develop an understanding of this error that draws on the work of Edith Stein and Stanley Cavell. (shrink)

[please see my website for the English language version] What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind’s conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself? I raise these questions by means of Freud. Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to “recognize” and “sympathize” with them. I call (...) this the recognition requirement. This idea clarifies the rationale behind Freud’s last metapsychology of Id, Ego, and Super-ego. I close by asking: when should a theory of mind try to meet the recognition requirement? I propose that a theory of mind should be structured according to the recognition requirement when that theory is connected with practical aims, specifically, when the theory is concerned with the life of the mind and with facilitating the mind’s own self-understanding. (shrink)

The long standing and still highly influential mindreading framework claims that social cog- nition is best understood as an ability to predict and explain others’ behavior in terms of their mental states. This ability is explained by appealing to mental representations and inferential reasoning via rule-based knowledge. However, recent enactive work on social cognition questions most, if not all, of the main assumptions on which mindreading is founded. Enac- tivism’s emphasis on the structural coupling of the brain-body-world constitutes the foundation (...) of the framework, which rejects the representational and inferential reasoning claims of the mindreading framework. For enactivists, social cognition is best explained in terms of the direct embodied and embedded interactions an agent has with her socio-material world. In continuing this work, the thesis provides new developments of the enactive project for investigating and explaining social cognition. The thesis utilizes two approaches to achieve this goal. First, it dialectally defends enactivism vis-a-vis the mindreading framework. It does this by both securing established enactive claims from criticism, and by developing new objections against the mindreading framework. Secondly, the thesis offers new enactive interpretations of empirical developmental data, and presents new ways of investigating three central areas of debate within the field of social cognition: the metaphysical basis of social cognitive processes, the false-belief test literature, and the concept of empathy in relation to therapeutic practices and autism. The thesis is composed of five different, but thematically intertwined papers. The first paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition by attempting to dissolve the causal-constitutive fallacy through appealing to a diachronic conception of constitution. This move both secures established enactive claims and develops a more thorough account of what is meant by enactive constitutive claims. The second paper then examines infant social cognitive capacities, arguing cognitivist explanations of these capacities rely on fallacious as- sumptions regarding the nature of perception. The paper then offers an alternative enactive and ecological account of these capacities. The third paper argues both innate and construc- tivist mindreading accounts of the folk psychological know-how required to reliably succeed on false-belief tests fall prey to an infinite regress problem. The paper ends by briefly pre- senting an alternative enactive, narrative explanation of the empirical data. The fourth paper then shifts focus to examine the concept empathy and practice of empathizing. It argues there are advantages to conceiving of empathy as enactive and exploratory, in the sense that when we empathize with others we understand them in a deeper and richer way, through exploring their self-authored narratives. Finally, the fifth paper re-examines our understand- ing of autism by integrating the enactive framework with a neurodiversity approach to cognition. It argues this integration can help us better understand how neurotypical social practices and institutions effect the development, and well-being, of autistic individuals. Through these substantial expansions of established enactivist accounts, and by offering new objections to the mindreading framework, the thesis provides reasons to prefer an enactivist framework in exploring human abilities for social cognition. (shrink)

Michael Fried’s unexpected contribution to defining the ontological status of video art includes an intriguing claim that projective art is particularly suited to the ‘staging’ of empathic projection. Fried applies Stanley Cavell’s notion of empathic projection, developed in relation to skepticism of ‘other minds’, to moving image installations that not only exploit the beholder’s capacity for empathically projecting, but do so in such a way as to reveal the mechanism at play. In developing this claim, I compare Fried’s key example (...) of Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time with Bill Viola and Kira Perov’s Martyrs, a work that likewise elicits an emotional response but without a compensatory foregrounding of the underlying structuring mechanism. However, the comparison suggests that the staging of empathic projection should not be interpreted as an anti-theatrical strategy, but rather as an exemplary manifestation of what I am calling the configurational encounter – a revealing of the artwork’s conditions of existence. I reference Paul Sharits’s Epileptic Seizure Comparison, an important precursor to Gordon’s staging of empathic projection. Finally, I consider Chris Welsby’s landscape films in the light of the capacity of technology to reveal psychological mechanisms of projection, tracing such processes of projection to early childhood experiences of differentiating the human from the non-human. (shrink)