The "Tangong Shang" chapter of the Liji provides a brief account of Confucius performing certain burial rites for his deceased parents. After finishing one portion of the rites, something awful occurs—heavy rains fall, causing the grave to collapse. Confucius' demonstration of reverence through the performance of these burial rites is thwarted; but whose fault is it that the grave collapsed? Could Confucius have prevented this failure? In this essay it is argued that contrary to most contemporary interpretations, unpreventable failures in (...) ritual were causes of concern for the authors of early Confucian texts because they believed that meaningful aspects of life were vulnerable to these failures, and because they found themselves occasionally unable to recognize a clear distinction between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. This essay provides a persuasive reading of an early Confucian text that preserves rather than resolves the ambiguity between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. It argues for an openness to a tragic reading of early Confucian ritual theory. Contemporary interpreters, for the most part, have neglected such a reading; yet in the worldview of the Liji unpreventable failures in ritual were a real, yet uncertain, possibility. (shrink)

This book is about the necessity, and even value, of vulnerability in human experience. In it, Michael Ing brings early Chinese texts into dialogue with questions about the ways in which meaningful things are vulnerable to powers beyond our control; and more specifically, how relationships with meaningful others might compel tragic actions.

Michael Ing's The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. Ing uses his analysis of the Liji to show how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary (...) interpreters of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure. (shrink)

Abstract:The Kumulipo has become one of the best-known compositions in Kanaka (Hawaiian) culture. This article focuses on sections 8–11 of the chant, which describe the coming forth of humanity in the context of the shift from Pō (darkness) to Ao (light). This shift is a pivotal moment in the chant, and it signals something distinctive about being human, namely the ability to organize complex societies on the basis of moʻokūʻauhau (genealogies). This ability is rooted in an awareness of oneself as (...) a being uniquely situated in time and place among a myriad of other beings all originating in the fecundity of Pō. Such self-awareness enables the construction of relational differences that support robust communities by means of kinship and other networks, but it also provides humanity with the ability to contend over our place in the genealogical cartography of the world and to ruin the otherwise flourishing world. The Kumulipo, as such, highlights an ambivalence associated with the rise of humanity. (shrink)

pThis article thinks through the work of Kanaka (Native Hawaiian) philosopher Davida Malo (1795–1853) and puts it in dialogue with the work of Richard Armstrong (1805–1860). It argues that Malo offers an account of being human that entails the proper management of impulses (makemake) and intentions (manaʻo) in ways that lead to flourishing (hoʻokūʻonoʻono) in complex communities (kauhale) overseen by leaders (aliʻi) that are informed by the examples of leaders from the past. Standards for proper living, in this setting, are (...) constructed by the community, the members of which are informed by their own experiences and the experiences of their ancestors (kūpuna) as the latter sought to ease the burdens (kaumaha) they confronted in daily life. Armstrong offers a similar picture of human beings as creatures that must learn to observe their intentions and to cultivate intentions that foster proper communal living—a community that Armstrong conceptualizes as a single family (hoʻokahiʻohana). Unlike Malo’s description, however, the standards of this family construct are based on universal laws of right and wrong that only pertain to humans and their standing before a divine figure understood as the Biblical God. The significance of this piece is not only to show how Malo and Armstrong may have conversed over the question of how to live well, but also to begin a conversation in the field of world philosophies about the viability of Kanaka ways of life./p. (shrink)

The ancient Greek historian and political scientist Polybius is not as well known in the present day as figures such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. This is in part due to his having lived in the Hellenistic period, an epoch often thought to be characteristic of Greek cultural and political decline, rather than in the earlier ‘golden age’ of Greek intellectual life in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Yet Polybius’s ideas have been of profound importance in modern western (...) thought, in areas as diverse as historiography, philosophy of history and the theorization of political institutions. This article illustrates the main contours of how subsequent thinkers have received and made use of Polybian ideas and themes, and argues for regarding Polybius as an important precursor of contemporary social scientific analyses of ‘globalization’. The article first excavates and identifies some of the main forms of appropriation of Polybius’s ideas that have occurred in the West over the last 500 years. Secondly, it delineates the most important appropriation of Polybius in the human sciences that has been effected in recent times, namely the use made of Polybian themes by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, their influential diagnosis of the contemporary state of world affairs. Thirdly, the article proffers a critique of these authors’ use of Polybius, and in its stead offers an alternative mode of appropriation of his work for the purposes of analytically reorienting the human sciences in light of present-day concerns with globalization and conditions of globality. It is argued that, far from being a figure of only antiquarian interest, Polybius continues to be of much relevance for human scientists today, for he may be seen as a foundational figure in efforts to think about the ‘global’ level in human affairs. (shrink)

This book expounds a system of ideas about the nature of mathematics which Michael Resnik has been elaborating for a number of years. In calling mathematics a science he implies that it has a factual subject-matter and that mathematical knowledge is on a par with other scientific knowledge; in calling it a science of patterns he expresses his commitment to a structuralist philosophy of mathematics. He links this to a defense of realism about the metaphysics of mathematics--the view that (...) mathematics is about things that really exist. (shrink)

Disagreement has garnered attention in a variety of academic disciplines, but its counterpart agreement is deserving of much more attention than it has received. This paper begins by reviewing some of the existing literature directly discussing agreement. Inspired by these conversations, I then provide a typology of basic types of agreement followed by a more general discussion of its nature. The aim of the paper is to provide conceptual clarifications and a framework for discussing and analyzing agreement wherever it may (...) be found. (shrink)

This book is forthcoming in Routledge. Here is the barest sketch of our aims: -/- We have two aims in this book. First, we aim to persuade you that conscious experience is sometimes realised by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement. Second, we aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly powerful predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience.

This essay explores the positive aspects of resentment in early Confucian thought. Specifically, it argues that from an early Confucian perspective, resentment is a frustration or anger that occurs when those close to us withhold their care or when they otherwise injure us. Stated succinctly, resentment is a result of frustrated desire for affection. It is a sign that we require the care of significant others, and that we are vulnerable to their concern or neglect. When understood appropriately, resentment signals (...) genuine recognition of meaningful relationships; it is a sign that we are affected by those that ought to matter to us. Importantly, resentment has a creative dimension in that it can lead to the production of literature aimed to channel frustrated desire toward realizing the Confucian dao 道. These texts work to connect the author’s resentment with the reader’s possibility of remaking the world in a way desired by the author. (shrink)

This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens, in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a global system that itself has a Markov blanket; thereby providing an (...) illustration of how autonomous systems can be understood as having layers of nested and self-sustaining boundaries. This allows us to show that: (i) any living system is a Markov blanketed system and (ii) the boundaries of such systems need not be co-extensive with the biophysical boundaries of a living organism. In other words, autonomous systems are hierarchically composed of Markov blankets of Markov blankets—all the way down to individual cells, all the way up to you and me, and all the way out to include elements of the local environment. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that underlying phronêsis is the more foundational virtue of a willingness to be rationally persuaded. A WTBRP is a virtue in the sense that it fulfills the doctrine of the mean by falling between two vices – never sticking to your position and never giving it up. Articulating a WTBRP in this way also helps address problems phronêsis faces in light of implicit bias research.

This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there (...) is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non-cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic). (shrink)

This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information, it does not establish a sufficient measure of representational content. We argue that this follows from the fact that the KL-divergence is a measure of relative entropy, which can (...) be shown to be the same as covariance (through a set of additional steps). It is well known that facts about covariance do not entail facts about representational content. So there is no reason to think that the KL-divergence is a measure of (mis-)representational content. This paper thus provides an enactive, non-representational account of Bayesian belief optimisation in hierarchical PP. (shrink)

The notions of “rational” and “reasonable” have much in common but are not synonymous. Conducting a review of the literature points to (at least) two distinct but related ideas as well as a middle “grey” area. This paper investigates and compares some characterizations of these notions and defends the view that focusing on reasonableness is best for those interested in human instances of reasoning and argumentation.

Philosophical accounts of the constitution relation have been explicated in terms of synchronic relations between higher‐ and lower‐level entities. Such accounts, I argue, are temporally austere or impoverished, and are consequently unable to make sense of the diachronic and dynamic character of constitution in dynamical systems generally and dynamically extended cognitive processes in particular. In this paper, my target domain is extended cognition based on insights from nonlinear dynamics. Contrariwise to the mainstream literature in both analytical metaphysics and extended cognition, (...) I develop a nonstandard, alternative conception of constitution, which I call “diachronic process constitution”. It will be argued that only a diachronic and dynamical conception of constitution is consistent with the nature of constitution in distributed cognitive processes. (shrink)

Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been criticized by philosophers, leading to calls for it to be jettisoned entirely (Colombetti, 2014; Hufendiek, 2016). This paper defuses those criticisms. In addition, it shows (...) that we have good reason to retain BET. Finally, it reviews and puts to rest worries that BET’s commitment to affect programs renders it outmoded. We propose that, with minor adjustments, BET can avoid such criticisms when conceived under a radically enactive account of emotions. Thus, rather than leaving BET behind, we show how its basic ideas can be revised, refashioned and preserved. Hence, we conclude, our new BET is still a good bet. (shrink)

This paper explores several paths a distinctive third wave of extended cognition might take. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings of first- and second-wave extended cognition associated with a tendency to conceive of the properties of internal and external processes as fixed and non-interchangeable. First, in the domain of cognitive transformation, I argue that a problematic tendency of the complementarity model is that it presupposes that socio-cultural resources augment but do not significantly transform the brain’s representational capacities (...) during diachronic development. In this paper I show that there is available a much more dynamical explanation—one taking the processes of the brain’s enculturation into patterned practices as transforming the brain’s representational capacities. Second, in the domain of cognitive assembly, I argue that another problematic tendency is an individualistic notion of cognitive agency, since it overlooks the active contribution of socio-cultural practices in the assembly process of extended cognitive systems. In contrast to an individualistic notion of cognitive agency, I explore the idea that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency to include socio-cultural practices. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there are ample resources in the English-speaking academic community to enable philosophers who cannot read Chinese to work with material from the Western Han dynasty in their research or teaching. It discusses three kinds of resources, with the aim of developing a community of philosophers engaged in a sustained conversation about Western Han thought. These resources are histories that describe various aspects of the Han dynasty, translations of key texts, and intellectual (...) histories that examine specific thinkers or texts from the Han. This article also provides a detailed example of one way in which Western Han texts demonstrate the diversity of Chinese philosophy with regard to value conflicts. (shrink)

This essay highlights an alternative tradition of understanding value conflicts in early Confucian thought. In contrast to a prominent position among interpreters that argues for the resolvability or harmonization of conflicting values, I argue that some early Confucians conceptualized value conflicts as irresolvable. In other words, when meaningful aspects of a situation come into tension with each other and values are threatened to be either left unfulfilled or harmed, early Confucians put forth a variety of views. Some believed that all (...) values could be tended to as long as one had the moral imagination of a sage, whereas others saw the world as a place where irreconcilable conflicts between values could occur for even the most profound people. Within this diversity, I take up a view about irresolvable value conflicts where the confrontation with a deep value conflict leaves behind a moral remainder that can mar even the character of a sage. (shrink)

A recent surge of work on prediction-driven processing models--based on Bayesian inference and representation-heavy models--suggests that the material basis of conscious experience is inferentially secluded and neurocentrically brain bound. This paper develops an alternative account based on the free energy principle. It is argued that the free energy principle provides the right basic tools for understanding the anticipatory dynamics of the brain within a larger brain-body-environment dynamic, viewing the material basis of some conscious experiences as extensive--relational and thoroughly world-involving.

Disagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they represent has a longstanding and venerable history. We take up this debate in relation to the free energy principle (FEP) - a contemporary framework in computational neuroscience, theoretical biology and the philosophy of cognitive science. The FEP is very ambitious, extending from the brain sciences to the biology of self-organisation. In this context, some find apparent discrepancies between the map (the FEP) and the territory (target (...) systems) a compelling reason to defend instrumentalism about the FEP. We take this to be misguided. We identify an important fallacy made by those defending instrumentalism about the FEP. We call it the literalist fallacy: this is the fallacy of inferring the truth of instrumentalism based on the claim that the properties of FEP models do not literally map onto real-world, target systems. We conclude that scientific realism about the FEP is a live and tenable option. (shrink)

This paper examines, for the first time, the relationship between realization relations and the free energy principle in cognitive neuroscience. I argue, firstly, that the free energy principle has ramifications for the wide versus narrow realization distinction: if the free energy principle is correct, then organismic realizers are insufficient for realizing free energy minimization. I argue, secondly, that the free energy principle has implications for synchronic realization relations, because free energy minimization is realized in dynamical agent-environment couplings embedded at multiple (...) time scales. (shrink)

This chapter considers the possible convergence of predictive processing and embodied cognition. It is argued that the embodied view of cognition comprises a subset (if not all) of the following theses: (1) the constitutive thesis, (2) the nonrepresentational thesis, (3) the cognitive-affective inseparability thesis, and (iv) the metaplasticity thesis. It is then argued that predictive processing is prima facie at odds with some (if not all) of these embodied cognition theses. The reason is that predictive processing is often understood in (...) epistemic, inferential, and representational terms, promoting an internalist and skepticism-prone view of the mind-world relation. The chapter proceeds to establish that this perceived tension between predictive processing and embodied cognition can be overcome. The chapter concludes that it is possible to accept predictive processing and endorse all four theses central to the embodied view of cognition. (shrink)

In Moral Exemplars in the Analects, Amy Olberding offers a self-reflexive and thought-provoking interpretation of the Analects. Scholars of China will find her book valuable in that it provides a holistic reading of the Analects that preserves the tensions in the text. Ethicists will find it valuable in that it furthers discussion on the role of emulating paradigmatic figures in moral development.Olberding characterizes her project as an attempt to "discern a governing logic that renders the Analects' compelling moral sensibility intelligible (...) as moral theory" (p. 1). The difficulty of interpreting the Analects, Olberding explains, is that the text does not offer an explicit moral theory. Instead it reads more like .. (shrink)

This article will argue that Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 recognized a tension between being himself and the natural transformations of the world. While he advocated a kind of ziran zhuyi 自然 主義, he did not believe that he, or human beings in general, were predisposed to accept the inevitable changes of the world. Hence, his "naturalism" is not necessarily about fitting into his natural surroundings, despite the fact that he relies on these surroundings in his poetry, and that contemporary scholars sometimes (...) see his work as "pastoral." Through an examination of "Returning to Live on the Farmstead" and several other of Tao's poems I will demonstrate two things: Tao saw... (shrink)

New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind—those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has had some success in understanding how sports skills (...) and expertise are acquired. But, REC approaches appear to encounter a natural obstacle when it comes to understanding skill acquisition in knowledge-rich, conceptually based domains like the hard sciences and mathematics. This paper offers a proof of concept that REC’s reach can be usefully extended into the domain of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, especially when it comes to understanding the deep roots of such learning. In making this case, this paper has five main parts. The section “Ancient Intellectualism and the REC Challenge” briefly introduces REC and situates it with respect to rival views about the cognitive basis of learning. The “Learning REConceived: from Sports to STEM?” section outlines the substantive contribution REC makes to understanding skill acquisition in the domain of sports and identifies reasons for doubting that it will be possible to apply the same approach to knowledge-rich STEM domains. The “Mathematics as Embodied Practice” section gives the general layout for how to understand mathematics as an embodied practice. The section “The Importance of Attentional Anchors” introduces the concept “attentional anchor” and establishes why attentional anchors are important to educational design in STEM domains like mathematics. Finally, drawing on some exciting new empirical studies, the section “Seeing Attentional Anchors” demonstrates how REC can contribute to understanding the roots of STEM learning and inform its learning design, focusing on the case of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper examines the application of the mutual manipulability criterion as a way to demarcate constituents of cognitive systems from resources having a mere causal influence on cognitive systems. In particular, it is argued that on at least one interpretation of the mutual manipulability criterion, the criterion is inadequate because the criterion is conceptualized as identifying synchronic dependence between higher and lower ‘levels’ in mechanisms. It is argued that there is a second articulation of the mutual manipulability criterion available, and (...) that it should be preferred for at least two reasons. The first is that the criterion of mutual manipulability is an instance of continuous reciprocal causation. The second is that it has implications for how to understand this distinction between causation and constitution. It is shown that when considering dynamic systems, continuous reciprocal causation - ubiquitous in dynamical systems - is a form of constitutive causality, which entails that causal factors may, in the right circumstances, by genuine constitutive factors of cognition. This notion of constitutive causality lends support to conceiving of the mutual manipulability criterion as a genuine demarcation principle in the debate over the boundaries of mind. (shrink)

Folk psychological practices are arguably the basis for our articulate ability to understand why people act as they do. This paper considers how social neuroscience could contribute to an explanation of the neural basis of folk psychology by understanding its relevant neural firing and wiring as a product of enculturation. Such a view is motivated by the hypothesis that folk psychological competence is established through engagement with narrative practices that form a familiar part of the human niche. Our major aim (...) is to establish that conceiving of social neuroscience in this wider context is a tenable and promising alternative to characterizing its job as understanding mentalizing as a wholly brain-based form of ‘theory of mind’ activity. To promote this change of view, it is shown that understanding folk psychology as a narrative practice can accommodate the known evidence from social neuroscience, developmental and cross-cultural psychology, and cognitive archaeology at least as adequately, if not better than its main rivals, modularist accounts of theory of mind. (shrink)

Context: Neurophenomenology, as formulated by Varela, offers an approach to the science of consciousness that seeks to get beyond the hard problem of consciousness. There is much to admire in the practical approach to the science of consciousness that neurophenomenology advocates. Problem: Even so, this article argues, the metaphysical commitments of the enterprise require a firmer foundation. The root problem is that neurophenomenology, as classically formulated by Varela, endorses a form of non-reductionism that, despite its ambitions, assumes rather than dissolves (...) the hard problem of consciousness. We expose that neurophenomenology is not a natural solution to that problem. We defend the view that whatever else neurophenomenology might achieve, it cannot close the gap between the phenomenal and the physical if there is no such gap to close. Method: Building on radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science that deny that the phenomenal and the physical are metaphysically distinct, this article shows that the only way to deal properly with the hard problem is by denying the metaphysical distinction between the physical and the phenomenal that gives the hard problem life. Results: This article concludes by discussing how neurophenomenology might be reformulated under the auspices of a radically enactive and embodied account of cognition. That is, only by denying that there are two distinct phenomena - the physical and the phenomenal - can the neurophenomenological project get on with addressing its pragmatic problems of showing how neuroscientists may be guided by first-person data in their analysis of third-person experimental data, and vice versa. Implications: The topic addressed in this article is of direct value to consciousness studies in general and specifically for the project of neurophenomenology. If the neurophenomenological project is to deal with the hard problem, it must denude itself of its non-reductionist background assumption and embrace a strict identity thesis. Constructivist content: Radical enactive and embodied approaches to mind and consciousness adopt a view of consciousness as a dynamic activity - something an organism enacts in ongoing engagement with its environment. These approaches therefore share with constructivist approaches an action-based view of mind. (shrink)

A recurrent theme in research on socially distributed cognition is to establish the claim that the cognitive phenomenon of transactive memory is grounded in a specific mode of organization: mechanistic compositional organization. My topic is the confluence of transactive remembering or transactive memory systems (TMSs) and mechanistic compositional organization. In relation to this confluence, the paper scrutinizes the claim that the kind of organization grounding TMSs and/or tokens of transactive remembering takes the specific form of mechanistic compositional organization – at (...) least as the latter is usually construed. It is argued (i) that the usual account of mechanistic compositional organization is based on a synchronic composition function, and (ii) that the organization of TMSs and/or transactive remembering is not well understood by way of synchronic composition. The positive account pursued is that TMSs and/or transactive remembering are better understood as grounded in a diachronic composition function. (shrink)

Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to (...) design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a number of recent papers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Some argue that biological systems exhibit historical path-dependent learning that is absent from systems that minimize free energy. Others have argued that a free energy minimizing system would fail to satisfy a key condition for sensorimotor agency referred to as “interactional asymmetry”. These critics question the claim we defend in this paper that the FEP can be used to formally model autonomy and adaptivity. We will argue it is too soon to conclude that the two frameworks are incompatible. There are undeniable conceptual differences between the two frameworks but in our view each has something important and necessary to offer. The FEP needs enactive cognitive science for the solution it provides to the problem of meaning. Enactive cognitive science needs the FEP to formally model the properties it argues to be constitutive of agency. Our conclusion will be that active inference models based on the FEP provides a way by which scientists can think about how to address the problems of engineering autonomy and adaptivity in artificial agents in formal terms. In the end engaging more closely with this formalism and its further developments will benefit those working within the enactive framework. -/- . (shrink)

We examine some of the ramifications of extended cognition for virtue epistemology by exploring the idea within extended cognition that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency such that cognitive agency includes socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we first explore the (seemingly unquestioned) assumption in both virtue epistemology and extended cognition that cognitive agency is an individualistic phenomenon. A distributed notion of cognitive agency alters the landscape of knowledge attribution in virtue epistemology. We conclude by offering a pragmatic notion of (...) cognitive agency, where the situation sets the benchmarks for whether cognitive agency is individualistic or socio-culturally distributed. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer reasons to justify the explanatory credentials of dynamical modeling in the context of the metaplasticity thesis, located within a larger grouping of views known as 4E Cognition. Our focus is on showing that dynamicism is consistent with interventionism, and therefore with a difference-making account at the scale of system topologies that makes sui generis explanatory differences to the overall behavior of a cognitive system. In so doing, we provide a general overview of the interventionist approach. (...) We then argue that recent mechanistic attempts at reducing dynamical modeling to a merely descriptive enterprise fail given that the explanatory standard in dynamical modeling can be shown to rest on interventionism. We conclude that dynamical modeling captures features of nested and developmentally plastic cognitive systems that cannot be explained by appeal to underlying mechanisms alone. (shrink)

This article attempts to articulate a theoretical framework, the target of which is to systematically unearth the conditions validating the ascription of agency to material culture. A wide range of studies, located within the interdisciplinary field known as material culture studies, testify to and aim at (re)uniting the materials of material culture with the notion of agency. In this article the argument is advanced that material entities have agency only if two necessary conditions are met: an ontological condition (agency is (...) an asymmetrical and relational category) and an epistemological condition (material entities mediate and transform human understanding). Hopefully, this way of approaching matters will help to establish a constructive framework for future debates. (shrink)

This article attempts to articulate a theoretical framework, the target of which is to systematically unearth the conditions validating the ascription of agency to material culture. A wide range of studies, located within the interdisciplinary field known as material culture studies, testify to and aim at uniting the materials of material culture with the notion of agency. In this article the argument is advanced that material entities have agency only if two necessary conditions are met: an ontological condition and an (...) epistemological condition. Hopefully, this way of approaching matters will help to establish a constructive framework for future debates. (shrink)

There is more to skillful performance in sport than technical proficiency. How an athlete feels – whether he or she is confident, elated, nervous or fearful – also matters to how they perform in certain situations. Taking stock of this, some sports psychologists have begun to develop techniques for ensuring more robust, reliable performances by focusing on how athletes respond emotionally to situations while, at the same time, training their action-oriented skills. This chapter adds theoretical insight to those efforts, offering (...) reasons to endorse a radically enactivist framework when it comes to thinking about: the basic characteristics of emotions; how emotions are involved in skilled performance; and how they integrate with the sort of intelligence that informs the skilled execution of action exhibited in embodied expertise. (shrink)