Browsing by Subject "Enactivism"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Agency from a radical embodied standpoint: an ecologial-enactive proposal
    (Frontiers Media, 2020-06-26) Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Filosofía
    Explaining 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.
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    Are plants cognitive? A reply to Adams
    (Elsevier, 2018-12-06) Segundo-Ortin, Miguel; Calvo, Paco; Filosofía
    According 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.
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    Distal engagement: intentions in perception
    Brancazio, Nick; Segundo Ortin, Miguel; Filosofía
    Non-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.
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    Enactivismo 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.
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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.