enactivism

Workshop in Enaction and Ecological Psychology

City: Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain).

Date: 9 & 10 July, 2019.

Venue: Ignacio María Barriola Building (Elhuyar Square, 1), University of the Basque Country.

This workshop aims to gather researchers in Enaction and Ecological Psychology in order to evaluate which are the complementarities, tensions, and overlaps between these two approaches.The topics of the workshop will be divided in three main sections:

  1. Methodological and scientific ontology: Ecological information, sensorimotor contingencies, and affordances.
  2.  Epistemic issues: Ecological meaning, phenomenology, and sense-making.
  3.  The social world within the enactive and the ecological approaches.

Unfortunately, there is no extra place for speakers, but do not hesitate to contact them for joining as attendants. There will be a great deal of discussion and debate, and it will be great to have an audience willing to engage into these topics. If you plan to go, please, confirm your assistance by emailing them in the contact section of the website (below). The workshop is organized by Manuel Heras-Escribano and Ezequiel Di Paolo (IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, EHU-UPV) and generously funded by the BBVA Foundation through the 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators entitled “La filosofía de las affordances: los orígenes ecológicos, evolutivos y sociales de la cognición [AFFORDEVOCOG]”

For more information, visit: https://enactionandecologicalpsychology.wordpress.com/

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Phenomenological Ethnography of Radiology: Enactive and Intersubjective

Talk at the 4E Cognition Group Seminar – March 14, 2-5 pm

IIMAS, UNAM

Abstract

The paper is based on research conducted at the actual radiology department in USA. It is concerned with the “radiologist at work”, i.e. the affective and intersubjective ground for her individual diagnostic intentions and personalised strategies of the enaction of diagnostically relevant experiences via imaging technology. The method of research includes “enactive proofs”— observations and analysis of the externalization of a radiologist’s professional memory through the interaction with medical imaging technology and other practitioners in the field. The findings of this research have much to offer to both philosophy and radiological praxis. While the observations strongly support the development of enactive phenomenology, critique of representationalism, primacy of inference in cognition, and shared intentions, they also provide insight into concrete operations in coping with radiology’s paraphernalia, habituality, the origin of mistakes, multilayered communication, and improving professional praxis. Finally, through the prism of phenomenological ethnography, we can raise anew some philosophically and socially crucial questions, such as “How does something new enter into experience and/or praxis?”

Author: Mindaugas Briedis, professor (Philosophy)

Address: Mykolas Romeris University, Institute of Humanities. Ateities g. 20, LT-08303, Vilnius, Lithuania

Email: mbriedis77@gmail.com

Phone: +37061497823

 

 

March 2019 ENSO seminar

Dear ENSO community

We are delighted to announce that our March 2019 ENSO seminar will be given by Hanne De Jaegher, of the University of the Basque Country, on “Loving and knowing. Reflections for an engaged epistemology.”

The live event will be next week, on the 7th March, at 10.00 UTC.

Details of the talk, including the time in your own timezone, can be found on the ENSO webpage. The abstract is below.

As ever, if you would like to join us in the live session to participate in the discussion you would be welcome to do so. If you are interested in doing so, please send an email to mde@matthewegbert.com or marek.mcgann@gmail.com and we will send an invitation link to the YouTube Live session when things kick off. We welcome all researchers with an interest in participating.

The opportunity for discussion will continue on the ENSO webpage after the talk also.

If you or your research group have any news and announcements you would like brought to the attention of the ENSO community, please send details to either of us in advance of the talk. The simplest way to do this would be to share a a google-slides presentation with either of us (please limit yourself to a single slide). (more…)

CALL FOR PAPERS. Special Issue of the Journal Synthese: RADICAL VIEWS ON COGNITION

Guest Editor(s): Marcos Silva (Federal University of Alagoas) and Francicleber Ferreira
(Federal University of Ceará)

Special Issue Description:

Several contemporary philosophers have been developing tenets in pragmatism (broadly construed) to motivate it as an alternative philosophical foundation for a comprehensive understanding of cognition, opposed to a far-reaching representationalist tradition.
This long-established representationalist tradition in philosophy of mind and cognitive science defends that cognition is fundamentally content-involving. On the other side, some radical contenders advocate that cognition is neither basically representational nor does it involve, as in usual internalist views, processing or manipulating informational contents. They call attention to the importance of inherited and embodied practices and social interactions in order to understand relevant topics in perception, language and the nature of intentionality. They take seriously evolving biological systems and situated individuals interacting in communities over time as preconditions of our rationality, features often dismissed as not central in the representationalist and internalist tradition.

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ENSO Seminar Series: Dan D. Hutto. Beyond Content: Explications, Motivations and Implications

Beyond Content: Explications, Motivations and Implications

Dan D. Hutto

University of Wollongong
April 4, 2018, 11 p.m. UTC // April 4, 2018, 6 p.m. in America/Mexico_City

Radically Enactive Cognition, or REC, proposes that cognition is best modelled on the activities of living systems. It construes cognition as fundamentally interactive, dynamic and relational. Controversially, REC also holds that in its most basic form cognition is not content-involving: it is neither representational at root, nor does it involve picking up and processing informational contents that are used, stored and reused to get cognitive work done. This presentation situates our evolving account of REC within the wider theoretical landscape. It will: (1) clarify how REC understands the thesis that basic cognition lacks content; (2) review reasons that motivate adopting that thesis, so construed; and (3) outline the theoretical consequences of such adoption, including some of the questions and new lines of research it inspires.

Event page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl_UHKnwJf0

Enactivism: Theory and Performance

15-17 March 2018
Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis

Enactivism continues to be developed as a theory of embodied cognition, informed by phenomenology, pragmatism, and ecological psychology. Recent work in this area has fostered theory development and applications across a number of disciplines and topics. This conference will explore theoretical issues concerning enactivist notions of intentionality, action, externalism, the causal or constitutive roles of affect and affordance, predictive coding, and niche construction with respect to consciousness and cognition. An associated workshop will explore application to the area of musical performance.

This conference and workshop are supported by the Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award. Further support: Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis; the Cognitive Science Program at the Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis; and the Australian Research Council’s Minds in Skilled Performance project at the University of Wollongong.

http://www.ummoss.org/enactivism18.html

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ENSO 16: MIRIAM KYSELO — DIVERSITY AND THE MINIMAL SELF
The new season of the ENactive Seminars Online (ENSO) will start on Thursday Sept. 7, at 10 a.m. UTC, with a presentation from Miriam Kyselo on Diversity and the Minimal Self. The abstract and other details for the event, including links for viewing the talk and a forum for discussion can all be found here.
If you are interested in participating in the live session, please send an email to Matthew Egbert <matthew.egbert@gmail.com> before or during the event. He will respond by sending a link that you can follow to participate. For this link to work, you will need to have the browser plugin for google hangouts.

Reading group for “Evolving Enactivism”

9780262036115In the next couple of weeks our research group will start reading Hutto and Myin’s new book Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Here is the book’s overview from the MIT Press website:

Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones.

Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.