{"title":"Attuning the world: Ambient smart environments for autistic persons","authors":"Janko Nešić","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10021-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10021-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Autism spectrum disorder is usually understood through deficits in social interaction and communication, repetitive patterns of behavior, and hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input. Affordance-based Skilled Intentionality that combines ecological-enactive views of cognition with Free Energy and Predictive Processing was proposed as the framework from which to view autism integrally. Skilled Intentionality distinguishes between a landscape of affordances and a field of affordances. Under the integrative Skilled Intentionality Framework, it can be shown that autistic differences in the field of affordances stem from aberrant precision estimation. Autistics over-rely on the precision afforded by the environment—a stable econiche they build. According to this approach, autism is understood as characterized by an atypical field of affordances. I will build on the ecological-enactive account of autism to suggest that one way to shape the neurotypical landscape of affordances in accordance with autistic needs is through the use of Ambient Smart Environments (ASEs). Taking the cue from autistic lived experience, ASEs could help minimize environmental uncertainty and afford affective scaffolding by supporting dynamic and flexible niche construction in accordance with individual autistic styles.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nonveridical biosemiotics and the Interface Theory of Perception: implications for perception-mediated selection","authors":"Brian Khumalo, Yogi Hale Hendlin","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10013-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10013-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recently, the relationship between evolutionary ecology and perceptual science has received renewed attention under perception-mediated selection, a mode of natural selection linking perceptual saliency, rather than veridicality, to fitness. The Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) has been especially prominent in claiming that an organism’s perceptual interface is populated by icons, which arise as a function of evolved, species-specific perceptual interfaces that produce approximations of organisms’ environments through fitness-tuned perceptions. According to perception-mediated selection, perception and behavior calibrate one another as organisms’ capacities to experience and know the objects and properties of their environments lead to responses highlighting certain environmental features selected for survival. We argue this occurs via the <i>Umwelt</i>/<i>Umgebung</i> distinction in ethology, demonstrating that organisms interact with their external environments (<i>Umgebung</i>) through constructed perceptual schema (<i>Umwelt</i>) that produce constrained representations of environmental objects and their properties. Following Peircean semiotics, we claim that ITP’s focus on icons as saliency-simplified markers corresponds to biosemiotics’ understanding of perceptual representations, which manifest as iconic (resembling objects), indexical (referring), or symbolic (arbitrary) modalities, which provide for organisms’ semiotic scaffolding. We argue that ITP provides the computational evidence for biosemiotics’ notion of iconicity, while biosemiotics provides explanation within ITP for how iconicity can build up into indices and symbols. The common contention of these separate frameworks that the process of perception tracks saliency rather than veridicality suggests that digital/dyadic perceptual strategies will be outcompeted by their semiotic/triadic counterparts. This carries implications for evolutionary theory as well as theories of cognition.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142224578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Keeping cognition kinky: a reply to Moyal-Sharrock on contentful cognition and its origins","authors":"Daniel D. Hutto","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10018-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10018-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Advocates of radical enactivism maintain that contentful cognition is kinky, and that we need a kinky explanation of its natural origins (Hutto & Satne 2017, Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). <i>Evolving enactivism</i>. MIT Press.). In advancing this idea, they maintain that there are qualitatively important cognitive differences between creatures capable of full-fledged contentful thought and speech and those which are not. Moreover, they maintain that the capacity for full-fledged contentful cognition needs special kind of explanation – it needs an explanation that isn’t a simple tale of the mere elaboration or embellishment of prior existing forms of cognition. Moyal-Sharrock (2021a, 2021b) rejects the need to introduce kinks of either sort. This contribution responds to her critical assessment, defending the radical enactivist stance on the need to keep contentful cognition kinky.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141945116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hinges, philosophy and mind: on Moyal-Sharrock’s certainty in action","authors":"Annalisa Coliva","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10016-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10016-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>Certainty in Action</i> is an invaluable collection of Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s papers appeared after her seminal <i>Understanding Wittgenstein’s</i> On Certainty (2004). It focuses on the centrality of action and claims that this is the distinctive trait of “the third Wittgenstein” – the one that, after the Wittgenstein of the <i>Tractatus</i> and the one of the <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>, wrote the <i>Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology</i>, the <i>Remarks on Colour</i> and <i>On Certainty</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141945118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experience and nature in pragmatism and enactive theory","authors":"Nathaniel F. Barrett","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10012-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10012-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Enactive theory seems to be reaching a critical juncture in its evolution, as it expands beyond cognitive science to include a project that Shaun Gallagher has called “new naturalism”: a “phenomenologized” reconstruction of nature, directed by a distinctive view of experience that is itself a product of “naturalized phenomenology.” This article aims to contribute to conversations about how to move forward with this project by highlighting important parallels between the trajectory of enactive theory and the early history of pragmatism. Pragmatism was first developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey out of a distinctive view of experience that strongly resembles that of enactive theory. Then, during the first third of the twentieth century, pragmatism evolved into a philosophy of nature and played a leading role in a reconstructive project much like the “new naturalism” proposed by Gallagher and others. Around midcentury, however, this project was largely abandoned as philosophers turned to problems of more limited scope. This history raises crucial questions for proponents of enactive “new naturalism”: Why did the pragmatist version of this project fail to achieve its aims? And how will it be different this time?</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141945119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-knowledge from resistance training","authors":"Giovanni Rolla","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10020-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10020-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The problem of self-knowledge has been thoroughly discussed in the context of traditional epistemology. In parallel to that traditional approach, Ecological-Enactive Cognition (EEC) has emerged in the last 30 years as a genuine contender in the cognitive sciences. According to EEC, the unity of analysis of cognitive processes is the dynamics between brain, body and environment. In this paper, I advance an EEC approach to self-knowledge, which immediately suggests that knowing oneself is a matter of knowing what one’s body can do. I then turn to resistance training, particularly weightlifting, and argue that it offers a paradigmatic case of self-knowledge in EEC’s terms. I contend that periodically reaching the point of mechanical failure provides an important insight into self-knowledge. Thus, resistance training allows the trainee to achieve knowledge of themselves in a fundamentally practical manner—and doing so is transformative of the kind of actions they are capable of.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141867284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Off the beaten path: perception in enactivism and the realism-idealism question","authors":"Thomas van Es","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10011-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10011-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involving, and isn’t realist because it emphasizes the agent’s role in shaping the world through our own historical, bodily activity. More generally, I argue that the question itself assumes a reified, abstract notion of perception. This introduces a wedge between organism and environment that is incompatible with enactivism’s view of organism and environment as mutually constitutive. This problematizes the intermediate position between realist and idealist extremes as has traditionally been argued for in enactivism. I also touch on the ethical implications of this question, and how enactivism provides a promising path to grapple with the contradiction of the objective, shared space and our individual, historically shaped encounters with it. In sum, I suggest it is time for enactivism to go off the beaten path, and lay its own path in walking again.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141867285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aesthetic experiences with others: an enactive account","authors":"Harry Drummond","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10015-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10015-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We can look at paintings, listen to music, dance, play instruments, and watch movies, on our own almost anytime, anywhere. That is, we have effortless, on-demand access to an abundance of private aesthetic experiences. Why, then, do we seek out aesthetic experiences together? Indeed, it is not controversial to claim that listening to music, dancing, and watching films are activities that we do together more so than we do on our own. While the significance of interpersonal aesthetic experiences, and what explains that significance, is not uncharted territory, I claim that more precision regarding the kinds of relations and interactions that modulate and enable different kinds of interpersonal aesthetic experiences is warranted than is offered in extant literature. As such, an enactive approach that not only foregrounds embodiment and intersubjectivity in cognition, but duly explains how variations in them cause variations in cognition, is paramount to my explanation. Here, then, I marshal three ‘varieties’ of interpersonal aesthetic experience that I term <i>aggregative</i>,<i> synchronised</i>, and <i>shared</i> aesthetic experiences. In doing so, I explain what makes them particularly worthwhile, while introducing terminological and explanatory clarity to the literature as a unifying base from which future research can unfold.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141784424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phenomenology and making sense of the DSM: situatedness in melancholic and atypical depression","authors":"Aryan Kavosh","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10014-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10014-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In light of the recent calls for integrating phenomenology and psychiatry, I will address the problem of heterogeneity in major depressive disorder (MDD) using the phenomenological account of depression put forth by Fernandez (Fernandez, 2014). I will first go over the distinction between two of the major specifiers of major depressive disorder, namely melancholic and atypical depression. Then, I review the account of depression developed by Fernandez, which considers some of the people diagnosed with MDD to have an erosion of the capacity for the category of moods as opposed to a particular kind of mood. I will apply this conception to the diagnostic and statistical manual criteria for melancholic and atypical depression, and consider how reactive and unreactive depressed moods can be clarified using this conception. I argue that we can help our understanding of MDD by viewing melancholic depression as primarily characterized by structural erosion of the person’s situatedness (observed as a lack of mood reactivity) and atypical depression as a state in which the capacity for moods in general has not been eroded (hence, the retention of mood reactivity), with the psychopathology rooted only in the content of experience (the moods themselves). I discuss how this conception related to other phenomenological accounts of depression and why it can be useful in making sense of some clinical observations between the two specifiers, namely the differences in illness severity and symptoms of depersonalization and derealization, before concluding the work by considering its relationship with the operationalized approach of the DSM.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141784576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distinguishing imagining from perceiving: reality monitoring and the ‘Perky effect’","authors":"Cain Todd","doi":"10.1007/s11097-024-10009-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-024-10009-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the problem of how we distinguish, phenomenologically, sensory imagination from perception. I suggest that philosophical discussions of this issue have been hampered by a surprising failure to carefully distinguish what is involved in our awareness of being in a <i>state</i> of imagining, from our awareness of the imagistic <i>content</i>. Rectifying this allows us, first, to gain a clearer insight into the problem at issue, and it also allows for a new interpretation of the so-called ‘Perky effect’, whereby subjects supposedly confuse imagining for perceiving. Second, it allows us to give a more nuanced account of reality monitoring and of the metacognitive mechanisms underpinning the phenomenal features we rely upon to distinguish state from content.</p>","PeriodicalId":51504,"journal":{"name":"Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141784577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}