Enactivist interventions : rethinking the mind / Shaun Gallagher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gallagher, Shaun, 1948- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cognition.

Knowledge, Theory of.

Physical Description:

x, 249 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Enactivist Interventions' is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including intentionality, representation, the affect, perception, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. Gallagher argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology and cognitive science. Enactivism is presented as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Gallagher argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. He offers an account of the continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. Gallagher's analysis also addresses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in-the-world rather than in-the-head; they are situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Cognition-in-the-Head: Some Recent Approaches 1

1.2 Cognition-in-the-World: Phenomenologically Inspired Enactivist Approaches 5

1.3 Causality, Constitution, and Diachronicity 7

1.4 How to be an Embodied Theorist without Losing your Head 13

1.5 Beyond Predictive Coding 15

1.6 Enactivism as a Philosophy of Nature 21

2. Variations on Embodied Cognition 26

2.1 Weak EC and B-formats 28

2.2 Functionalist EC and the Extended Mind 35

2.3 A Biological Model of EC 37

2.4 Enactivist EC and Radical Embodiment 40

2.5 Getting Down on All 4Es 43

3 Pragmatic Resources for Enactive and Extended Minds 48

3.1 Pragmatism and Enactive Perception 48

3.2 Pragmatism and the Extended Mind 52

3.3 Dewey's Notion of Situation 54

3.4 Rapprochement 57

3.5 Responding to Objections 60

4 Enactive Intentionality 65

4.1 Intentionality in Mind and Action 66

4.2 Neo-behaviorism and Theory of Mind 67

4.3 Neo-pragmatism 71

4.4 Enactive Intentionality 77

4.5 Enactive and Extended Minds 80

5 Action without Representations 83

5.1 Representation in Action 83

5.2 Minimal Representations 87

5.3 Decouplability and Causal Spread 91

5.4 Where's the Representation? 96

5.5 What's Left of the Idea of Representation in Action? 103

5.6 Scientific Pragmatism about Representations 106

6 Perception without Inferences 107

6.1 Inference Models of Perception 107

6.2 An Example from Social Cognition 111

6.3 The Enactivist Alternative 115

6.4 Cultural Penetration 121

6.5 Rethinking Nature: From Free-Energy to Autopoiesis 125

7 Action and the Problem of Free Will 132

7.1 The Question of Free Will as Commonly Understood 132

7.2 Reflective and Perceptual Theories 136

7.3 Libetarian Experiments 139

7.4 Motor Control and Free Will 143

7.5 Restructuring Behavior 148

8 Making Enactivism Even More Embodied 150

8.1 Affectivity 151

8.2 Intersubjectivity 155

8.3 The Embodied and Enactive Brain 159

9 The Upright Posture: Its Current Standing 164

9.1 The Genesis of Upright Posture: Recent Biological and Evolutionary Theory 164

9.2 What Upright Posture Does for Human Cognition 167

9.3 Extending Straus's Embodied Account 169

9.4 Affordance Spaces and Enactive Hands 174

9.5 Manipulatory Areas 179

9.6 Handling Others 183

10 The Practice of Thinking 187

10.1 Simulating Solutions 187

10.2 Affordance-Based Imagining 192

10.3 Debating Minds 197

10.4 Doing the Math 204.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [213]-243) and index.

ISBN:

9780198794325

0198794320

OCLC:

974862470