We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provi... more We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provide an analysis of basic trust in relation to urban places. We use the term basic trust to refer to the attitude of certainty we express when we act in skilled, often unreflective, habitual ways in the living environment. We will argue that the basic trust of people living in cities should be understood in relation to what we will call trusted urban places. Trusted urban places can be understood similarly as what Giovanna Colombetti and Joel Krueger have called "affective niches" that provide affordances for amplifying, dampening, and sustaining affective states. The basic trust of people living in cities, we will argue, depends upon people moving through and engaging with trusted urban places. In urbanism and architecture, it is barely recognized how the city affords places of affective significance that the person incorporates into their bodily way of existing. Persistent exposure to urban stressors can disturb basic trust in one's living environment, resulting in a person no longer being at home in the world. We provide examples in which people, as a consequence of the repeated exposure to stressors, no longer move through and engage with trusted urban places, and the impact this has on their basic trust. Our aim is to understand how the urban environment can contribute to the path from stress to anxiety and mood disorders, and how a person can regain their openness to possibilities for regulating their emotions skilfully.
Our essay starts from our first-person experience of visiting El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexic... more Our essay starts from our first-person experience of visiting El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City. Over the course of our visit, El Eco became, what we will call an 'intimate place' in which we were able to explore personal thoughts, memories, and feelings. We go on to compare El Eco to Black Water (2021), a site-specific art installation by RAAAF. We draw on Donald Winnicott's work on play to show how intimate places like the El Eco museum have commonalities with the therapeutic setting of psychotherapy. They are places that enable people to freely associate by enabling a visitor to be in a state of relaxation, and by affording a rich array of disruptive possibilities for self-exploration. We understand such intimate places as playgrounds that can (temporarily) disrupt rigid patterns of resistance or avoidance, enabling a person to confront difficult emotions and experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological ... more Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological theories tend not to target intuitive causal engagement that is done in daily life. To fill this gap, we propose an Ecological-Enactive (E-E) affordance-based account of situated causal engagement, that is, causal judgments and perceptions. We develop this account to improve our understanding of this way of dealing with the world, which includes making progress on the causal selection problem, and to extend the scope of embodied cognitive science to causal cognition. We characterize identifying causes as selectively attending to the relevant ecological information to engage with relevant affordances, where these affordances are dependent on individual abilities. Based on this we construe causal engagement as based on a learned skill. Moreover, we argue that to understand judgments of causation as we make them in our daily lives, we need to see them as situated in sociocultural practices....
Ecological-enactive cognitive science is an increasingly influential paradigm that has proved its... more Ecological-enactive cognitive science is an increasingly influential paradigm that has proved its heuristic value in various fields of the human sciences. This text, in the form of a conversation, explores possibilities for an ecological-enactive account of how people experientially engage with works of art on the basis of their embodied skills.
With this inaugural lecture as Socrates Professor on the topic of Making Humane Technologies, I a... more With this inaugural lecture as Socrates Professor on the topic of Making Humane Technologies, I aim to show that artistic practices afford embedding technologies better in society. Analyzing artworks made at RAAAF, an art collective that makes visual art and experimental architecture, I will describe three aspects of making practices that may contribute to improving the embedding of technology in society: (1) the skill of working with layers of meaning; (2) the skill of creating material playgrounds that afford free exploration of the potential of new technologies and artistic experiments; and (3) the skill of openness to the possibility of having radically different socio-material practices. I will use images of several RAAAF projects to make these skills involved in making more tangible. It is artistic skills like these that can contribute to a better societal embedding of technologies.
This article aims to sketch a new integrative perspective on what I call change-ability. I define... more This article aims to sketch a new integrative perspective on what I call change-ability. I define change-ability as skilled ways of coordinating with a rapidly changing world. Many urgent societal challenges – from climate change to obesity, from the mass extinction of species to fraying social cohesion – require people to collectively change everyday patterns of behaviour they take for granted. The key insight I start from is that to durably change undesirable patterns of behaviour, we could start by changing the affordances the environment offers – the possibilities for action offered to us by the living environment. The aim of this article is to sketch an integrative conceptual framework for understanding change-ability in terms in terms of a dynamical ‘brain ↔ body ↔ community ↔ landscape of affordances’ system. This Change-Ability Conceptual Framework starts from the idea that individuals and communities are situated in the same rich landscape of affordances and suggests that m...
We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance... more We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance of art for making technologies—around the following five themes. (1) The experience of artworks and whether such experiences can be described in terms of the affordances of artworks. (2) The possibility that engagement with artworks offers for the transformation of ourselves and the sociomaterial practices we take part in. (3) The claim that artworks can serve as what Annemarie Mol describes as “material propositions” that can be used to engage philosophical reflection. (4) The temporality of making practices and how art installations can be thought of as places in which past, present, and future meet. (5) How art could potentially enable a better embedding of technologies in society.
This paper presents a novel theoretical view on impulsive action, integrating thus far separate p... more This paper presents a novel theoretical view on impulsive action, integrating thus far separate perspectives on non-reflective action, motivation, emotion regulation, and impulse control. We frame impulsive action in terms of directedness of the individual organism toward, away, or against other givens – toward future states and away from one’s present state. First, appraisal of a perceived or thought-of event or object on occasion, rapidly andwithout premonition or conscious deliberation, triggers amotive tomodify one’s relation to that event or object. Situational specifics of the event as perceived and appraised motivate and guide selection of readiness for a particular kind of purposive action. Second, perception of complex situations can give rise to multiple appraisals, multiple motives, and multiple simultaneous changes in action readiness. Multiple states of action readiness may interact in generating action, by reinforcing or attenuating each other, thereby yielding impulse...
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PP... more We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time . Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing.
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inher... more In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will callmetastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent’s flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two com...
Radical collective behavior change is required to develop sustainable forms of urban life. This d... more Radical collective behavior change is required to develop sustainable forms of urban life. This demands redesign of everyday environments. However, the ways in which our material world shape our behaviors are still understudied and underappreciated. Not much is known about how collective behaviors are facilitated through infrastructural or material interventions. Here, we draw upon 15 years of experience at RAAAF, an Amsterdam-based collective for visual art and architecture, to introduce ten practical lessons for developing strategic design interventions for affordance-based behavior change in urban environments. Affordances are the possibilities for action provided by the environment. Strategic design interventions aim to set collective social change in motion by developing sustainable affordances and dismantling unsustainable behavioral constraints. Strategic design interventions seek to inspire policies and public imagination. Whereas scientific studies aim to describe reality a...
Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A cl... more Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A clinical expert does not only have general textbook knowledge, but is sensitive to what is demanded for the individual patient in a particular situation. A method that can do justice to the subjective and situation-specific nature of clinical expertise is ethnography. Effective deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involves an interpretive, evaluative process of optimizing stimulation parameters, which makes it an interesting case to study clinical expertise. The aim of this study is to explore the role of clinical expertise through an ethnography of the particular case of DBS optimization in OCD. In line with the topic of the special issue this article is a part of, we will also use our findings to reflect on ethnography as a method to study complex phenomena like clinical expertise. This ethnography of DBS optimization is based on 18 months of participant o...
There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointl... more There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointly such as playing music in a band or dancing as a couple, and performing these same activities alone. This difference is sometimes captured by appealing to shared or joint intentions that allow individuals to coordinate what they do over space and time. In what follows we will use the terminology of we-intentionality to refer to what individuals do when they engage in group ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Our aim in this paper is to argue that we-intentionality is best understood in relation to a shared living environment in which acting individuals are situated. By the “living environment” we mean to refer to places and everyday situations in which humans act. These places and situations are simultaneously social, cultural, material and natural. We will use the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action the living environment furnishes. Affordances form and are mai...
Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adeq... more Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offered by a concrete situation. The concept of situated normativity has so far primarily been discussed in the context of skilled unreflective action. In this paper, we aim to explore and sketch the role of the concept of situated normativity in characterising more reflective forms of normativity. The goal of the paper is two-fold: first, by showing more reflective forms of normativity to be continuous with unreflective situated normativity, we bring these reflective forms into the reach of embodied accounts of cognition; and second, by extendin...
We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provi... more We draw on insights from ecological psychology, explorative architecture, and psychiatry to provide an analysis of basic trust in relation to urban places. We use the term basic trust to refer to the attitude of certainty we express when we act in skilled, often unreflective, habitual ways in the living environment. We will argue that the basic trust of people living in cities should be understood in relation to what we will call trusted urban places. Trusted urban places can be understood similarly as what Giovanna Colombetti and Joel Krueger have called "affective niches" that provide affordances for amplifying, dampening, and sustaining affective states. The basic trust of people living in cities, we will argue, depends upon people moving through and engaging with trusted urban places. In urbanism and architecture, it is barely recognized how the city affords places of affective significance that the person incorporates into their bodily way of existing. Persistent exposure to urban stressors can disturb basic trust in one's living environment, resulting in a person no longer being at home in the world. We provide examples in which people, as a consequence of the repeated exposure to stressors, no longer move through and engage with trusted urban places, and the impact this has on their basic trust. Our aim is to understand how the urban environment can contribute to the path from stress to anxiety and mood disorders, and how a person can regain their openness to possibilities for regulating their emotions skilfully.
Our essay starts from our first-person experience of visiting El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexic... more Our essay starts from our first-person experience of visiting El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City. Over the course of our visit, El Eco became, what we will call an 'intimate place' in which we were able to explore personal thoughts, memories, and feelings. We go on to compare El Eco to Black Water (2021), a site-specific art installation by RAAAF. We draw on Donald Winnicott's work on play to show how intimate places like the El Eco museum have commonalities with the therapeutic setting of psychotherapy. They are places that enable people to freely associate by enabling a visitor to be in a state of relaxation, and by affording a rich array of disruptive possibilities for self-exploration. We understand such intimate places as playgrounds that can (temporarily) disrupt rigid patterns of resistance or avoidance, enabling a person to confront difficult emotions and experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological ... more Causal cognition is a core aspect of how we deal with the world; however, existing psychological theories tend not to target intuitive causal engagement that is done in daily life. To fill this gap, we propose an Ecological-Enactive (E-E) affordance-based account of situated causal engagement, that is, causal judgments and perceptions. We develop this account to improve our understanding of this way of dealing with the world, which includes making progress on the causal selection problem, and to extend the scope of embodied cognitive science to causal cognition. We characterize identifying causes as selectively attending to the relevant ecological information to engage with relevant affordances, where these affordances are dependent on individual abilities. Based on this we construe causal engagement as based on a learned skill. Moreover, we argue that to understand judgments of causation as we make them in our daily lives, we need to see them as situated in sociocultural practices....
Ecological-enactive cognitive science is an increasingly influential paradigm that has proved its... more Ecological-enactive cognitive science is an increasingly influential paradigm that has proved its heuristic value in various fields of the human sciences. This text, in the form of a conversation, explores possibilities for an ecological-enactive account of how people experientially engage with works of art on the basis of their embodied skills.
With this inaugural lecture as Socrates Professor on the topic of Making Humane Technologies, I a... more With this inaugural lecture as Socrates Professor on the topic of Making Humane Technologies, I aim to show that artistic practices afford embedding technologies better in society. Analyzing artworks made at RAAAF, an art collective that makes visual art and experimental architecture, I will describe three aspects of making practices that may contribute to improving the embedding of technology in society: (1) the skill of working with layers of meaning; (2) the skill of creating material playgrounds that afford free exploration of the potential of new technologies and artistic experiments; and (3) the skill of openness to the possibility of having radically different socio-material practices. I will use images of several RAAAF projects to make these skills involved in making more tangible. It is artistic skills like these that can contribute to a better societal embedding of technologies.
This article aims to sketch a new integrative perspective on what I call change-ability. I define... more This article aims to sketch a new integrative perspective on what I call change-ability. I define change-ability as skilled ways of coordinating with a rapidly changing world. Many urgent societal challenges – from climate change to obesity, from the mass extinction of species to fraying social cohesion – require people to collectively change everyday patterns of behaviour they take for granted. The key insight I start from is that to durably change undesirable patterns of behaviour, we could start by changing the affordances the environment offers – the possibilities for action offered to us by the living environment. The aim of this article is to sketch an integrative conceptual framework for understanding change-ability in terms in terms of a dynamical ‘brain ↔ body ↔ community ↔ landscape of affordances’ system. This Change-Ability Conceptual Framework starts from the idea that individuals and communities are situated in the same rich landscape of affordances and suggests that m...
We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance... more We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance of art for making technologies—around the following five themes. (1) The experience of artworks and whether such experiences can be described in terms of the affordances of artworks. (2) The possibility that engagement with artworks offers for the transformation of ourselves and the sociomaterial practices we take part in. (3) The claim that artworks can serve as what Annemarie Mol describes as “material propositions” that can be used to engage philosophical reflection. (4) The temporality of making practices and how art installations can be thought of as places in which past, present, and future meet. (5) How art could potentially enable a better embedding of technologies in society.
This paper presents a novel theoretical view on impulsive action, integrating thus far separate p... more This paper presents a novel theoretical view on impulsive action, integrating thus far separate perspectives on non-reflective action, motivation, emotion regulation, and impulse control. We frame impulsive action in terms of directedness of the individual organism toward, away, or against other givens – toward future states and away from one’s present state. First, appraisal of a perceived or thought-of event or object on occasion, rapidly andwithout premonition or conscious deliberation, triggers amotive tomodify one’s relation to that event or object. Situational specifics of the event as perceived and appraised motivate and guide selection of readiness for a particular kind of purposive action. Second, perception of complex situations can give rise to multiple appraisals, multiple motives, and multiple simultaneous changes in action readiness. Multiple states of action readiness may interact in generating action, by reinforcing or attenuating each other, thereby yielding impulse...
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PP... more We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time . Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing.
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inher... more In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will callmetastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent’s flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two com...
Radical collective behavior change is required to develop sustainable forms of urban life. This d... more Radical collective behavior change is required to develop sustainable forms of urban life. This demands redesign of everyday environments. However, the ways in which our material world shape our behaviors are still understudied and underappreciated. Not much is known about how collective behaviors are facilitated through infrastructural or material interventions. Here, we draw upon 15 years of experience at RAAAF, an Amsterdam-based collective for visual art and architecture, to introduce ten practical lessons for developing strategic design interventions for affordance-based behavior change in urban environments. Affordances are the possibilities for action provided by the environment. Strategic design interventions aim to set collective social change in motion by developing sustainable affordances and dismantling unsustainable behavioral constraints. Strategic design interventions seek to inspire policies and public imagination. Whereas scientific studies aim to describe reality a...
Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A cl... more Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A clinical expert does not only have general textbook knowledge, but is sensitive to what is demanded for the individual patient in a particular situation. A method that can do justice to the subjective and situation-specific nature of clinical expertise is ethnography. Effective deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involves an interpretive, evaluative process of optimizing stimulation parameters, which makes it an interesting case to study clinical expertise. The aim of this study is to explore the role of clinical expertise through an ethnography of the particular case of DBS optimization in OCD. In line with the topic of the special issue this article is a part of, we will also use our findings to reflect on ethnography as a method to study complex phenomena like clinical expertise. This ethnography of DBS optimization is based on 18 months of participant o...
There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointl... more There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointly such as playing music in a band or dancing as a couple, and performing these same activities alone. This difference is sometimes captured by appealing to shared or joint intentions that allow individuals to coordinate what they do over space and time. In what follows we will use the terminology of we-intentionality to refer to what individuals do when they engage in group ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Our aim in this paper is to argue that we-intentionality is best understood in relation to a shared living environment in which acting individuals are situated. By the “living environment” we mean to refer to places and everyday situations in which humans act. These places and situations are simultaneously social, cultural, material and natural. We will use the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action the living environment furnishes. Affordances form and are mai...
Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adeq... more Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offered by a concrete situation. The concept of situated normativity has so far primarily been discussed in the context of skilled unreflective action. In this paper, we aim to explore and sketch the role of the concept of situated normativity in characterising more reflective forms of normativity. The goal of the paper is two-fold: first, by showing more reflective forms of normativity to be continuous with unreflective situated normativity, we bring these reflective forms into the reach of embodied accounts of cognition; and second, by extendin...
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