- Philosophy Of Language, Later Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, Emotion, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Psychology, and 10 morePhilosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Wittgenstein, Affordances, Affect/Emotion, Philosophy of Psychiatry, Anxiety, Phenomenology, Embodied Cognition, and Philosophy of Emotionedit
In the last few years, there has been an interest in understanding the impact of environmental change and degradation on people's affective life. This issue has become particularly pressing for populations whose form of life is... more
In the last few years, there has been an interest in understanding the impact of environmental change and degradation on people's affective life. This issue has become particularly pressing for populations whose form of life is heavily dependent on ecosystem services and functions and whose opportunities for adaptation are limited. Based on our work with farmers from the Xochimilco urban wetland in the southwest of Mexico City, we begin to draw a theoretical approach to address and explain how environmental degradation impacts people's affective life and sense of agency. Farmers who were part of our project referred to a sense of despair and helplessness toward the loss of the ecosystem and their traditional farming-based form of life. From the perspective of phenomenology, enactivism and ecological psychology, we argue that the loss of this form of life in the area is related to the degradation of socio-ecological systems, limiting the opportunities for people to relate mea...
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Any complete account of morality should be able to account for its characteristic normativity; we show that enactivism is able to do so while doing justice to the situated and interactive nature of morality. Moral normativity primarily... more
Any complete account of morality should be able to account for its characteristic normativity; we show that enactivism is able to do so while doing justice to the situated and interactive nature of morality. Moral normativity primarily arises in interpersonal interaction and is characterized by agents’ possibility of irrevocably changing each other’s autonomies, that is, the possibility of harming or expanding each other’s autonomy. We defend that moral normativity, as opposed to social and other forms of normativity, regulates and, in some cases, constitutes this very possibility. Agents are thus morally responsible for caring about their own and others’ autonomies in interaction. In our conception, moral normativity is embodied, situated, and deeply affective, and is constituted in social practices and maintained in interaction. We identify at least two necessary conditions for moral normativity to arise as a social practice. The first is our embodied constitution as living beings who are precarious and therefore vulnerable and in need of interaction with others and with the environment. The second is our sociolinguistic nature, which allows us to exponentially expand our possibilities for action and normatively distinguish among them. We finish by drawing a distinction between moral character and the moral content of interactions, which allows us to universally recognize the ethical dimensions of all human interaction while doing justice to the situated character of morals.
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The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their... more
The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their responses in terms of what is better or worse to maintain their own precarious identity. Thus, normative behavior emerges from living organisms. Under this basic understanding of normativity as self-maintenance, autopoietic enactivism defends a continuity between biological, cognitive, and social norms. The self-maintenance of an agent's sensorimotor identity establishes the cognitive norms that regulate its behavior, and the self-maintenance of its social identity determines the social norms. However, there is no clear explanation of how individuals, who by their very constitution are primarily moved to interact with the world under the norm of self-maintenance, could interact with the world driven by non-individual norms. Furthermore, understanding all normativity as self-maintenance makes it unclear how agents establish genuine social interactions and acquire habits that have no implication for their constitution as individuals. So, to face these challenges, I propose an alternative notion of normativity grounded on a Wittgensteinian, action-oriented, and pragmatic conception of meaning that distinguishes between an agent with a normative point of view and external normative criteria. I defend that a normative phenomenon is an interaction that is established by an individual point of view as defined by autopoietic enactivism and that is part of a self-maintaining system. The latter establishes the external normative criteria to evaluate the interaction, and it may or may not coincide with the identity of the interacting agent. Separating external normative
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Thomas Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018, 336 pp.
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In this paper, we argue that the intentionality at play in skilled performance is not only inherently normative but also inherently affective. We take a radically embodied approach to the mind in which we conceive of cognitive agents as... more
In this paper, we argue that the intentionality at play in skilled performance is not only inherently normative but also inherently affective. We take a radically embodied approach to the mind in which we conceive of cognitive agents as sensorimotor systems moved to maintain their biological and sociocultural identity, whose perception is direct and occurs in terms of affordances. Within this framework, we define skilled performance as the enactment of action and perception patterns in which the agent is intentionally oriented towards specific features in the environment. We propose that (i) skillful intentionality is guided by normative constraints involving the material and social conditions of the agent but is ultimately determined by the intrinsic purpose of maintaining the agent's identity, and (ii) skilled intentionality is inherently affective because it is a specific occurrence arising from a general sense of care to maintain one's identity which is realized by orienting oneself towards the right aspects of the environment in the right way. Skilled performance thus requires agents to establish a normative and affective intentionality towards aspects of their material environment. We show that, since sociocultural practices shape human identities, sociocultural practices play a crucial role in shaping human intentionality of skilled performance both in their normative and affective dimensions. Maintaining a human identity, we argue, amounts to routinely carrying out activities that form a historical pattern which is shared with and recognized by others.
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Rietveld's conception of artistic practices and artworks allows us to engage with nature in a radically different manner: in a way that is more active and alive than we routinely do within the practices of philosophy and cognitive... more
Rietveld's conception of artistic practices and artworks allows us to engage with nature in a radically different manner: in a way that is more active and alive than we routinely do within the practices of philosophy and cognitive sciences. I argue that Rietveld's material playgrounds allow us to challenge our understanding of matter as purely passive and devoid of agency; they show us that nature's existence is a unique, raw, and powerful occurrence that intrinsically has a horizon of open possibilities. Rietveld's lecture provides an inspiring glimpse into how artworks and artistic practices illuminate human life as they open possibilities for engaging with ourselves and with nature in a radically different way. I contend that artworks, as Rietveld conceives them, make us more alive because they open our possibilities for engagement with our material environment and allows us to see their very existence as a unique, raw, and powerful occurrence. This way of seeing generated by art can help us in questioning our anthropocentric assumptions and radically transforming our engagement with nature within the practices of philosophy and cognitive sciences. I would like to elaborate first upon the concept of life and agency behind this idea. Being a living creature consists of being a precarious entity that constantly establishes meaningful interactions with its environment. The precariousness of life compels the entity to interact with the environment to avoid perishing, and its interactions with the environment are meaningful because they open possibilities for action from which the agent can choose. A living agent can differentiate between these possibilities according to how they nourish its identity by allowing it to counteract its precar-iousness and so on. The possibility of choice for the agent is significant both with respect to its future interactions and its own identity. On one hand, each possibility that is selected comes with a particular horizon of further possibilities; on the other hand, the agent's sensibilities and capacities to relate to the world are shaped by its selection of the sort of interactions it has with its environment. These two consequences coincide in their most fundamental form: the agent's selection makes a difference between persisting and dying. Being alive thus means navigating and shaping a world of possibilities: possibilities of interaction with the environment and possibilities of transformation or reaffir-mation of oneself-thus, life ceases when there are no more possibilities. As Rietveld points out, human forms of life and its realm of possibilities are shaped by the practices we share, and artworks and artistic practices make visible to us how these possibilities can be radically transformed. As there is life where there are possibilities , artworks and artistic practices have the power to make us more alive by opening us to radically different possibilities and by bringing us to question what we routinely take for granted. Part of what we take for granted is that there is always a standpoint from which we engage with others
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I dispute Heras-Escribano's reasons for denying that affordances are normative by offering an alternative reading of Wittgenstein's considerations in which there is room for nonsocial but public normativity, and by defending that... more
I dispute Heras-Escribano's reasons for denying that affordances are normative by offering an alternative reading of Wittgenstein's considerations in which there is room for nonsocial but public normativity, and by defending that organisms' affordance perception and engagement cannot be completely described in causal non-normative terms.
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The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-making is adaptivity, i.e., the agent's capacity to actively monitor and regulate its own trajectories with respect to its viability constraints.... more
The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-making is adaptivity, i.e., the agent's capacity to actively monitor and regulate its own trajectories with respect to its viability constraints. However, there are examples of sense-making, known as ultrafast cognition, that occur faster than the time physiologically required for the organism to centrally monitor and regulate movements, for example via long-range neural feedback mechanisms. These examples open a clarificatory challenge for the enactive approach with respect to how to operationalize monitoring and regulation, and with respect to the temporal scale of sense-making, which has traditionally been limited to the here-and-now in accordance with the axiom of structural determinism. We explore possible responses to this challenge and suggest that this axiom should be explicitly rejected: adaptivity is a property of organism-environment interactions over a time span that includes both present and past conditions. Therefore, ultrafast performances are no longer a challenge for the enactive approach because the constitutive basis of their normativity is spatiotemporally extensive. This is in accordance with recent developments in different varieties of enactivism, which all converge toward assigning a constitutive role to an agent's history of interactions.
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On March 23, 2016, Microsoft introduced Tay.ai, a Twitter AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and... more
On March 23, 2016, Microsoft introduced Tay.ai, a Twitter
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired
because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use
Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and
philosophy of emotions approach, that the Web environment
conforms a landscape of affordances that are crucial for the
development of digital social interactions. A landscape of
affordances is a space of action possibilities available for
agents that share a form of life. Some affordances constitute
an affective arrangement, that is, a space that elicits emotionally
intense, meaningful, and normative interactions.We
suggest that affective arrangements contribute to the maintenance
of the identity of the agent within a history of coupling
with a social and cultural environment. Tay.ai failed to tell
right from wrong and behave accordingly because the normativity
that defined its behavior and interactions was only
linguistic but did not aim at maintaining any social and cultural
identity.
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired
because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use
Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and
philosophy of emotions approach, that the Web environment
conforms a landscape of affordances that are crucial for the
development of digital social interactions. A landscape of
affordances is a space of action possibilities available for
agents that share a form of life. Some affordances constitute
an affective arrangement, that is, a space that elicits emotionally
intense, meaningful, and normative interactions.We
suggest that affective arrangements contribute to the maintenance
of the identity of the agent within a history of coupling
with a social and cultural environment. Tay.ai failed to tell
right from wrong and behave accordingly because the normativity
that defined its behavior and interactions was only
linguistic but did not aim at maintaining any social and cultural
identity.
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Breathing Life into Biology is a brave attempt to do science while wearing its values on its sleeves. It is written under the commitment that life is intrinsically valuable, and its value has to be taken seriously in doing biology.... more
Breathing Life into Biology is a brave attempt to do science while wearing its values on its sleeves. It is written under the commitment that life is intrinsically valuable, and its value has to be taken seriously in doing biology. Stewart defends a conception of life in which every living organism has a subjective point of view from which it makes sense of the world. Under this conception and the commitment that life is valuable in itself, the book presents the story of life from its origin and our history as humankind. However, the book is more successful in presenting the former than the latter. Yet Stewart's conception of enaction opens the possibility for cognitive science and his conception of what makes us human enables us to embrace the histories and the forms of life of those who have been systematically silenced.
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Introducción La idea de que la mente es equiparable al cerebro es extremadamente popular hoy en día. Se asume como verdad indiscutible que los fenómenos como la percepción, la consciencia y la resolución de problemas son esencialmente... more
Introducción La idea de que la mente es equiparable al cerebro es extremadamente popular hoy en día. Se asume como verdad indiscutible que los fenómenos como la percepción, la consciencia y la resolución de problemas son esencialmente procesos cerebrales. Esta idea se materializa, por ejemplo, en la psiquiatría, que equipara desórdenes afectivos con desbalances en el cerebro, o en posiciones de filosofía de la mente y ciencias cognitivas que asumen, por ejemplo, que la percepción es esencialmente una representación cerebral del mundo exterior o que la información es procesada y representada por módulos cerebrales dedicados a diferentes tareas como el procesamiento del lenguaje o las respuestas emocionales. Ecología del cerebro de Fuchs es una propuesta refrescante dentro de este panorama que, sin desconocer la importancia del cerebro, devuelve un papel protagónico dentro de la cognición al sujeto corporizado, situado en su ambiente e inequiparable con su cerebro. Ecología del cerebro ofrece una explicación empíricamente sustentada del papel del cerebro en la cognición desde una perspectiva enactiva, corporizada, extendida y situada (Fuchs 2018, p.108)-perspectivas también conocidas como 4e cognition, en las que se entiende la cognición como un proceso de interacción entre un organismo y su ambiente. Para Fuchs, la cognición es 1) corporizada en tanto que su realización en un cuerpo vivo es constitutiva de su consecución, 2) es embebida porque "los sistemas cognitivos explotan sus circunstancias específicas para incrementar sus capacidades" (p. 108), 3) es extendida más allá de los límites del cuerpo en tanto que los sistemas cognitivos están inherentemente conectados con su ambiente mediante bucles de retroalimentación, y 4) es enactuada porque surge solo en la interacción activa entre un agente y su ambiente (p. 108). Fuchs argumenta que el agente cognitivo corporizado y su perspectiva subjetiva de primera y segunda persona son irreducibles a las funciones cerebrales incluso a la hora de construir una explicación científica de la cognición. Bajo esta perspectiva y sin desconocer la importancia del cerebro, propone que este tiene tres funciones fundamentales: (i) es un órgano de mediación y transformación en la interacción sensoriomotora (p. 131), (ii) es un órgano de regulación e
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En esta tesis defiendo una concepción de normatividad fundamentada en la acción y sus consecuencias prácticas. Con ello busco contribuir a una explicación naturalista de los fenómenos normativos en general y de la cognición en particular.... more
En esta tesis defiendo una concepción de normatividad fundamentada en la acción y sus consecuencias prácticas. Con ello busco contribuir a una explicación naturalista de los fenómenos normativos en general y de la cognición en particular. Empiezo sentando las bases conceptuales del fenómeno de la normatividad y defiendo que todo fenómeno normativo tiene dos elementos: por un lado, un agente individual capaz de seleccionar las interacciones que establece con el ambiente en el presente, y por otro, criterios normativos que se extienden en una escala temporal más amplia que tales interacciones y permiten determinar su corrección más allá de las impresiones del individuo que las establece. Con esta base conceptual, tomo como punto de partida para la naturalización de la normatividad la aproximación enactiva a la cognición que ofrece una explicación naturalista de agencia y normatividad en términos de autopreservación. Sin embargo, muestro que el enactivismo no distingue explícitamente entre agencia y criterios normativos, y esto limita su poder explicativo respecto a fenómenos como la cognición ultrarrápida y el surgimiento de normas irrelevantes o nocivas para la preservación de la agencia individual como las normas sociales o las funciones biológicas establecidas evolutivamente. Para encarar estas limitaciones, propongo refinar la concepción enactiva de normatividad como autopreservación, y defiendo que las interacciones normativas, primero, son establecidas por un sistema autónomo y adaptivo, y segundo, hacen parte de algún sistema autónomo que se extiende en el tiempo y establece los criterios normativos de tal interacción. Al contrario de lo que se asume actualmente en el enactivismo, en la definición que propongo el sistema autónomo que establece los criterios normativos no es necesariamente idéntico al agente que establece la interacción, aunque puede serlo, y esto permite explicar no solo cómo es posible que los agentes erren sin darse cuenta sino también por qué es posible que agentes individuales establezcan interacciones correctas pero irrelevantes o nocivas para su automantenimiento.
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The aim of this thesis is to investigate our experience of anxiety from a Wittgensteinian perspective. I start this investigation by off ering a general conception of emotions following Wittgenstein's conception of language and his... more
The aim of this thesis is to investigate our experience of anxiety from a Wittgensteinian perspective. I start this investigation by off ering a general conception of emotions following Wittgenstein's conception of language and his remarks in both volumes of his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. I argue that our terms of emotion are syntheses of three elements that converge in our lives: manifestations, circumstances and contents of our consciousness. The way these syntheses are con figured is culture-dependent, and
they determine how we experience our emotions.
Having this framework in mind, I explore our language-games of 'anxiety' and some of the cultural elements of our society that shape them: capitalism, democracy, media, art and science. Finally, I argue that existential anxiety towards one's own death belongs to a wider family of emotional experiences, a family characterized by the experience of detachment and meaninglessness. I show that existential anxiety towards one's own death is an emotional experience bodily felt that pervades our world and lives with meaninglessness. As it consists in the experience of a pervasive meaninglessness, it cannot be fully captured by any of our language-games; therefore, it shows the limits of our forms of life.
they determine how we experience our emotions.
Having this framework in mind, I explore our language-games of 'anxiety' and some of the cultural elements of our society that shape them: capitalism, democracy, media, art and science. Finally, I argue that existential anxiety towards one's own death belongs to a wider family of emotional experiences, a family characterized by the experience of detachment and meaninglessness. I show that existential anxiety towards one's own death is an emotional experience bodily felt that pervades our world and lives with meaninglessness. As it consists in the experience of a pervasive meaninglessness, it cannot be fully captured by any of our language-games; therefore, it shows the limits of our forms of life.