1,720,995 research outputs found
Agency in behavior settings: A mindshaping perspective on ecological psychology
Get PDFThis chapter focuses on Heft's ecological interpretation of behavior settings, and specifically on the question how to understand individual agency within this framework. We will argue that although Heft's remarks about agency offer promising suggestions, they do not yet provide a full-fledged account of how agency can be understood as being situated in behavior settings. Elaborating on the work of McGeer, we aim to show how the mindshaping view can contribute to an explanation of how behavior settings shape agency, without determining it (thus leaving room for individual freedom). Thus, we propose an outline for a situated theory of agency that combines Gibson's ecological psychology, Barker's eco-behavioral science, and McGeer's mindshaping approach
Socio-cultural norms in ecological psychology: the education of intention
Get PDF© The Author(s) 2022. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09807-9Although it is a common claim in the ecological psychology literature that our perception of the environment’s affordances is influenced by socio-cultural norms, an explanation of how this is possible remains to be offered. In this paper, I outline an account of this phenomenon by focusing on the ecological theory of perceptual learning. Two main theses are defended. First, I argue that to account for how socio-cultural norms can influence perception, we must pay attention not only to the education of attention but to the education of intention too. Consequently, I offer some ideas about how intention can be socio-normatively educated. Secondly, I hold that the education of intention occurs via the acquisition of habit-based preferences for particular actions. I claim that once we understand how these habit-based preferences relate to socio-cultural norms, the hypothesis that norms must be represented in the individual’s mind for them to influence affordance perception is no longer needed. If this hypothesis is on the right track, we can have an explanation for how perception can be normatively shaped and direct (non-mediated by internal representations and inferences) at the same time
Intentions in ecological psychology: an Anscombean proposal
Get PDF© The Author(s) 2022. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Review of Philosophy and Psychology. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00661-xAccording to ecological psychology, agency is a crucial feature of living organisms: therefore many ecological psychologists maintain that explaining agency is one of the core aims of the discipline. This paper aims to contribute to this goal by arguing that an ecological understanding of agency requires an account of intention. So far, intentions have not played a dominant role in ecological accounts of agency. The reluctance to integrate a notion of intention seems to be motivated by the widespread assumption that intentions should be understood as internal states with representational content. This assumption goes against two main tenets of ecological psychology: its anti-representationalist stance and its claim that perception is direct (in the sense of not being mediated by inferential processes). Ecological psychology thus needs a different answer to the question what intentions are. In this paper, we aim to show that Elizabeth Anscombe’s theory of intention can be fruitfully brought to bear on an ecological theory of agency. We will argue that Anscombe’s account can meet the two challenges of bringing intentions into the framework of ecological psychology: firstly it can explain what intentions are, if not representational states; and, secondly, it can show how our perception of affordances is guided by intention without undermining the idea of direct perception
Distal engagement: Intentions in perception
Get PDFNon-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representation-hungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use
Similarity-based cognition: radical enactivism meets cognitive neuroscience
Get PDF© Springer Nature B.V. 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Synthese. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02505-1Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items — e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on— in order to perform some
cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has
advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations (even if contentless) in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radically enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of
neurodynamics
Featured Article:
No full textFEATURED ARTICLE: Segundo-Ortin, Miguel and Calvo, Paco (2023) Plant Sentience? Between romanticism and denial: Science. Animal Sentience 33(1)
The authors weigh assumptions that plant behavior is hardwired and inflexible against the evidence to suggest that it is time to take seriously the hypothesis that plants, too, might be sentient.https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/homepage/1002/thumbnail.jp
Lectures on Perception: An Ecological Perspective: by Michael T. Turvey, New York, NY, Routledge, 2018, 432 pp., 64.95$ (Paperback), ISBN: 9781138335264
Get PDFSocio-cultural norms in ecological psychology: The education of intention
Get PDFAlthough it is a common claim in the ecological psychology literature that our perception of the environment’s affordances is influenced by socio-cultural norms, an explanation of how this is possible remains to be offered. In this paper, I outline an account of this phenomenon by focusing on the ecological theory of perceptual learning. Two main theses are defended. First, I argue that to account for how socio-cultural norms can influence perception, we must pay attention not only to the education of attention but to the education of intention too. Consequently, I offer some ideas about how intention can be socio-normatively educated. Secondly, I hold that the education of intention occurs via the acquisition of habit-based preferences for particular actions. I claim that once we understand how these habit-based preferences relate to socio-cultural norms, the hypothesis that norms must be represented in the individual’s mind for them to influence affordance perception is no longer needed. If this hypothesis is on the right track, we can have an explanation for how perception can be normatively shaped and direct (non-mediated by internal representations and inferences) at the same time
A book review of Chauncey Maher, Plant minds: A philosophical defense, New York, Routledge, 2017
No full textREVIEW, Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin (2017). Evolving enactivism: Basic minds meet content.
No full text- …
