On interactional expertise: Pragmatic and ontological considerations

This paper is a critical examination of Harry Collins's investigation into a third form of knowledge, “interactional expertise.” We argue that although Collins makes a genuine contribution to the phenomenological literature on expertise, his account requires further critical evaluation and response due to pragmatic and ontological considerations. We contend that by refining (in some questionable ways) the category of interactional expertise so as to create epistemological equivalence between activists, sociologists, critics, journalists, and some science administrators, Collins potentially undermines the value that a more rigorously construed concept of interactional expertise might have. We further show that Collins misunderstands the nature of embodiment in a way that is exacerbated by the sociological perspective that he adopts.     

Expertise and its embodiment: Examining the impact of sensorimotor skill expertise on the representation of action-related text

In two experiments, we explored how novice and expert athletes represent the everyday and sportspecific objects and actions that they read about. Novice and expert ice hockey players (Experiment 1) and football players (Experiment 2) read sentences describing everyday or sport-specific situations and then judged whether a pictured item (either matching the action implied in the previous sentence or not) was mentioned in the preceding sentence. The sentences in Experiment 1 consisted of everyday and hockey-specific scenarios. The sentences in Experiment 2 depicted football scenarios implying football-specific or non—football-specific actions anyone might perform. Everyone responded most quickly to items that matched the sentence-implied actions for everyday and non—sport-specific actions. Only athletes showed this effect for their respective sport-specific scenarios. Differentiating between the same item in different action orientations is thought to be driven by embodied knowledge containing the sensorimotor characteristics of what one is reading about. We show that possessing this type of representation depends on experience interacting with objects and performing the actions in question.     

Attribute centrality and imaginative thought

Participants' representations of the concept human were examined to differentiate three types of associations between concepts and their component attributes: the capacity of concepts to cue attributes (attribute accessibility), the capacity of attributes to cue concepts (instance accessibility), and the extent to which attributes are thought of as central to concepts (attribute centrality). The findings provide information about the concept human itself and, more generally, about the functionally distinct roles those different attribute-concept associations play in guiding imaginative thought. College students listed attributes that differentiate humans from other animals, rated the centrality of those attributes, and listed animals that possess those attributes. Other students drew and described extraterrestrials that possessed some of the attributes that were found to vary across those listing and rating tasks. Rated centrality was the most important determinant of an attribute's impact on imaginative generation. When the imagined extraterrestrials were supposed to possess attributes that had been rated as central to humans (intelligence, emotional complexity, or opposable thumbs), participants projected more aspects of human form onto them than when the creatures were supposed to possess less central attributes or when attributes were unspecified.     

Impaired embodiment and intersubjectivity

This paper considers the importance of the body for self-esteem, communication, and emotional expression and experience, through the reflections of those who live with various neurological impairments of movement and sensation; sensory deafferentation, spinal cord injury and Möbius Syndrome (the congenital absence of facial expression). People with severe sensory loss, who require conscious attention and visual feedback for movement, describe the imperative to use the same strategies to reacquire gesture, to appear normal and have embodied expression. Those paralysed after spinal cord injury struggle to have others see them as people rather than as people in wheelchairs and have been active in the disability movement, distinguishing between their medical impairment and the social induced disability others project onto them. Lastly those with Möbius reveal the importance of the face for emotional expression and communication and indeed for emotional experience itself. All these examples explore the crucial role of the body as agent for social and personal expression and self-esteem.     

Resonance and radical embodiment

One big challenge faced by cognitive science is the development of a unified theory that integrates disparate scales of analysis of cognitive phenomena. In this paper, I offer a unified framework that provides a way to integrate neural and behavioral scales of analysis of cognitive phenomena—typically addressed by neuroscience and experimental psychology, respectively. The framework is based on the concept of resonance originated in ecological psychology and aims to be the foundation for a unified theory for radical embodiment; that is, a unified theory for that dissident part of cognitive science that shares a methodological commitment to dynamic systems theory and remains skeptical about the adequacy of mechanism and representationalism as the guiding ideas in the field. In the course of my presentation, I analyze different issues regarding the requirements and constraints unification poses to radical embodiment.

     

Hypnotizability, imaginative involvement, and anxiety

Forty-five undergraduate students were investigated to determine the relationship between hypnotizability, imaginative involvement (absorption), and anxiety responses. Hypnotizability was measured independently with the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS), and imaginative involvement was measured with the Absorption Scale (ABS). The results indicated moderate significant correlations between CIS, ABS, and several of the anxiety measures. In particular self-reported physiological aspects of anxiety/activation were associated with the CIS and the ABS. Three of the subjects reported having panic attacks. These subjects also exhibited high hypnotic responsiveness, and their scores on the ABS and several of the anxiety scales were considerably elevated as compared with the group mean level.     

Clinical conversations between psychoanalysis and imaginative literature

A literary form created by an imaginative writer captures something of the way the author shapes emotional experience and psychologically engages with it. The manner in which experience is created and contained in an imaginative literary text has much in common with the way experience is generated and worked with in the psychoanalytic situation. The author describes a clinical experience in which there was a collapse of the analytic (imaginative) space. He then discusses how he made use of a "conversation" he created with a short story and his own analytic experience to restore his imaginative capacities and to resume psychological work with the patient.     

Temporal and interactional effects in short-term storage

The operation of temporal and interactional processes in short-term storage was studied under conditions which require that information about all items presented be stored and the relative retention of all be evaluated concurrently, but preclude further interference after presentation by testing or retrieval effects. Random sequences of twelve two digit numbers from a known set of thirteen were presented visually at 1, 2, or 4 per sec. for full interval and .25 sec. presentation durations to 15 Ss who reported the missing number that was not presented from the set. For 1/sec. full duration presentations the missing scan serial position error distribution shows a linear decrease in errors from first through last presented items. As rate of presentation increases there is a linear increase in total errors, a linearly increasing primacy effect, and an increase of errors over at least the last half of the sequence such that the error distribution remains linear with the same slope. These findings are compatible with the operation of time dependent interactional and perceptual processes in short-term storage but not with autonomous decay.     

Action,knowledge and embodiment in Berkeley and Locke

Embodiment is a fact of human existence which philosophers should not ignore. They may differ to a great extent in what they have to say about our bodies, but they have to take into account that for each of us our body has a special status, it is not merely one amongst the physical objects, but a physical object to which we have a unique relation. While Descartes approached the issue of embodiment through consideration of sensation and imagination, it is more directly reached by consideration of action and agency: whenever we act upon the world, we act by moving our bodies. So if we can understand what an immaterialist such as Berkeley thinks about agency, we will have gone a fair way to understanding what he thinks about embodiment. §1 discusses a recent flurry of articles on the subject of Berkeley’s account of action. I choose to present Berkeley as a causal-volitional theorist (realist) not because I think it is the uniquely correct interpretation of the texts, but because I find it more philosophically interesting as a version of immaterialism. In particular, it raises the possibility of a substantive account of human embodiment which is completely unavailable to the occasionalist. §2 articulates an apparent philosophical problem for Berkeley qua causal-volitional theorist and show that Locke was aware of a related problem and had a solution of which Berkeley would have known. §3 distinguishes two interpretations of Berkeley’s famous denial of blind agency – as the assertion of a weak representational condition or a strong epistemic one – and provide evidence that there was a well-established debate about blind powers in the seventeenth century which took the metaphor of blindness as indicating an epistemic rather than merely representational failing. What remains to do in §4 is to consider whether Berkeley, with his own peculiar commitments, could in fact accept this account of agency.     

Social embodiment in directional stepping behavior

Embodiment theories emphasize the role played by sensory and motor processes in psychological states, such as social information processing. Motivated by this idea, we examined how whole-body postural behaviors couple to social affective cues, viz., pictures of smiling and angry faces. We adopted a Simon-like paradigm, whereby healthy female volunteers were asked to select and initiate a forward or backward step on a force plate in response to the gender of the poser (male/female), regardless of emotion. Detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal unfolding of the body center of pressure during the steps revealed that task-irrelevant emotion had no effect on the initiation times of the steps, i.e., there was no evidence of an affective Simon effect. An unexpected finding was that steps were initiated relatively slow in response to female angry faces. This Stroop-like effect suggests that postural behavior is influenced by whether certain stimulus features match or mismatch.     

Electrophysiological examination of embodiment in vision and action

A wealth of behavioral data has shown that the visual properties of objects automatically potentiate motor actions linked with them, but how deeply are these affordances embedded in visual processing? In the study reported here, we used electrophysiological measures to examine the time course of affordance resulting from the leftward or rightward orientation of the handles of common objects. Participants were asked to categorize those objects using a left- or right-handed motor response. Lateralized readiness potentials showed rapid motor preparation in the hand congruent with the affordance provided by the object only 100 to 200 ms after stimulus presentation and up to 400 ms before the actual response. Examination of event-related potentials also revealed an effect of handle orientation and response-hand congruency on the visual P1 and N1 components. Both of these results suggest that activity in the early sensory pathways is modulated by the action associations of objects and the intentions of the viewer.     

Friendship: Communication and interactional patterns in same-sex dyads

Based on the classic work of Georg Simmel on dyadic intimacy and dependency and more recent work on self-disclosure, this study uses subjective accounts to compare same-sex dyadic friendships. Past research has neglected the important dimension of content. Thus, a major purpose was to specify three content levels of communication — topical, relational, and personal — and to determine sex differences in the range and primacy of these levels. In addition, seven interactional factors were identified: spontaneous communication, trust, nonverbal communication, dependency, shared value systems, conflict, and competition for power. The data reveal that women relate on all three levels, while men relate primarily on the topical level. Overall findings on the seven interactional factors reveal high congruence with traditional gender stereotypes. A serendipitous finding for both male and female dyads is that a particular individual is of less importance than a particular type of friendship. This suggests that friendship in modern society may be more tenuous than Simmel contended.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 74th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1979.Kidder, Peabody, & Co.     

Empathic interactional sequences and counsellor trainee effectiveness

Consecutive counsellor trainee and client statements from 12 audiotaped assessment interviews were coded to operationalize empathy as a sequential variable. For each two statement sequence the speaking order (counsellor to client, client to counsellor) was also coded, and the resultant matrix analyzed via loglinear statistical procedures for categorical data. For the speaking order client to counsellor, three empathy sequences (empathy enhancing, empathy diverging, empathy commencing) were found to be significantly related to counselling effectiveness. For the speaking order counsellor to client, only one sequence(empathy diverging) was found to be significantly related to counselling effectiveness. Implications for counsellor training and future research are discussed.     

Alfarabi's imaginative critique: overflowing materialism in Virtuous Community

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In this article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi's sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi's account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi's ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation.     

The role of graded category structure in imaginative thought

Participants generated lists of exemplars from the categories of animals, tools, and fruit, and their lists were used to determine the relative accessibility of individual exemplars. Measures of accessibility included output dominance (the number of participants who listed an exemplar), rank (how early instances were listed), and two scores that reflect their combination-output precedence and dominance/rank. Other participants drew and described novel exemplars of those categories that might exist on an imaginary planet and reported on the factors that influenced their creations. References to Earth animals, tools, or fruit were used to determine imagination frequency (the number of participants who mentioned relying on particular Earth exemplars). Items high in accessibility were also high in imagination frequency, implying that those items that come to mind most readily are the ones most likely to serve as starting points for the development of novel ideas. This result held even when task constraints weighed against the use of such items (Experiment 2) and when participants were encouraged to be as creative as possible (Experiment 4), suggesting that it is difficult to avoid the influence of highly accessible category exemplars. Other measures of category structure, including the rated typicality, familiarity, and frequency of exemplars, did not predict imagination frequency as well. The results are discussed in terms of expanding concept boundaries and the inadvertent application of knowledge that is readily accessible.