Understanding the ‘active’ in ‘enactive’

Much recent work on cognition is characterized by an augmentation of the role of action coupled with an attenuation of the role of representation. This coupling is no accident. The appeal to action is seen either as a way of explaining representation or explaining it away. This paper argues that the appeal to action as a way of explaining, supplementing, or even supplanting, representation can lead to a serious dilemma. On the one hand, the concept of action to which we appeal cannot, on pain of circularity, be a representational concept. Such an appeal would presuppose representation and therefore can neither explain it nor explain it away. On the other hand, I shall argue, if the concept of action to which we appeal is not a representational one, there is every reason for supposing that it will not be the sort of thing that can explain, or supplement, let alone supplant, representation. The resulting dilemma, I shall argue, is not fatal. But avoiding it requires us to embrace a certain thesis about the nature of action, a thesis whose broad outline this paper delineates. Anyone who wishes to employ action as a way of explaining or explaining away representation should, I shall argue, take this conception of action very seriously indeed. I am going to discuss these issues with respect to a influential recent contribution to this debate: the sensorimotor or enactive model of perception developed by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë.     

Social Comparison and the ‘Circle of Objectification’

The purpose of this study was to test a new theoretical model that integrates self-objectification, objectification of others, and social comparison as contributors to the development and maintenance of body image disturbance and disordered eating behavior. Within the new theoretical model, self-objectification, objectification of others, and social comparison are conceptualized as a self-perpetuating cycle, rather than as processes that occur independently of one another. Measures of self-objectification, objectification of others, social comparison, body shame, body dissatisfaction, and eating disorder symptomatology were completed by 549 female students between the ages of 18 and 30?years from a large university in the southeastern United States. Structural equation modeling with nested model comparisons was used to examine the fit of the new theoretical model relative to less complex models which contain only relationships which have received previous attention in the research literature (e.g., the relationship between self-objectification and body shame). Results indicated that the new theoretical model demonstrates good fit for the data and that the fit of this model is significantly better than the original model suggested by the literature. This model also brings together two distinct lines of research and offers a more complete understanding of processes underlying women’s body image and eating behavior. Implications for clinical work as well as theory and measurement are discussed.     

Social deviance activates the brain’s error-monitoring system

Social psychologists have long noted the tendency for human behavior to conform to social group norms. This study examined whether feedback indicating that participants had deviated from group norms would elicit a neural signal previously shown to be elicited by errors and monetary losses. While electroencephalograms were recorded, participants (N = 30) rated the attractiveness of 120 faces and received feedback giving the purported average rating made by a group of peers. The feedback was manipulated so that group ratings either were the same as a participant’s rating or deviated by 1, 2, or 3 points. Feedback indicating deviance from the group norm elicited a feedback-related negativity, a brainwave signal known to be elicited by objective performance errors and losses. The results imply that the brain treats deviance from social norms as an error.     

Nietzsche’s ‘Anti-Naturalism’ in ‘The Four Great Errors’

Abstract

This paper is primarily a response to ‘analytically-minded’ philosophers, such as Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, who push for a ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Nietzsche. In particular, this paper will consider Leiter’s (2007 Leiter, B. 2007. Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will. Philosophers’ Imprint, 7(7): 1–15.  [Google Scholar]) discussion of Nietzsche’s chapter in Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Four Great Errors’, and argue that Leiter has misinterpreted this chapter in at least four ways. I provide a superior interpretation of this chapter, which argues that Nietzsche is using a transcendental style of argument to argue against a common conception of causation. I argue that Nietzsche’s ultimate aim of this chapter is to argue for ‘the innocence of becoming’ rather than, as Leiter claims, the error of free will. I argue that this anti-naturalist methodology and conclusion are in tension with Leiter/Clark’s Nietzsche, and highlights the need to pay attention to the being/becoming distinction in Nietzsche.     

The ‘If’ in the ‘What If’

In this paper, I defend the view that any good account of the logical form of thought experiments should contain a conditional. Moreover, there are some reasons to think it should be a counterfactual conditional. First, I defend Williamson’s account of the logical form of thought experiments against a competing account offered by Ichikawa and Jarvis. The two accounts have a similar structure, but Williamson’s posits a counterfactual conditional where Ichikawa and Jarvis’ posits a strict conditional. Williamson’s motivation is related to the problem of deviant realizations, and Ichikawa and Jarvis propose to take care of this problem by enriching the content of the thought experiment in the way we enrich the content of a text of fiction. However, this sort of enrichment is also compatible with Williamson’s account. I then consider a different view, defended by Malmgren, on which a complex possibility claim exhausts our reasoning on typical thought experiments. I argue that this account, leaving out a conditional, fails to represent an important part of our reasoning with thought experiments. This is brought out by reflection on the relationship between thought experiments and similar actual cases and by reflection on the requirement, formulated by Malmgren herself, that our reasoning should have an adequate level of generality.

     

Aristotle’s Notion of ‘Place’ in the Context of Present-day Physics

The article deals with Aristotle’s conception of ‘place’, which is of cruсial importance for his theory of motion. It is shown that in the physics of Aristotle there is no concept of spасe; instead, there is the notion of ‘place’ of a body (topos). Aristotle considered ‘place’ as the first boundary of a body embracing (containing) the body in question. The author shows the incommensurability between the spatial ideas of the Stagirite and the similar ideas of Newtonian physics. The article states that in order to give an adequate reconstruction of Aristotle’s concept of ‘place’ we need to take into account two different levels of consideration: local and global. Places locally separable (from bodies) cannot be separated on the global level. In Newtonian physics, bodies are separable from places on both levels. The nature of parallelism of ideas between Aristotle’s conception of ‘place’ and the notions of space in present-day physics is analysed.     

‘Necessity’ and ‘provability’ in the later wittgenstein

I present a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of logic and mathematics. This interpretation, like others, emphasizes Wittgenstein's attempt to reconcile platonistic and constructivistic approaches. But, unlike other interpretations, mine explains that attempt in terms of Wittgenstein's position about the relations between our concepts of necessity and provability. If what I say here is correct, then we can rescue Wittgenstein from the charge of naive relativism. For his relativism extends only to provability, and not to necessity.     

God’s omnipresence in the world: on possible meanings of ‘en’ in panentheism

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - Panenetheism is the claim that God and the cosmos are intimately inter-related, with the cosmos being in God and God being in the cosmos. What...     

Havighurst’s Social Roles Revisited

The purpose of this exploratory research was to review, update, and revise Havighurst’s classic social role studies for their relevance in contemporary society. Based on the input of expert panels, 13 roles, Association/Club Member, Citizen, Daughter/Son, Friend, Grandparent, Home/Services Manager, Kin/Relative, Learner, Leisure Time Consumer, Parent, Religious Affiliate, Spouse/Partner, and Worker, were incorporated into an instrument to assess social role importance. The instrument was administered to a stratified, quota sample of 300 respondents. Univariate repeated-measures analysis and Dunn’s test for multiple comparisons were conducted. Perceived social role importance ratings were established for age, gender, and socio-economic status (SES) groupings. The Friend role and a cluster of family-associated roles received the highest overall ratings. Many roles appeared to have a distinct age-related factor. SES differences, particularly among the lowest level, were also significant in many roles.     

Beyond Darwinism’s Eclipse: Functional Evolution,Biochemical Recapitulation and Spencerian Emergence in the 1920s and 1930s

During the 1920s and 1930s, many biologists questioned the viability of Darwin’s theory as a mechanism of evolutionary change. In the early 1940s, and only after a number of alternatives were suggested, Darwinists succeeded to establish natural selection and gene mutation as the main evolutionary mechanisms. While that move, today known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is taken as signalling a triumph of evolutionary theory, certain critical problems in evolution—in particular the evolution of animal function—could not be addressed with this approach. Here I demonstrate this through reconstruction of the evolutionary theory of Joseph Needham (1900–1995), who pioneered the biochemical study of evolution and development. In order to address such problems, Needham employed Herbert Spencer’s principles of emergence and Ernst Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation. While Needham did not reject Darwinian theory, Spencerian and Haeckelian frameworks happened to better fit his findings and their evolutionary relevance. He believed selectionist and genetic approaches to be important but far from sufficient for explaining how evolutionary transformations occur.     

What’s the object of object working memory in infancy? Unraveling ‘what’ and ‘how many’

Infants have a bandwidth-limited object working memory (WM) that can both individuate and identify objects in a scene, (answering ‘how many?’ or ‘what?’, respectively). Studies of infants’ WM for objects have typically looked for limits on either ‘how many’ or ‘what’, yielding different estimates of infant capacity. Infants can keep track of about three individuals (regardless of identity), but appear to be much more limited in the number of specific identities they can recall. Why are the limits on ‘how many’ and ‘what’ different? Are the limits entirely separate, do they interact, or are they simply two different aspects of the same underlying limit?We sought to unravel these limits in a series of experiments which tested 9- and 12-month-olds’ WM for object identities under varying degrees of difficulty. In a violation-of-expectation looking-time task, we hid objects one at a time behind separate screens, and then probed infants’ WM for the shape identity of the penultimate object in the sequence. We manipulated the difficulty of the task by varying both the number of objects in hiding locations and the number of means by which infants could detect a shape change to the probed object. We found that 9-month-olds’ WM for identities was limited by the number of hiding locations: when the probed object was one of two objects hidden (one in each of two locations), 9-month-olds succeeded, and they did so even though they were given only one means to detect the change. However, when the probed object was one of three objects hidden (one in each of three locations), they failed, even when they were given two means to detect the shape change. Twelve-month-olds, by contrast, succeeded at the most difficult task level.Results show that WM for ‘how many’ and for ‘what’ are not entirely separate. Individuated objects are tracked relatively cheaply. Maintaining bindings between indexed objects and identifying featural information incurs a greater attentional/memory cost. This cost reduces with development. We conclude that infant WM supports a small number of featureless object representations that index the current locations of objects. These can have featural information bound to them, but only at substantial cost.     

Causal Clarity Prevents the Emergence of Social Biases in Children’s Excusing of Mistakes

In two studies, we examined how 5-­year-­olds weigh similarity against other factors in deciding from whom to learn. Specifically, we examined the factors of history of and reasons for inaccuracy in Experiment 1 (n = 64) and of competence and authority in Experiment 2 (n = 32). In the 1st phase of Experiments 1 and 2, children’s social biases were tested: 5-year-olds met both a similar informant (SI) and a dissimilar informant (DI). These informants were puppets (Experiment 1) or human teachers (Experiment 2). Children could select either informant as a source of object names. Across experiments children systematically preferred learning from the SI over DI. In the 2nd phase of Experiment 1, both informants first provided accurate information and then 1 of them became inaccurate during an event that clearly explained (being blindfolded) or did not explain (wearing a scarf) the inaccuracy. For half the children, the SI was accurate and the DI was inaccurate. Only after inaccuracy events that were causally unclear did children showcase similarity biases in their subsequent learning preferences. Experiment 2 showed that identifying a DI as a teacher (a profession associated with positive attributes) failed to counter children’s similarity bias. These findings provide important insights on contextual factors that contribute to children’s favoring of socially meaningful others.     

Timing in the performance of Erik Satie's ‘Vexations’

In traditional studies of single cue probability learning the subject's errors and the covariation he/she establishes between the judgments and the cue (cue dependency) are confounded. Learning results in increased cue dependency which is necessarily accompanied by decreasing errors. This paper presents a method for disentangling errors from cue dependency. This is done by (1) making the criterion contingent upon the judgments instead of the cue, and (2) giving standard instructions, implying that the cue is informative about the criterion. In this way errors are controlled independently of any covariation that the subject may create between the cue and the judgments, and indirectly between the cue and the criterion (task regularity). The paper examines whether subjects aim at small errors or task-regularity when the task does not allow them to do both. It was found that error reduction does occur only when task-regularity can be maintained. Conclusion: task regularity, and thus cue-dependency, has priority to error reduction under the standard conditions used in single cue probability learning experiments. The study may be viewed as an example of conditions under which a cue illusion (false beliefs in the validity of a cue) arises.     

‘Developing’ the Self in the Knowledge Economy

The term ‘knowledge economy’, like the term ‘globalisation’, has become a catchword in political and educational debate over the last decade or so, especially in debates upon educational policy where the role of education in preparing young people to take their part in the Knowledge Economy is often seen as paramount over other traditional schooling activities. It is said in such debates that the production of knowledge, information and skills, will become more valuable than traditional primary and secondary production. A lot is said about the knowledge required in the Knowledge Economy, and about how institutions, businesses, activities and human beings are to be ordered or structured in accordance with views of knowledge and new Management theories. But little is said of the young people expected to take their part in the knowledge economy. Do they have a choice? Is lying on a surfboard excluded from their life options? How will they be developed, trained or educated to take their part? Will they be committed to developing their selves in accordance with the model of the IT Knowledge Entrepreneur (hereinafter TIKE) presented as a model for education by policy makers in the Knowledge Economy? This article will argue against this latter notion of the development of the self, arguing that because knowledge is prioritised over ethics, there is both an inadequate notion of the self and the educational development of the self and, because of its implicit view only of ethics, an inadequate ethical and moral view of education [246 words].     

Nietzsche as ‘Europe’s Buddha’ and ‘Asia’s Superman’

Nietzsche represents in an interesting way the well-worn Western approach to Asian philosophical and religious thinking: initial excitement, then neglect by appropriation, and swift rejection when found to be incompatible with one’s own tradition, whose roots are inexorably traced back to the ‘ancient’ Greeks. Yet, Nietzsche’s philosophical critique and methods - such as ‘perspectivism’ - offer an instructive route through which to better understand another tradition even if the sole purpose of this exercise is to perceive one’s own limitations through the eyes of the other: a self-destruktion of sorts. To help correct this shortcoming and begin the long overdue task of even-handed dialogue - or contemporary comparative philosophy - we will be served well by looking at Nietzsche’s mistakes, which in turn informed the tragic critic of the West of the last century, Martin Heidegger. We may learn here not to cast others in one’s own troubled image; and not to reverse cultural icons: Europe’s Superman, and Asia’s Buddha.