The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.     

How we think and act together

In this paper, I examine the challenges socially extended minds pose for mainstream, individualistic accounts of social cognition. I argue that individualistic accounts of social cognition neglect phenomena important to social cognition that are properly emphasized by socially extended mind accounts. Although I do not think the evidence or arguments warrant replacing individualistic explanations of social cognition with socially extended explanations, I argue that we have good reason to supplement our individualistic accounts so as to include the ways in which situational context affects social interactions. The result, I hope, is a more sophisticated individualism that offers a more comprehensive account of how we think and act together.     

On the role of social interaction in social cognition: a mechanistic alternative to enactivism

Researchers in the enactivist tradition have recently argued that social interaction can constitute social cognition, rather than simply serve as the context for social cognition. They contend that a focus on social interaction corrects the overemphasis on mechanisms inside the individual in the explanation of social cognition. I critically assess enactivism??s claims about the explanatory role of social interaction in social cognition. After sketching the enactivist approach to cognition in general and social cognition in particular, I identify problems with an enactivist taxonomy of roles for social interaction in the explanation of social cognition (contextual, enabling, and constitutive). In particular, I show that this enactivist taxonomy does not clearly distinguish between enabling conditions and constitutive elements, which would make them in danger of committing the coupling-constitution fallacy found in some attempts to extend cognition. I explore resources enactivism has to more clearly demarcate constitutive parts of a cognitive system, but identify problems in applying them to some of the main cases of social cognition enactivists characterize as being constituted by social interaction. I offer the mechanistic approach to explanation as an alternative that captures much of what enactivists want to say about the relations between social and individual levels, but views social interactions from the perspective of embedded cognition rather than as being constitutive of social cognition.     

Overcoming the Problems of ‘Difference’ in Education: Empathy as ‘Intercorporeality’

In this paper I am concerned with the notion of empathy and its capacity for overcoming the problem of difference in social life. The concept of empathy has a long history in the Western philosophic tradition but has become discursively submerged in recent times. I am particularly interested in what philosophies of the body may contribute to our understanding of empathy. Psychoanalytic feminism provides some insights. However I identify Merleau-Ponty's conception of body-subject and the intersubjective encounter as offering a potentially more fruitful account of empathy.     

Merleau-Ponty's Modification of Phenomenology: Cognition,Passion and Philosophy

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Ponty's modification of Husserl's phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserl's work and recurs in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserl's reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserl's texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.     

Cognitive Indicators of Social Anxiety in Youth: A Structural Equation Analysis

Previous studies have demonstrated significant relationships among various cognitive variables such as negative cognition, self-efficacy, and social anxiety. Unfortunately, few studies focus on the role of cognition among youth, and researchers often fail to use domain-specific measures when examining cognitive variables. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine domain-specific cognitive variables (i.e., socially oriented negative self-referent cognition and social self-efficacy) and their relationships to social anxiety in children and adolescents using structural equation modeling techniques. A community sample of children and adolescents (n = 245; 55.9% female; 83.3% Caucasian, 9.4% African American, 2% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 2% “other,” and 1.2% not reported) completed questionnaires assessing social cognition and social anxiety symptomology. Three latent variables were created to examine the constructs of socially oriented negative self-referent cognition (as measured by the SONAS scale), social self-efficacy (as measured by the SEQSS-C), and social anxiety (as measured by the SPAI-C and the Brief SA). The resulting measurement model of latent variables fit the data well. Additionally, consistent with the study hypothesis, results indicated that social self-efficacy likely mediates the relationship between socially oriented negative self-referent cognition and social anxiety, and socially oriented negative self-referent cognition yields significant direct and indirect effects on social anxiety. These findings indicate that socially oriented negative cognitions are associated with youth's beliefs about social abilities and the experience of social anxiety. Future directions for research and study limitations, including use of cross-sectional data, are discussed.     

Friends at last? Distributed cognition and the cognitive/social divide

Distributed cognition (d-cog) claims that many cognitive processes are “distributed” across groups and the surrounding material and cultural environment. Recently, Nancy Nersessian, Ronald Giere, and others have suggested that a d-cog approach might allow us to bring together cognitive and social theories of science. I explore this idea by focusing on the specific interpretation of d-cog found in Edwin Hutchins' canonical text Cognition in the wild. First, I examine the scope of a d-cog approach to science, showing that there are important disputes between cognitive and social theorists on which d-cog remains silent. Second, I suggest that, where social explanations can be recast in d-cog terms, this reformulation will not be acceptable to all social theorists. Finally, I ask how we should make sense of the claim that, on a d-cog analysis, social factors are cognitive factors.     

Cultivating Ethos through the Body

The paper lays the groundwork for understanding Heidegger's original ethics in the context of embodiment. I draw upon Merleau-Ponty's account of the flesh to develop a new ontology of embodiment as the basis for ethics. This ontology is formulated by integrating three unique accounts of the embodiment, namely, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Yuasa Yasuo's Eastern-based phenomenology of the body, and the emerging science of Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). In each of these accounts of embodiment, the flesh is revealed as simultaneously consisting of presence and absence, incarnation and transcendence, being and consciousness. As a result, the Heideggerian approach to ethics, which is based upon the relationship we have with being, can be realized on many levels of embodiment. This makes the cultivation of a holistic ethos more feasible. Such an ethos overcomes the shortcomings in Heidegger's ethics and, in particular, those revealed by Levinas, Levin, Krell, and Caputo.     

Lessons and new directions for extended cognition from social and personality psychology

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world.     

OUTSOURCED COGNITION

Recent developments in technologically enabled social cognition call for a rethinking of many aspects of human cognition. According to the hypothesis of extended cognition, we must revise our psychological categories by eliminating allegedly superficial distinctions between internal cognition and external processes. As an alternative to this proposal, I outline a hypothesis of outsourced cognition which seeks to respect distinctions that are operative in both folk psychology and the social and cognitive sciences. According to this hypothesis, the cognitive states and processes of the individual are substantially and explanatorily distinct from the relevant external states and processes. In consequence, the individual remains a cognitive unit that is both central and indispensable in the explanations of cognitive science. As a case study, I consider the epistemology of testimony. I will argue that important epistemological categories may be preserved by adopting the hypothesis of outsourced cognition over the hypothesis of extended cognition. Moreover, I will argue that the outsourced cognition hypothesis deepens the problems that beset an extended epistemology of testimony.     

农民工社会认知状况的调查研究

本研究以465名农民工为被试,采用有较高信、效度的自编农民工社会认知状况调查问卷,考查农民工打工生活和城市融入的社会认知状况.结果发现:(1)农民工的整体社会认知状况尚可,平均得分高于3分临界值;(2)不同年龄、婚姻、学历,打工次数、打工时间的农民工的社会认知差异显著.年龄较大的、已婚的、学历较低的、有过多次打工经历的和打工时间较长的农民工社会认知更好;新生代农民工较第一代农民工社会认知低,呈明显的代际特征;(3)收入较高和从事职业较好的农民工社会认知得分更高,即收入与职业影响农民工的社会认知.     

Social understanding through direct perception? Yes,by interacting

This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.     

儿童的社会权力认知及其与社会行为的关系

有关成人社会权力认知的研究已有大量的成果及理论, 但儿童的社会权力认知近期才受到关注。社会权力认知是儿童社会认知的重要组成部分。社会权力经常体现在社会支配及社会地位上的差异。从很早开始, 儿童就能基于不同的线索来判断社会权力, 儿童基于这些线索的认知发展有进化上的适应意义。儿童对社会权力获得方式的认知会随年龄增长而发生变化, 年幼儿童更认可基于支配的社会权力获得方式, 而年长儿童更认可基于声望的社会权力获得方式。儿童的社会权力认知会影响选择性信任、资源分配及亲社会行为。未来研究需要考虑影响儿童社会权力认知发展的内部机制以及儿童社会权力对社会行为影响的过程机制, 并考虑文化因素和早期互动经验对儿童社会权力认知发展的影响。     

进化动机影响社会认知的一般特点及过程

进化动机影响社会认知的研究关注社会认知的起源、机能及影响。进化动机影响社会认知的一般特点有(1)特殊性, 如成功地解决求偶问题的机制不能用来解决身体危险有关的问题, (2)灵活性, 如不同类别的环境线索自动地激活与线索类别有关的社会信息。借用传统的社会认知研究方法, 研究者发现特定的线索会启动相应的进化动机(如面孔吸引力启动人们的求偶动机), 进化动机激活后就能引导人们加工有利于这种动机(或目标)实现的信息(如性别相关的风险信息等)。未来的进化动机影响社会认知的研究可以结合积极心理学(positive psychology)与具身认知(embodied cognition)的理论假设, 以产生更有价值的研究成果。     

Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms

Recent work in social cognition has moved beyond a focus on how people process social rewards to examine how healthy people represent other agents and how this is altered in psychiatric disorders. However, formal modelling of social representation has not kept pace with these changes, impeding our understanding of how core aspects of social cognition function, and fail, in psychopathology. Here, we suggest that belief-based computational models provide a basis for an integrated sociocognitive approach to psychiatry, with the potential to address important but unexamined pathologies of social representation, such as maladaptive schemas and illusory social agents.     

What's in a look?

The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine the logic, utility, and future prospects for further gains in our understanding of infant cognition from the use of looking time measures.     

The Embodied Chiasmic Relationship of Mother and Infant

In this paper the very earliest relationship of mother and newborn will be described phenomenologically through an interlacing of Donald Winnicott's work on maternal holding with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts of flesh and chiasm. Merleau-Ponty's thinking suggests that the holding relationship described by Winnicott is formed as much by the infant's holding of the mother as it is by mother's holding of her infant. Both flex and bend towards each other and inscribe each other yet retain their own particularity. Further specification and articulation of the lived body of both arises from the ongoing overlapping and sedimenting of past and current touches, movements, sounds, and sightings initiated internally and externally. Examples drawn from fieldwork and secondary sources will illustrate this ongoing embodied relationship.     

Reuse and body-formatted representations in simulation theory

I review the shifting definitions of simulation as found in recent versions of the simulation theory (ST) of social cognition. I focus on two concepts that have become central to recent ST in the work of a number of simulation theorists: the notion of reuse and the notion of B-formatted representations. I point out specific limitations or problems involved in these concepts. Although the reuse hypothesis provides an interesting evolutionary account of how neural mechanisms may adapt to new tasks, it doesn’t offer an explanation of how these mechanisms work. In contrast to the genuinely embodied account that simulation theorists seek, an explanation of social cognition in terms of B-formatted representations not only remains disembodied, but also ignores social interaction and remains solipsistic. I conclude by briefly outlining a non-simulationist enactivist account that can incorporate the reuse hypothesis.