Workshop overview

This is a day workshop with presentations from members of the Philosophy of Cognitive Science Doctoral Group. This years invited speaker will be Dr Fiona Macpherson from the University of Glasgow.

Attendence is free and all graduate students and faculty are welcome but please email the organiser in advance if you plan to come so that appropriate catering can be arranged.

Organiser: Matteo Colombo

The 2009 DoG's workshop programme can be seen here.

The workshop is funded by the Scots Philosophical Association with support from the Department of Philosophy, and the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.

Programme

Venue: The Reception Room at McEwan Hall

To get to the Reception Room go past Teviot and round the back of the McEwan Hall. In the quadrangle there is a large set of doors with stairs leading up. The reception room is at the top of the stairs.

15th March 2010

9.00 - 9.30	DoGs Gathering
9.30 - 10.30	Keynote talk: "Cognitive Penetration of Colour Experience" Dr Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow)
10.30 - 10.45	Break
10.45 - 11.30	“The Mind as a Corkscrew” David Des Roches Dueck (Edinburgh)
11.30 - 12.15	“What choreographic, compositional and mediation strategies might engage, challenge or reveal the (dancing) embodied mind?” Sue Hawksley (ECA/Edinburgh)
12.15- 12.30	Break
12.30 - 13.00	"Feeling the Body and Touching the World" Mog Stapleton (Edinburgh)
13.00 - 13.30	“Recent research in infant intersubjectivity” Richard Stockle (Edinburgh)
13.30 - 14.00	"Revisiting Language as a cognitive tool" Koosha Eghbal (Edinburgh)
14.00 - 15.00	Lunch
15.00 - 15.45	"Mechanisms of Consciousness" Liz Irvine (Edinburgh)
15.45 - 16.30	"Joint Action for Out-of-Control Kids" Olle Blomberg (Edinburgh)
16.30 - 16.45	Break
16.45 - 17.15	"That's my Dessert!" John Bray (Edinburgh)
17.15 - 17.45	“Orders of linguistic intervention, linguistic novelty and linguistic creativity” Andrew Hartline (Edinburgh)

 

 

Abstracts

Fiona Macpherson

Cognitive Penetration of Colour Experience

Can one’s perceptual experiences be altered by the states of one’s cognitive system, for example, one’s beliefs or desires? If one thinks that this can happen (at least in certain ways that will be identified in my paper) then one thinks that there can be cognitive penetration of perceptual experience, otherwise, one thinks that perceptual experience is cognitively impenetrable. I used to find the cognitive impenetrability thesis rather plausible. There are myriad alleged counterexamples to the cognitive impenetrability thesis - but there are good strategies to deal with them. But there is one example – the “colour” example - that can’t be explained away very well. I’ll explain the force of this example. Then I’ll posit a plausible indirect mechanism for cognitive penetration. I hope that those who don’t like the idea that cognitive penetration occurs will not be so against it when they think about this mechanism. Those who typically think it does occur should welcome the elucidation of a plausible mechanism. This mechanism may explain some (but perhaps not all) alleged cases of cognitive penetration, if they are such.

 

David Des Roches Dueck

The Mind as a Corkscrew

Suppose we say that cognition is the manifestation of a certain kind of ability – the ability to do certain things. One might similarly think that a corkscrew is also the manifestation of an ability – viz; to remove corks. If kinds are functionally individuated in this way, in what sense are different mental states actually different REALIZATIONS of mental states?

 

Sue Hawksley

What choreographic, compositional and mediation strategies might engage, challenge or reveal the (dancing) embodied mind?

This inquiry addresses the role of connectivity of the body-schema in relation to embodiment. The question is whether and in what ways hereditary or learned patterns become ‘inscribed’ in the body-schema and whether and in what ways such patterns impact cognition and the capacity for coping with the environment (danced or otherwise). The 'body-schema' is conceived here as the somatic and movement-based tensegrity-structure of the organism and the expressive form of dynamically organising mind. Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema has plasticity, allowing for tools and objects to become incorporated into the body-bulk. (2002). Ihde’s post-phenomenology (2003) considers different embodiment relations between organism, instrument and environment. The ‘Supersize Mind’ of Clark’s Extended Cognition thesis incorporates environmental extras – from notebooks and pencils to iPhones (2008). This discussion of embodiment and body-schema also draws on Gallagher (2006), Sheets-Johnstone (2005) and Weiss (1999). 'Mind' in this context is regarded as nomadic; it is active, social, situated and distributed, engaging with the environment through movement, influenced by the moment, by morphology, memory and meaning-making. Dance, as a paradigm of movement, and choreography, as a mode of critical engagement with dance, are the primary research tools. I will present some of my recent studio practice engaging these concepts.

 

Mog Stapleton

Feeling the Body and Touching the World

In this talk I want to explore some ideas related to sensory augmentation. I think that understanding cognition and the body is best done by underpinning these notions with the enactive conception of autonomy. Here I will investigate what tool use can tell us about the nature of cognition by considering in detail the phenomenological and neural correlates of bodily augmentation and assimilation.

 

Richard Stoeckle-Schobel

Recent research in infant intersubjectivity

Colwyn Trevarthen’s research in the origins of social cognition in infants (1979, 2001) has become the basis for a recent contender to the classic Theory of Mind approaches. Interaction Theory holds that our understanding of other’s intentions and thoughts is based on our embodied capacities to engage in intersubjective practices. Infants have a much earlier understanding of themselves as subjects and of other people as being like them – an understanding that leads to intersubjectivity – than classic developmental theories would have posited. In the first part of the paper, I will lay out the theory’s basic assumptions and the classic research that supports Interaction Theory.

Second, I want to present recent research in intersubjectivity & theory of mind, especially research at the Max Planck Institute Leipzig. There, researchers have recently explored topics like joint commitment (Grafenhain et al 2009), shared experience (Liebal et al 2009) and false belief test based on an active helping paradigm (Buttelmann et al 2009). I want to argue for the soundness of an interaction-theoretic interpretation of the findings and point out some of their philosophical implications.

 

Koosha Eghbal

Revisiting Language as a cognitive tool

In keeping with a Vygotskyan line of thought, Andy Clark (1996, 2006) has developed the idea that certain uses of public languages bestow various cognitive benefits to the users, the benefits which are beyond the communicative purposes and actively influence the ways in which one thinks. More recently, more researchers have developed theories which explain how language works as a cognitive tool. Among them, Parisi and Mirolli (2009) distinguishes ‘linguistic network’ from the ‘sensory-motor network’ and explain how these two ‘networks’ function within the cognitive system and form the categorization capacities. Moreover, Richard Menary (2007) has explained how writing, itself, appears to be a sort of thinking. Also, Stanislas Dehaene (2009) explores what reading does to the human brain and how enables it for more complicated computations. Yet, an important philosophical question seems to be unanswered: Could high-level thoughts, also, be available at a non-linguistic level? Or, is language as a cognitive tool necessary for high-level cognitive tasks?

In order to answers those questions I will attempt to 1) reconsider certain ways in which language influences thought, and 2) propose two sorts of arguments which cast doubt on the necessity of language as constitutive of thought. The first sort concerns the independence of some fundamental categorisation capacities from language acquisition; and the second one addresses the content/vehicle distinction.

 

Liz Irvine

Mechanisms of consciousness

Cognitive neuroscience is now making it possible to find the mechanisms that underlie mental abilities. This paper explores what a mechanistic approach can tell us about the status of consciousness, and standard subtypes of consciousness, as natural kinds. This will be done by exploring how mechanisms need to be individuated if they are to remain non-arbitrary, and how inter-level identity claims can be tested and how informative they can be. After a brief discussion of Bechtel’s (2008) work on the mechanism(s) of memory, two popular mechanisms of consciousness will be considered (global availability and local recurrent processing), but it will be argued that both of these mechanisms fail to be individuated in a non-problematic way. Although mechanisms exist for broad types information processing, and for more specific cognitive abilities, it will be argued that there are no mechanisms on a suitable level of description that give rise to (only) properties associated with consciousness. Consciousness and subtypes of consciousness fail to pick out distinct phenomena, and instead research needs to shift focus to the mechanisms found in the brain and the real taxonomy of phenomena that they describe.

 

Olle Blomberg

Joint action for out-of-control kids

Philosophical accounts of joint action typically require highly sophisticated socio-cognitive capacities from participants, such as the capacity to share beliefs with others. But infants and toddlers engage in activities with each other (e.g. pretend play) which, intuitively at least, appear to involve joint action, despite the fact that they do not have full mind-reading capacities. Can a philosophical account be modified to deal with this fact? In this talk, I will (1) quickly introduce you to the philosophy of joint action, (2) present Deborah Tollefsen's account of joint action (2005), which is tailored to deal with the joint action of kids, (3) argue that while her account solves some problems, it leaves unexplained how infants and toddlers can have intentions-in-action of the form ('I intend that we J') that is required for her account to be successful, (4) suggest a way to overcome this weakness in Tollefsen's account.

Tollefsen, D. (2005). Let's Pretend! Children and Joint Action. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1), 75-97.

 

John Bray

That's my dessert!

You are in a restaurant and order some desert, at which point does it become yours? Thanks to the social context, I argue that the desert is yours at the moment of order initiation (not when you take your first bite). I will criticise the notion that 'free won't' compromises the notion of free will regarding agency by equating conscious awareness of a decision with the eating of the desert and the social context of act ownership with that of placing an order in a restaurant. The self who initiates action is the owner of said action whether consciously aware of it or not, just as I own the dessert whether I take a bite or not. The dessert is due to he who orders, my claim is that in the case of act ownership our self can own an action without conscious deliberation or awareness. Regular customers in the restaurant may simply need to sit down at the table to initiate the order (they have “the usual” and no longer need to order); they may even become regular enough for the chef to expect their arrival at a certain time and act accordingly. I argue that much of our behaviour takes a similar form but that it is no less 'free' as a result.

 

Andrew Hartline

Orders of linguistic intervention, linguistic novelty and linguistic creativity

In this talk I develop related definitions of linguistic interventions, linguistic novelty and linguistic creativity. In this conception, linguistic interventions can occur on multiple orders (i.e., we can make nth-order interventions in our repertoire of n-1th order interventions); and novelty or creativity can be a property of interventions of any order. Dividing things up in this way allows us to solve a few puzzles about creativity and novelty as they pertain to language.

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