• Overview
• Programme

Overview

This graduate workshop will take place on Monday 11th May in seminar room 5 of the Crystal MacMillan Building. Inquiries about this workshop should be directed to Matteo Colombo. This workshop is run by the Mnd & Cognition Research Group.

Mind & Cognition is one of the main research clusters in Philosophy at Edinburgh, and as such it hosts a number of research activities. For more details about Mind & Cognition @ Edinburgh, click here.

Programme

9.00 - 9.30 DoGs Gathering

9.30 - 10.30 Guest Speaker: Mike Wheeler (Stirling): Making Your Mind Up: A Conceptual Geography of Extended Cognition

ABSTRACT. The primary goal of this talk is not to defend the hypothesis of extended cognition against its critics (although I shall do a little of that), but rather to understand that hypothesis better, both in terms of its internal features (e.g. the character and the role of the parity principle, the hypothesis as a form of functionalism) and in terms of its relationship with other positions in the 4E arena (embodied cognition, embedded cognition, enactive cognition). We shall emerge, I hope, with a firmer grip on the claims, the options, and the disputes that matter.

10.30 - 10.45 Break

10.45 - 11.30 Alisa Mandrigin: Self-Identification and Self-Awareness

ABSTRACT. When I notice that it is me and not another, as I previously thought, who has made a set of muddy footprints on the new carpet I achieve a certain form of self-recognition. This self-recognition seems to involve the identification of the subject with an object. Given a prevailing belief that subject and object are unassailably distinct, and in view of Shoemaker’s (1968) assertion that the subject is not known by identification, how can the subject be identified with an object, either a physical object or an object of awareness? I argue that if we hold on to both of these two notions then we cannot explain self-recognition of this kind. We must give up either the idea that we can understand consciousness and self-consciousness in terms of a subject and object relation, or that our self-acquaintance is identification-free.

11.30 - 12.15 Liz Irvine: Minimally Flexible Responses and *d'*

ABSTRACT. Although subjective measures of awareness seem to be the most intuitively reasonable measures of awareness, subjective responses are liable to be biased and do not always reflect the degree of information that is consciously available to subjects. Instead, Holender (1986) famously argued that the SDT measure of sensitivity *d’* should be used to measure awareness. *d’* is a measure of how good the subject is at differentiating signals (the target stimuli) from background noise, and subjects are said to be aware of stimuli for conditions under which *d’* is greater than zero. In support of this measure, Holdender claimed that “it is fundamental that an indicator of awareness must be intentional” (p.51), and that the apparent intentionality and flexibility of subjects’ responses is an indication that they are conscious of stimuli for conditions above *d’*=0. However, is possible to argue that the presence or absence of intentional strategies does not mark the presence or absence of conscious perception. The idea developed in this paper is that ‘minimally flexible’ responses near *d’*=0 can be generated without conscious perception of stimuli. A discussion of *d’* in relation to blindsight and the role of expectation and learned associations in determining actions will be followed by a Bayesian account of how unconscious ‘action triggers’ for minimally flexible responses can be established. In this case neuronal ‘expectations’ play the role of ‘intentions’ and provide the link between incoming visual information and responses. The way that minimally flexible responses can be generated in Bayesian systems suggests that *d’* does not adequately index awareness.

12.15 - 12.30 Break

12.30 - 13.15 John Bray: The Social Extended Mind

ABSTRACT. Three scientifically guided positions form the empirical backdrop which I propose supports, at the very least, investigating the possibility of describing minds as socially extended. These are Simon Garrod and Martin Pickering’s work on the nature of the cognition involved in conversation, Alex Pentland’s sociometer data featured in his book Honest Signals and Sean Gallagher’s analysis of narrative selves from a neurological perspective. The conceptual backdrop of the proposed socially extended mind hypothesis is somewhat more widely-spread across various philosophical positions. However, for brevity’s sake, this talk will simply focus on the predominant philosophical roots from which I consider the position to gain much of its conceptual backdrop. These are Daniel Dennett’s work on the self and on the nature of consciousness, Martin Heidegger’s description of Dasein as socially embedded and Jenann Ismael’s work on the emergence of self-regulating systems. In this talk I will briefly explain each of these positions, whilst describing where the combining of these approaches might allow us to say, what I consider to be, some fairly interesting things about the role of social setting/interaction in our everyday cognitive performance. Following from this I will briefly go on to explain where the socially extended mind differs from the ‘standard’ extended mind position and I will also describe some of the possible avenues of enquiry available to us if we choose to adopt the socially extended mind hypothesis in future investigations into cognition, consciousness, personal identity and action theory, amongst others.

13.15 - 14.00 Tom Roberts: Extended Beliefs?

ABSTRACT. A central example used to motivate the Extended Mind Hypothesis states that Otto's beliefs are constitutively dependent upon the entries in his notebook, an item located outwith his biological boundaries, just when he is disposed to deploy their content smoothly and efficiently when appropriate. I argue that if they are to truly count among his beliefs, certain further conditions must be met: Otto is required to update his extended beliefs (and their logical consequences) according to rational norms. While these conditions can be accommodated by the EMH, they affect how we must understand the epistemology of extended mental states.

14.00 - 15.00 Lunch

15.00 - 15.45 Matteo Colombo: Leges sine moribus vanae. Clark on Language and Norm-Hungriness

ABSTRACT. Many philosophers think that language is the key to understand the huge chasm between humans and all the other animals with respect to the capacity for social normativity. Andy Clark argues that labels, words, and the normative discourse re-shape the computational space of our cognitive processes, and, as a consequence, they make possible our unique “norm-sensitivity” and “norm-hungriness”. His thesis is that our social normative space is a “secondary effect of getting language going” (Clark 2002: 54 discussion). The aim of this paper is to resist Clark’s conclusion. Firstly, it is argued that Clark’s case-study on chimpanzees cognition does not support adequately his thesis. The kind of re-coding empowered by language might not be causally necessary for the raising of social normativity. Secondly, when information about what most people do in a situation is inconsistent with information about what most people think ought to be done in that situation, the empirical information trumps the normative information. Since the former, unlike the latter, doesn’t require the lingua-form coding of a norm, the influence of linguistically encoded norms on our social behaviour may not be as prominent as Clark surmises. The paper concludes with some “ecumenical” considerations about the relationship between language and social normativity.

15.45 - 16.30 Olle Blomberg: Is Cognition in HMI Wrongheaded or Merely out of its Head?

ABSTRACT. The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) has become a topic of hot debate in the philosophy of mind and cognition in recent years. However, approaches that treat large systems made up of individuals working together with tools as "cognitive systems" have been around at least since the mid 1980s in applied fields of research such as Human-Machine Interaction (HMI). In this talk, I will explore what role the concept 'cognition' might play in HMI. While adopting a larger unit of analysis than an individual human problem-solver is no doubt useful in order to inform system design, it is less clear why the focus should remain on cognition, wherever it may be found.

16.30 - 16.45 Break

16.45 - 17.30 Mog Stapleton: Leaky Levels and the case for Proper Embodiment

ABSTRACT. Embodied cognitive science seemed at first to be a radical shift in the way that we understood, and how we should research, cognition. However, the most influential of these research programmes are not as radical as they at first seem; they are in fact extensions of orthodox cognitive science, a science predicated upon machine functionalism and an outdated understanding of levels in neurobiology. In this presentation I will introduce a strong form of embodiment supported by neuroscience and systems biology. Proper embodiment is the thesis that the causally relevant properties for cognition are at a much finer grain than proposed by orthodox functionalist cognitive science. They are at such a fine grain that specifying the algorithm for cognition entails specifying parts of the biological body normally considered to be background or enabling conditions for cognition. I will present an argument for proper embodiment based on the inseparability of emotion from cognition at the neural level, and sketch the outline of an argument at the systems level.

17.30 - 18.15 Dave Ward: Enjoying the Spread: Extended Consciousness Reconsidered

ABSTRACT. Andy Clark has recently assessed various 'enactivist' attempts to argue that the vehicles of conscious experience extend beyond the bounds of the body and out into the environment, and found them wanting. In my talk, I'll attempt to respond on behalf of the enactivists. Andy's criticisms rely on reading the enactivists as arguing for a particular view of how extended subpersonal vehicles add up to the enabling basis of a standard conception of experience. I'll argue that this misconstrues the nature of the enactivists' project. We should read them as arguing for a revision of standard philosophical conceptions of experience, not for a new hypothesis about how experience, traditionally construed, arises. I'll try to say something about this revised conception, and show that when we adopt it, issues about mechanical underpinnings of experience look less philosophically pressing, and the temptation to suppose that those underpinnings are internally located does not arise.

18.15 Andy Clark's Conclusive Remarks

LATER: DoGs Dinner

Last updated: May 5th 2009 by Duncan Pritchard.