ISI 2015 Abstracts25May15 - Lehigh Universityinteract/isi2015/ISI2015... · 2015. 5. 25. · Mark...

Jed Allen [email protected]

An Action-‐Based Approach to Implicit Theory of Mind

Interactivist Summer Institute, 2015

Jedediah WP Allen [email protected] Bilkent University Ankara Turkey

There is growing evidence for the conclusion that infants possess a rudimentary understanding of other people’s beliefs as representational states. The empirical basis for this conclusion comes from looking time studies indicating that infants are able to pass “age-‐appropriate” False-‐Belief (FB) tasks (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007). FB tasks are particularly important because they have long been regarded as a litmus test for the possession of a “theory of mind” (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). However, the ability to reason about another person’s false beliefs has traditionally been assumed to develop during the preschool years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Therefore, the dissociation between tasks creates an apparent problem: why do older children fail traditional FB tasks if their younger peers already posses the relevant ability? To solve this dissociation, researchers are converging on the idea that infants possess an implicit Theory of Mind (ToM) while older children possess an explicit ToM (Low & Perner, 2012). However, without a theoretical model of implicit knowledge that allows for the possibility of epistemic reflection and emergence, the implicit-‐explicit distinction will not be able to adequately explain the task dissociations for which it has been invoked. Further, an epistemically robust notion of implicitness will require adopting an action-‐based approach to mind more broadly. In further consequence, social-‐cognitive theory can reject the taken-‐for-‐granted assumption of a folk-‐psychological ontology for understanding other’s actions.

Mark Bickhard [email protected] Parmenides to Persons Interactivism and Central Nervous System Dynamics Inter- and En- Activism The Anticipative Brain: Two Approaches An Interactivist Perspective on Ethics Robert Campbell [email protected] Robert L. Campbell, Psychology, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA Moral Psychology and the Interactivist Ontology of the Person This tutorial will present key principles of the interactivist ontology of the person as they pertain to the pursuit of goals and values, and to character and its invariants. The ease of implementation within this ontology will be assessed for a variety of conceptions of morality in the Western tradition: Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s rule-‐based morality (and its psychological derivatives such as the theories of Piaget and Kohlberg), and Haidt’s sentiment-‐based theory of six moral foundations. Robert L. Campbell, Psychology, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, USA Writing about Psychology A recent book by Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, incisively criticizes the prevailing manner in which psychology books and articles are written. The main points of his critique will be illustrated and defended. Billig recommends: (1) using technical terms only when they are demonstrably more precise than everyday language; (2) cutting down on the use of passive sentences;

(3) using clauses with active verbs in place of nouns or noun phrases; (4) writing about people rather than “things” (reified concepts or variables); (5) avoiding technical terms when they are mainly functioning to market the writer. David Eck [email protected] 1. Major Themes: large-‐scale social coordination patterns, first-‐personal agency 2. Title: Applying Participatory Sense-‐Making to Epistemic Communities: The Danger of Reifying Coordination Patterns 3. Extended Abstract Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo’s (2007, 2008) concept of participatory sense-‐making has addressed an important lacuna within the enactive movement in cognitive science—namely, the movement’s implications for social theory. Applied to two-‐person interactions, participatory sense-‐making shows how epistemically productive social coordination does not presuppose individual cognitive mechanisms. But applying participatory sense-‐making and enactivism more generally to larger-‐scale and longer-‐term social contexts has proven difficult: most efforts have reified social interaction patterns and consequently obscured the role of the idiosyncratic, future-‐oriented first-‐personal agent. To examine this issue, I begin with De Jaegher’s attempts to expand the scope of participatory sense-‐making.

De Jaegher’s extension of participatory sense-‐making has centered on the notion of a participation spectrum. This spectrum is based on degrees of social coordination: on one side of the spectrum lies mere “orientation” and, on the other, “joint sense-‐making.” In the latter case, it may be very difficult or even impossible to tease out each individual’s distinct contributions due to high coordination between participants. In cases of orientation, by contrast, there is low orientation and, as a result, it is easy to delineate each individual’s contributions. While the social coordination spectrum can be a useful tool in assessing the interdependence within a given interaction, it has also been linked to the affective character of social interaction. The latter link is first proposed by De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher (2010).

De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher (2010) tentatively propose that the coordination spectrum is a general indicator of the affective character of social interaction. Their proposal is based on empirical studies of psychotherapy in which there is a correlation between, on the one hand, high bodily coordination of therapist and patient and, on the other, a patient’s positive assessment of the therapy session. Over a series of articles, De Jaegher expands on the social coordination spectrum, especially the

latter suggestion that high coordination correlates with positive affective states (e.g., Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, McGann and De Jaegher 2009, De Jaegher 2013). Even though the connection between the coordination spectrum and the affective character of interaction is indexed to a specific context in De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher (2010), this qualification and any other proviso is scanty if not entirely absent from De Jaegher’s subsequent efforts.

De Jaegher proposes a number of spectra based on the social coordination spectrum. Among her many efforts, I will concentrate on McGann and De Jaegher (2009) and De Jaegher (2013): the former captures the tight link between the spectra and the privileging of motility, while the latter shows the extent to which De Jaegher is willing to give motility explanatory priority. Beginning with the former: the main goal of McGann and De Jaegher (2009) is to give an account of social perception in terms of social contingencies and thereby link participatory sense-‐making to O’Regan and Noë’s (2001) sensorimotor contingency theory. Towards this end, McGann and De Jaegher recast joint sense-‐making and orientation, the opposite poles of the social coordination spectrum, in terms of fluid and rigid interactions, respectively. In this context, fluidity appears as sensitivity to social contingencies. That is to say, being socially skilled entails the ability to improvise based on our own and others’ changing emotional states (p. 427-‐28). Lack of social skill, by contrast, implies rigidity and predictability, an inability to engage one’s particular audience. In making this connection with O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor contingency theory, McGann and De Jaegher erode some of participatory sense-‐making’s value: interpreting sociality in terms of unpredictability dovetails with O’Regan and Noë’s general privileging of quantifiable movement over first-‐personal experience. Likewise, De Jaegher’s application of fluidity and rigidity to political theory suggests that she too believes that motility holds a general explanatory priority over first-‐personal experience.

Drawing upon Gilligan and Richards (2009), De Jaegher (2013) frames the fluid-rigid dichotomy in terms of horizontal democratic forms of association in contrast to top-down patriarchal social organizations, respectively. The connection is ambitious, representing an attempt to show participatory sense-making’s relevance to analyzing entire societies. This extension is predicated on yet another spectrum, the spectrum of power symmetry. De Jaegher writes, “When interacting with another person, or with an institution, one or other partner may be more or less ‘dominant,’ more or less influential. In such asymmetric relations or interactions, the degree of influence that each partner has is different” (p. 23). Greater power symmetry corresponds to the high coordination of joint sense-making and a positive affective character; greater power asymmetry corresponds to the low coordination of mere orientation and a negative affective character. In this manner, the significance of social interaction is confined to one-dimensional spectra. In attributing affective meaning to coordination patterns irrespective of participants’ first-personal experiences, De Jaegher reifies the patterns. Diagnosing De Jaegher’s extension of participatory sense-making serves as a useful lens for considering other problematic attempts to apply enactivism to large-scale social contexts, such as Pierre Steiner and John Stewart’s structural normativity and Richard Menary’s Cognitive Integrationism.

Steiner and Stewart’s structural normativity undermines first-personal agency by positing an objective set of communal norms. Steiner and Stewart (2009) argue that enactivism is by itself ill-equipped to account for humans’ higher-level cognitive abilities and thus human social domains. To supplement enactivism, Steiner and Stewart draw upon the “Pittsburgh School” of philosophy, arguing that there is a qualitative difference between humans’ language capabilities and other animals’ “stereotyped” communication. Accordingly, on this view, humans’ distinctive language capacities generate an objective social domain. Social domains consist of normative structures that are acquired and enforced via language. Joining a social domain requires heteronomous submission to its normative structure; a member who violates a social norm risks expulsion from a particular domain. Given this picture of language and objective social domains, the role of first-personal agents is even more greatly marginalized than in De Jaegher’s account. Menary’s Cognitive Integrationism, in turn, drops Steiner and Stewart’s human exceptionalism but retains the general picture of an objective set of communal norms.

In presenting Cognitive Integrationism, one of Menary’s primary concerns is to present an account of cognitive practices that addresses the issue of cognitive bloat (regarding cognitive bloat, see Rupert 2004). The cognitive bloat issue, Menary argues, stems from confusing mere “artifact extension” with “encultured cognition.” Whereas the former only involves an “outsourcing” or “offloading” of cognition, the latter transforms the cognitive character of the epistemic agent. Accordingly, physical artifacts should not be counted as part of an epistemic agent—thus blunting the cognitive bloat concern—but rather only the communal norms that guide how to skillfully manipulate artifacts. Analogous to Steiner and Stewart’s notion of heteronomous submission, Menary models the acquisition of skills as the internalization of cognitive norms. Using one of his favorite examples of a cognitive practice, Menary (2012, 152) describes learning a written language as follows: “the inside is transformed to be more like the outside (as a kind of reverse parity principle).” The notion of reverse parity, in which all “internal” skills and norms are the product of previous engagements with cognitive practices, highlights the affinity with Steiner and Stewart’s account. Although by dropping the human exceptionalism of the Pittsburgh School and its attendant focus on the nature of human language, Menary has more resources to model the acquisition of communal norms—Menary and Kirchhoff (2013), for instance, draw upon Hubert Dreyfus’s (1986) account of embodied expertise. While Cognitive Integrationism is thus an advance over Steiner and Stewart’s structural normativism, the role of the first-‐personal agent is still marginalized by the underlying notion of an internalization of objective communal norms.

The basic insight of participatory sense-making is that coordination dynamics endogenously emerge within the actual interaction between agents. In order to preserve this insight while addressing larger-scale social contexts, I sketch two interrelated aspects of the epistemic agent that are absent from De Jaegher’s extension: first, the agent’s prospective orientation and, second, the opaqueness of coordination factors. The first aspect relates to Mark Bickhard’s (Bickhard and Terveen 1996, Bickhard 2002) account of error-guided learning, the second to Isabela Granic’s (2002) notion of behavioral attractors. Jointly, both aspects stand in stark contrast to the notion of a shared set of objective social norms: social interaction’s epistemic significance derives from the ineliminable differences between agents rather than a shared set of internalized norms.

Using the problematic nature of structural normativity and Cognitive Integrationism as a cautionary reference point, I argue against attributing any substantive meaning or affective character to coordination patterns without incorporating the first-personal perspectives of the participants.

References Bickhard, Mark H. 2002. "Critical principles: On the negative side of rationality." New

Ideas in Psychology 20 (1):1-34.

Bickhard, Mark H, and Loren Terveen. 1996. Foundational issues in artificial intelligence and cognitive science: Impasse and solution. Vol. 109. New York: Elsevier.

De Jaegher, Hanne. 2013. "Rigid and fluid interactions with institutions." Cognitive Systems Research 25:19-25.

De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2007. "Participatory sense-making." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4):485-507.

De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2008. "Making sense in participation: An enactive approach to social cognition." Emerging Communication 10:33.

De Jaegher, Hanne, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Shaun Gallagher. 2010. "Can social interaction constitute social cognition?" Trends in cognitive sciences 14 (10):441-447.

Dreyfus, Hubert L, and Stuart E Dreyfus. 1986. Mind over machine. New York: Free Press.

Fuchs, Thomas, and Hanne De Jaegher. 2009. "Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (4):465-486.

Gilligan, Carol, and David AJ Richards. 2009. The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Granic, Isabela. 2002. "The Self-Organization of Parent-Child Relations: Beyond Bidirectional Models." In Emotion, development, and self-organization: Dynamic systems approaches to emotional development, edited by Marc D. Lewis and Isabela Granic, 267-297. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McGann, Marek, and Hanne De Jaegher. 2009. "Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (4):417-437.

Menary, Richard, and Michael Kirchhoff. 2013. "Cognitive transformations and extended expertise." Educational Philosophy and Theory: Incorporating ACCESS 46 (6):610-623.

O'Regan, J Kevin, and Alva Noë. 2001. "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness." Behavioral and brain sciences 24 (05):939-973.

Rupert, Robert D. 2004. "Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition." The Journal of philosophy:389-428.

Steiner, Pierre, and John Stewart. 2009. "From autonomy to heteronomy (and back): The enaction of social life." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (4):527-550.

Paweł Gładziejewski Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences

ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00-‐330 Warsaw, Poland

Phone number: (+48) 518 096 011

E-‐mail: [email protected]

1. Major theme: Critical examination of the relation between practical and

representational normativity, in particular of the possibility of reducing the latter to

the former.

2. Paper title: Representation and (inter)action: a moderate proposal

3. Extended abstract:

Cognitive systems are related to their environments in two prima facie

distinct ways, both of which can be construed as normative in nature. First, there is

the practical relation: organisms interact with their environments, and those

interactions can either succeed or fail. Second, there is the representational relation.

Minded creatures can internally represent worldly states of affairs, i.e. have

contentful internal states which can be accurate or inaccurate (true or false) with

respect to how the world actually is. What is the metaphysical and explanatory

connection between the two ways of being related to environment, if there is any? Is

the representational content somehow determined or constituted by practical

engagements with the world? Can the representational normativity be somehow

explained in terms of practical normativity? It seems that there are at least two

positions which one might hold with respect to those questions:

Intellectualism: There exists no strong or theoretically significant

connection between representational content and the normativity

of action. Representational content is not determined or

constituted by action. And action does not play any explanatory

role with respect to how content arises. Something else entirely

determines/constitutes/explains representational content (e.g.

some correspondence or natural relation between the

representation itself and what is represented).1

Interactivism: There is a strong and theoretically significant


of action. Representational content is wholly determined or

constituted by being appropriately related to action. And we can

provide a complete explanation of content in terms of this relation

to action.2

1 We might imagine Super-‐Intellectualism, a position which reverses the order of

metaphysical/explanatory relationship and claims that normativity of action is

constituted/determined/explained by the normativity of representation. To keep things simple, I will

not discuss this option here. 2 This is not to suggest that Interactivism denies any sort of relevance of factors other than action for

content. Nonetheless, I take Interactivism to be committed to a claim that (1) non-‐action-‐related

factors are never necessary for representational content and (2) action-‐related factors are sufficient

for representational content.

Proponents of Interactivism sometimes charge Intellectualism with inability

to explain how representational error detection is possible. That is, on the

Intellectualist view of things, it remains a mystery how cognitive systems can have

access to whether they accurately represent the environments, and so how they are

capable of error-‐based learning. It is the ability to explain representational error

detection that is supposed to constitute a major advantage of Interactivism over

Intellectualism. Roughly speaking, from the Interactivist perspective, organisms can

detect representational error indirectly, through detecting failures of those

(inter)actions which confer content on representational states.

One might get an impression that when discussing the relation between

practical and representational normativity, Intellectualism and Interactivism

exhaust all the theoretical options and thus we face the dilemma of choosing

between either of the two. But this is clearly a false alternative, as an intermediate

position is also available:

The Moderate View: There is a strong and theoretically significant


of action. Representational content is partly determined or

constituted by being appropriately related to action. And we can in

part explain content in terms of this relation to action.

In my talk, I will attempt to achieve two things. First, I will try to elucidate

what the Moderate View amounts to. In particular, I will sketch a view on which

representational content is co-‐constituted both by the representation’s involvement

in action-‐guidance as well as by the structural resemblance holding between the

representation and what is represented. Second, I will argue that the Moderate View

has the advantages of both Intellectualism and Interactivism, without sharing (what

I take to be) their disadvantages. In particular, similarly to Interactivism, the

moderate position can explain how representational error detection is possible. At

the same time, the Moderate View avoids what I take to be a major drawback of

Interactivism. It seems that by postulating such a tight link between content and

action, Interactivism often makes representational talk explanatorily vacuous.

Simply speaking, representations often play no separate and significant explanatory

role in the Interactivist story. I will argue that the Moderate View does not give rise

to this problem, since it provides us with a clear distinction between

representational and non-‐representational action-‐guiding mechanisms.

Abel R. Hernández-‐Ulloa [email protected] Multicausal Abductive Reasoning as an interactivist account for “scientific

discovery” Guanajuato University, México

Russell Hanson (1961) challenged the accepted idea that there is no logic of scientific discovery. He states that if there are reasons to suggest a particular hypothesis then it is possible to consider some kind of logic of scientific discovery. The question is how it is possible to generate a particular hypothesis to explain some surprising phenomena within the boundaries of an accepted theory. In some cases it would be a question of: how it is possible to generate a new theory. It is proposed that the inference of the best explanation of surprising phenomena has some regularities. This particular kind of inference to the best explanation is called abductive inference (Aliseda, 1997). Jerry Fodor (2000) has challenged the available psychological theories about how human minds work because they lack of an explanation for abductive reasoning. Previously, claiming an anticonstructivist approach, he discarded any theory of learning and the theories committed to the perspective of developmental psychology (Fodor, 1992). Bickhard developed a theory that presents a solution to Fodor’s perspective through the alternative position now acknowledged as interactivism (Bickhard, 2003; Campbell & Bickhard, 1992). The interactivism emphasize the fact that there has been an emergence of the representation and, furthermore, there can also be considered the emergence of normative representation. From this approach the mind is conceived as a process that operates as an evolving self regulated open system. In order to exemplify some of these key ideas about the emergence of new knowledge, I will present the results from an empirical study on multicausal abductive reasoning. This study shows how, after a brief training to understand the main features of a ‘multicausal’ system, some participants are able to develop hypotheses in order to explain new observations. Such hypotheses emerge in a gradual process in which successive tentative working hypotheses are adapted to new information.

ALISEDA, A. (1997) Seeking Explanations: Abduction in Logic, Philosophy of Science and Artificial Intelligence., PhD thesis, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

BICKHARD, M. H. (2003). Mind as Process. In F. G. Riffert, M. Weber (Eds.) Searching

for New Contrasts. (285-‐294). Vienna: Peter Lang. URL: http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/mindasprocess.pdf FODOR, J. A. (1992) Fixation of Belief and Concept Acquisition. IN SMITH, L. (Ed.)

Jean Piaget: Critical Assessments. London, Routledge. FODOR, J. A. (2000) The mind doesn't work that way : the scope and limits of

computational psychology, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Dr. Annette Hohenberger [email protected]

Major themes of the paper: Cognition and Representation; Representation emergent in action systems; Development

Paper title: The role of perception in an action-‐based approach to object representation

Extended abstract:

Allen and Bickhard (2013) advocate an action-‐based approach to object representation in order to transcend both nativism and empiricism which are both trapped in foundationalism, i.e., they resort to innate atomic representations. Allen and Bickhard claim that objects are not represented in virtue of the referents in the environment they stand in for but in virtue of the anticipated (inter)actions they afford for some agent. Their action-‐based approach avoids conceptual and methodological problems which are ubiquitous in the field of cognitive developmental research and allows for representational emergence, i.e., the active construction of object representations out of interactions with these objects, as first proposed by Piaget (1954). In their developmental reconstruction of representational emergence they reject correspondence as the basis of the relation between the representing and the represented entity and rather determine anticipation as the basis of two essential properties of representation – aboutness (intentionality) and truth value. In this paper, I am suggesting how action can be vindicated as a proper basis of object and action representation, namely by invoking perception as an indispensable counterpart of action and as the locus of anticipation. This extension is relevant to cognitive development (ontogenetic and phylogenetic) in particular and to action science, more generally.

My suggestion invokes a theory with a long and eventful tradition in cognitive psychology, namely ideo-‐motor theory (Stock & Stock, 2004). First being proposed in the 18th century and then constantly being improved until today, ideo-‐motor theory claims that (motor) actions are represented, instigated and controlled in terms of the perceptual anticipation of their goal objects and their desired distal goal states (Prinz, 1997; Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001). Thus, perception (of intended action outcomes) and action are two sides of the same medal, sharing a common code during processing. Common coding (Prinz, 1997) obviates the need of translating between them, as in traditional information-‐processing theories. It rather claims that the two are representationally equivalent (at some point of cognitive processing), collapsing the traditional tripartite sequence of perception – cognition – action into a unitary ideo-‐motor concept of cognition. Ideo-‐motor theory has a strong empirical foundation at the behavioral and neuro-‐scientific level, in adult as well as in developmental research (Prinz, Beisert, & Herwig, 2013). I suggest invoking the perceptual aspect of the ideo-‐motor complex as the locus of anticipation which plays a major role in Bickhard and colleagues’ action-‐based account (Bickhard, 2009a+b; Allen & Bickhard, 2013; Campbell, 2010; among many others). In Bickhard and colleagues’ account, the future directedness of anticipation provides the agent an expectation of how her interaction in the current context would proceed and whether it might possibly succeed. Van Geert & Steenbeek (2013) call these anticipations “pre-‐presentations” and grant them an important role in development, e.g., by facilitating subsequent interactions with a particular object and allowing for increasingly more differentiated actions. In ideo-‐motor theory anticipation is explicitly attributed to perception. In order to engage with an object in the environment through some purposeful, goal-‐direct behavior, e.g., grasping a mug of tea, the agent is invoking the perceptual image of its anticipated distal goal state, e.g., holding the mug in her hand (and drinking the tea). Through the perceptual loop, ideo-‐motor theory can bridge the otherwise insurmountable rift between the intention to act (in the mind) and the motor act (of the body) itself. Thus, ideo-‐motor theory answers the mind-‐body problem, namely how willed action is possible: the mind can instruct the body to move only via the activation of the perceptual image of the distal action effects. The proximal motor act is left to the peripheral motor system itself. Perceptual instruction is possible through bilateral associations that are formed during the cognitive and motor development of the agent, starting in the first year of life. These connections work both ways: from (firstly unintentional) motor acts to perception of their outcomes, and, later, intentionally, from perception to action. While action is not anticipatory by itself, perception is, as when the agent is simulating the desired result state of the action. This simulation activates and instigates the corresponding motor program and the action is launched. Lastly, ideo-‐motor theory accounts for a major but often neglected aspect of object and action representation which goes beyond mere considerations of affordances, namely the motivational aspect: why do we act at all?

Allen, J. W.P. & Bickhard, M. H. (2013). Stepping off the pendulum: Why only an action-‐based approach can transcend the nativist-‐empiricist debate. Cognitive Development 28, 96-‐133.

Bickhard, M. H. (2009a). Interactivism: A manifesto. New Ideas in Psychology 27, 85-‐95. Bickhard, M. H. (2009b). The biological foundations of cognitive science. New Ideas in Psychology 27,

75-‐84. Campbell, R. (2010). The emergence of action. New Ideas in Psychology 28(3), 283-‐295. Hommel, B., Müsseler, J., Aschersleben, G., & Prinz, W. (2001). The theory of event coding (TEC): A

framework for perception and action planning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, 849-‐878. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic. Prinz, W. (1997). Perception and action planning. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 9, 129-‐

154. Prinz, W., Beisert, M., & Herwig, A. (2013). Action science. Foundations of an emerging discipline.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stock, A. & Stock, C. (2004). A short history of ideo-‐motor action. Psychological Research 68, 176-‐188. Van Geert, P.L.C. & Steenbeek, H. W. (2013). (P) (re) presentations: What are they and how do they

develop? Commentary on “Stepping off the pendulum: Why only an action-‐based approach can transcend the nativist-‐empiricist debate.” By J. Allen & M. Bickhard. Cognitive Development 28, 138-‐143.

Author or co-‐authors with names, addresses, telephone number, and e-‐mail address:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Annette Hohenberger Middle East Technical University (METU) Informatics Institute, Department of Cognitive Science Cankaya Ilcesi Universiteler Mah. Dumlupinar Bulvari 1 06800 Ankara TURKEY Tel.: ++90 (0) 312 210 3789 Fax: ++90 (0) 312 210 3745 e-‐mail: [email protected]

Chris Janeke [email protected] Interactivist Summer Institute: [email protected] Main Theme: Cognition and representation Title: Exploring the postcognitivist era: A perspective from cognitive psychology Abstract During the cognitivist era, a notion of symbolic representations coupled with a computational theory of mind prevailed as the dominant approach in cognitive psychology. This ‘rules and representation’ type of cognitive architecture achieved a paradigmatic status during the 1970s and 80s, but it has now been largely abandoned in favour of a number of alternative conceptions of cognition and mind that reject at least some of the key assumptions underlying either the representational or computational aspects of the cognitivist paradigm. In this presentation I try to illuminate aspects of this changing landscape of research. However, since this is a large and complicated domain of research, only three significant strands of research falling within this ‘postcognitivist’ research tradition are briefly examined, and my perspective is mostly based on that of cognitive psychology. The three strands of research that will be considered range from a relatively mild ‘revisioning’ of the cognitivist approach, to a more radical rejection of its core postulates. I first consider connectionism in which much of the flavour of the computational paradigm is still retained, albeit in a parallel distributed processing framework. However, connectionism does part with the cognitivist tradition because it is based on a subsymbolic representational scheme, and it advances a statistical learning mechanism. This use of statistical computation entails a novel way of thinking about the origins of knowledge as ‘emerging’ from the learning and processing activity of massively interconnected processing units in large networks. The standard connectionist approach is a relatively mild amendment of the cognitivist tradition, but a stronger version of this approach posits that cognitive explanations should be supplanted with concepts and theories at the neural-‐level. This approach is therefore eliminative. A second important manifestation of postcognitive research is this eliminative, reductionist approach to cognition. The availability of brain imaging technologies (e.g. fMRI, MEG), progress in neuroscience in uncovering brain mechanisms at the cellular level, and the considerable funding opportunities associated with large scale projects such as the human connectome and blue brain are all forces that are currently driving a bottoms-‐up, reductionist orientation in cognitive psychology. This has fostered a ‘molecules to mind’ style of explanation, so that John Bickle argues for a “ruthless reductionism” in terms of which theories and explanations of psychological phenomena are reduced to concepts and mechanisms at the neural level. The third strand of postcognitivist research that I will discuss is the most radical, because it discards both the computational and representational tenets of the cognitivist tradition. The radical embodied perspective that is described in, for example, Chemero (2011), argues for a perspective in which concepts of space,

direct perceptual experience, and bodily interaction with the world form the basis for psychological knowledge and also the explanation of behaviour. In this approach the internalist, brain-‐in-‐a-‐vat conception of cognition and behaviour is rejected, and an interactive perspective involving brain/mind, body, and behaviour is presented and modelled using dynamical systems theory. The approach is therefore non-‐representational and also non-‐mechanistic because there is no attempt to elucidate a purely internal cognitive mechanism; instead explanation is aimed at clarifying the dynamical interaction of mind, perception and action in an environment. An equally radical rejection of the cognitivist notion of mechanism is provided by the recent exploration of aspects of quantum theory in cognitive psychology, and a new field called ’quantum cognition’ has even emerged from this research. In this field no assumptions or claims are made about the physical structure of the brain, instead the focus is simply on exploring the use of the mathematical theory of quantum probability as a basis for modelling aspects of human cognition. Hence, there is no attempt to capture internal cognitive representations and mechanisms, a purely mathematical, descriptive theory of cognition is presented. I conclude by briefly drawing a few implications and mention the problem of distinguishing between a realist and instrumentalist conceptions of computation and representation in both cognitivist and postcognitivist theories. Reference Chemero, A. (2011). Radical embodied cognitive science. MIT Press. Author: Chris Janeke Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of South Africa Address: TvW Building 5-‐108, Department of Psychology, University of South Africa, P O Box 392, Pretoria, 0003, Republic of South Africa Tel: +27 124298218, email: [email protected] Alex Levine [email protected] Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence Contributors to the literature on interactivism and process metaphysics have criticized received views on emergence in a number of different senses of the word. First, substance-‐metaphysical approaches have historically left the problem of change intractable. In contemporary approaches to mind, this legacy has made it difficult if not impossible for heirs to the substance-‐metaphysical tradition to explain how aspects of mind (including the functional normativity of cognition, language, etc.) can evolve and develop. Evolution and development are examples of diachronic emergence. At the same time, similar substance-‐metaphysical presuppositions have made it difficult to account for emergence-‐at-‐a-‐time, or what I call synchronic emergence. Jaegwon Kim, for example, has famously argued that the

emergence of the higher-‐level properties of cognitive systems must be understood as mere supervenience, with such properties ultimately reducible to the properties and structures of a microphysical substrate. In this paper, I ask whether it makes sense to consider the programmatic critique of inadequate accounts of emergence as addressing one target, or two. To what extent must synchronic and diachronic emergence be understood as involving similar dynamics and similar ontologies? I argue that despite deep kinship, the two are not identical. Sensitivity to differences will increase the efficacy of critique. Raamy Majeed [email protected] TITLE: From Process Philosophy to Quietism: A ‘Daoist’ Account of Consciousness ABSTRACT: Daojia, the philosophical tradition associated with Daoism, provides its own brand of epistemology and metaphysics. The former can be interpreted as espousing a form of Quietism not too dissimilar from the one attributed to the latter Wittgenstein: that the role of philosophy is to defuse linguistic and conceptual confusions instead of offering up positive theses of its own. Moreover, and somewhat paradoxically, the latter can be viewed as offering a process ontology; though of a non-‐theistic variety that is more naturalistic than the one made popular by Whitehead, and yet distinct from other naturalistic accounts, such as those of Bickhard and Campbell. In this paper, I aim to explain how we can employ the Daoist process philosophy to argue for a Quietist account of phenomenal consciousness. Marcin Milkowski [email protected] Does system-‐detectable error imply methodological solipsism? It has been argued that a proper account of system-‐detectable error in cognitive representation requires that content supervenes on the intrinsic properties of the cognitive agent (Bickhard 1993). The purpose of my talk is to ask whether this implies that interactivism endorses methodological solipsism. Previous work on the interactivist model did not focus on the externalism / internalism debate, and just because of the immense popularity of these distinction this issue needs to be tackled. I will defend a claim that the basic anticipatory representations, being inherently context-‐sensitive, should not be framed in internalist terms; rather they supervene on the ongoing interaction between cognitive processes and its milieu. For this reason, they are not intrinsic to the cognitive agent. At the same time, contents may be still accessible to the cognitive system, as it logically supervenes on its interaction; there is no observer-‐dependence in error-‐detectability. If this

argument is correct, depending on the spatiotemporal scale of cognitive interactions, there may be contents that can be only partially accessed by an individual agent but still subject to (partial and fallible) evaluation by a whole interacting community of agents. Melvin Woody [email protected]

“Freedom and Trauma” -‐ Abstract

Recent events have forced the U.S. to contend with traumatic injury – physical, psychic and social. That tragic calamity is most vividly realized in the torrent of traumatized veterans that overwhelms both military and VA medical facilities. Confrontation with trauma challenges philosophers and politicians to acknowledge the limits of freedom. Yet to be free is to be vulnerable to the threat of trauma, since freedom cannot exist without a supporting and confining world, the source of obstacles, opportunities -‐-‐ and assaults. In order to inhabit such a world and realize its choices in action freedom must be embodied and its body must not only be capable of action, but must also be receptive to determination by the world. Freedom is therefore inherently mortal and always at risk of paralysis or defeat. I will explore the relations between trauma and freedom by focusing on the pathology of post-‐traumatic stress disorder and comparing the paralysis characteristic of post-‐traumatic stress disorder with physical trauma and paralysis. While still capable of acting upon the world, victims of post-‐traumatic stress disorder are captivated by past events that they cannot assimilate, forget or consign to normal memory. In the midst of the helplessness of a traumatic event, the self preserves itself by dissociating from the self that is determined by the world and, often, from its own body. But the saving strategy leaves the post-‐traumatic self alienated and still helplessly ensnared by a past that it cannot leave behind because it has become embodied in the body that it disowned in order to survive. Georgi Stojanov [email protected] Representation Revisited (Again): 15 years of ISI At the beginning of the new millennium, 15 years ago when we started the ISI meetings, it was an exciting time to work in the field of cognitive sciences (from robotics, via philosophy of mind, to psychology and other related fields). Alternatives to the so called “symbolic” and “connectionist” models started to gain in popularity, trying to suggest new potential answers to the old questions. Here are some of those: “embodied and embedded cognition”, “extended mind/ distributed cognition”, “anticipation based representation” “epigenetic robotics”. Of course, this is not to say that the ideas were not there before but to underline that they were

never in the “mainstream research”. We felt that many of these “new wave” approaches shared one thing or another with Bickhard’s interactivism, and initiating ISI was our attempt to bring these people together and articulate a firm theoretical framework. Fast forward to today’s scene. At least within the context of cognitive robotics, we can definitely say that the classical (the Shakey – no pun intended) approach is all but dead. Todays’ cognitive roboticists are likely to be familiar at least with some developmental psychology, will be working with physical robots in non-‐specifically crafted “mini worlds”, and on real-‐life problems (from urban rescue to assistive robotics). Current vocabulary includes: SLAMs, probability, uncertainty, Markov models, Kalman filters, clustering, big data, to mention but a few. In my presentation, I will try to paint a broad picture of the evolution of the notion of representation (of knowledge, of environment) and the variety of its implementation in the period of these past 15 years. Ioannis Xenakis [email protected] Argyris Arnellos [email protected]

Feelings and the construction of perceptual content Ioannis Xenakis1 & Argyris Arnellos2 1Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece 2The KLI Institute, Klosterneuburg, Austria e-‐mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract A cognitive agent should exhibit the capacity to differentiate between situations in the environment in order to be able to orientate itself towards those interactions that will better satisfy its norms. In this way, agents actively construct a relation between them and their world. This relation is not pre-‐given but emergent and evoked during interaction, and it thus constitutes, even in its primitive forms interactive potentialities, where the agent actively constructs a body-‐mind-‐environment relation, according to which it perceives the surroundings as appropriate conditions for future interactions. We understand the perceptual content as emergent, and with a normativity that derives from biological normative functions. Perception has a twofold normative function; namely to signal the agent for both internal and external modifications

that will be useful for action-‐selection. Considering perception as a preparatory-‐anticipatory process, agents are in place not only to functionally detect the related inputs but also to actively evaluate them with respect to the consequences they have for their norms. In other words, the content of perception emerges when the agent detects and evaluates the indications of possible interactions, namely, the actions being available to the agent at the exact time of interaction (Bickhard, 2011). While the content of perception must be understood in terms of truth conditions, it should not always imply a successful contribution to the world since the evaluated appropriateness of a possible interaction may also be prone to dysfunction or failure, thereby increasing the uncertainty in perception. Therefore, agents develop ways to handle and reduce this uncertainty. Learning and inference are two important processes, which result in the reduction of uncertainty. Through learning agents could develop ways to evaluate indications of possible interactions, to anticipate the result of their perceptual outcomes, to prepare themselves, and to possibly learn to modify their actions when things just do not go well (Bickhard & Richie, 1983; Christensen & Hooker, 2000). However, agents do not always perceive situations with which they are familiar. In those interactive cases, cognitive agents can also develop ways (functions) to perceive their environments and reduce their interactive uncertainty. Our claim here is that feelings do not only play an important role in the reduction of interactive uncertainty (Bickhard, 2000) but they also have an active role in the construction of the perceptual content facilitating the emergence of interactive potentialities. It is known that feelings play a major role in action-‐selection: an active contribution to the preparation for action. This type of emotional preparation may promote actions related to fundamental physiological functioning, for instance, by triggering the elicitation of autonomic (e.g., a change in heart rate) and endocrine responses (e.g., the release of adrenaline), to higher levels of cognitive actions such as playing music, writing books, painting, appreciating and classifying art, etc. (Rolls, 2011; Xenakis & Arnellos, 2014; 2015). Contemporary bibliography in cognitive psychology and the science science of emotions suggests that feelings function by providing significance to the current situation. The main argument is that emotional episodes are constructed during the meaning making process playing thus a central role (Wilson-‐Mendenhall, Barrett, Simmons, & Barsalou, 2011). It is now accepted that there is no ontological distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ cognitions. All thoughts or actions are more or less infused by feelings. “Thinking” is not a fundamentally different sort of psychological activity than “feeling” when the agent is about to construct the active state that determines what the environment means to it. How the agent perceives an object and how it feels about it should be considered as facets of the same concrete experience (Duncan & Barrett, 2007). In this way, it sounds invalid to speak strictly for affective and non-‐affective perceptions. As Duncan and Barrett argue “the fact that thoughts and feelings are experienced as different is important, and needs to be explained, but is not, in and of itself, evidence that they are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena” (p.1203). Emotional evaluations detect for opportunities and threats, the existence or not of a possible interaction, and influence the agent with feelings of how a possible act may

result. The normative function of these feelings is the elicitation of signals (interactive values) that derive from the prospects for norm satisfaction or failure (Rolls 2011). In other words, feelings are outcome of processes through which the agent evaluates modifications that take place internal or/and external to its organization with respect to its norms. Such emotional signals produce anticipatory values, whose intensity is a crucial aspect that influences the potential motivation to satisfy those norms. The normativity of feelings is inherited to the perceptual content. Considering that perception blends ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ processes, the content of perception does not involve strictly identified indications that concern “invariants, constancies, sensorimotor contingencies, etc.” as characteristics of the object in consideration and an answer to how objects are or look. Rather, a normative perceptual content entails that the object comes always to experience as an interactive opportunity having a value, and thus having always the possibility to be dysfunctional. The above view is in contrast to classic conceptions of emotional theory that want feelings to be outcomes of conceptual thoughts that are added to experience as evaluative judgments or combinations of beliefs and desires. Our argument is that feelings are elicited in perception as the agent constructs the range of interactive potentialities by assigning to each of them values that influence the agent’s anticipatory system in predicting a potential effect that each possible action might have according to its norms. Since emotional values emerge mostly on uncertain conditions, where the agent’s competence in such interactive challenges is minimal, feelings provide an important function to perception by aiding the agent to resolve its interactive uncertainty. Feelings influence the content of perception with interactive (anticipatory) values that prepare the agent to decide between possible actions through the development of strategies for the reduction of its uncertainties and the control of its experience. This makes feelings a crucial aspect of perception through which the agent assigns values to indications of possible interactions and may differentiate situations in the environment during action-‐selection. In sum, cognitive agents do not emotionally evaluate situations after they first know what they look like, but they feel the significance of the situations, as they perceive them.

References Bickhard, M. H. (2000). Motivation and Emotion: An Interactive Process Model. In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton (Eds.), The Caldron of Consciousness: Motivation, Affect and Self-‐organization (pp. 161–178). Philadelphia, USA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bickhard, M. H. (2011). The Dynamics of Acting. Humana Mente, (15), 177–187. Bickhard, M. H., & Richie, D. M. (1983). On the Nature of Representation: A Case Study of James Gibson’s Theory of Perception. Praeger Pub.

Christensen, W. D., & Hooker, C. A. (2000). An interactivist-‐constructivist approach to intelligence: Self-‐directed anticipative learning. Philosophical Psychology, 13(1), 5–45. Duncan, S., & Barrett, L. F. (2007). Affect is a form of cognition: A neurobiological analysis. Cognition & Emotion, 21(6), 1184–1211. Rolls, E. T. (2011). The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics. In E. Schellekens & P. Goldie (Eds.), The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology (pp. 116–165). Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press. Wilson-‐Mendenhall, C. D., Barrett, L. F., Simmons, W. K., & Barsalou, L. W. (2011). Grounding emotion in situated conceptualization. Neuropsychologia, 49(5), 1105–1127. Xenakis, I., & Arnellos, A. (2014). Aesthetic perception and its minimal content: a

naturalistic perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1038). Xenakis, I., & Arnellos, A. (2015). Aesthetics as an Emotional Activity That Facilitates

Sense-Making: Towards an Enactive Approach to Aesthetic Experience. In A. Scarinzi (Ed.), Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy (pp. 245–259). Springer Netherlands. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-9379-7_15

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