Witold Wachowski

In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to (1) relational properties of objects, that is affordances; (2) structured nature of the world of human communities; and (3) the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity.

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives toward building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. Wide perspectives are essentially research heuristics for building mechanistic explanations. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We argue that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals toward the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.

http://logika.uwb.edu.pl/studies/index.php?page=search&vol=54
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Table of contents:

Witold Wachowski, Witold M. Hensel: Thinking with Hands, Eyes, and Things. Introduction

Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, Anthony Chemero: Against Smallism and Localism

Chris Baber: Thinking Through Tools: What Can Tool-Use Tell Us About Distributed Cognition?

Lisa G. Guthrie, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau: Interactivity and Mental Arithmetic: Coupling Mind and World Transforms and Enhances Performance

Erik Myin, Daniel D. Hutto: REC: Just Radical Enough

Marcin Miłkowski: The Hard Problem of Content: Solved (Long Ago)

Tomasz Korbak: Scaffolded Minds and the Evolution of Content in Signaling Pathways
 
Knud Thomsen: The Ouroboros Model Embraces its Sensory-Motoric Foundations and Learns to Talk
 
Katarzyna Stadnik: Language as a Memory Carrier of Perceptually-Based Knowledge: Selected Aspects of Imagery in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and "Troilus and Criseyde"

Zsuzsanna Kondor: Theoretical Controversies—Terminological Biases: Consciousness Revisited
 
Marek Pokropski: Affectivity and Time: Towards a Phenomenology of Embodied Time-Consciousness

The presentation of the basic principles of Wittgenstein’s methodology of
language research has two objectives. First, his discussion of language and meaning only becomes intelligible in a broader perspective of the assumptions adopted concerning research methodology. Second, the assumption of some propositions in contemporary theories on the categories of use or the notion of rule that involves accepting or rejecting some more general claims on language. On account of the vastness of the material, ambiguity in Wittgenstein’s thought but also the complexity of the issues, means not all the principles of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy will be investigated. Only the contexts (of grammar, use and practice) that are vital from the perspective of philosophical dissertations on language will be presented in three steps.

Understanding Social Cognition

Within the social sciences, it is widely accepted that groups of people exhibit social properties and dynamics that emerge from, but cannot be reductively identified with the actions and properties of individual members. However, psychology and cognitive science have only reluctantly embraced the idea that something similar might happen in the domain of mind and cognition. Contemporary research on the distinctively social aspects of human cognition, which has exploded over the past two decades, tends to fall somewhere along the following continuum. On the “conservative” side, the minds of individuals are currently being reconceived as socially situated, culturally scaffolded, and deeply transformed by our life-long immersion and participation in group contexts. According to more “liberal” multi-level approaches, the informational integration of functionally interdependent and socially distributed individual cognitive processes can give rise to emergent group-level cognitive phenomena. We invite participants to explore the full spectrum of social cognition, running the gamut from elementary social-cognitive skills that allow people to think and act together, through embodied behavioral coupling and joint intentionality, mechanisms of mindreading and mutual understanding, all the way to group cognition.

Web: http://avant.edu.pl/trends3/

Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):
- Socially situated and scaffolded individual cognition
- Social cognition from an evolutionary, cultural-historical, and ontogenetic perspective
- Psychological underpinnings of social interaction (joint, multi-agent, collective)
- Collective intentionality and social ontology
- Technologically vs. socially extended cognition
- Distributed cognition and group minds
- Current debates on mindreading, empathy, social affordances, and the cognitive bases for intersubjectivity

Key speakers and Guests of special symposia
- Daniel Dennett (Tufts University, USA)
- Morana Alač (University of California San Diego, USA)
- Stephen Cowley (University of Southern Denmark)
- Arkadiusz Gut (Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)
- Robert Rupert (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
- Judith Simon (University of Hamburg, Germany)
- Deborah Tollefsen (University of Memphis, USA)
- Robert Wilson (University of Alberta, Canada)

Deadlines
- Abstracts submission: July 31
- Notification of acceptance: August 30
- Registration fee: September 30

http://avant.edu.pl/trends3/

In this paper, we argue that several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives toward building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. Wide perspectives are essentially research heuristics for building mechanistic explanations. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the study of " mindreading " and debates on emotions. We argue that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals toward the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences.