Kant’s conception of self as subject and its embodiment

August 31, 2010

Check out my chum, philosopher extraordinaire, and occasional co-author, Chris Onof’s new piece for the Kant Yearbook.


Shapiro’s Embodied Cognition

August 11, 2010

Larry Shapiro’s book Embodied Cognition has just been published. Anything by Larry is well worth a read. This book comes with dust jacket recommendations from no less than heavy hitters such as Fred Adams, Arthur Glenberg, Rob Wilson, Elliott Sober and Ken Aizawa. If you haven’t already done so, check out his excellent The Mind Incarnate.


Journal of Mind and Behavior 31: 1&2

August 11, 2010

The latest issue of JMB is now available. The pieces that will particularly interest my constituency are:

(1) The Boundaries Still Stand: A Reply to Fisher  by Kenneth Aizawa, and

(2) A Critical Notice of  Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony Chemero, reviewed by Rick Dale.


Cognitive Science Research: Extended Mind Themed Issue

July 13, 2010

Here is my introduction to the themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research. The full collection is now available here.



Extended Mind (Yet Again)

July 10, 2010

The articles comprising the themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research are now available from the publisher’s Articles in Press page.

Note from Elsevier:

The section “Articles in Press” contains peer reviewed accepted articles to be published in this journal. When the final article is assigned to an issue of the journal, the “Article in Press” version will be removed from this section and will appear in the associated published journal issue. The date it was first made available online will be carried over. Please be aware that although “Articles in Press” do not have all bibliographic details available yet, they can already be cited using the year of online availability and the DOI as follows: Author(s), Article Title, Journal (Year), DOI.

Please consult the journal’s reference style for the exact appearance of these elements, abbreviation of journal names and the use of punctuation.

There are three types of “Articles in Press”:

Accepted manuscripts: these are articles that have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by the Editorial Board. The articles have not yet been copy edited and/or formatted in the journal house style.

Uncorrected proofs: these are copy edited and formatted articles that are not yet finalized and that will be corrected by the authors. Therefore the text could change before final publication.

Corrected proofs: these are articles containing the authors’ corrections and may, or may not yet have specific issue and page numbers assigned.


John Haugeland

June 26, 2010

As most will already know, John Haugeland passed away this week.


The New Science of the Mind

May 15, 2010

Here’s a soon to be released book written by Mark Rowlands one of the major extended mind/situated cognition players. Let’s hope the proofing is significantly better than what has been coming out of MIT Press of late. This book will be reviewed by Michael Madary in The Journal of Mind and Behavior.


Embodiment, Stigmergy, and Swarm Intelligence

May 7, 2010

Here is a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded from the book’s dedicated webpage. This offer will cease on publication of the book – which will be VERY soon. There is also a nicely produced 15 minute mini-documentary on the publisher’s site featuring Dawson and Depuis (click the video tab).


Another Review of “Supersizing”

May 6, 2010

Here’s another review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (Do also check out Rob Rupert’s critical notice here). It helps that Mirko, the blog author, has as his advisors, Andy Clark and Julian Kiverstein. Mirko is also working as co-translator of Supersizing into Italian. Great stuff – this guy is going places.


Guidance, Selection, and Representation/Affordances and Intentionality

April 18, 2010

Here is a two-fer from The Journal of Mind and Behavior:

1. Guidance, Selection, and Representation: Response to Anderson and Rosenberg

Tom Roberts

2. Affordances and Intentionality: Reply to Roberts

Michael L. Anderson and Anthony Chemero

Abstracts

Roberts:

Anderson and Rosenberg’s (2008) guidance theory of representation offers an analysis of mental content that strongly emphasises the influence that intentional states have upon the production and modulation of bodily behavior. On this view, a mental state gains both its status as a representation, and its content, in virtue of occupying a particular role in the guidance of action. I present three related challenges for the guidance theory, before defending an alternative model that is grounded not in action-guidance, but in action-selection. Firstly, I argue that the guidance theory fails to explain an important category of perceptual misrepresentation. Secondly, I propose that the content ascriptions predicted by the theory are not sufficiently determinate. Thirdly, I propose that the contents implicated by the guidance view do not match those that are naturally ascribed in the explanation of intentionally-directed behavior. The modified account that I develop responds to these concerns, and suggests that representational states depict affordance properties: the opportunities and obstacles that the subject’s environment offers for the pursuit of goals and plans.

Anderson and Anthony Chemero:

In this essay we respond to some criticisms of the guidance theory of representation offered by Tom Roberts. We argue that although Roberts’ criticisms miss their mark, he raises the important issue of the relationship between affordances and the action oriented representations proposed by the guidance theory. Affordances play a prominent role in the anti-representationalist accounts offered by theorists of embodied cognition and ecological psychology, and the guidance theory is motivated in part by a desire to respond to the critiques of representationalism offered in such accounts, without giving up entirely on the idea that representations are an important part of the cognitive economy of many animals. Thus, explorations of whether and how such accounts can in fact be related and reconciled potentially offer to shed some light on this ongoing controversy. Although the current essay hardly settles the larger debate, it does suggest that there may be more possibility for agreement than is often supposed.

P.S. Stay tuned for a critical notice of Tony Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science to be reviewed in JMB by Rick Dale.