Archive | social cognition RSS feed for this archive

Animal Mindreading

9780262016056-f30

Kristin Andrews and Robert Lurz discuss animals and mindreading.

Leave a Comment

Rationalism in Politics

41wmptChOHL._SL500_AA300_

In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP.

The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as a “conservative political theorist,” although he rejected ideology and his conservatism was primarily temperamental. Furthermore, his work on politics was only a fraction of his output, which comprised idealist philosophy, aesthetics, religion, education, the philosophy of history, and even horse racing. His popularity reached its zenith in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing on the BBC and becoming the favorite philosopher at National Review. But he never seemed to seek popularity, and did little or nothing to boost his own when it subsequently faded. Today, despite the growing interest in Oakeshott since his death in 1990, even his best-recognized work, his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” is, I contend, not appreciated widely enough—thus, this article.

Lovers of liberty should keep Oakeshott’s work on rationalism in mind for at least two reasons. First, it offers a complementary but still significantly different critique of planning to those of Mises and Hayek. However, at the same time, it provides a warning to the advocates of freedom not to fall into the rationalist quagmire themselves. The relevance of the latter point is demonstrated by, for example, the tendency of many development economists, even those who are “market oriented,” to attempt to impose their theoretical schemes for taking a shortcut to westernization on some Third World country, while running roughshod over all the traditions, customs, and morals native to the place, which, whatever their short-comings, at least managed to sustain the society in question over previous centuries. Freedom cannot be “imposed” on a people according to some preconceived scheme. We all need to watch out for “the rationalist within.”

Leave a Comment

Collective Intelligence 2012

Unknown

Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.”

Leave a Comment

Shaun Gallagher: Enactively extended intentionality

images

Shaun Gallagher talk:

I argue that the extended mind hypothesis requires an enactive, neo-pragmatic concept of intentionality if it is to develop proper responses to a variety of objections. This enactive concept of intentionality is based on the phenomenological concept of a bodily (or motor or operative) intentionality outlined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I explore the connections between this concept and recent embodied approaches to social cognition.

See also Evan Thompson on “Mind in life and life in mind” and Michael Wheeler on “Cognition at the crossroads: from embodied minds to thinking bodies

Leave a Comment

Hayek’s Self-organizing Mental Order and Folk-Psychological Theories of the Mind

large_chiara.chelini

Here is the Introduction to Chiara Chelini’s paper, the full version available here.

Humans are social creatures and they deeply rely on mentalizing, which aims at understanding other people behaviours and formulating expectations about their future actions. The existence of inner mental states has been postulated in order to give an explanatory account of the observed behaviors of other individuals. In particular, the activation of theory of mind in social situations has been demonstrated by neuroeconomic and behavioural experiments such as: processes of market exchange and specialisation of labour (Coricelli, Mc Cabe and Smith, 2000), decision-making involving strategic uncertainty, detection of social cheaters and, in general, cooperative games in which subjects need to predict their opponents’ strategies; these are all situations in which theory of mind is activated. Historically, two different models of mental processes have been considered in the literature about folk psychology: theory-theory and simulation-theory. Theory-theory posits that subjects who are attributing to others a particular mental state are applying a tacit piece of knowledge previously acquired “about what people feel, think, want, etc in given circumstances and how they will, therefore, act” (Perner, Gschaider, Kǖhberger and Schrofner, 1999). They basically own “folk theories” about others’ mental states and implicit causal laws about how the mind works. On the contrary, simulation theory posits that, in attributing mental states, subjects are not possessing tacitly codified knowledge, but they are rather running a simulation “putting themselves in others’ shoes”. Simulating means using one’s own mind as a model for other people’s mental states, while being unaware of this activity. Simulation directly bridges perception and action (Decety and Grèzes, 2006). Hayek had already envisioned this relationship between sensory and motor activity (Hayek, 1952, p. 92) but he dwells more on a neuronal level explanation than a mental one. Notwithstanding this historical opposition between theory and simulation, an approach that highlights their intermingling contributions and cross-fertilisations has nowadays been favoured (Goldman, 2006). This is the reason why, after introducing a brief sketch of these two positions, our paper focuses then on theory of mind broadly speaking as the capacity to share psychological states with others: this is the social cognitive capacity making humans collaborative and cooperative, able to be engaged in mutual coordinated actions and plans (Tomasello, 2005). Humans, as social actors, have to possess a cognitive machinery that makes them able to coordinate. This paper investigates whether theory of mind can provide a plausible explanation, at the mind level, of the tacitly triggered process of knowledge coordination elaborated by Hayek. More specifically, does Hayek’s concept of coordinating and self-organizing orders imply a model of the mind that can be framed as the current philosophical concept of theory of mind? In particular, we address the question whether theory of mind can give an account of that “inter-personal” understanding of other people’s mental states that Hayek sketches without developing it in details (Hayek, 1952, p. 23). The paper is then structured as follow: sections 2 frames the concept of mentalizing as it has been historically developed in theory-theory and simulation-theory; section 3 presents Hayek’s philosophical psychology, identifying specific issues in order to integrate the latter with modern theory of mind; it explains the roles of communication between individuals and the process of knowledge formation in Hayek’s view, trying to address the question why Hayek’s philosophical psychology does not properly consider the concept of “theory of mind”. Section 4 concludes with further ideas of comparison, presenting the concept of “social mind” from a neuroscientific perspective, considering the idea of mirror neurons.

Leave a Comment

Hegel and the extended mind

cda_displayimage

Anthony Crisafi and Shaun Gallagher in AI & Society (Volume 25, Number 1, 123-129):

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the ‘‘parity principle’’ (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.

Leave a Comment

Knowledge Has Always Been Networked

51MHfWHnRkL._SS500_

Here is a rather scathing review of David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used “medium is the message,” McLuhan’s major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems — such as the media — operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan’s primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, “McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan’s inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher — probably the greatest of the 20th century — the most important aspect of Heidegger’s thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

Leave a Comment

Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”

41dE+pv2OZL._SL500_AA300_

Here is a draft of my entry for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences.

Leave a Comment

E.O. Wilson

images

Here’s an article in this month’s Atlantic.

Rejecting the views of classic political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that primitive humankind started out as a collection of scattered, unorganized individuals, Fukuyama writes: “Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.” Nowhere is Wilson, who pioneered this view, even mentioned.

Wilson is of course famous for his work on stigmergy:

•  Sematectonic stigmergy.

•  Sign-, cue-, or marker-based stigmergy.

Sematectonic stigmergy denotes communication via modification of a physical  environment, an elementary example being the carving out of trails. One needs only to cast an eye around any public space, a park or a college quadrangle for instance, to see the grass being worn away, revealing a dirt pathway that is a well-traveled, unplanned and thus indicates an ‘‘unofficial’’ intimation of a shortcut to some salient destination.

Marker-based stigmergy denotes communication via a signaling mechanism. A standard example is the phenomenon of pheromones laid by social insects. Pheromone imbued trails increase the likelihood of other ants following the aforementioned trails. Unlike sematectonic stigmergy  which is a response to an environmental modification , marker-based stigmergy does not  make any direct contribution to a given task.

Wilson, E. O. (1975/2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leave a Comment

Trailing Hayek in Mind

sensory order

Here is the table of contents for my forthcoming (in press) edited volume focusing on The Sensory Order – this is the first salvo of shameless promotion.

CONTENTS

“SOCIALIZING” THE MIND AND “COGNITIVIZING” SOCIALITY

Leslie Marsh

“MARGINAL MEN”: WEIMER ON HAYEK

Walter Weimer

PART I: NEUROSCIENCE

HAYEK IN TODAY’S COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Joaquín Fuster

THE NON-CARTESIAN VIEW AND THE BRAIN

Erol Başar

PART II: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

HAYEK’S QUESTION: HOW CAN PARTS OF THE WORLD COME TO MODEL THE REST OF THE WORLD

Joshua Rust

HAYEK’S SPECULATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, THE NEUROSCIENCE OF VALUE ESTIMATION AND THE BASIS OF NORMATIVE INDIVIDUALISM

Don Ross

HAYEK, POPPER AND THE CAUSAL THEORY OF THE MIND

Edward Feser

PEIRCE AND HAYEK ON THE ABSTRACT NATURE OF COGNITION AND SENSATION

James Wible

HAYEK’S POST-POSITIVIST EMPIRICISM: EXPERIENCE BEYOND SENSATION

Jan Willem Lindemans

A NOTE ON THE INFLUENCE OF MACH’S PSYCHOLOGY IN HAYEK’S PSYCHOLOGY

Giandomenica Becchio

PART III: MIND AND SOCIALITY

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MIND: HAYEK’S ACCOUNT OF MENTAL PHENOMENA AS A PRODUCT OF SPONTANEOUS PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ORDERS

Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo

HAYEK’S SELF-ORGANIZING MENTAL ORDER AND FOLK-PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE MIND

Chiara Chelini

BEYOND COMPLEXITY: CAN THE SENSORY ORDER DEFEND THE LIBERAL SELF?

Chor-yung Cheung

COGNITIVE OPENING AND CLOSING: TOWARDS AN EXPLORATION OF THE MENTAL WORLD OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Thierry Aimar

GETTING TO THE HAYEKIAN NETWORK

 Troy Camplin

Leave a Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 87 other followers