Learning to Act

Contains fulltext : 162748.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)In this paper I argue that to understand minded agency - the capacity we typically find instantiated in instances of human behaviour that could sensibly be questioned by asking "What did you do?" - one needs to understand childhood, i.e. the trajectory of learning to act. I discuss two different types of trajectory, both of which seem to take place during childhood and both of which might be considered crucial to learning to act: a growth of bodily control (GBC) and a growth in taking responsibility (GTR). The discussion of GTR takes up about half of the entire paper. In the final two sections I argue that GTR is the most promising trajectory in terms of which to understand a child’s process of learning to act.25 p

Jezelf blijven

Contains fulltext : 19398.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)24 p

The antinomy of thought : Maimonian skepticism and the relation between thoughts and objects

Contains fulltext : 105782.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Revision of doctoral thesis, University of UtrechtXIII, 197 p

Studying Brains. What could neurometaphysics be to NeurotechEU?

NeurotechEU has introduced a new conceptual hierarchy for neuroscientific research and its applications along 8 different core research areas, including the so-called ‘neurometaphysics’. This paper explores this concept of neurometaphysics, its topics and its potential approach. It warns against an endemic Cartesianism in (neuro)science that somehow seems to survive explicit refutations by implicitly persisting in our conceptual scheme. Two consequences of this persisting Cartesian legacy are discussed; the isolated brain assumption and the idea that activity requires identifiable neural ‘decisions’. Neuropragmatism is introduced as offering the promise of progress in neurometaphysics, by emphasizing that (1) studying brains interact organically with their environment and (2) studying brains requires an attitude of continuous learning

Self-Management as Socially Embedded Endeavor

When we first anticipated the research project concluded with this special issue, about eight years ago, it seemed timely and appropriate to investigate the opportunities and the challenges of self-management in mental health care. At the time self-management was well on the rise in general health care, offering both empowerment to patients and efficiency and cost-effectiveness to the health care system. It seemed a most promising approach in an era that celebrates individualistic self-reliance. And we were sure about our insight that self-management in mental health care would deserve comprehensive investigation because ‘the self’ that was supposed to do the management would itself be the core problem in psychiatric and psychosomatic conditions. Now that the project is over and done with some changes seemed to have happened in the general appreciation of individualism and of the dominant kind of management. As we are writing this during the COVID-19 crisis – locked up at home obeying the instruction to keep physical distance – these changes seem to accelerate. We cannot do it alone. And we shouldn’t think of self-regulation in terms of decisive control. Solidarity and entrustment markedly strike home. It may be that we have picked up the Zeitgeist in our research or have played a role ourselves in bringing about these changes. Either way, the results discussed in this issue certainly resonate with a transformation that might be in progress. In this concluding paper we want to highlight two novel features of our understanding of self-management as it turned out to find articulation in our investigations. One feature concerns a shift in our understanding of management, a shift away from decisive control towards an embedded facilitation. We can follow this shift along three lines of analysis, which concern different scaffolding resources: environmental cues, language and caregivers. The other feature concerns the acknowledgement of a potentially persistent ambiguity of the self as an element of self-management. The preceding papers display the conceptualization of this ambiguity along five different dimensions of ‘the self’: responsible agency, experiential subjectivity, personal integrity, narrative authority and existential concern

Player Chemistry: Striving for a Perfectly Balanced Soccer Team

status: Published onlin

Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to Perform Under Mental Pressure

While most existing soccer performance metrics focus on players’ technical and physical performances, they typically ignore the mental pressure under which these performances were delivered. Yet, mental pressure is a recurrent concept in the analysis of players’ or teams’ performances. Hence, this paper takes a first step towards objectively understanding how high-mental pressure situations affect the performances and behavior of soccer players. We introduce an approach that compares soccer players’ performances across different levels of mental pressure. For each game situation, our approach uses a machine learned model to estimate how much mental pressure the player possessing the ball experiences using a combination of match context features and the current game state. Similarly, our approach uses machine learned models to evaluate three aspects of each action performed by the player: the choice of action, the execution of the chosen action, and the action’s expected contribution to the scoreline. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to provide actionable insights for soccer clubs in four relevant use cases: player acquisition, training, tactical decisions, and lineups and substitutions. For example, we identify Houssem Aouar and Xherdan Shaqiri as suitable replacements for Leicester City’s former star Riyad Mahrez. We also identify a large number of needless fouls under pressure as a fixable weakness of Orlando City’s striker Dom Dwyer. Since soccer players are often confronted with high-pressure situations, our metric provides insights in the link between pressure and performance that can provide soccer clubs a competitive advantage.status: Published onlin