Wittgenstein\u27s poker: the story of a ten-minute argument between two great philosophers

Did Wittgenstein violently threaten Karl Popper with a poker on the cold evening of 25 October 1946 at a meeting of Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge? Responding to this question is the wonderful pretext that the authors use to introduce the rich world and characters of mid-twenteith century philosophy. They grab their readers\u27 imaginations by latching onto this concrete, legendary, event - the alleged aggressive weilding of a poker - at what many would have imagined to be an utterly civilised, if not downright dull, philosophical meeting. Through this investigation, they bring to life not only the characters in this drama, both principal and supporting, but they also put flesh on the bones of the historical contexts from which some great philosophical ideas have emerged

Review: The Character of Consciousness

Chalmers is a very big name in the philosophy of consciousness and this is a very big book about consciousness. Weighing in at over six hundred pages and comprised of fourteen, already published papers (two of which are co-authored), it collects together Chalmers’ greatest hits on consciousness in one handy tome. It is comprised of some highly technical and intricate philosophical papers juxtaposed with a couple of more accessible writings that have influenced disciplines outside of philosophy. For anyone wishing to familiarize themselves with the nuances and fine details of Chalmers’ approach (or who lacks the full set of his papers already) the book offers excellent value for money. It provides a window on what motivates his approach and, crucially, where his thinking is leading him now

A reconciliation for the future of psychiatry: Both folk psychology and cognitive science

Philosophy of psychiatry faces a tough choice between two competing ways of understanding mental disorders. The folk psychology (FP) view puts our everyday normative conceptual scheme in the driver\u27s seat - on the assumption that it, and it only, tells us what mental disorders are (1). Opposing this, the scientific image (SI) view (2, 3) holds that our understanding of mental disorders must come, wholly and solely, from the sciences of the mind, unfettered by FP. This paper argues that the FP view is problematic because it is too limited: There is more to the mind than FP allows; hence, we must look beyond FP for properly deep and illuminating explanations of mental disorders. SI promises just this. But when cast in its standard cognitivist formulations, SI is unnecessarily and unjustifiably neurocentric. After rejecting both the FP view, in its pure form, and SI view, in its popular cognitivist renderings, this paper concludes that a more liberal version of SI can accommodate what is best in both views - once SI is so formulated and the FP view properly edited and significantly revised, the two views can be reconciled and combined to provide a sound philosophical basis for a future psychiatry

Culture in Mind - An Enactivist Account: Not Cognitive Penetration But Cultural Permeation

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted

The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation in Its Place

The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains cognition. Our analysis reveals that there is no compelling evidence or argument for thinking that brains compute. It makes the case for inverting the explanatory order proposed by the computational basis of cognition thesis. We give reasons to reverse the polarity of standard thinking on this topic, and ask how it is possible that computation, natural and artificial, might be based on cognition and not the other way around

The roots of remembering: Radically enactive recollecting

This chapter proposes a radically enactive account of remembering that casts it as creative, dynamic, and wide-reaching. It paints a picture of remembering that no longer conceives of it as involving passive recollections – always occurring wholly and solely inside heads. Integrating empirical findings from various sources, the chapter puts pressure on familiar cognitivist visions of remembering. Pivotally, it is argued, that we achieve a stronger and more elegant account of remembering by abandoning the widely held assumption that it is rooted in the retrieval of stored information or content in order to represent past events. We demonstrate how a radically enactive account of the roots of remembering can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature while, at same time, accommodating experientially rich forms of episodic memory

Narrative practices in medicine and therapy: Philosophical reflections

This article examines two important movements-narrative medicine and narrative therapy-that aim to put narrative practices at the heart of medicine and therapeutic practices. It exposes the core assumptions of these movements and identifies ways in which attention to those assumptions can benefit from philosophical clarification and further investigation. Overall, our analysis defends the view that being a competent narrator matters for understanding and building trust with others, and that it also matters for shaping ourselves because the narratives we weave can help us to see live options and improve our chances of flourishing and living well

Similarity-based cognition: radical enactivism meets cognitive neuroscience

2019, Springer Nature B.V. Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items-e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on-in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations (even if contentless) in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radical enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of neurodynamics

Minds in skilled performance: From phenomenology to cognitive explanations

Performing successfully, in any domain, depends on being in the right state of mind. An experienced athlete might fail to make a well-practiced move distracted by a fellow athlete\u27s unsolicited advice given to her in the last minute before the game. An expert driver may fumble at making a simple manoeuvre, distracted by the pain developing in his lower back after hours of driving. A student can fail at a math test despite his devoted preparation, his nerves getting the better of him on the test day. Such occurrences are all too familiar. But what exactly goes wrong in all these cases? Characterizing the right state of mind needed for skilled performance poses a vexing theoretical challenge

Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognitive” and is bereft of other adequate means for individuating cognitive activity. It also argues that giving proper attention to the way the folk use their psychological concepts requires questioning the legitimacy of commonsense functionalism. In place of extended functionalism—empirical or commonsensical—we promote the fortunes of extensive enactivism, clarifying in which ways it is distinct from notions of extended mind and distributed cognition