The role of experts in the Covid-19 pandemic and the limits of their epistemic authority in democracy

Copyright © 2020 Lavazza and Farina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution License (CC BY). It was originally published in Frontiers in Public Health, 14 July 2020 | Volume 8 | Article 356 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00356) and is published here with permission

Slaying the chimera: a complementarity approach to the extended mind thesis

Much of the literature directed at the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT) has revolved around parity issues, focussing on the problem of how to individuate the functional roles and on the relevance of these roles for the production of human intelligent behaviour. Proponents of EMT have famously claimed that we shouldn’t take the location of a process as a reliable indicator of the mechanisms that support our cognitive behaviour. This functionalist understanding of cognition has however been challenged by opponents of EMT [such as Rupert (2009); Adams & Aizawa (2009)], who have claimed that differences between internal, biological processes and putatively extended ones not only exist but are actually crucial to undermine the idea that inner and outer are functionally equivalent. This debate about how to individuate the functional roles has led to a treacherous stand-off, in which proponents of EMT have been trapped under the persistent accusation of causal/constitution conflation. My strategy for responding to this charge is to look precisely at those functional differences highlighted by critics of EMT. I reckon that extended cognitive systems are endowed with quite different properties from systems that are “brain bound” and argue that it is precisely these differences that allow human minds to transcend their biological limitations. I thus defend a complementarity version of the extended mind, according to which externally located resources and internal biological elements make a different but complementary contribution to bringing about intelligent behaviour [Sutton (2010)]. My defence of complementarity is based on both the phylogeny and the ontogeny of cognitive systems. I initially explore the interrelation between brain and cognitive development from a neuroconstructivist perspective [Quartz & Sejnowski (1997); Mareshal et al. (2007)] and then argue that our brains do not have fixed functional architectures but are sculpted and given form by the activities we repeatedly engage in. As a result of repeated engagements in socio-cultural tasks, relevant brain pathways undergo substantial rewiring. Development thus scaffolds our brains, which become geared into working in symbiotic partnership with external resources. [Kiverstein & Farina (2011)]. On these grounds, I call into question any tendency to interpret the human biological nature as fixed and endogenously pre-determined and side with proponents of DST [Oyama (2000); Griffiths & Gray (2001)] and ontogenetic niche construction [Stotz (2010)] in arguing that we should think of natural selection as operating on whole developmental systems composed of living organisms in culturally enriched niches. [Wheeler & Clark(2008)]. Complementarity defences of EMT argue that many of the kinds of cognition humans excel at can only be accomplished by brains working together with a body that directly manipulates and acts on the world [Rowlands (2010); Menary (2007)]. I take Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs henceforth) as my empirical case study. SSDs exploit the remarkable plasticity of our brains and with training supply a novel perceptual modality that compensates for loss or impaired sensory channel. I argue that the coupling with these devices triggers a new mode of phenomenal access to the world, something I propose to label as a kind of “artificial synaesthesia [Ward & Meijer (2010)].This new mode of access to the world transforms our cognitive skills and gives rise to augmented processes of deep bio-technological symbiosis. SSDs therefore become mind enhancing tools [Clark (2003)] and a perfect case study for Complementarity. Having shown the relevance of SSDs for EMT, I then take up the possibility that these devices don’t just relocate the boundaries of cognition but may also stretch the bounds of perceptual awareness. I explore the possibility that perceivers using SSDs count as extended cognitive systems and therefore argue that the experiences they enjoy should be counted as extended conscious experiences.[Kiverstein & Farina, (forthcoming)]. SSDs are quite often said to involve some form of incorporation.[Clark (2008)]. Rupert has challenged this idea and its relevance for EMT on the grounds of his embedded approach. Particularly, he has explained tool-use in terms of the causal interaction between the subject and its detached tool. In the final chapter of my dissertation I critically look at his objections and argue that all his arguments fail to apply to SSDs. In SSD perception in fact the tool becomes geared to work in symbiotic partnership with the active subject and then get factored into its’ body schema so that both of them come to form a single system of cognitive analysis

Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems

Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems is a state-of-the-art collection whose main goal is to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationship between action and perception. A second goal of the volume is to investigate how perception and action interact specifically in the production of phenomenal awareness. In presenting and contrasting the major perspectives on the field, this volume marks a good sign of the progress being made on the nature of phenomenally conscious visual experience. By combining theoretical and empirical approaches it also contributes to the debate in key domains of the cognitive sciences .The book contains a useful editorial introduction written by the Editors and six sections further divided into fifteen chapters. In the first part of this review I briefly summarize the content of each section. Having offered an outline of the volume, I then turn my attention to the main theme of the collection, which is the dichotomy between action-oriented theories of perception and the two visual systems hypothesis and look at the dialectic underlying this debat

Neither touch nor vision: sensory substitution as artificial synaesthesia?

Block (Trends Cogn Sci 7:285–286, 2003) and Prinz (PSYCHE 12:1–19, 2006) have defended the idea that SSD perception remains in the substituting modality (auditory or tactile). Hurley and Noë (Biol Philos 18:131–168, 2003) instead argued that after substantial training with the device, the perceptual experience that the SSD user enjoys undergoes a change, switching from tactile/auditory to visual. This debate has unfolded in something like a stalemate where, I will argue, it has become difficult to determine whether the perception acquired through the coupling with an SSD remains in the substituting or the substituted modality. Within this puzzling deadlock two new approaches have been recently suggested. Ward and Meijer (Conscious Cogn 19:492–500, 2010) describe SSD perception as visual-like but characterize it as a kind of artificially induced synaesthesia. Auvray et al. (Perception 36:416–430, 2007) and Auvray and Myin (Cogn Sci 33:1036–1058, 2009) suggest that SSDs let their users experience a new kind of perception. Deroy and Auvray (forthcoming) refine this position, and argue that this new kind of perception depends on pre-existing senses without entirely aligning with any of them. So, they have talked about perceptual experience in SSDs as going "beyond vision". In a similar vein, MacPherson (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011a) claims that “if the subjects (SSD users) have experiences with both vision-like and touch-like representational characteristics then perhaps they have a sense that ordinary humans do not” (MacPherson in Oxford University Press, New York, 2011a, p. 139

Beyond the Brain - How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds

Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds is an eye-opening and thought- provoking book that sets out a much-needed contribution to the study of the relationship between animals, cognition and the environment. The volume provides remarkable new insights into how to understand animal (including human) behavior, raises interesting questions about the role of environmental affordances in the emergence of complex cognitive processes and provides the reader with a refreshing break from the wearisome excess of brain-centric literature that still pervades much of the debate surrounding evolutionary psychology. In embracing the theoretical framework endorsed by proponents of embodied cognition, Barrett adopts an ecological approach to psychology that aims at challenging any attempt to describe complex thinking and flexible behavior as mere by-products of internal cognitive activity

Embraining Culture: Leaky Minds and Spongy Brains

We offer an argument for the extended mind based on considerations from brain development. We argue that our brains develop to function in partnership with cognitive resources located in our external environments. Through our cultural upbringing we are trained to use artefacts in problem solving that become factored into the cognitive routines our brains support. Our brains literally grow to work in close partnership with resources we regularly and reliably interact with. We take this argument to be in line with complementarity or “second-wave” defences of the extended mind that stress the functional differences between biological elements and external, environmental resources in putative cases of extended cognition. Complementarity defences argue that many of the kinds of cognition humans excel at can only be accomplished by brains working together with a body that directly manipulates and acts on the world [Rowlands (1999); Menary (2007); Sutton (2010)]. We argue that complementarity and functionalist defences of the extended mind aren’t opposed, but that complementarity considerations can provide much needed and hitherto under exploited leverage in defending EMT. Moreover, the developmental work we will describe adds extra weight to the complementarity case for EMT

Learning from West African storytellers

Several research works propose non-textual alternatives to textual documentation and similar forms of representing information in software development. This is because of the problems that stem from writing these documents, which range from incomprehensible requirements to ambiguous user stories. The various proposals of researchers often contain some trace of oral or visual communication. In this paper, we study the implications of eliminating textual communication and substituting unnecessary writing by extracting the values of West African oral storytellers. Traditional West African communities did not make use of writing for thousands of years and yet their legends, customs, beliefs, and knowledge were effectively transmitted across several generations. How did they manage to accomplish this? What can we learn from their storytellers? How can these lessons be applied to software products? These are all questions that this paper attempts to answer. Perhaps if we fully understand how they operated, then we can target our written communication to the activities where it is needed instead of spreading writing across plenty of tasks as it is currently. To achieve this, we performed an analysis of the two domains: West African oral storytelling and software development and found similarities, then selected some key elements from oral storytelling and explained how they can have relevance in software development. The theme directly encompasses diversity and inclusion by bringing into software engineering a perspective of a region where its literacy research is scarcely being explored. The study found that traditional oral storytelling can provide insights into effective communication and audience engagement, and identified four ways in which software development can be compared to oral storytelling. The study also found that certain elements of storytelling, such as audience relationship, story structure, parables and proverbs, and community relaxation and support, can be applied to writing tasks in software development