Program

WEDNESDAY THE 16th

8:45 – 9:00 Welcome
9:00 – 10:00 Chris Mays – On Stubbornness and Cognitive Stability in Rhetoric Systems
10:00 – 11:00 Selene Arfini – Extended Ignorant Cognition: Explaining Misinformation, Taboos, and Covering Beliefs with Cognitive Niches
11:00 – 11:15 Coffe Break
11:15 – 12:15 Scott Jordan – The Skin is not an Epistemic Border
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:00 Lorenzo Magnani – Unconventional Cognitive Embodiments: Computational
Domestication of Physical and Biological Bodies
15:00 – 16:00 Marco Viola – Emotion as Functional States: A Reduction ad Absurdum
16:00 – 17:00 ROUNDTABLE: THE VALUE OF SCIENCE FICTION AS THE NEW MYTHOLOGY

THURSDAY THE 17th

9:00 – 12:00 “BODY-MIND IN PLAY” WORKSHOP – (Leader Tomie Hahn)
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:00 Tomie Hahn & Curtis Bahn – Extending the Body via Sensible Objects
15:00 – 16:00 Tommaso Bertolotti – Danish Bricks and the Plastic Mind: LEGO as a Cognitive Artifact
16:00 – 17:00 ROUNDTABLE: MAKE INTERDISCIPLINARITY SEXY AGAIN

FRIDAY THE 18th

 TRIP TO THE SEASIDE

Abstract of the presentations:

On Stubbornness and Cognitive Stability in Rhetoric Systems

Chris Mays
University of Nevada, Reno
cmays@unr.edu

This phenomenon of stubbornness—refusing to reconsider one’s belief or point of view in spite of contrary evidence—is a useful illustration of the way that in any situation, there are multiple ways to view the “facts” of an issue. As this presentation argues, a study of rhetoric reveals that this phenomenon is a result of the existence of radically different but coexisting logical structures and value systems, which often clash when individuals interact (see also Perelman; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca). This point leads to a central claim of this presentation: that these divergent structures of argument are actually divergent rhetoric systems that profoundly impact our cognition about the world. Specifically, a rhetoric system is a set of interconnected rhetorical elements (beliefs, arguments, commonplaces [loci communes], meanings, and texts) that cohere into a selforganized system. The borders of this system are stabilized such that, to a person caught up in a particular rhetoric system, 1) his or her cognition pertaining to specific events, texts, and words will seem static, 2) the total holistic understanding of those static meanings will be internally coherent, and 3) the system will be constrained by the other rhetorical, social, biological, and physical systems with which it is in relation. In this sense, a rhetoric system is a “body” that is thoroughly “about” its contexts (see also: Jordan; Jordan and Mays), and that helps shape cognitive processes. To illustrate these points, the presentation examines a particular belief that seems strongly resistant to change: the belief that the “founders” of the United States were devout Christians. As the presentation argues, what are often considered stubborn beliefs, rather than exclusive features of an ideology or political party, are actually an integral and complex part of the way all cognition (and knowledge) is created and sustained in a rhetoric system.

• Jordan, J. Scott. “Wild-Agency: Nested Intentionalities in Neuroscience and Archaeology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences), 2008, vol. 363, pp. 1981-91.
• Jordan, J. Scott, and Chris Mays. “Wild Meaning: The Intercorporeal Nature of Objects, Bodies, and Words.” In Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction, Eds. Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, and J. Scott Jordan, Oxford UP, 2017.
• Perelman, Chaim. The Realm of Rhetoric. Trans. William Kluback, U of Notre Dame P, 1982.
• Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, 1958, Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver, U of Notre Dame P, 2006.

Extended Ignorant Cognition: Explaining Misinformation, Taboos, and Covering
Beliefs with Cognitive Niches

Selene Arfini
University of Pavia, Italy
selene.arfini@gmail.com

Can we distribute ignorance as we distribute knowledge into our cognitive environment? And if it is the case, how could we investigate the distribution of ignorance?
In this paper I discuss the possibility of considering ignorance a situated and cognitively extended state of individuals (as sociologically discussed by Tuana, 2006), which can be shared
among agents by exploiting the functionality of context-based information-sharing mechanisms. To get a picture of how ignorance is shared by agents who belong to a common eco-cognitive environment, I will employ the theoretical models that explain and foster understanding on how information and knowledge are distributed in those contexts: cognitive niches (Tooby and DeVore, 1987; Pinker, 2003) and extended cognition (Clark, 2005; Bertolotti and Magnani, 2017; Magnani, 2009). Since humans lean heavily on forms of external support and scaffolding that permit them to tune and integrate internal and external epistemic resources, I will ask how ignorance, as the inherent limitation of those resources, affects the distribution of knowledge, information, and data into the environment and it is actually shared with other occupants of the same cognitive niche, where this epistemic distribution happens. Finally, without bringing about some differentiations of types of ignorance, I will describe some ways ignorance can be recognized as cognitively distributed, in the form of misinformation, covering beliefs, and taboos.

• Bertolotti, T. and Magnani, L. (2017). Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche construction. Synthese, 194(12):4757–4779.
• Clark, A. (2005). Word, niche and super-niche: How language makes minds matter more. Theoria, 20(3):255–268.
• Magnani, L. (2009). Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg.
• Pinker, S. (2003). Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In Christiansen, M. H. and Kirby, S., editors, Language Evolution, pages 16–37. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Tooby, J. and DeVore, I. (1987). The reconstruction of hominid behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In Kinzey, W. G., editor, Primate Models of Hominid Behavior, pages 183–237. Suny Press, Albany.
• Tuana, N. (2006). The speculum of ignorance: The women’s health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia, 21(3):1–19.

Wild Relationality: The Skin is not an Epistemic Border

J. Scott, Jordan
Department of Psychology, Illinois State University
jsjorda@ilstu.edu

The present paper questions whether or not metatheoretical approaches to cognitive science that utilize dynamical systems theory (DST) require a definitive means of demarcating the cognitive from the non-cognitive. As more researchers utilize DST as means to describe relational properties that emerge in an organism’s interaction with its environment, and then utilize relational properties as an account of cognition, we are forced to clearly specify (1) how relational properties differ from non-relational (i.e., intrinsic) properties, and (2) what, if any, roles the two types of properties play in constituting cognition. According to Wild Systems Theory (WST), this intrinsic-relational tension lies at the heart of current debates regarding extended cognition. WST asserts that if DST allows us to see cognitive phenomena in terms of relational properties, and not intrinsic properties, it might be the case that discovering the ‘bounds of cognition’ was never a problem in need of solving.

Unconventional Cognitive Embodiments: Computational Domestication of Physical and Biological Bodies

Lorenzo Magnani
Department of Humanities & Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Italy
lmagnani@unipv.it

Eco-cognitive computationalism sees computation as active in “domesticated” physical entities
suitably transformed so that data can be encoded and decoded to obtain fruitful cognitive results. Turing’s original intellectual perspective furnished the conceptual framework able to show how thanks to an imitation of the evolutionary emergence in humans of information, meaning, and of the first rudimentary forms of cognition the subsequent invention of the Universal Practical Computing Machine is achieved, that computer that in the perspective offered by Turing I call “mimetic mind”, as minds embodied in suitable physical entities. It is by extending this framework that I think we can limpidly see that the recent emphasis on the simplification of cognitive and motor tasks generated in organic agents by morphological aspects implies – in robotics – the need not only of further “computational mimesis” of the related performances – when possible – but also the construction of appropriate unconventional and computationally domesticated “mimetic bodies” able to render the accompanied computation simpler, according to a general appeal to the “simplexity” of animal embodied cognition.

Emotion as Functional States: A Reduction Ad Absurdum

Marco Viola
Russian Institute for Advanced Studies
marco.viola@iusspavia.it

Notwithstanding many decades of research in affective science, “we are apparently not much closer to reaching consensus on what emotions are than we were in Ancient Greece”  (Scarantino 2016, 37). While researchers generally agree on the typical properties of emotion, they disagree on their definition, i.e. on which properties should be regarded as essential.
A popular solution to this thorny definitional issue is adopting Emotion Functionalism (EF), i.e.
defining emotion as functional (or dispositional) states:

[EF] to be in Emotion X = given an external input Y, to produce (or be more inclined to produce) a response pattern Z

Some variant of EF has been undescribed by various philosophers and scientists, e.g. Ryle
(1949/2000), Plutchick (1970), and recently Adolphs (2016). EF is luring because it allows to cluster together emotions in human and non-human animals, due to the Multiple Realizability (MR) of functional states.

However, precisely in virtue of MR, EF is way too inclusive. In order to demonstrate it,

(1) I expound Casati’s (forthcoming) theory of four modes of exploiting a same cognitive task, e.g. navigation: M1, fast-and-frugal; M2, controlled and reflexive; M3, aided by some cognitive artifact; M4, completely farmed out to some cognitive artifact.
(2) I briefly sketch various thought experiment wherein the functional definition of emotion is fulfilled according to M1—M4;
(3) I discuss why EF is unsuitable either as a descriptive (a) or as a prescriptive (b) thesis (cf. Strawson 1959 on descriptive/prescriptive metaphysics);
(3a)descriptive-EF is too counterintuitive, e.g. it assigns emotion to non-living things and to extended subjects (Clark and Chalmers 1998);
(3b)prescriptive-EF fails to distinguish between functional states produced by homologuos
mechanisms (Basic Emotions in human and other animals) and those that do not (artificial ‘emotions’).
(4) I draw some reflections on the evolutionary significance of these artificial ‘emotions’.

• Adolphs, R. (2016). How should neuroscience study emotions? By distinguishing emotion states, concepts, and experiences. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, nsw153.
• Casati, R. (2017). Two, Then Four Modes of Functioning of the Mind: Towards a Unification of “Dual” Theories of Reasoning and Theories of Cognitive Artifacts. In Representations in Mind and World (pp. 7-23). Routledge.
• Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. analysis, 7-19.
• Plutchik, R. (1970). Emotions, evolution, and adaptive processes. In Feelings and emotions: the Loyola Symposium (pp. 3-24). Academic Press, New York.
• Ryle, G. (1949/2009). The concept of mind. Routledge.
• Scarantino, A. (2016) The philosophy of emotions and its impact on affective science. In Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). Handbook of emotions. Guilford Publications.

Extending the Body via Sensible Objects

Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn
Department of the Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
hahnt@rpi.edu
crb@rpi.edu

Artist-scholars Hahn and Bahn will co-present “Extending the Body via Sensible Objects,” asking:
how does the inanimate appear as animate in performance? An object, whether a musical instrument or a stage prop, can come to life in skilled hands. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork, an awareness of the cultural sensibilities of how objects extend the body in performance can offer insights into cultural concepts cognition and expressivity. In this presentation we propose the existence and perception of “sensible objects”—acknowledgement that many objects serve as animated vehicles for performance expressivity. These objects are “sensible” because they extend the body and senses. Imbued with energy via movement and sound, sensible objects vivify, revealing enactive knowledge and embodied cultural knowledge. This presentation focuses on the transmission of presence from body to object—specifically, how movement and sound enliven sensible objects in an integrally intertwined relationship. We ask: how are cultural notions of vitality or live-ness connected to a culture’s concept of embodied cognition, and the transmission of energy flow between body and sensible object? As the body extends itself through objects, it also learns new sensibilities from interactions with “things.” The physically expanding body often transforms, revealing shifts in identity through the experiential encounters with sensible objects in performance. We will present several case studies on the kinesthetic transmission/entrainment of embodied cultural knowledge from Hahn and Bahn’s experience with sensible objects, including musical instruments, musical robots, Japanese dance, and puppetry.

Danish Bricks and Plastic Minds: LEGO as a Cognitive Artifact

Tommaso Bertolotti
Department of Humanities & Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Italy
bertolotti@unipv.it

Philosophy and the worldliest matters shade into one another, just as the mind shades into the world coopting the available resources to enhance its cognitive processes or develop altogether new ones. Philosophy and games have entertained a particular relationship since Plato’s developed his notion of paideia. I will sketch out the philosophical and cognitive relevance of a particular “cognitive niche”, that is the Lego Universe. The LEGO bricks act indeed as fitting cognitive anchors to expand the mind in several directions: thinking through doing, emotional reasoning, political modeling and storytelling, mathematical training, creative heuristics and abductive inferences, collective thinking and embodied cognition. The Danish bricks can indeed make the mind more… plastic in countless ways: I will make a case for that by relying on the works of American pragmatists, extended mind advocates and Plato himself.

Goodies

WORKSHOP: “BODY-MIND IN PLAY”
Leader: Tomie Hahn

In this workshop Tomie Hahn will introduce a playful yet contemplative activity called “banding.”
Banding is an experimental exercise in movement and sound improvisation she has been developing since 2008 where participants are connected by giant rubber bands. Through the bands participants are able to sense each other’s movements and presence in profound ways. Anticipation presents itself on several time-scales, from the minutiae of sensibilities real and imagined, as well as largescale, gross movements and sensations. Participants report that they experience a heightening sensory awareness—particularly a sense of connectedness with others in the group through shared enactive, tactile, visual and auditory sensibilities. This work directly stems from Hahn’s long-term research on the transmission, or transfer, of embodied cultural knowledge.
No previous experience necessary, just come and participate or just observe!

ROUNDTABLE: “THE VALUE OF SCIENCE FICTION AS THE NEW MYTHOLOGY”

Science fiction can indeed be seen as the modern mythology. But how useful can it really be for
theoretical speculation? Some authors, such as Asimov, appear quite often among the references of theses and memoirs, but contemporary science fiction raises the stakes by pushing high-quality productions to mainstream viewership. Are movies and series such as Westworld, Black Mirror, Interstellar and countless more turning into a reference as robust as, for instance, the Biblical narratives were for earlier generations? How valuable are the thought-experiments incorporated in the –usually dystopic– narratives they propose? What is their epistemological value, namely, are they mere tools for facilitating reflection or can they be embedded as sui generis scientific argumentation?

ROUNDTABLE: “MAKE INTERDISCIPLINARITY SEXY AGAIN”

On June the 30th 2016, Nature published a letter entitled “Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success”: the authors bring compelling evidence to show the ambivalence surrounding the notion of “interdisciplinarity” in contemporary scientific funding. Almost a NIMBY notion, interdisciplinarity often emerges as a keyword for contemporary scientific goals, but then the actual reviewing process for grants and applications seems to penalize interdisciplinary projects – chiefly because of the lack of true interdisciplinary reviewers, who will (understandably?) favor mono-disciplinary projects they are more comfortable to assess. The aim of the roundtable is to share our experience about this claim, and to imagine ways to apply for major funding (European Union, Templetons etc.) with interdisciplinary projects stemming from our competences.

Practical details

The workshop will take place around Piazza Botta, in Pavia, where the Philosophy Building is
located. In general, the meeting point is the entrance at Piazza Botta 6.

• On the first day, the talks and roundtable will take place in the neighboring Department of
  Economics. They graciously let us use they chiesetta, a hall obtained from an ancient
  church. The whole complex, where Philosophy and Economics are, was once a monastery.
• The BODY-MIND IN PLAY workshop will take place in an underground hall of the
  Department of Psychology. It’s tricky to find, so the meeting point will be at the entrant hall
  of the Philosophy Building.
• The afternoon session of the second day will take place at the C class of the Philosophy
  Building.

As for the available technology:

• All conference rooms are equipped with projectors.
• The C class of the Philosophy Building is hard to darken. This has an impact on the quality
  of projected images. Please make sure that you have high-contrast presentations. If you need to display premium quality videos, please let me know and I can make a 21” iMac available.
• Most video inputs are VGA. I have a Mac with a VGA adaptor that I can lend you, or you
  can just transfer your PowerPoint files.
• Please let me know if you also need to play audio with your presentation.

For those who are coming to the seaside on Friday, do not forget to pack a swimsuit!