Abstracts for oral examination on Situated Cognition course
Anastasiia Mikhailova
Contrasting theories of Embodied Cognition
A. B. Markman and C. M. Brendl
Relation of human mind to perception and motor activity was in a focus of study by different sciences. Authors wants to explore this relation within follow up from embodied cognition theory: perception of positive versus negative stimuli lead to different reaction time for pulling varsus pushing movements. However, there is a contradiction in empirical studies on this topic. One branch of studies shows that pulling movements are faster for positive stimuli and pushing movements are faster for negative stimuli, which represents automatic connestions of perception and action. The other branch
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One argument against extended cognition is that some cognitive processes are not extended. But in fact, extended theory does not need to claim that all cognitive processes are extended. Authors support the idea of causal and explanatory pluralism and that cognitive system is to complex to fall into just one explanation. So not all cognition needs brain-body-environment explanation but some processes do.
Extended cognitive science neither ignores brain, nor pure philosophy of mind. It is not only philosophy of mind because it relies a lot on empirical data from neuroscience and robotics. For example, some studies of drugs, neurotransmitters and its effect on behavior on rodents cannot be taken in account without exploring depandancy of object’s affordances, which were used in this study. On the other hand, extended mind uses dynamical systems theory a lot in its argument, and it has been show to work both within brain-only and brain-body-environment explanations so it cannot be argued that extended mind ignores
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But external features are not any features; it should play an active role. That is why the authors come up with idea of active externalism. There are few critiques, which are possible on this stage. Such as cognitive process should be portable: real cognitive process should lie on concstant ground and everything else is just an add-on extra. But the authors say that portability intuition in fact a criterion of reliability hence active externalism does not undermined by it. They also go further by pointing that maybe brain evolved in a way that those reliable external features are considered in cognitive processes. It makes extended cognition a core cognitive