[PHILOS-L] Deadline Approaching: CFP: Synthese Topical Collection - new directions in the extended mind
Marco Facchin
Caution: This email originated from outside of the University. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the source of this email and know the content is safe. Check sender address, hover over URLs and don't open suspicious email attachments. |
Synthese topical collection
Call for Papers
New Directions in the Extended Mind
Guest Editors:
Luke Kersten, University of Alberta
Marco Facchin, Universiteit Antwerpen
Topical Collection Description:
Where does the mind end and the rest of the world begin? According to the extended mind thesis, the answer is a bit surprising. Rather than the physical machinery of the mind localizing squarely in the brain, the extended mind thesis maintains that the mind stretches outwards, extending to encompass an agent’s body, actions, and environment.
The extended mind has sparked a heated debate. Originally, discussion focused on the tenability of the extended mind thesis itself, which was variously attacked or defended on the basis of thought experiments and specific empirical case studies (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2003; Wilson 2004). More recently, however, the debate broadened, shifting the focus towards applying the extended mind thesis to new domains. More in detail, the extended mind thesis has been applied in a variety of new philosophical debates, including those concerning affectivity (Colombetti & Roberts 2015), epistemology (Carter et al. 2018) consciousness (Ward 2012), non-human animals (Sims & Kiverstein 2022), plants (Parise et al. 2020) mechanistic explanations (Krickel 2020) and posthumanism (Farina & Lavazza 2022). Moreover, the extended mind thesis has also spread beyond strict philosophical circles, having been applied to such diverse fields as education (Pritchard et al. 2021), mental health (Roberts et al. 2019), human-computer interactions (Smart 2021), mathematics (Vold and Schlimm 2020) and neurocomputational theories, such as predictive processing and the free-energy principle (Kirchhoff and Kiverstein 2021).
These novel developments all highlight the fecundity and ongoing significance of the extended mind thesis. Yet, these developments have been largely elaborated in an uncoordinated and isolated fashion. While understandable to an extent, one consequence is that it has been extremely difficult to reconstruct the ways in which the extended mind thesis has been developed and elaborated, to track the influence of each thread of development on the others, to determine the success of these applications, and to predict which direction(s) the extended mind thesis might take in future.
This topical collection therefore aims to address the current situation by providing a space to weave together many of various threads of research, allowing them to constructively interact. In this way, it aims to address a number of pressing questions concerning the extended mind thesis; questions such as: how successful have the various applications of the extended mind thesis been? Can the extended mind be applied to systems other than individual human subjects, such as non-human animals, plants, or social groups? Is the extended mind thesis only a philosophical nicety, or can it fruitfully interact with the empirical sciences? And, if the extended mind has empirical relevance, how does it sit - and interact - with exciting emerging paradigms, such as Bayesian cognitive science, Large Language Models, or the Active Inference framework? How do recent applications of the extended mind thesis affect the prospects of the extended mind? Do they “feedback” on the theoretical, foundational issues concerning the very tenability of the extended mind thesis? And if so, what effects do they have? Moreover, where does the extended mind sit in the “4E” cognition movement? And how does it relate to post-cognitivist movements such as ecological (neuro)psychology, the “biogenic” approach to cognition and the various forms of enactivism? How has the debate on the extended mind historically developed, and what lies ahead? Lastly, what are the ethical implications of the extended mind thesis?
The special issue will address these questions by bringing together a variety of cutting-edge work at the intersection of philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, providing a forum for new insight into a topic of central interest to those working on the nature of mind and brain.
Appropriate Topics for Submission include, among others:
Foundational issues concerning the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses, their metaphysics, and their impact on our conceptions of cognition, consciousness and affectivity
Extended epistemology, including socially extended epistemology
The explanatory impact of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses in the mind sciences (broadly construed)
Analysis of the relationship between the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses and various approaches to cognitive science, including computationalism, connectionism and post-connectionism, dynamical cognitive science, cybernetics, Bayesian approaches to cognitive science and the active inference framework
Case studies in which one or more putative cognitive, conscious or affective extensions are described and assessed, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view
Empirical, conceptual and methodological reflections on the impact of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses on various strands of biological thought, including - but not limited to - Niche Construction Theory, Developmental System Theory and neurobiological theory (including cognitive neuroscience)
Methodological implications of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses for the mind sciences, including experimental applications or tests of the extended mind thesis
Investigation of the importance the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses have or may have in the humanities (broadly construed), including anthropology, sociology, and education sciences.
The applicability of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses to non-human subjects, including non-human animals, plants, robots and social groups; and more generally unusual applications of the extended mind thesis to agents and/or contexts that have not been previously investigated
Ethical and social implications of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses
Metatheoretical reflections on the historical development of the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses, including discussion on its philosophical precursors and related ideas in non-western philosophy
Theoretical and metatheoretical reflections on the relationship between the extended mind, extended consciousness and extended affectivity theses, “4E” cognition and other post-cognitivist approaches to the mind
For further information, please contact the guest editors:
Deadline extended to 30/07/2024
Facchin Marco, Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Rodestraat 14
Luke Kersten, University of Alberta, Department of Philosophy, Assiniboia Hall 2-51, T6G 1C9
References
Carter, J. A., Clark, A., Kallestrup, J., Palermos, S. O., & Pritchard, D. (Eds.). (2018). Extended Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural Born Cyborgs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19.
Colombetti, G., & Roberts, T. (2015). Extending the extended mind: the case for extended affectivity. Philosophical Studies, 172, 1243-1263.
Farina, M., & Lavazza, A. (2022). Mind embedded or extended: transhumanist and posthumanist reflections in support of the extended mind thesis. Synthese, 200(6), 507.
Kirchhoff, M. D., & Kiverstein, J. (2021). How to determine the boundaries of the mind: A Markov blanket proposal. Synthese, 198(5), 4791-4810.
Krickel, B. (2020). Extended cognition, the new mechanists' mutual manipulability criterion, and the challenge of trivial extendedness. Mind & Language, 35(4), 539-561.
Parise, A. G., Gagliano, M., & Souza, G. M. (2020). Extended cognition in plants: is it possible?. Plant signaling & behavior, 15(2), 1710661.
Pritchard, D., English, A. R., & Ravenscroft, J. (2021). Extended cognition, assistive technology and education. Synthese, 199(3-4), 8355-8377.
Roberts, T., Kruger, J., and Glackin, S. (2019). Psychiatry Beyond the Brain: Externalism, Mental Health, and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 26(3), p. E-51-E-68. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ppp.2019.0030.
Sims, M., & Kiverstein, J. (2022). Externalized memory in slime mould and the extended (non-neuronal) mind. Cognitive Systems Research, 73, 26-35.
Smart, P. R. (2021). Shedding light on the extended mind: HoloLens, holograms, and internet-extended knowledge. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 675184.
Vold, K., & Schlimm, D. (2020). Extended mathematical cognition: external representations with non-derived content. Synthese, 197(9), 3757-3777.
Ward, D. (2012). Enjoying the spread: Conscious externalism reconsidered. Mind, 121(483), 731-751.
Wilson (2004). Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press.
FWO Founded (Grant number 1202824N -Towards a globally non-representational theory of the mind)
Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Recent posts can also be read in a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/ Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos To sign off the list send a blank message to philos-l-unsub...@liverpool.ac.uk.