Philosophy of Cognitive Science

This paper asks about the ways in which embodimentoriented
cognitive science contributes to our understanding of phenomenal
consciousness. It is first argued that central work in the field
of embodied cognitive science does not solve the hard problem of consciousness
(Chalmers, 1996) head on. It is then argued that an
embodied turn toward neurophenomenology makes no distinctive
headway on the puzzle of consciousness; for neurophenomenology
either concedes dualism in the face of the hard problem or represents
only a slight methodological variation on extant cognitive-scientific
approaches to the easy problems of consciousness. The paper closes
with the positive suggestion that embodied cognitive science supports
a different approach to phenomenal consciousness, according to
which the mind is massively representational (and cognitive processing
teems with body-related representations), cognitive science has no
use for the personal-level posits that tend to drive philosophical theorizing
about consciousness and mind, and the hard problem is
illusory.

As hundreds of so-called "psychotherapies" have been foisted onto the public, all claiming to treat "mental illness," newer understandings of how the human brain actually works and the processes which drive the formations of mentation that we refer to as "the mind," demand a reassessment of what exactly we are referring to by the term "mental illness" and what kinds of intervention would be feasible in both the prevention of and recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder. A fundamental process in the formation of an individual's mentation is the associations of experience. These associations not only account for constructive behavior, but can also lead to deleterious or negative behavior, suggesting that some associations are negative and therefore the negative behavior can be remolded through contrasting positive associations; however, to understand what this really means and how it works, we must start at the beginning and define what exactly is this negative behavior that we refer to by the term "mental illness." One of the most important axioms of life so simply but profoundly phrased by Oscar Wilde, is that "the truth is rarely pure and NEVER simple" (emphasis mine). Nothing can ever be explained by simple sound bites – oversimplification is just another word for misrepresentation – so to understand, we must truly engage the subject, and to engage the subject, we must first and foremost clearly define what it is that we are seeking to understand. In this case, it demands that we understand what exactly is mental illness.

This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.

Is the sense of smell a source of aesthetic perception? Traditional philosophical aesthetics has centered on vision and audition but eliminated smell for its subjective and inherently affective character. This article dismantles the myth that olfaction is an unsophisticated sense. It makes a case for olfactory aesthetics by integrating recent insights in neuroscience with traditional expertise about flavor and fragrance assessment in perfumery and wine tasting. My analysis concerns the importance of observational refinement in aesthetic experience. I argue that the active engagement with stimulus features in perceptual processing shapes the phenomenological content, so much so that the perceptual structure of trained smelling varies significantly from naive smelling. In a second step, I interpret the processes that determine such perceptual refinement in the context of neural decision-making processes, and I end with a positive outlook on how research in neuroscience can be used to benefit philosophical aesthetics.

How much does stimulus input shape perception? The common-sense view is that our
perceptions are representations of objects and their features and that the stimulus structures the perceptual object. The problem for this view concerns perceptual biases as responsible for distortions and the subjectivity of perceptual experience. These biases are increasingly studied as constitutive factors of brain processes in recent neuroscience. In neural network models the brain is said to cope with the plethora of sensory information by predicting stimulus regularities on the basis of previous experiences. Drawing on this development, this chapter analyses perceptions as processes. Looking at olfaction as a model system, it argues for the need to abandon a stimulus- centred perspective, where smells are thought of as stable percepts, computationally linked to external objects such as odorous molecules. Perception here is presented as a measure of changing signal ratios in an environment informed by expectancy effects from top-down processes.

Přednáška základně představuje v současnosti velmi prominentní teorii, která si klade za cíl být sjednocenou teorií funkce mysli a mozku. Hlavním principem je, že se mozek neustále snaží předvídat následující vstupy a díky tomu si tvoří model světa. Teorie se na základě toho snaží vysvětlit takové jevy jako je vnímání, pozornost, učení, tvorba přesvědčení, jednání, ale i např. jáství, schizofrenii či autismus. Stojí na konceptech jako je Bayesovský mozek, prediktivní kódování a tzv. free energy principle. Tento přístup srovnám s přístupy jako je kognitivismus, vtělená kognice a pod.

This paper is aimed at exploring the hidden fundamental computational property of natural language that has been so elusive that it has made all attempts to characterize its real computational property ultimately fail. Earlier natural language was thought to be context-free. However, it was gradually realized that this does not hold much water given that a range of natural language phenomena have been found as being of non-context-free character that they have almost scuttled plans to brand natural language contextfree. So it has been suggested that natural language is mildly context-sensitive and to some extent context-free. In all, it seems that the issue over the exact computational property has not yet been solved. Against this background it will be proposed that this exact computational property of natural language is perhaps the N-th dimension of language, if what we mean by dimension is nothing but universal (computational) property of natural language.

We give a pictorial, and absurdly simple, proof that transparently illustrates why four colours suffice to chromatically differentiate any set of contiguous, simply connected and bounded, planar spaces; by showing that there is no minimal planar map. We show, moreover, why the proof cannot be expressed within classical graph theory.

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube's recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users' attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers.

Penser la relation entre l'intelligence et les émotions afin de mieux appréhender la structure interne de l'esprit humain. Il s'agit à la fois de revenir sur la théorie des marqueurs somatiques de Damasio et de questionner l'anticartésianisme de cette thèse.

Summary:
This book introduces a principled approach to conceptualizing and measuring working memory in first and second language research. It presents comprehensive, thorough and updated reviews of relevant literatures of WM and SLA research in cognitive sciences, cognitive psychology and applied linguistics. Drawing on multidisciplinary research insights, it advocates an integrated framework for implementing working memory and second language acquisition research. In light of the basic tenets and general principles of this integrated perspective, the book then proposes an overarching theoretical model that clearly specifies the distinctive roles of phonological and executive working memory as they relate to specific second language acquisition domains and processing activities. The implications of this innovative Phonological/Executive Model are further discussed and elaborated, first for the specific realm of L2 task-based speech planning and performance, and then within the broader context of foreign language aptitude.

Reviews:
"One of the most encouraging features of the development of the multicomponent model of working memory has been its application beyond the laboratory to a range of  issues of which language learning is among the most important. Work was initially focused on native language acquisition but subsequently exciting developments are increasingly occurring in the hugely significant field of second language learning. This book surveys the field in detail , producing a synthesis of evidence and theory that will make a substantial contribution to this important field." Alan Baddeley, University of York, U.K.

"There are perhaps few predicaments as frustrating as being unable to communicate with another person because he or she does not speak the same language as you. In this volume, Dr. Wen comprehensively considers the importance for second-language learning of the individual’s working memory, the small amount of information that can be readily held in mind to carry out cognitive tasks. Different theoretical views are considered in detail and they are judiciously applied in an up-to-date treatment of various facets of language learning. The volume will be of great interest to students of both memory and language, ranging from novices to experts." Nelson Cowan, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA

"A well-informed, up-to-date, and comprehensive review of phonological and executive aspects of working memory, their  components and measurement, their roles in second language acquisition and processing, and their status as language aptitudes. An excellent overview for scholars in these areas." Nick Ellis, University of Michigan, U.S.A.

"A thorough analysis of how the various components of the working memory system relate to different aspects of second language processing and learning. This is a very timely and useful contribution to a centrally important topic in the field of individual differences."  John Williams, University of Cambridge, UK

Author Biography:
Zhisheng (Edward) Wen is Associate Professor at School of Languages and Translation at Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI). Dr. Wen has been lecturing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in applied linguistics and psycholinguistics for over 15 years. He has published extensively in these areas. His paper publications have appeared in key academic journals (e.g., Language Teaching, ELT Journal, InJAL). He is recipient of the ‘Language Learning Roundtable Conference Grant’ and lead-editor of “Working memory in second language acquisition and processing” (2015, Multilingual Matters).  His another forthcoming monograph “Cognitive individual differences in second language acquisition” will be published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2017.

What can we do—and what should we do—to fight against bias? This final chapter introduces empirically-tested interventions for combating implicit (and explicit) bias and promoting a fairer world, from small daily-life debiasing tricks to larger structural interventions. Along the way, this chapter raises a range of moral, political, and strategic questions about these interventions. This chapter further stresses the importance of admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We should be humble about how much we still don’t know and dedicate efforts to gathering as much knowledge as possible. Even so, we know enough now to start making a difference, and this chapter ultimately aims to chip away at the gap between our abstract commitments to treat people fairly and our lived habits and experiences, which continue to be shaped by implicit and explicit prejudices and stereotypes about race, gender, and other social categories.

Dynamical systems theories describe a wide range of theoretical orientations in cognitive science. In this chapter we focus on a particular formulation of dynamical systems theory that provides a strong theoretical basis for some of the claims made by 4E approaches to cognition. In particular, the target dynamical systems approaches depend on two hypotheses. First, the interaction hypothesis states that the states and behaviors of any entity in a cognitive system are highly dependent on the states and behaviors of some other entity or set of entities. Second, the openness hypothesis states that cognitive systems only persist in the context of other systems. Taken together, these hypotheses entail that the boundaries of cognitive systems should not be taken for granted, and that there are both metrics and reasons for empirically investigating how cognitive systems may be bounded and how those boundaries might change.

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: (a) that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and (b) that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as "fish", "red", and "gun". Hypotheses (a) and (b) are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that (a) is not negotiable; so they tend to reject (b). Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims, but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile (a) and (b) if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality.

This is a translation of the table of contents from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's first book, "La structure du comportement". This TOC is more detailed than the one provided in A. Fisher's English translation, and lays out the structure of the text with greater clarity. Page numbers are given for the English translation and the original French.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

Sample chapter available for download!

CONTENTS
Introduction - Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: An Overview (M.R. Broome and L. Bortolotti)

Psychiatry as Science
Chapter 1. Is Psychiatric Research Scientific? (R. Cooper)
Chapter 2. A Secret History of ICD and the Hidden Future of DSM. (K.W.M. Fulford and N. Sartorius)
Chapter 3. Delusion as a Natural Kind. (R. Samuels)

The Nature of Mental Illness
Chapter 4. Mental Illness is Indeed a Myth. (H. Pickard)
Chapter 5. Psychiatry and the Concept of Disease as Pathology. (D. Murphy)

Reconciling Paradigms
Chapter 6. On the Interface Problem in Philosophy and Psychiatry. (T. Thornton)
Chapter 7. What does Rationality Have to Do with Psychological Causation? Propositional attitudes as Mechanisms and as Control Variables. (J. Campbell)
Chapter 8. Mad Scientists or Unreliable Autobiographers? Dopamine Dysregulation and Delusion. (P. Gerrans)

Psychiatry and the Neurosciences
Chapter 9. When Time is Out of Joint: Schizophrenia and Functional Neuroimaging. (D. Lloyd)
Chapter 10. Philosophy and Cognitive-Affective Neurogenetics. (D. Stein)
Chapter 11. An Addictive Lesson: A Case Study in Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience. (L. Stephens and G. Graham)

Phenomenology and Scientific Explanation
Chapter 12. Understanding Existential Changes in Psychiatric Illness: The Indispensability of Phenomenology. (M. Ratcliffe)
Chapter 13. Delusional realities. (S. Gallagher)

Delusions and Cognition
Chapter 14. Delusions: a Two-Level Framework. (K. Frankish)
Chapter 15. Explaining Pathologies of Belief. (A.M. Aimola Davies and M. Davies)

Moral Psychology and Psychopathology
Chapter 16. Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility. (J. Kennett and S. Matthews)
Chapter 17. Motivation, Depression and Character. (I. Law)

Conclusion: The Future of Scientific Psychiatry. (L. Bortolotti and M.R. Broome)


One of the best books of 2009 for the Guardian, according to Mary Warnock:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/22/books-of-the-year-2009.

For reviews and other information about the book, go to: http://sites.google.com/site/lisabortolottiphilosophy/books/psychiatry

This chapter addresses a theoretical problem that arises when we treat non-linguistic animals as thinkers in order to explain their behavior in psychological terms. Psychological explanations work because they identify beliefs and desires that show why the action in question made sense from the agent’s perspective. To say that an action makes sense in the light of an agent’s beliefs and desires is to say that it is the rational thing to do (or, at least, a rational thing to do) given those beliefs and desires. And that in turn means that, in at least some cases, an agent might reason her way from those beliefs and desires to acting in the relevant way. Most models of reasoning, however, treat it in terms of logical operations defined over linguistic structures, which makes it difficult to see how it might be extended to non-linguistic creatures. This paper develops a framework for thinking about the types of reasoning engaged in by non-linguistic creatures. It explores non-linguistic analogs of basic patterns of inference that can be understood at the linguistic level in terms of rules of inference involving elementary logical concepts. The three schemas discussed (reasoning from an excluded alternative and two types of conditional reasoning) are highly relevant to animal practical reasoning, and I show how animals might apply them without deploying any logical concepts.

Presentation at “The Way We Think: A Research Symposium on Conceptual Integration and the Nature and Origin of Cognitively Modern Humans.” University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Demark, August 19-23,  2002. Document includes Supplemental Materials: Resource Guide and Commentaries
In recent years the relationship between language change and biological evolution has captured the attention of investigators operating in different disciplines, particularly evolutionary biology, AI and A-Life (Zeimke 2001, Hull 2001), as well as linguistics (Croft 2000; Sinha 1999), with each group often bringing radically different conceptualizations of the object under study, namely, “language” itself, to the debate.  Over the centuries, meanings associated with the expression “language” have been influenced by mappings of conceptual frames and inputs from the biological sciences onto the entity referred to as “language”. At the same time the prestige of the “science of linguistics” created a feedback mechanism by which the referentiality of “language”, at each stage, was mapped back into the field of evolutionary biology along with the emergent structure(s) of the resulting “blend”. While significant energy has been spent on identifying ways in which biological evolution has been linked to concepts of language evolution (Dörries 2002), little attention has been directed to the nature of the conceptual integration networks that have been produced in the process. This paper examines the way conceptual integration theory can be brought to bear on the “blends” that have been created, focusing primarily on examples drawn from 19th century debates concerning the “language-species-organism analogy” in the emerging field of comparative-historical philology.

The term " Cognitive Architectures " indicates both abstract models of cognition, in natural and artificial agents, and the software instantiations of such models which are then employed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The main role of Cognitive Architectures in AI is that one of enabling the realization of artificial systems able to exhibit intelligent behavior in a general setting through a detailed analogy with the constitutive and developmental functioning and mechanisms underlying human cognition. We provide a brief overview of the status quo and of the potential role that Cognitive Architectures may serve in the fields of Computational Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.

An important part of David Hume’s work is his attempt to put the natural sciences on a firmer foundation by introducing the scientific method into the study of human nature. This investigation resulted in a novel understanding of the mind, which in turn informed Hume’s critical evaluation of the scope and limits of the scientific method as such. However, while these latter reflections continue to influence today’s philosophy of science, his theory of mind is nowadays mainly of interest in terms of philosophical scholarship. This paper aims to show that, even though Hume‟s recognition in the cognitive sciences has so far been limited, there is an opportunity to reevaluate his work in the context of more recent scientific developments. In particular, it is argued that we can gain a better understanding of his overall philosophy by tracing the ongoing establishment of the enactive approach. In return, this novel interpretation of Hume’s “science of man” is used as the basis for a consideration of the current and future status of the cognitive sciences.

[...I sistemi politici non si sottraggono a questa prospettiva onnicomprensiva e si differenziano non tanto per l’ideologia che incarnano, quanto per la modalità di manipolazione dei dati, dove dittatura è centralizzazione delle informazioni e democrazia è processamento delocalizzato: prevale il sistema che in accordo con il momento storico in cui si trova ad agire rivela maggiore efficienza.]

RESUMEN - ABSTRACT
Las investigaciones aquí desarrolladas buscan una aproximación interdisciplinaria al fenómeno de la salud y la enfermedad, así como a la naturaleza de la práctica médica en la posmodernidad. La filosofía de la medicina se inspira fundamentalmente en la actual filosofía de la ciencia, que ha abandonado la idea de una realidad objetiva o de un orden natural inmutable, reemplazándola por la representación de nuestro conocimiento, adquiriendo así uno de sus rasgos fundamentales, el carácter holístico e interpretativo.
Enfermedad, Biopolítica y Salud pública
Las investigaciones aquí desarrolladas buscan una aproximación interdisciplinaria al fenómeno de la salud y la enfermedad, así como a la naturaleza de la práctica médica en la posmodernidad. La filosofía de la medicina se inspira fundamentalmente en la actual filosofía de la ciencia, que ha abandonado la idea de una realidad objetiva o de un orden natural inmutable, reemplazándola por la representación de nuestro conocimiento, adquiriendo así uno de sus rasgos fundamentales, el carácter holístico e interpretativo.
Llevado al extremo de la irracionalidad, el esfuerzo de la medicina por preservar y cuidar la salud de las personas ha demostrado que es capaz de volverse en contra de aquellos a quienes pretende proteger. Cuando los médicos se empecinan en extender la vida aún más allá de las posibilidades fisiológicas y del deseo de sus pacientes, aparece lo que se ha dado en llamar el encarnizamiento terapéutico. Pero prolongar la vida innecesariamente no sólo perjudica a quienes se les priva del derecho a una muerte digna. En un mundo donde los recursos públicos que se destinan al cuidado de la salud no sólo son finitos, sino que muchas veces resultan insuficientes, su uso irracional parece cercenar aún más el acceso de la población en general al cuidado de su salud. Hoy se acepta el establecimiento de un límite en la asistencia médica, pero la cuestión es definir cuál es y quién establece, y aun más, cómo se valida este límite. Un punto de partida puede ser la observación de casos y el cambio actitudinal frente al manejo de estos conceptos.
Dr. ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA

‘The Çatalhöyük evidence as a whole’, write Hodder and Pels, ‘gives many indications that, indeed, people began to link themselves to specific pasts, by burying pots, tools, humans and hunting trophies in ways that indicate particular memories rather than a generic reference to a group’. Such striking claims about Neolithic cognitive change seem to chime neatly with the other ambitious hypotheses explored in this volume, intended to link measurable changes in the archaeological record to historical changes in consciousness, creativity, and self. In this essay I return to memory as a test case for evaluating claims about cognitive change in the Neolithic, trying to flesh out and generalise Hodder’s suggestive remarks about memory at Çatalhöyük by setting them in the context of a broad theoretical approach to personal memory which might both make sense of and in turn be buttressed and developed by the archaeological case study. I proceed by first explaining and defending the possibility of historical changes in autobiographical memory, anchoring this exercise in speculative cognitive archaeology and cognitive history in the picture of the ‘scaffolded mind’ suggested by the ‘distributed cognition’ framework. In section 3, I discuss features of autobiographical memory and its components which are highlighted in various domains of recent science and theory, and which taken together reveal personal remembering as a rich and complex set of learned and enculturated skills. Section 4 lays out the background conditions for the putative historical changes, in or before the Neolithic, before I go on in section 5 to sketch a picture of the nature, causes, and implications of the hypothesised changes in memory capacities and practices.

Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli “spark” neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. This has fostered a view of the brain as a space that we can map: here the brain responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation in your left hand. But it turns out that the sense of smell—only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience—doesn’t work this way. A. S. Barwich asks a deceptively simple question: What does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?

Barwich interviews experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the biological mechanics and myriad meanings of odors. She argues that it is time to stop recycling ideas based on the paradigm of vision for the olfactory system. Scents are often fickle and boundless in comparison with visual images, and they do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Although olfaction remains a puzzle, Barwich proposes that what we know suggests the brain acts not only like a map but also as a measuring device, one that senses and processes simple and complex odors.

Accounting for the sense of smell upsets theories of perception philosophers have developed. In their place, Smellosophy articulates a new model for understanding how the brain represents sensory information.

The idea that the brain is an information processing system raises some challenging questions about whether information exists independently of brains. Answering these questions is relevant for clarifying the theoretical foundations of the sciences of mind and brain, but also for appropriately interpreting and evaluating the evidence about how brains—and other biological systems—work. This article claims that (1) informational descriptions in the sciences of mind and brain can be genuinely explanatory, despite assuming a mind-dependent notion of information; and (2) that Popperian objectivity is sufficient for the explanatory role that information often plays in these sciences. Hierarchical predictive processing, which has become a central theoretical paradigm for neurobehavioural research, is used as a case study for supporting these two claims.

Collaborating with others takes intriguing and complex forms. We collaborate with others in a wide variety of activities: from team sports to shared labour, from committee work to mass demonstrations, from dancing to reminiscing together about old times. Recently, philosophy of mind and cognitive science has turned to theorizing and studying socio-cognitive interactions of these kinds, asking what kinds of adaptive and shared intelligence are involved in collaborative activities in small groups. Theorists focus on complex and intricate cognitive and affective processes that spread beyond a single individual’s brain – distributed across the body and/or the environment, coopting objects and driving interactions with other individuals. We explore embodied practices of collaboration in sporting and other performance contexts, drawing on rich literatures from cognitive psychology, sports psychology, organisational psychology and social ontology.  Our interest in both sport and embodied minds centres on cases in which people are not working or moving alone, but in which individual participants’ unique skills and capacities are coordinated with those of others in service of shared goals. We identify a range of levels of socio-cognitive processes that interact to drive and sustain embodied collaboration in a variety of contexts. By appreciating how such processes interact, we can begin to understand how human collaboration is achieved and maintained.

In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene presents a compelling account of how the brain learns to read. Central to this account is his neuronal recycling hypothesis: neural circuitry is capable of being ‘recycled’ or converted to a different function that is cultural in nature. The original function of the circuitry is not entirely lost and
constrains what the brain can learn. It is argued that the neural niche co-evolves with the environmental niche in a way that does not undermine the core ideas of neuronal recycling, but which is quite different from the models of cognitive and cultural evolution
provided by evolutionary psychology and epidemiology. Dehaene contrasts neuronal recycling with a naïve model of the brain as a general learning device that is unconstrained in what it can learn. Consequently a tension develops in Dehaene’s account of the role of plasticity in the acquisition of language. It is argued that the functional and structural changes in the brain that Dehaene documents in great detail are driven by learning and that this learning-driven plasticity does not commit us to a naïve model of the brain.