In this conceptual analysis contribution to the special issue on radical embodied cognition, we discuss how embodied cognition can exist with and without representations. We explore this concept through the lens of judgment and decision making in sports (JDMS). Embodied cognition has featured in many investigations of human behavior, but no single approach has emerged. Indeed, the very definitions of the concepts “embodiment” and “cognition” lack consensus, and consequently the degree of “radicalism” is not universally defined, either. In this paper (...) we address JDMS not from a rigid theoretical perspective, but from two embodied cognition approaches: one that assumes there is mediation between the athlete and the environment through mental representation, and another that assumes direct contact between the athlete and the environment and thus no need for mental representation. Importantly, our aim was not to arrive at a theoretical consensus or set up a competition between approaches, but rather to provide a legitimate scientific discussion about how to explain empirical results in JDMS from contrasting perspectives within embodied cognition. For this, we first outline the definitions and constructs of embodied cognition in JDMS. Second, we detail the theory underlying the mental representation and direct contact approaches. Third, we comment on two published research papers on JDMS, one selected by each of us: (1) Correia et al. (2012) and (2) Pizzera (2012). Fourth, following the interpretation of the empirical findings of these papers, we present a discussion on the commonalities and divergences of these two perspectives and the consequences of using one or the other approach in the study of JDMS. (shrink)

Human motor skills are exceptional compared to other species, no less than their cognitive skills. In this perspective paper, we suggest that “movement matters!,” implying that motor development is a crucial driving force of cognitive development, much more impactful than previously acknowledged. Thus, we argue that to fully understand and explain developmental changes, it is necessary to consider the interaction of motor and cognitive skills. We exemplify this argument by introducing the concept of “embodied planning,” which takes an embodied cognition (...) perspective on planning development throughout childhood. From this integrated, comprehensive framework, we present a novel climbing paradigm as the ideal testbed to explore the development of embodied planning in childhood and across the lifespan. Finally, we outline future research directions and discuss practical applications of the work on developmental embodied planning for robotics, sports, and education. (shrink)

Pylyshyn provides sound arguments against the dominant picture theory of mental imagery. However, we claim that mental imagery is intrinsically dynamic and that the very nature of mental imagery will not be uncovered by studying static pictures. Understanding mental imagery of motor actions reveals that any theory of mental imagery should start off with the temporal nature of real-life experiences.

Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem. In two studies with healthy adults, we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via (...) right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks. (shrink)

Johnson et al. suggest that we rely on narratives to make choices under radical uncertainty. We argue that in its current version Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) does not account for embodied, direct sensorimotor influences on choices under radical uncertainty that may bypass narratives, particularly in highly time-constrained situations. We therefore suggest to extend CNT by an embodied choice perspective.

Research in sport pedagogy and its applied recommendations are still characterized by a contrast between the different learning theories from psychology. Traditional theories and their corresponding approaches to the specific case of teaching and learning “how to play [team sports like soccer]” are subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities. We discuss how behaviorism as an approach to teaching the game shows more incompatibilities with the nature of tactical actions when compared to constructivism. As coaches strive to teach the game and make (...) their players and team perform, we argue that teaching the game requires teaching approaches that will help develop their way to play without taking away their autonomy and adaptiveness. The teaching-learning-training process for playing the game should then be conducted to harmonize the characteristics of the contents, the context, and the individual at hand. We provide two illustrated examples and portray how the recommended approaches fit key contents of the game that are observed in the tactical behavior. We finally argue that the coherent design of games provides minimal conditions to teaching approaches, and that such a design should be a priority when elaborating the learning activities along the player development process. As a conclusion, the interactionist theory is the one that best serves the teaching of the game and the development of tactical behavior. We therefore defend that its principles can help coaches tailor their own strategy to teach the game with the many tools. (shrink)

In this book, Raabe argues that philosophy can effectively inform and improve conventional methods of treating mental illness. He presents clinical evidence showing that mild and so-called clinical mental illnesses can be both prevented and alleviated with philosophical talk therapy. Raabe offers concrete case examples that support his findings.

The main goal of this paper is to work out Quine's account of explication. Quine does not provide a general account, but considers a paradigmatic example which does not fit other examples he claims to be explications. Besides working out Quine's account of explication and explaining this tension, I show how it connects to other notions such as paraphrase and ontological commitment. Furthermore, I relate Quinean explication to Carnap's conception and argue that Quinean explication is much narrower because its main (...) purpose is to be a criterion of theory choice. (shrink)

This paper proposes and defends an account of what it is to act for reasons. In the first part, I will discuss the desire-belief and the deliberative model of acting for reasons. I will argue that we can avoid the weaknesses and retain the strengths of both views, if we pursue an alternative according to which acting for reasons involves taking something as a reason. In the main part, I will develop an account of what it is to take something (...) as a reason for action. On the basis of this, I will then offer a new account of what it is to act for reasons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James KeatingChristian Raab O.S.B.Configured to Christ: On Spiritual Direction and Clergy Formation by James Keating (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road, 2021), xxix + 312 pp.Deacon James Keating has served the Church by forming her clergy for thirty years. While he has been a seminary professor and a director of deacon formation at the diocesan level, his prolific scholarship (...) as well as his time as director of theological formation for the Institute for Priestly Formation in Creighton, NE, made him a national figure. Configured to Christ is a collection of Keating's most important essays.While this book is a retrospective, it couldn't be more timely. In 2016 (on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8), the Congregation for Catholic Education issued The Gift of the Priestly Vocation—Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, a text which provides guidelines for the whole Church concerning priestly formation. In the fall of 2021, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops completed their revision of the sixth edition of the Program of Priestly Formation (PPF), which translates the principles of the Ratio for the American context. With these two documents in place, it now falls upon seminaries to examine their programs in light of the vision provided by the magisterium. The next five to ten years promise to be a time of reform and renewal in seminary formation. Institutions will be looking for fresh and orienting ideas. Keating's book can be recommended as among the best resources for the venture that awaits.One reason Keating's book is so valuable is its focus on the "perichoresis" of the various aspects of formation (107). This emphasis is consonant with the terminological change found in the new PPF from the language of formational "pillars" to the language of formational "dimensions" (see the USCCB's 5th edition of the PPF, §28). The thinking behind this change seems to have been that it was too easy to imagine "pillars" as separate from [End Page 1110] one another. The human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral dimensions of formation are in fact interwoven, interdependent, and interpenetrating. While they can be distinguished, they cannot be divided. Growth in one fosters growth in the other. Keating has long understood this, as his various essays show.The book is divided into three parts and eighteen chapters. Part 1 is entitled "The Interior Life of the Cleric." Here, readers are introduced to the integral relationship between the spiritual and intellectual formational dimensions. For example, Keating provides, in chapter 1, a sustained theoretical reflection on the relationship between academic theology and spirituality, and, in chapter 2, he examines John Henry Newman's writings as a concretized test case for the right relationship of prayer, study, and thought. Authors such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean Leclercq have investigated this relationship in classic works, but Keating's presentation is notable for its accessibility, coherence, and concision. The remaining chapters of part 1 address the topics of silence and spiritual direction. Emerging from these analyses are the insights that interiority expands through discovery of Christ within. We participate in Christ as we behold, wonder, think, theologize, and pray. Keating's plea that we introduce ministerial candidates to the romance of silence is most welcome.The second part of the book is entitled "The Formation of the Cleric." It brings together nine essays which explicitly explore the art of formation. The key to this section, and maybe to the whole book, is chapter 7, "Christ is the Sure Foundation: Priestly Human Formation Completed in and by Spiritual Formation." This chapter makes the case not only for the perichoresis of formational dimensions but also for a much stronger emphasis on spiritual formation than is often the case. Of special note is Keating's observation that spiritual formation can truly support human formation. This is an important insight. In his 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (on the formation of priests), John Paul II had articulated that human formation was "the basis of all priestly formation" (§43).Unfortunately, this line could be (and has been) interpreted problematically to mean human formation... (shrink)

The focus of AI ethics has recently shifted towards the question of whether and how the use of AI technologies can promote sustainability. This new research question involves discerning the sustainability of AI itself and evaluating AI as a tool to achieve sustainable objectives. This article aims to examine the justifications that one might employ to advocate for promoting sustainable AI. Specifically, it concentrates on a dimension of often disregarded reasons — reasons of “meaning” or “meaningfulness” — as discussed more (...) recently in the “meaning in life” literature of analytic ethics. To proceed, the article first elucidates the working definitions of “sustainable AI” and “meaning in life”, while also setting the criteria for evaluating the plausibility of these reasons. Subsequently, it presents and scrutinises three arguments for the claim that one has reasons to care about sustainable AI from a perspective of meaning: the Meaning-conferring-action Argument, the Afterlife Argument, and the Harm Argument. In conclusion, this article asserts that only the Harm Argument presents a viable line of reasoning. However, it also outlines the presuppositions of this argument and the additional steps necessary to make it compelling. (shrink)

I focus on the impact of mindfulness practice in the face of aversive experience and argue that it is more than merely changing one’s cognitive strategy. Shifting perspective instead may be ….

This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where (...) the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION I. CETERIS PARIBUS LAWS An alleged law of nature—like Newton's law of gravitation—is said to be a ceteris paribus law if it does not hold under ...

Benjamin Libet's empirical challenge to free will has received a great deal of attention and criticism. A standard line of response has emerged that many take to be decisive against Libet's challenge. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that this standard response fails to put the challenge to rest. It fails, in particular, to address a recent follow-up experiment that raises a similar worry about free will (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). In the second part, (...) however, I will argue that we can altogether avoid Libet-style challenges if we adopt a traditional compatibilist account of free will. In the final section, I will briefly explain why there is good and independent reason to think about free will in this way. (shrink)

According to the standard view in philosophy, intentionality is the mark of genuine action. In psychology, human cognition and agency are now widely explained in terms of the workings of two distinct systems (or types of processes), and intentionality is not a central notion in this dual-system theory. Further, it is often claimed, in psychology, that most human actions are automatic, rather than consciously controlled. This raises pressing questions. Does the dual-system theory preserve the philosophical account of intentional action? How (...) much of our behavior is intentional according to this view? And what is the role of consciousness? I will propose here a revised account of intentional action within the dual-system framework, and we will see that most of our behavior can qualify as intentional, even if most of it is automatic. An important lesson will be that philosophical accounts of intentional action need to pay more attention to the role of consciousness in action. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste. According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective. Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in depth and (...) assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism. (shrink)

The notion of reduction continues to play a key role in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science. Supporters of reductionism claim that psychological properties or explanations reduce to neural properties or explanations, while antireductionists claim that such reductions are not possible. In this book, I apply recent developments in philosophy of science, particularly the mechanistic explanation paradigm and the interventionist theory of causation, to reassess the traditional approaches to reduction in philosophy of mind. I then elaborate and defend (...) a pluralistic framework for philosophy of mind, and show how reductionist ideas can be incorporated into it. This leads to a novel synthesis of pluralism and reductionism that I call pluralistic physicalism. (shrink)

Upregulation of implicit positive affect (PA) can act as a mechanism to deal with negative affect. Two studies tracked temporal changes in positive and negative affect (NA) assessed by self-report and the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009). Study 1 observed the predicted increases in implicit PA after exposure to a threat-related film clip, which correlated positively with the speed of recognising a happy face among an angry crowd. Study 2 replicated increases in implicit (...) PA after exposition to the same film clip, and showed that such increases were enhanced by priming self-referential stimuli. The findings are discussed against the background of personality systems interaction (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001), which emphasises the role of the implicit self in affect regulation. (shrink)

The commentators of our target article present several detailed arguments to refute the opposing theory. The real issue, however, seems to be the fundamental question of how the mind represents the content of beliefs. We distinguish between qualitative, quantitative and comparative approaches to modeling uncertain beliefs. We describe which theory falls into which of these classes. We also argue that the comparative level is the most fundamental, and challenge commentators to justify why they think that beliefs have more or less (...) structure in the human mind than can be captured at the comparative level. (shrink)

Computer assisted theorem proving is an increasingly important part of mathematical methodology, as well as a long-standing topic in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the current generation of theorem proving software have limited functioning in terms of providing new proofs. Importantly, they are not able to discriminate interesting theorems and proofs from trivial ones. In order for computers to develop further in theorem proving, there would need to be a radical change in how the software functions. Recently, machine learning results (...) in solving mathematical tasks have shown early promise that deep artificial neural networks could learn symbolic mathematical processing. In this paper, I analyze the theoretical prospects of such neural networks in proving mathematical theorems. In particular, I focus on the question how such AI systems could be incorporated in practice to theorem proving and what consequences that could have. In the most optimistic scenario, this includes the possibility of autonomous automated theorem provers (AATP). Here I discuss whether such AI systems could, or should, become accepted as active agents in mathematical communities. (shrink)

This chapter examines the similarities in the views of Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche about faith in the providence. It explains that, for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the issue of providence is occasioned not primarily by the study of nature or of history but of their own lives, and that both of them can help show that neither faith in providence, nor the abandonment of such faith, can be taken too lightly. The chapter also analyses the ideas of Kierkegaard in (...) his The Point of View for my Work as an Author and Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo. (shrink)

For most of its history, the psychology of reasoning was dominated by binary extensional logic. The so-called “new paradigm” instead puts subjective degrees of belief center stage, often represented as probabilities. We argue that the “new paradigm” is too vaguely defined and therefore does not allow a clear decision about what falls within its scope and what does not. We also show that there was not one settled theoretical “old” paradigm, before the new developments emerged, and that the alleged new (...) paradigm is less revolutionary as the term suggests. A more veridical view is that current progress is developing in continuities where rival research programs can thrive or fail in the face of new experimental findings. The article closes with some topics where more connections between competing research programs are likely to promote progress in our understanding of human reasoning. (shrink)

This chapter discusses whether the appropriation of Kuhnian thoughts by the so-called Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge is appropriate. In order to answer the question of appropriate appropriation, Kuhn’s and the Strong Programme’s stances on two “isms” are compared: relativism and naturalism. It is shown that the Strong Programme clearly goes beyond Kuhn and breaks more radically with philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, there are also philosophical continuities and similarities.

I discuss the difference and the connections between Kant’s notions of cognition (Erkenntnis) and knowledge (Wissen). Unlike knowledge, cognition is a representational state which need not have the propositional structure of a judgments. Even cognitions that have such a structure need not coincide with knowledge, because they might rather have the doxastic status of opinion or faith, or they might be false (whereas knowledge is a certain recognition of truth). I argue that while Kant distinguishes between many different species of (...) cognition, he uses the term ‘knowledge’ univocally across his theoretical and practical philosophy. All knowledge is based upon some kind of cognition that provides the sufficient objective, certain ground for a knowing assent to a proposition. However, not all knowledge must be based upon the demanding type of cognition that is central to Kant’s overall argument in the first Critique, which requires a synthesis of concepts and sensible intuition. We have a lot of determinate knowledge, including knowledge that we possess transcendental freedom of will, that is based upon purely conceptual practical cognition. We can also have some indeterminate philosophical knowledge (e.g. knowledge that there are non-sensible, noumenal beings) that is based upon purely conceptual theoretical cognition. (shrink)

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)