Abstract
The term Methodological Cognitivism was introduced in the late 90s when cognitivism was dominated by the information-processing psychology approach. The model of the mind was of the Cartesian type, and the analogy was that of the digital Turing machine. The MC program was, however, open to incorporate within it the developments of neurocognitive sciences and embodied cognition. A dimension of wide embodied cognition of action incorporates both the causal role of the body and the causal variables of the extended, embedded, and enactive dimension of individual action. Ultimately, it is an Embodied Individualism that structurally includes the environmental and social dimensions in individual action. The concept of social affordances and the individual enaction towards them demonstrates how there is a horizontal relationship and recursive interaction between individual action and the social environment. The embedded dimension of the action in the sense of the situational context that shapes it is another concept that expresses the founding social dimension of the action. Finally, the extended dimension of cognition, which is not limited only to what is contained in the individual’s skull, but is present in all mnemonic supports and external computing devices of an artificial but also social human type.
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Notes
- 1.
The EI might have a conventional approach to the use of social concepts. They may be judged pragmatically useful tools for social explanation and prediction even if they do not correspond to real entities. There are other similar examples in science and philosophy. For example, according to the monist approach in the philosophy of mind mental phenomena and concepts such as pain, hunger, and fear are useful fictions for research and communication, but the only real entity is the neural structure. The neurocomputational approach (Anderson & Rosenfeld, 1988; Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992) has the goal to substitute the mental language with neural language but until then, the mental language may be used among neurocognitivist scientists.
- 2.
While the main task of logic is to define the consistency (or inconsistency) of ideas (sentences) and the definition of inference in the erothetic logic, the definition of questions, and rules have to ascertain whether a sentence can be conceived as an answer to a given question.
- 3.
Because assertions are linguistic entities whereas causal explanation focuses on real facts that may or not linguistically represented.
- 4.
In other words by empirically testing the results of changes of a fact (the cause) on the other connected fact (the effect).
- 5.
An example of bridge law between social laws and psychological laws are: imitation heuristics drive the individual to imitate the crowd; the imitation of the crowd generates social phenomena as flock behavior in stock market; flock behavior in the stock market causes financial bubbles.
- 6.
Indeed, the identity is not token-token or type-token, but type-type (Bhargava, 1992, pp. 68–78). Furthermore, this microreductionist individualism offers fundamental, rock-bottom explanations, whose essential nature is decided—by convention—according to the pragmatic Factor K mentioned earlier with reference to van Fraassen.
- 7.
To do this, however, we must assume the existence of social laws and social properties, the object of the reduction. If this type of assumption corresponds to an affirmation of the epistemological reality of social laws, this would not be accepted by psychologism because, according to it, only the laws of the human mind are real. On the contrary, according to the non-reductionist option, what can be explained is only the particular social event and the explanation is based on laws and the starting conditions of individuals and their properties.
- 8.
For example the imitation heuristics.
- 9.
Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian conditioning) refers to a learning procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g., food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g., a bell). It also refers to the learning process that results from this pairing, through, which the neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response (e.g., salivation) that is usually similar to the one elicited by the potent stimulus. Classical conditioning is distinct from operant conditioning (also called instrumental conditioning), through which the strength of voluntary behavior is modified by reinforcement or punishment. However, classical conditioning can affect operant conditioning in various ways; notably, classically conditioned stimuli may serve to reinforce operant responses. Classical conditioning was first studied in detail by Ivan Pavlov, who conducted experiments with dogs and published his findings in 1897.
- 10.
Economic incentives can be both paternalistic and libertarian. The difference with nudging lies in the fact that they rely on an abstract model of rationality that does not correspond to the real human decision-maker. Moreover, paradoxically the ideal aim of economic incentives is to find the exact amount of gains or losses that would lead the rational citizen to choose the option that is preferable for the government. From this perspective, the libertarian element seems rather weak.
- 11.
The theoretical support for this model is varied. In the philosophy of mind, according to the functionalist approach (Fodor, 1975; Putnam, 1975), mental states are functional to the brain in the same way that the states generated in the computer by the software are functional to its hardware. This is the position of “Dualism of Properties” (in its version of “anomalous monism” see Davidson, 1970; in its version of “biological naturalism” see Searle, 1983) which supports the theory that mental activities described by cognitive psychology are different from those of any kind of hardware, for example, from those of the brain, capable of implementing them. This is the theory of the multirealization of mental properties by various types of physical substrate inspired by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor.
- 12.
In another metaphor, the “mental sandwich” introduced by Susan Hurley (1998), the cognitive processes are the tasty, protein-laden internal part of the sandwich, while the sensory and motor parts are the two tasteless external slices of bread.
- 13.
In the sense that mental representations are the product of a translation from a language of sensory modalities to one independent of the senses, therefore a modal.
- 14.
A classic example of pre-adaptation is constituted by the feathers of birds, evolved from dinosaurs presumably for thermal insulation purposes and which then proved to be very useful for flight; or the primitive lung that evolved from the swim bladder of fish. In the human species, the laryngeal folds, which appeared to prevent the regurgitation of food from entering the lungs during vomiting, were subsequently co-opted to produce sounds and transformed into the vocal cords, while maintaining their original function.
- 15.
Neuroscientists have baptized this reuse of motor programs disconnected from motor output with various names such as “neural exploitation,” “neural reuse,” and “neural recycling.”
- 16.
For example, refer to the characteristics of the structure of the environment introduced by Gigerenzer and colleagues (Gigerenzer & Gassmaier, 2011) such as uncertainty, redundancy, variability, number of alternatives, and sample size. These characteristics derive from symbolically deconstructed empirical phenomena that are manipulated as cues with statistical meaning (tallied, weighted, sequenced, and ordered).
- 17.
- 18.
Weak EC issues from the Classic Computational model of cognitivism. Goldman and Vignemont (2009) believe that the body plays an important role through the brain representations of its states. Every body representation is formatted in the brain ruling out any role of anatomy and body activity (actions and postures). Such B-formats are representations and processes that represent or respond to the body, such as perception of a bodily movement, and they are representations and processes that affect the body, such as motor commands.
- 19.
Goldman and Vignemont (2009) believe that the B-formats are purely internal to the brain and they have no interest in understanding the body interacting with and embedded in the environment. From this point of view, their weak EC is also narrow.
- 20.
For example, in a recent interview with Corriere della Sera on 17 April 2022, the Italian downhill champion Sofia Goggia stated how the vibrations she felt on the sole of her foot during the descent were essential for her to understand both the slope of the track itself and the speed and fluidity of her skiing. This information generated postural adjustments that had the aim of increasing the speed and fluidity of sliding skis.
- 21.
Hubert Dreyfus (1972) was right when, in 1972, he criticized AI because of its disembodied dimension. Without the body, the mind is not able to work and to feel to be situated in the world (“dasein”): “Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet. This system of relations […] makes it possible to discover objects when they are needed in our home or our world” (Dreyfus, 1972, p. 172).
- 22.
Current AI, on the other hand, lacks any umwelt. The environment of these machines is composed of the data they obtain to adapt to their parameters. But a deep neural network is not even aware that an environment exists. Alpha Zero can beat any human in chess or Go, but it does not know that it is playing a game called chess, or that there is a human opponent playing against it (Gigerenzer, 2022).
- 23.
I thank a reviewer for his/her remark on the enactive approach of Hayek: “Hayek liked Merleau-Ponty’s book The Structure of Behavior because he considered it very similar to his book The Sensory Order. Hayek’s book, whose first draft was written in the 20’s, is regarded by scholars like Gerald Edelman, Joaquin Fuster, Jean Petitot and Barry Smith like the first proto-connectionist theory of mind.” I do not agree that his theory of mind entails the validity of the interpretative approach of MI. The validity is endangered by Hayek’s refusal of the embodied cognition explanation of social action.
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Viale, R. (2023). Explaining Social Action by Embodied Cognition: From Methodological Cognitivism to Embodied Individualism. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41508-1_24
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