10 found
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  1. Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference.Inês Hipólito & Thomas van Es - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind. Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, (...)
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  2.  48
    Scientific practice as ecological-enactive co-construction.Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, Thomas van Es & Inês Hipólito - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-33.
    Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive (...)
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  3.  78
    Autism as Gradual Sensorimotor Difference: From Enactivism to Ethical Inclusion.Thomas van Es & Jo Bervoets - 2021 - Topoi 41 (2):395-407.
    Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalities. Indeed, in a state space description, this can be taken as a skewing of sensorimotor variables that influences social interaction and so also enculturation and habituation. We argue that this construal leads to autism being treated on a (...)
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  4.  30
    A universal ethology challenge to the free energy principle: species of inference and good regulators.Thomas van Es & Michael D. Kirchhoff - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-24.
    The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesian inference. According to the FEP, therefore, inference is at the explanatory base of biology and cognition. In this paper, we discuss a specific challenge to this inferential formulation of adaptive (...)
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  5.  35
    Between pebbles and organisms: weaving autonomy into the Markov blanket.Thomas van Es & Michael D. Kirchhoff - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6623-6644.
    The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework can capture anything specific to (...)
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  6.  43
    Minimizing prediction errors in predictive processing: from inconsistency to non-representationalism.Thomas van Es - 2020 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (5):997-1017.
    Predictive processing is an increasingly popular approach to cognition, perception and action. It says that the brain is essentially a hierarchical prediction machine. It is typically construed in a representationalist and inferentialist fashion so that the brain makes contentful inferences on the basis of representational models. In this paper, I argue that the predictive processing framework is inconsistent with this epistemic position. In particular, I argue that the combination of hierarchical modeling, contentful inferentialism and representationalism entail an internal inconsistency. Specifically, (...)
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  7.  11
    Off the beaten path: perception in enactivism and the realism-idealism question.Thomas van Es - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-26.
    Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involving, and isn’t realist because it emphasizes the agent’s role in shaping the world through our own historical, bodily activity. More generally, I argue that the question (...)
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  8.  26
    Free-energy pragmatics: Markov blankets don't prescribe objective ontology, and that's okay.Inês Hipólito & Thomas van Es - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e198.
    We target the ontological and epistemological ramifications of the proposed distinction between Friston and Pearl blankets. We emphasize the need for empirical testing next to computational modeling. A peculiar aspect of the free energy principle (FEP) is its purported support of radically opposed ontologies of the mind. In our view, the objective ontological aspiration itself should be rejected for a pragmatic instrumentalist view.
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  9.  9
    Co-constructing Markov blankets: tricky solutions.Thomas van Es & Inês Hipólito - unknown
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  10.  20
    The embedded view, its critics, and a radically non-representational solution.Thomas van Es - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 1):195-211.
    Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, the argument against explanatory exclusionism, the (...)
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