Download Situating the Embodied Mind in the Landscape of Affordances Dr

Situating the Embodied Mind in the Landscape of Affordances
Dr. Erik Rietveld
University of Amsterdam
Dept. of Philosophy/ILLC/AMC/Brain&Cognition
[email protected]
http://erikrietveld.wordpress.com/about-2/
Humans share with other animals a skillful responsiveness to possibilities for action provided by the
environment or ‘affordances’ (Gibson, 1979; Chemero, 2009). We have recently argued that
affordances are best understood as relations between an aspect of the environment and abilities
available in a ‘form of life’ (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014, Ecological Psychology; cf. Wittgenstein, 1953).
Crucially, the landscape of affordances in our human form of life is very rich thanks to the variety of
our practices and abilities.
It is generally assumed that the field of enactive or embodied cognitive science has sensible things to
say about ‘lower’ cognition, such as grasping a cup or riding a bike, but not about ‘higher’ cognition,
such as building a house. I use our conceptual work on affordances as well as insights from skillful
action in everyday life and expertise of architects to develop a notion of ‘skilled intentionality’. The aim
is to show how, using this philosophical notion, enactive/embodied cognitive science will be able to
deal with (at least certain central kinds of) what is traditionally called ‘higher’ cognition.
The rich landscape of affordances includes possibilities for actions that are traditionally considered as
instances of ‘higher’ cognition: e.g. possibilities for social interaction, for architectural design, and even
affordances for making a correct propositional knowledge claim about the world. For example, given
our practices and the abilities available in it, the color of the letters on my screen affords judging
correctly that these letters are black. I will present research on social cognition in architectural practice
and show how our concept of skilled intentionality (Rietveld, 2012a/b; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2012;
Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014), understood as skillful responsiveness to a whole field of affordances,
substantially increases the reach of the paradigm of embodied cognitive science.
The notion of skilled intentionality has both theoretical and practical significance. We have already
applied it successfully in medical practice for understanding the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on
patients’ subjective experience (Rietveld, De Haan & Denys, 2013, BBS; De Haan, Rietveld, Stokfhof
& Denys, 2013, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience).