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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).