Brains

Conference/CFA: "Thinking With Hands, Eyes and Things"

Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies
1st International Avant-Conference 2013

8-10 November 2013, Torun, Poland

The claim that both the body and the environment are involved in
our experience of the world is a banal claim. However, the point is
what a great role in our mental processes is played by the whole body as
well as its interactions with the environment. Cognition may involve
integration with our tools, and we may even delegate some of our
thinking to the environment. According to situated cognition and
extended mind approaches, humans use elements of their environment as
external components of cognitive processes or as means enabling them to
reduce the complexity of the cognitive problems they face. The theory of
affordances connects observers and environments in the act of cognition
and cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective. Some researchers
treat immune system as one of cognitive systems. Proponents of embodied
cognitive science claim that aspects of the body beyond the brain play a
significant role in cognition. Conversely, there are many critical
voices in answer to the statements above. They say that
cognitive-scientific results do not enough support thesis of embodied,
distributed, extended and situated cognition. According to those
critics, nonneuronal body and elements of environment play a peripheral
role in cognitive processing.

Thinking with the body/environment – or thinking in the
body/environment? Is the question appropriate or simply misleading in
the second decade of 21st century?

We invite you to participate in the conference
devoted to extra-neural aspects of cognition as well as controversies
related to them.

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Key speakers: David Kirsh (USCD), Anthony Chemero (Cincinnati)

Deadline for abstract submission: 14 July 2013

Further details here; abstract submission form here.

16. December 2012 by John Schwenkler
Categories: Conferences | 2 comments