Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) and Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (University of Granada). It is based on their chapter “ Embodied, embedded, enactive, extended… and exclusionary? Toward an inclusive E-Cognition for cognitive diversity, ” published in Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , which explores how 4E approaches can be made more inclusive of neurodiversity.  Víctor Fernández Castro (University of Granada) If, following Alice Crary and the political turn in analytic philosophy, one takes the conceptual and methodological to be political, then 4E Mental Health concepts express a range of political commitments. Some of these merit special attention in debates about how cognitive diversity and disability should be understood and recognized. In our chapter at Analytic Philosophy and 4E Cognition , this is exactly our goal: to critically examine 4E Mental Health from the lens of the Neurodiversity movement and its academic branch, the neurodiver...

This post is by Enrico Petracca (University of Bologna), who recently published a paper entitled ‘A cognition paradigm clash: Simon, situated cognition and theinterpretation of bounded rationality’ in the Journal of Economic Methodology. Enrico is involved in a project called ‘ embodied rationality ’, and pursued with his colleague Antonio Mastrogiorgio (University of Chieti-Pescara). The project aims to integrate the notion of embodied cognition within the framework of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality has been a hard-to-digest notion in economics and the other social sciences since its introduction by Herbert A. Simon in the middle of the last century. How could ‘rationality’ be ‘bounded’? And – as a typically related concern – would this imply that social sciences should abandon any normative horizon, giving the way to an unappealable ‘irrationality’?

This post is by Alex Miller Tate (pictured below), PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His work investigates the nature of mental illness and emotion, using insights from research into Situated Cognition. His thesis examines the role that situated theories of cognition and emotion can play in explaining and describing various symptoms common in major depression. Anhedonia is a core symptom of many Psychiatric conditions, most commonly presenting in patients diagnosed with a depressive disorder or schizophrenia ( Oyebode, 2014 ). It is most commonly defined as an absent or diminished ability to experience pleasure from participating in previously enjoyable activities ( Treadway & Zald, 2011: 538 ). As an example, somebody who used to enjoy playing football and listening to David Bowie, but no longer enjoys either of these things, may be said to be exhibiting Anhedonia. One popular theory of Anhedonia, call it sustainability theory, argues that it is characteris...