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Poster: Flash Talks & Poster Session & Coffee
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Explaining: A normative account 1University of Warsaw, Faculty of Philosophy, Poland; 2Jagiellonian University, Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Poland From the origins of black holes to the flow of electorate between presidential candidates and the rise in popularity of K-pop — the world is complicated. And yet, we do our best to understand it. In some cases, each of us tries to do it on our own. But with the majority of phenomena, we either need to rely on others willing and able to explain things to us, or we are the ones offering explanations. Whenever we do that, we take part in the practice of explaining. We argue that, while the practice of explaining is unified by its function — dissemination of understanding (Lipton 2004; Grimm 2010) — there are different ways in which we can engage in it. We can do it by offering what we call a minimal explanation, a default explanation, or a full-blown explanation. Each of them is appropriate in different contexts and comes with a set of relevant expectations. Moreover, each of them is guided by a specific norm. We start by characterizing what we call the minimal explanation. A natural initial assumption is that to explain something, one needs — minimally — to understand it (Achinstein 1983). This is reflected in the following norm, which we call UNDERSTAND, or (U) for short: (U) One should explain p only if one understands p. We believe that (U) demarcates an entry point to the practice of explaining. Even though we consider it rather uncontroversial, we briefly discuss two cases that may challenge (U) as the norm of minimal explanation. The first one is the case of a substitute teacher, who teaches evolution despite not understanding it, simply by reading a chapter from a biology book. We argue that the teacher does not explain — they serve merely as a proxy transmitting the explanation offered by the author of the book (cf. Ludwig 2020). The second case is one in which someone explains something that they barely understand. They have some of the facts right, and they grasp some connections between them, but they are also wrong with a lot of things. In this case — we argue — the explainer satisfies (U). This is because understanding is gradable (Kvanvig 2003; Elgin 2007), and it would be unrealistic to demand that one should explain p only if one fully understands p — if that were the case, no one would, for example, be in a position to explain the physics of black holes. Fulfilling (U) is enough to participate in the practice of explaining. However, simply understanding the subject matter is insufficient in most contexts. Think about a university professor invited to a local high school to lecture on the formation of crystals. She has an excellent and in-depth understanding of this phenomenon, in fact, she is one of the leading scholars in the field. Unfortunately, she is not able to adjust the explanation to her audience. Most students are already lost at the third slide, and nobody manages to follow the whole lecture. This case illustrates that we are typically expected to adjust or customize the explanation to our audience. Hence, we propose the following UNDERSTAND&CUSTOMIZE (U&C) norm of default explanation: (U&C) One should explain p only if (i) one understands p, and (ii) the means one uses are customized to the audience. Notice that the customization of the means would not always equal making the material easier and more accessible (cf. discussion on the scientific and expert testimony, e.g., De Regt 2017; Gerken 2022). If the same university professor presents her work to other scientists, she may fulfill the norm by assuming that her audience possesses a great amount of background knowledge and skipping over most of the material to get straight to her novel point. Many cases of online explanations, such as YouTube videos, pre-recorded lectures, educational podcasts, etc., are crafted for the intended audience (e.g., interested and motivated non-experts) and thus fulfill (U&C). Even though, in those cases, there is no interaction between the explainer and the recipient of the explanation, default explanations often succeed in disseminating understanding. In many contexts, however, we expect the explainer to be additionally attentive to the audience in real-time. Think about a competent teacher who understands evolution and explains it to her students in a way customized to the level of their background knowledge but who does not monitor whether the student’s understanding increases or not. Clearly, despite fulfilling (U&C), the teacher would fail to participate in the practice of explaining in the way expected given their profession. What we expect good teachers to do is to offer what we call the full-blown explanation, governed by the norm UNDERSTAND&CUSTOMIZE&MONITOR (U&C&M). (U&C&M) One should explain p only if (i) one understands p, (ii) the means one uses are customized to the audience, and (iii) one monitors the audience’s understanding of p. Monitoring is pivotal for tracking the increase of the audience’s understanding and identifying what information would be most helpful to introduce at any given moment. We will show that monitoring often happens naturally — explainers do it automatically (e.g., Vélez et al. 2023), and is widespread — there is a variety of educational techniques and theories, like the scaffolding theory, that are intended to ensure successful monitoring (e.g., Reiser & Tabak 2014). Only if we take all these ways of participating in the practice of explaining into account will we be able to spell out what is expected from explainers in different situations. As a result, we will be able to tell good explainers from bad ones by assessing whether they fulfill the norm and thus offer explanations (either minimal, default, or full-blown) appropriate for a given context. References Achinstein, P. (1983). The Nature of Explanation. OUP. De Regt, H. W. (2017). Understanding Scientific Understanding. OUP. Elgin, C. Z. (2007). Understanding and the Facts. Philosophical Studies, 132(1), 33–42. Gerken, M., (2022). Scientific Testimony: Its roles in science and society. OUP. Grimm, S. R. (2010). The Goal of Explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 41(4), 337–344. Kvanvig, J. L. (2003). The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. CUP. Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to the Best Explanation. Routledge. Ludwig, K. (2020). Proxy Assertion. In S. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion (pp. 305–326). OUP. Reiser, B. J., & Tabak, I. (2014). Scaffolding. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 44–62). CUP. Vélez, N. et al. (2023). Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners’ beliefs. PNAS, 120(22). Seweryna Łuszczewska-Romahnowa on Clarity University of Ostrava, Czech Republic Philosophy has always been considered to be an obscure and opaque discipline, full of ambiguous and complicated constructions. However, many contemporary philosophers stress the importance of a clear style in both philosophy and science and have a negative view of those who fail to adhere to this criterion (cf. Będkowski 2019b; Buekens & Boudry 2015). This claim is not new in philosophy. Already Heraclitus was called "obscure" by his contemporaries because of his unclear expressions (cf. Joll 2009, 85). In my talk, I will focus on the demand for a clear philosophical style formulated by the philosophers of the so-called Lvov-Warsaw School. In particular, I will discuss the reception of this demand by Seweryna Łuszczewska-Romahnowa. Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School, stressed that philosophy should be presented clearly. The clear and comprehensible presentation of philosophy was also one of the reasons for his success as an educator (see Będkowski 2019a, 90-91). He also presented his views on clear and unclear philosophical style in his eponymous essay "O jasnym i niejasnym stylu filozoficznym" [On Clear and Unclear Philosophical Style] (see Twardowski 1919), which became the Lvov-Warsaw School's manifesto. However, there was neither a generally accepted definition of clarity nor a consensus on how unclear philosophical texts should be treated (see Brożek et al. 2020, 194). While the logical branch of the school, especially Jan Łukasiewicz and Stanisław Leśniewski took a radical stance on unclear philosophical style, i.e. they rejected all texts that they considered obscure, other members of the school pointed out the disadvantages of this position (see Czeżowski 1969). Łuszczewska-Romahnowa was one of them. Jacek Jadacki (2018, 26-27) presented several perspectives from which to consider textual clarity and unclarity. First, a text may be unclear because it deals with a complicated philosophical (or scientific) issue that cannot be clearly presented. Second, a text may be unclear because the author himself is not thinking clearly. Thirdly, an unclear text may result from the author thinking clearly but failing to articulate what he is thinking. However, Jadacki does not mention a case that is discussed in detail by Buekens and Boudry (2015). The possibility is that the problem is not too complex, the author thinks clearly and would be able to present his or her ideas in this way, but for various malicious reasons decides to write his or her text in an unclear way. This latter approach is called obscurantism. The members of the Lvov-Warsaw School did not deal with it. However, I would like to use the example of Łuszczewska-Romahnowa's approach to show that their approach to the question of clarity in philosophy can also contribute to the current discussion of obscurantism. Łuszczewska-Romahnowa introduced the question of clarity several times in her work. The focus of my presentation is on two of them, namely the question of clarity in Twardowski's work and the question of ambiguity in the language of science (Łuszczewska-Romahnowa 1967; 1977; 1948). On the one hand, Łuszczewska-Romahnowa (1967, 160-161) appreciated the clarity of style in philosophy and pedagogy and considered the demand for clarity as one of the great contributions of the Lvov-Warsaw School to Polish philosophy. On the other hand, she stressed that the quick discarding of obscure texts could do more harm than good. She argued that in philosophy (as in science) even vaguely formulated theories can yield valuable results (see Łuszczewska-Romahnowa 1948/1979, 153-155; 1967, 161-162). As I have already mentioned, the members of the Lvov-Warsaw School did not concern obscurantism in the discussion over clarity. They did not reflect on the possibility that the author wrote obscurely on purpose; rather, following Twardowski, they argued that an obscure philosophical style is often a sign of obscure thinking. And since, according to them, obscurely thinking authors do not deserve to have the reader bother with their texts, they refused to read them. Yet their practice of avoiding unclearly written texts may have acted as an antidote to the dangers of obscurantism, both in the texts they wrote and in their acceptance and appreciation of the texts of other philosophers. However, Łuszczewska-Romahnowa's critique points out that it is not always wise to rush to dismiss all that is unclear and ambiguous. It also reminds us that an unclear style is not always a defect and that accusing an opponent of obscurantism should always be thoughtfully considered. Bibliography
An alternative disease model of addiction University of Macau, Macau S.A.R. (China)
In the realm of psychology and neuroscience, addiction has long been conceptualized as a neurobiological disease characterized by compulsive drug use. In a philosophical viewpoint, it needs a more nuanced characterization of the phenomenon of addiction. Alan Leshner once proposed a famous account and claimed that addiction is primarily a brain disease resulting from the long-term effects of drug use on brain structure and function (Leshner, 1997). Leshner’s account starts the discussion also among philosophers, for instance, Neil Levy responded to this account directly and claimed, “Addiction is not a brain disease (and it matters).” (Levy, 2013) This article aims to delve into the debate surrounding these viewpoints, examining them through the lenses of the compulsion model of addiction and the choice model of addiction. Additionally, it explores the current addiction models through the framework of theory of mind and suggests adopting an alternative disease model—an externalist perspective on mental illness. 2. Brain disease and non – brain disease debate Psychologist Alan Leshner, an important figure in addiction research, put forth the disease account of addiction. His main thesis of addiction is as such: addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disorder characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use. (Leshner, 1997,45) He supported his thesis with empirical evidence of neuroimaging, highlighting both acute drug use and the long-term drug use alter brain function. This results in distinct difference between addicted brain and nonaddicted brain. Therefore, Leshner argues that addiction is a brain disease. Meanwhile, Leshner emphasized on the compulsive feature in addiction. He argues that addicts can’t control their behaviors just like schizophrenics cannot control their hallucinations and delusions; Parikinson’s patients cannot control their trembling. However, Leshner's viewpoint faces philosophical scrutiny regarding the classification of addiction as a disease solely based on brain differences. His thesis received criticism by Levy in a paper entitled “Addiction is not a brain disease (and it matters)”. Levy argues that addiction is a brain disease only under two premises. First, if the neural correlates in addiction are pathological. Second, if the pathology is sufficient for the person to have a disease. (Levy, 2013) Drawing from philosophical accounts of dysfunction and with the support of neuropsychological evidence, Levy argues that it is true that addiction involves a neuropsychological dysfunction, it does not inherently qualify as a brain disease. Levy also questions whether addiction sufficiently impairs an individual's agency functioning. He argues that the former heavy drinker or drug taker who has been abstinent for many years need not be suffering from any impairment, and most people addicted to caffeine do not exhibit significant impairment. If Levy’s argument holds true --- that the neural correlates of addiction do not necessarily lead to impairment, then addiction cannot be classified as a brain disease in the manner proposed by Leshner. Unlike conditions like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease, which entail profound defects in rationality and agency, addiction, according to Levy, may involve deficits in self-control mechanisms but does not necessarily result in significant impairments of agency or rationality. 3. Alternative disease model The controversy between Leshner and Levy stems from their adherence to different models of addiction, the compulsion model and the choice model. The compulsion model posits that addicts are not capable of freely acting upon their behaviors due to compulsion. Leshner is a prominent advocate of this perspective. Proponents of the choice model view addiction as a voluntary behavior and an act of choice. Levy contends that addiction arises when individuals lack the cognitive resources to resist temptations, suggesting that addicts still exercise control over their actions based on their judgments. (Levy, 2014) This conflict between Leshner and Levy is rooted in differing metaphysical perspectives—reductionistic versus dualistic. If our mind is identical and entirely determined by the neural processes in our brain, then compulsion in addiction is reducible to changes in brain function. If mind is a separate entity from the body as dualists would argue, then people still act freely in their action. Addicts can make choices based on their judgments. In this regard, this debate over whether addiction is a brain disease encompasses two distinct aspects:: firstly, whether addiction is a disease of the brain , meaning whether it can be fundamentally characterized as a neurochemical condition. Secondly, whether it fits the classification as a disease . Levy's counterargument seems to conflate the notions of disease and illness, particularly in a dualistic perspective where brain disease does not necessarily equate to mental illness. He argues that addiction is not a brain disease do not mean that addiction is not a disease at all. To be more specifically, he cannot reject that addiction is a mental illness. An externalist model in psychology and psychiatry proposes that a person’s mental health depends on social and cultural factors, not solely on brain-related activity. Addicts may experience severe anxiety and depression, leading them to self-medicate with substances (Khantzian, 1997) Moreover, many addicts endure socio-economic challenges and poor mental health (Pickard, 2019) These findings advocate for adopting an externalist perspective rather than the traditional dichotomy of brain disease versus non-brain disease models of addiction. 4. Conclusion I began by presenting the debate about whether addiction is a brain disease, as articulated by psychologist Alan Leshner and philosopher Neil Levy. Leshner's proposition aligns with the compulsion model of addiction, categorizing it as a brain disease. Levy's perspective falls under the choice model, suggesting addiction involves voluntary behavior. The crux of these models lies in the question of whether addicts possess free control over their actions. Moreover, their disagreement stems from opposing metaphysical viewpoints: reductionistic versus dualistic. Despite disagreeing with the idea that addiction is solely a brain disease, an alternative perspective may consider addiction as a mental illness without entirely reducing it to brain circuitry. I argue that the externalist perspective can be an alternative disease model of addiction, which emphasizes the role of social, cultural, and environmental factors alongside neurological processes in shaping addictive behaviors.
Leshner Alan. (1997) Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters. Science. Oct 3;278 Levy N. (2013) Addiction is Not a Brain Disease (and it Matters). Front Psychiatry. Apr 11 Levy, Neil. (2014) Addiction and Compulsion in O’Conner, Timothy ; Sandis Constantine (Eds) A companion to philosophy of action, A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication, 267-273 Pickard, Hanna. (2018). THE PUZZLE OF ADDICTION. In Pickard, Ahmed (Eds) Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction Routledge Khantzian, E. J. (1997) “The self-medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: a reconsideration and recent application”, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 4(5): 231–244. Structures of Inner Discourse: A Strategy Based Approach University of Salzburg, Austria People can do a lot of things by talking. They can use speech to narrate, deliberate, plan, reason or reflect. People can also do a lot of things by talking to themselves. They can use inner speech to narrate, deliberate, plan, reason or reflect. Putting it this way, there seems to be a symmetry between some social and psychological processen. An explanation for this, first formulated by the psychologist Lev Vygotksy (1986), is that higher-order thought results from the internalization of social interactions. In recent years, internalization has been used to explain various cognitive processes, including meta-cognition, reasoning and planning (Frankish, 2018; Kompa & Mueller, 2022; Gauker, 2018). However, what exactly is internalized has not been spelled out in detail. In the literature on inner speech, it is usually held that what is internalized is a kind of dialogical structure. One proposal for such a structure is presented by Fernyhough (1996). On his account, fully internalized inner dialogue involves flexible coordination of multiple perspectives within an individual. This coordination need not involve the same semantic and syntactic elements as overt speech and as a result, inner speech can appear to be unlike out-loud conversation, though underlying cognitive processes remain dialogical. A problem with this account is that it is unclear how these different perspectives are represented, and how they are coordinated if not by means of conducting a fully worded inner conversation. Kompa & Mueller (2022) present an alternative account. They interpret inner dialogue as a looping structure that emerges through engaging both speech production and comprehension. This structure is most effectively engaged when an individual adheres to pragmatic principles that govern interpersonal dialogue and is useful for deliberative thinking and reasoning. Contrary to Fernyhough, this account holds that a kind of ‘to and fro’ is essential for these functions of inner speech. To the extent that any thinking process engages both speech production and comprehension mechanisms, it may be said to be dialogical. The problem with this is that speech production and comprehension are presumably also engaged in producing a complex monologue, which means that there is nothing specifically dialogical about the mechanism they propose. In addition to these problems, the notion of internalized dialogue may not be saying very much to start with. Dialogue is a broad notion that includes many types of discourse and its open-ended structure may not be sufficient to explain specific types of higher-order thinking. In order to get a better grip on the types of structure involved in inner speech, I borrow some ideas from the literature on discourse structure and planning. With these ideas, I argue, it becomes possible to describe some functions of inner speech in more detail. This is important because at a basic level, dialogue does not have much structure apart from some form of to and fro. Moreover, this structure can often be removed without much effect. Take the following example: A1: Who won? B1: Bob won, but he wasn’t happy about it. A2: Why not? B2: He thought he should have won by a bigger margin. A3: What did he do afterwards? B3: He went into the dressing room and sulked for about half an hour. Here, A1, A2 and A3 can be removed, turning it into a monologue without loss of information or coherence. This is because the structure of any particular interaction is determined by the strategies employed by interlocutors to achieve individual or collective goals (Carlson, 1983), and those strategies may or may not be represented dialogically. Therefore, strictly speaking it is goal-directed strategies, rather than dialogical structures per se, that explain the higher-order functions of inner speech. In 1), the goal is to establish a general narrative of what happened, and this may include a broad range of information. As a result, what is relevant is that Bob won, but also the contrastive information that he was unhappy about it, the reason for his unhappiness and the sequence of events that followed. Note also that the second and third question-answer pairs can be swapped round without loss of coherence. Compare this with the following adapted from Grosz (1981): E0: First you have to remove the flywheel. F1: How do I remove the flywheel? E1: First, loosen the two allen-head set screws holding it to the shaft, then pull it off. F2: OK… I can only find one. Where's the other one? E2: On the hub of the flywheel. F3: That's the one I found. Where's the other one? E3: About ninety degrees around the hub from the first one. In 2) swapping round any of the question-answer pairs would render the sequence incoherent. This is because the interaction is driven by a plan that includes strictly ordered goals and subgoals, which results in a more hierarchical structure. Because of these differences in structure, I argue that an explanation of inner speech function should be based on the goal-directed strategies employed, rather than on general aspects of communication like those referenced by Fernyhough (1996) and Kompa & Mueller (2022). I illustrate this by discussing several real-life examples of private speech being used for action planning, reasoning and narration, and showing how their structure is determined by goals and strategies. References -Carlson, L. (1983). Dialogue Games. D. Reidel Publishing Company. -Fernyhough, C. (1996). The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology, 14(1), 47–62. -Frankish, K. (2018). Inner speech and outer thought. In Langland-Hassan, P., & Vicente, A. (eds.). Inner speech : new voices. (pp. 221-243). Oxford University Press. -Gauker, C. (2018). Inner speech as the internalization of outer speech. In Langland-Hassan, P., & Vicente, A. (eds.). Inner speech : new voices. (pp. 53-77) . Oxford University Press. -Grosz, B. (1981). Focussing and description in natural language dialogues. In Joshi, A. Webber, B. & Sag, I. (eds.) (pp. 84-105). Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press. -Kompa, N., & Mueller, J. (2022). Inner speech as a cognitive tool—or what is the point of talking to oneself? Philosophical Psychology, 1–24. What Distinguishes Online and Offline Hate Speech? A Transformativist View on Online Abuse Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic Recently, the question of how hate speech differs in offline and online spaces has been raised in applied philosophy of language. One of the main contributions to the debate has been provided by Michael Barnes (2023), who has distinguished between two types of hate speech. Barnes speaks of: 1. Collective subordinating speech acts, characterized by crowd anonymity, which gain authority as a result of the active efforts and mutual solidarity of the hate speech authors (mutual quotes, likes, hastag sharing, language imitation). 2. Individual subordinating speech acts that gain authority passively, through accommodation, i.e. only by not being blocked or opposed to. The first type, according to Barnes, characterizes typically online hate speech: an example is a hate campaign on the X network, where verbal attacks on LGBT people accumulate into a single linguistic entity causing a specific harm. The second type characterizes typically offline hate speech: an example is an offensive statement about LGBT people made by a politician during an election rally. Barnes’ distinction is an important step towards understanding online hate speech insofar as it shows the role of the collective: as Barnes accurately points out, hate speech in the online space is not only individual speech, but thanks to the technical aspects of social media, it can also produce specific speech acts of a group nature. In my article, however, I will show that this conception must be substantially supplemented or modified. More specifically, I will argue that Barnes’ conception can be described as additivist: on the additivist view, a collective subordinating act is added to individual subordinating acts as a new linguistic act. This new act is qualitatively different from individual speech acts and does not transform their quality. In contrast, I will defend a conception that I will label transformativist: on the transformativist view, when a collective subordinating act is constituted, not only a new linguistic act appears, but the whole linguistic environment is transformed, i.e. individual subordinating acts retroactively acquire new properties. I will focus on the two main properties thus acquired: 1. Individual subordinating act is not only part of, but also a concrete representation, avatar or embodiment of a collective subordinating act. The fact that individual acts are representations, not just parts of a subordinating act, intensifies their subordinating power. 2. Once a collective subordinating act is established, the individual subordinating acts do not have the same authority. Some of them take on more authority insofar as they more significantly determine the dynamics of the entire collective subordinating act. This concerns, for example, the individual acts that introduce a higher level of aggression or a new type of offensive vocabulary further accepted in the collective. My argument for the transformativist conception of online hate speech rests on the assumption that any account of this phenomenon should be able to explain for four facts associated with this type of speech. I refer to these phenomena as (i) plurality of effective means, (ii) rational response of recipients, (iii) double harm, (iv) and the dynamics of online hate speech. The plurality of effective means. The authority of online hate speech is routinely undermined both by means of restricting collective or group aspects of hate speech (limiting the possibility of sharing, blocking hashtags, restricting certain types of vocabulary) and by means of targeting individual speech (countering the prejudices or misinformation supporting hate speech, drawing attention to the consequences of hate speech, etc.). The rational response of the recipients. Despite the collective nature of hate attacks in the online environment, we often consider the tendency of the attacked to respond to individual hate speech to be rational. Double harm. In online hate speech, there are harms caused by the collective subordinating act, but also harms arising from individual speech. The dynamics of online hate speech. When someone is continuously attacked in a hate campaign, not only is the collective authority of individual discourses intensified, but also the vocabulary and character of the hateful illocutionary acts are often continuously transformed. I will show how the transformativist model of online hate speech can account for these phenomena and why the additivist model can do this only imperfectly. Mapping out the 4E cognition spectrum Central European University, Austria Over the past three decades, the ideas of cognition as an embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive phenomenon have been widely discussed among philosophers and cognitive scientists. Together, these are believed to constitute a family of very closely related approaches that has been called “4E cognition.” (Newen, De Bruin & Gallagher 2018) The expression seems to tacitly introduce three presuppositions: (1) First, that each “E” stands for a well-defined, unique theory or field of research. (2) Second, that compatibility issues between these different approaches are a matter of detail, and that the adoption of one of them usually implies the acceptance of the others. (3) Third, that E-approaches share a set of commitments which is at odds with traditional theories in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely: i) antirepresentationalism and the rejection of ii) functionalism, iii) computationalism, and iv) multiple realizability. Upon closer inspection, however, none of these seems to hold. In this presentation, I will investigate the internal theoretical diversity within each one of the four Es, as well as their external points of incompatibility with each other. My arguments will conform to the following outline: (1) E-approaches usually present stronger and weaker versions, which can be individuated based on their stance on whether body and environment play a constitutive or merely causal role in cognitive processes. This strategy is inspired by Gallagher’s account, but I depart from him in applying the weaker-stronger distinction to the fields of embedded and extended cognition too, which I conceive as two varieties of the same theory. (Gallagher 2017, 2023) Thus, in the case of embodied cognition, the weaker variant will incorporate the body into explanations of cognitive and perceptual processes only insofar as it plays a causal role in these processes; the stronger, on the other hand, will introduce brain-body couplings as an ineliminable part of such explanations. Similarly, embedded and extended cognition, I will argue, should be seen as the weaker and stronger variants of the same theory: in the first case, brain-body-environment couplings may play a relevant role in cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes, but only a causal one; in the second, they may also be of constitutive relevance. As we will see, however, these distinctions cannot be applied to the field of enactive cognition, precisely because brain-body-environment couplings are always taken to be constitutive in such theories, which makes weak enactivism an unstable theoretical position. (2) Additionally, I will investigate the external relations that hold among each of the Es in the 4E spectrum, showing that the weaker-stronger distinction can be used to assess their mutual compatibility. I will show that the compatibility scheme for 4E cognition theories follow a hierarchical structure: generally, weak extension theories (i.e., embedded cognition) are compatible with both weak and strong embodiment theories; strong extension theories (i.e., extended cognition proper) are compatible only with strong embodied cognition. Again, since it is bereft of a weaker version, enactivism tends to be generally incompatible with weaker theories in the 4E cognition spectrum. (3) Finally, I will show that some influential E-theories are still very much committed to at least some of the tenets in i-iv)—i.e., i) representationalism, ii) functionalism, iii) computationalism, and iv) multiple realizability. Usually, weaker versions—i.e., those without the constitution claim—tend to be more easily incorporated into such classical cognitivist frameworks. I will illustrate my argument by briefly discussing, in the case of embodied cognition, Goldman & Vignemont’s concept of B-formatted representations, and compare it with conceptions of bodily-based representation in cognitive linguistics and in Barsalou’s perceptual symbols system. (Goldman & Vignemont 2009; Goldman 2014; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Barsalou 1999) A similar argument will then be developed for the case of weak and strong extended cognition: embedment theories such as Hutchins’ distributed cognition and Gibson’s ecological psychology will be compared to extension theories, particularly Chalmers & Clark and Clark’s externalist interpretation of results in predictive processing. (Hutchins 1995; Gibson 1979; Chalmers & Clark 1998; Clark 2016) We will also see, however, that both main varieties of current enactive theories—i.e., Noë & O’Regan’s sensorimotor enactivism and Thompson’s autopoietic enactivism—do indeed reject i-iv). (O’Regan & Noë 2001; Noë 2004; Thompson 2007) After showing that incompatibility with classic cognitivism and computationalism more broadly construed cannot be wholesale applied to the entire field of 4E cognition, my conclusion will be that features of enactivism, the most radical theoretical family in the 4E cognition spectrum, are often mistakenly assigned to the whole 4E cognition spectrum. In general, embodied, embedded (weakly extended), and extended (strongly extended) cognition theories present various degrees of compatibility with classic cognitivism, accepting or rejecting different elements in i-iv)—but almost never all of them at once. Thus, only enactivism, which rejects i-iv) entirely in all of its current theoretical strands, should be strictly speaking conceived of as promoting a significant paradigm shift in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Bibliography: Barsalou, L. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–660. Chalmers, D.; & Clark, A. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19. Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, S. (2023). Embodied and enactive approaches to cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. London: Psychology Press. Goldman, A. (2014). The bodily formats approach to embodied cognition. In: U. Kriegel (ed.), Current controversies in philosophy of mind. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 91–108. Goldman, A.; & Vignemont, F. (2009). Is social cognition embodied? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 154–159. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, G.; & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Newen, A.; De Bruin, L.; & Gallagher, S. (eds.). (2018). Oxford handbook of 4E-Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Regan, J.; & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and brain sciences, 24(5), 939–973. Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emotional Behavior and Contagious Imitation: Cases Between Reflexes and Actions Husserl-Archiv der Universität zu Köln, Germany In current action theory, the oversimplified dichotomy of human behavior – represented by various dual-process models which divide human behavior into a ‘controlled, flexible, effortful, reflective and conscious’ system and a ‘automatic, inflexible, effortless, reflexive and unconscious’ one (Gawronski & Creighton 2013) – is increasingly under criticism (Salin & Phillips 2007; Fridland 2014, 2017a, b). “The facts that one could unify in the brace of the ‘mechanical’ are not so homogeneous as one believes”; rather, “the automatism is not a so simple phenomenon as it appears” (Ricoeur 2009, Vol. 1, p. 381, p. 383). The more appropriate characterization of human behavior is a spectrum, with reflexes and ‘full-blooded actions’ which involve reflective control such as deliberation and decision-making (Velleman 1996) on two extremes. There are a number of in-between cases that are irreducible to each extreme. One of them is habitual action, such as drinking a cup of coffee every morning ‘purely out of habit’ (Pollard 2006; Douskos 2017). Arguably, this is still an action, insofar as it takes place by virtue of agentive power exertion for certain reasons, but reflective self-determination is not necessary in this case. Another case is what I call ‘expressive behavior’, which includes non-purposeful emotional behavior – such as laughing out of joy, crying out of sorrow, stamping one’s feet with anger – and contagious imitation: one yawns when he sees another person yawning (Jeannerod 2006, pp. 121–124). Such behavior is less than action, because it is not goal-directed. But it is more than mere reflex, so long as the latter occurs before one is conscious of the trigger, which is not the case in expressive behavior. Where is expressive behavior positioned in the spectrum of human behavior? If the impression above qualifies as evidence against its reducibility to reflex or habitual action, how should we articulate the boundaries between reflex, expressive behavior and habitual action? Two parameters appear to be promising candidates for this demarcation. One is the different roles of consciousness in three cases. Phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal in reflexes (Ricoeur 2009, Vol. 1, p. 293). It only serves the post hoc comprehension when one withdraws his hand reflexively from the fire. By contrast, as I would argue against epiphenomenalism regarding actions, factors that are guiding the agentive power exertions, in order to be reasons for action, have to be conscious. Here, goals are always part of the reason. In comparison, expressive behavior does seem to be ‘mediated’ by consciousness, but the goal is not one of the guiding factors. The other candidate is causation. Reflexes obey the law of event causation, insofar as it can be described in terms of regular successions of events. By contrast, according to the agent-causalist tradition, the relevant causation for action performance is irreducible to event causation. It is intriguing, then, to consider a unique type of causation for expressive behavior. My proposal means to offer a more precise characterization of these two parameters: Expressive behavior non-purposefully externalizes the emotional subject’s concern in a quasi-symmetrical way. As for the emotional subject, ‘self’ is a too ‘thick’ notion to be simple and primitive (Textor 2018). Rather, it is grounded by more fundamental notions of subjects. One of them is what I call the emotional subject. It is the ‘heart’ upon which the valuable entities ‘lie’ with their weights (Ricoeur 2009, Vol. 2, pp. 125–135), considering the German expression for ‘concern’ (Anliegen) which literally means ‘lying on one’s heart’ and the Greek root of value (ἄχιος) which is originally connected with ‘weight’. I use ‘concern’ to designate the relation between the emotional subject and what concerns it. ‘Concern’ means that the emotional subject is ‘charged’ (laden) with the load of value or ‘impressed’ by it, and expressive behavior is what ‘discharges’ (entladen) or ‘expresses’ this load. But this discharge or externalization is not arbitrary. Rather, the relation between the expressive behavior and its performer is quasi-symmetrical to the one between the emotional subject and what concerns it. Acute pain is expressed by abrupt alteration of behavioral patterns. Those at a loss behave diffusely and randomly. Appall results in fossilization and a collapsed person looks ‘fallen apart’. Expressive behavior also concerns the emotional subject and thereby provides either positive or negative feedback to the axiological load. That is a fact captured by the James-Lange theory of emotion. This proposal addresses the distinctive role of consciousness and the unique sort of causation in expressive behavior. The consciousness is not epiphenomenal in expressive behavior, insofar as how one is conscious of the valuable entities specifies the manner of performance. Unlike in the case of action, consciousness plays no role of justification. For this reason, the relevant causation for expressive behavior is not agent causation, but it is irreducible to event causation as well, which lacks such consciousness-mediated quasi-symmetry. An important implication: the consciousness-mediated quasi-symmetry lays the foundation for intersubjective understanding in general, because it establishes the original association of one’s mental state and bodily behavior and provides the readiness to be impressed by the expressive behavior of others in the case of contagious imitation. This is the prerequisite for sophisticated intersubjective understandings such as communicative actions. Douskos, C. (2017). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25(4), 504–524. Fridland, E. (2014) They’ve lost control: reflections on skill. Synthese 191, 2729–2750. Fridland, E. (2017a). Skill and motor control: intelligence all the way down. Philosophical Studies 174:1539–1560. Fridland, E. (2017b). Automatically minded. Synthese 194, 4337–4363. Gawronski, B. & Creighton, L. A. (2013). Dual Process Theories. In D. Carlston (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition. Jeannerod, M. (2006). Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly 43(1), 57–69. Ricoeur, P. (2009). Philosophie de la volonté. Paris: Édition Points. Saling, L. L. & Phillips, J. G. (2007). Automatic behaviour: Efficient not mindless. Brain Research Bulletin 73(1–3), 1–20. Textor, M. (2018). Enjoy yourself: Lotze on Self-consciousness and Self-Concern. History of Philosophy Quarterly 35(2), 157–179. “Desolate” as a Case Study in Non-Canonical Descriptive Slurs Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Czech Republic “Just because he doesn’t have teeth, doesn’t mean he’s a desolate, just because he’s an asshole without an opinion usually does,” states an anonymous profile on the social network X during a debate regarding Ukrainian refugees. The expression “desolate” began to appear in Czech media and public discourse in 2022, specifically in relation to the anti-government demonstrations that took place in response to radically increasing inflation and rising energy prices. These demonstrations carried strong anti-EU and anti-NATO undertones, contributing significantly to the definition of the individuals participating in the demonstrations. These persons began to be referred to as “desolates,” a term with no stable semantic dictionary definition. The Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech (2024) defines a “desolate” as “a person who is unsuccessful in life because of his or her bad character traits, a loser (often derogatory).” In contrast, the community-managed dictionary of neologisms Czech 2.0 (2024) defines a desolate person as “(i) a homeless person or a drunkard, very repulsive in appearance, smell, etc.; (ii) a protagonist of the disinformation scene, usually a permanently dissatisfied individual on the fringes of society, who compensates for his frustration in life by rejecting social authority and turning to conspiracy theories and political extremism; (iii) a derogatory term.” Wiktionary’s (2024) first definition gives a similar characteristic to (ii) in the case of Czech 2.0: “(neologism, pejorative) a person who spreads and falls for disinformation; usually rejects the authority of the state and state institutions, is prone to conspiratorial thinking” and the second definition is the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech’s definition. A common intersection of dictionary definitions is the designation of the term as derogatory or pejorative. The present paper aims to show whether the newly arisen derogative or pejorative term “desolate” can be considered a slur. In the expressivist framework proposed by Robin Jeshion (esp. 2013, 2017, 2021), I will argue for this expression being a pejorative lexical item, using primarily the most extreme form of their use, i.e. their use as a pejorative speech act performed with a pejorative lexical item used pejoratively (cf. Jeshion 2021: 213). Specifically, I consider it a slur based on stereotyping other than gendered, racial, and ethnic stereotyping. Stereotyping related to the notion of the “desolate” is based on an axis of presumed intelligence derived from specific political beliefs intersecting with the axis of economic class. From a philosophy of language perspective, the notion of “desolate” is a specifically borderline example not only because of its novelty and relative lack of an accepted definition but also because it violates the principle of neutral counterparts questioned by Foster (2023). Later in the paper, therefore, I develop Foster's argument while using an example (seemingly) completely devoid of its semantic neutral counterpart. The final part of the argument is to relate the notion of “desolate” to the act of reclaiming a slur, which in media and public discourse runs parallel to the granting or denying of slur status to the term itself. As I will argue, it is a pride reclamation in Jeshion’s (2020) sense. The philosophical analysis is based on a sample of media outputs from the nationwide Czech media between March 2022 and December 2023, which explicitly seek to establish a definition of the pejorative and discuss the pejorative aspects of the label or their absence. In addition, a sample of posts on social network X from the period September 2023 - December 2023 that actively use the term “desolate” either as a non-canonical stereotyping slur, i.e. pejoratively, or are an active act of pride reclamation is used. Foster, J. (2021): Busting the Ghost of Neutral Counterparts, Ergo. An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 10(42): 1187-1242. Jeshion, R. (2013): Expressivism and the Offensiveness of Slurs, Philosophical Perspectives, 27(1): 231-259. Jeshion, R. (2017): Slur Creation, Bigotry Formation. The Power of Expressivism, Phenomenology and Mind, 11: 130-139. Jeshion, R. (2020): Pride and Prejudiced. On the Reclamation of Slurs, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 97: 106-137. Jeshion, R. (2021): Varieties of Pejoratives, in Khoo, J, & R. K. Sterken: The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, 211-231. https://cestina20.cz/slovnik/dezolat/ https://slovnikcestiny.cz/heslo/dezolát/1/49367 https://cs.wiktionary.org/wiki/dezolát Demonstratives and the Semantic Redundancy of Intentions University of Warsaw, Poland Intentionalism about demonstratives, such as “that,” is the view in which the reference of these expressions' uses is determined, at least partially, by the speakers’ referential intentions. This view manifests in two main forms: semantic and pragmatic. The semantic version argues that demonstrative reference is a semantic phenomenon achieved by pairing the expressions’ linguistic meaning (for example, Kaplanian characters) with their context of use (King 2014, Stokke 2010, Radulescu 2019). The pragmatic version, conversely, posits that the meaning of demonstratives does not determine their reference based on context. Instead, it argues that it is not the expressions in context that refer, but rather the speakers themselves (Bach 2017, Heck 2014, Smit 2012). Proponents of the pragmatic approach argue against the semantic version by highlighting the alleged redundancy of its crucial aspect (Heck 2017: 344, Smit 2012: 52). They contend that it is illogical for the semantic convention governing the uses of demonstratives to require hearers to interpret the speakers’ intended referents, as this requirement is already inherent in linguistic communication. Therefore, they conclude that the linguistic meaning of demonstratives underdetermines their reference, and that the gap is filled by general pragmatic reasoning. In my presentation, I will focus on two main objectives. First, I will present a straightforward argument demonstrating why the aforementioned reasoning, despite its intuitive appeal, is fallacious. This argument cannot be universally valid because, if it were, it would also apply to complex denoting expressions like “the object I intend to refer to.” However, considering that this phrase clearly refers to the object its speaker intends, as a matter of its semantics and without pragmatic mediation, and that its hearer would need to engage in pragmatic-like reasoning about the speaker’s referential intentions to understand its referent, the redundancy argument seems to overgeneralize. My second aim will be to refine the original argument. I will argue that the redundancy observation does not convincingly apply only to these expressions whose semantic interpretation involves considering speakers’ intentions as a result of the compositional process — that is, as a consequence of combining smaller semantic conventions. References
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