Affective affordances and psychopathology

Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis. These things and spaces often play an ineliminable role in shaping what we feel and how we feel it; when we interact with them, they contribute ongoing feedback that " scaffolds " the character and temporal development of our affective experiences. However, in some psychopathological conditions, the ability to access to these things and spaces becomes disturbed. Individuals not only lose certain forms of access to the practical significance of the built environment but also to its ​ regulative​ significance, too — and the stability and organization of their affective life is compromised. In developing this view, we discuss core concepts like " affordance spaces " , " scaffolding " , and " incorporation ". We apply these concepts to two case studies, severe depression and schizophrenia, and we show why these cases support our main claim. We conclude by briefly considering implications of this view for developing intervention and treatment strategies

Editorial: Affectivity Beyond the Skin

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Frontiers Media via the DOI in this record

Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus: Comments on Stephen Law

We use Bayesian tools to assess Law’s skeptical argument against the historicity of Jesus. We clarify and endorse his sub-argument for the conclusion that there is good reason to be skeptical about the miracle claims of the New Testament. However, we dispute Law’s contamination principle that he claims entails that we should be skeptical about the existence of Jesus. There are problems with Law’s defense of his principle, and we show, more importantly, that it is not supported by Bayesian considerations. Finally, we show that Law’s principle is false in the specific case of Jesus and thereby show, contrary to the main conclusion of Law’s argument, that biblical historians are entitled to remain confident that Jesus existed

Psychopathology and the enactive mind

According to the ‘enactive’ approach in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, mental states are neither identical with, nor reducible to, brain activity. Rather, the mind is enacted or brought forth by the whole situated living organism in virtue of its specific structure and organization. Although increasingly influential in cognitive science, the enactive approach has had little to do with psychopathology so far. In this chapter I thus first outline this approach in some detail, and then illustrate its conceptual and methodological connections to psychopathology. I also provide some indications on how to develop a more explicitly ‘enactive psychopathology’

Enactive affectivity, extended

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.In this paper I advance an enactive view of affectivity that does not imply that affectivity must stop at the boundaries of the organism. I first review the enactive notion of “sense-making”, and argue that it entails that cognition is inherently affective. Then I review the proposal, advanced by Di Paolo (2009), that the enactive approach allows living systems to “extend”. Drawing out the implications of this proposal, I argue that, if enactivism allows living systems to extend, then it must also allow sense-making, and thus cognition as well as affectivity, to extend—in the specific sense of allowing the physical processes (vehicles) underpinning these phenomena to include, as constitutive parts, non-organic environmental processes. Finally I suggest that enactivism might also allow specific human affective states, such as moods, to extend.European Research Counci

The Somatic Marker Hypotheses, and what the Iowa Gambling Task does and does not show

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Vol.59(1), 2008, pp.51-71) is available online at: http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/59/1/51. 24 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released March 2010.Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) is a prominent neuroscientific hypothesis about the mechanisms implementing decision-making. This paper argues that, since its inception, the SMH has not been clearly formulated. It is possible to identify at least two different hypotheses, which make different predictions: SMH-G, which claims that somatic states generally implement preferences and are needed to make a decision; and SMH-S, which specifically claims that somatic states assist decision-making by anticipating the long-term outcomes of available options. This paper also argues that neither hypothesis is adequately supported empirically; the task originally proposed to test SMH is not a good test for SMH-S, and its results do not support SMH-G either. In addition, it is not clear how SMH-G could be empirically invalidated, given its general formulation. Suggestions are made that could help provide evidence for SMH-S, and make SMH-G more specific.Cognitive Science Laboratory (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences), University of Trento (Italy); Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard Universit

On normative cognition, and why it matters for cognitive pragmatics

In Cognitive pragmatics: The mental processes of communication (2011), Bruno Bara presents a detailed summary of a theory of human communication, called "cognitive pragmatics,” which he has been developing since the 1980s together with a number of colleagues, and has been presented in several scientific articles and in a recent book (Bara 2010). The basic tenets of this theory are that communication is a cooperative activity, in which human agents engage intentionally, and that for communication to take place successfully all the participants must share certain mental states. Coherently with these assumptions, cognitive pragmatics aims at clarifying what mental states are constitutive of communication, and what cognitive structures underlie the cooperative activities involved in communication. To this position we are strongly sympathetic. However, we think that the theoretical framework currently offered by cognitive pragmatics is inadequate to account for the cooperative nature of human communication. In particular, we believe that to deal with human cooperation, the types of mental states considered by cognitive pragmatics should be extended; that the concepts of conversation and behavior game do not adequately explain the dynamics of human communication; and that the role of communicative intentions is not sufficiently clarified. In this commentary we first discuss the issue of collective activities (Section 1). Next we consider some problems related to conversation and behavior games (Section 2), and bring in the issue of normativity, that we consider as a crucial component of human interaction (Section 3). We then discuss the relationship between communicative intentions and normativity (Section 4), and finally draw some conclusions (Section 5

Interpersonal communication as social action

We compare a number of influential approaches to human communication with the aim of understanding what it means for interpersonal communication to be a form of social action. In particular, we discuss the large-scale social normativity advocated by speech act theory, the view of communication as small-scale social interaction proper of Gricean approaches, and the intimate connection between communication and cooperation defended by Tomasello. We then argue in favor of a small-scale view of communication capable of accounting for the normative effects of communicative acts; to this purpose, we introduce the concept of interpersonal normativity and analyze its relationship with communicative intentions

Some Ideas for the Integration of Neurophenomenology and Affective Neuroscience

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleDraft version published by permission of the Editor of Constructivist FoundationsPlease see Journal website for published pdfContext • Affective neuroscience has not developed first-person methods for the generation of first-person data. This neglect is problematic, because emotion experience is a central dimension of affectivity. > Problem • I propose that augmenting affective neuroscience with a neurophenomenological method can help address long-standing questions in emotion theory, such as: Do different emotions come with unique, distinctive patterns of brain and bodily activity? How do emotion experience, bodily feelings and brain and bodily activity relate to one another? > M ethod • This paper is theoretical. It advances ideas for integrating neurophenomenology and affective neuroscience, and explains how this integration would allow progress on the above questions. > R esults • An integrated “affective neuro-physio-phenomenology” may help scientists understand whether discrete emotion categories come in different experiential varieties, which would in turn help interpret concomitant brain and bodily activity. It may also help investigate the bodily nature of emotion experience, including how experience relates to actual brain and bodily activity. > Implications • If put into practice, the ideas advanced here would enrich the scientific study of emotion experience and more generally further our understanding of the relationship of consciousness and physical activity. The paper is speculative and its ideas need to be implemented to bear fruit. > Constructivist content • This paper argues in favor of the neurophenomenological method, which is an offshoot of enactivis

Appraising valence

‘Valence’ is used in many different ways in emotion theory. It generally refers to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of an emotion, as well as to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of some aspect of emotion. After reviewing these different uses, I point to the conceptual problems that come with them. In particular, I distinguish: problems that arise from conflating the valence of an emotion with the valence of its aspects, and problems that arise from the very idea that an emotion (and/or its aspects) can be divided into mutually exclusive opposites. The first group of problems does not question the classic dichotomous notion of valence, but the second does. In order to do justice to the richness of daily emotions, emotion science needs more complex conceptual tools