A talk I gave recently at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA.
Philosophy of Mind
MEA Conference Outline
The 18th annual Media Ecology Association conference is coming up this Friday and will run from June 22–25 at Saint Mary’s College of California. I’ll be speaking on Friday (I think around 1:00 pm).
Feel free to drop me a line if you’ll be there and want to connect. Below I’m including the outline and notes for my talk. I’ll likely submit the final paper to the MEA’s journal, Explorations in Media Ecology. More on that soon.
Media Ecology and Bios Theoretikos: Philosophy as Extended Cognition
– In this talk I draw on the work of Peter Sloterdijk to suggest that philosophical ability is closely tied to modes of training (askēsis) that aim to transform awareness through self-overcoming (metanoia). Specifically, I explore the media environments that facilitate philosophical activity and the practices that enable philosophical understanding.
– Philosophy on this view is facilitated by an intricate ecology of affordance spaces—academies, libraries, monasteries, and more—whose design helps train up the individual’s capacity to perform certain maneuvers in thought, maneuvers that make apparent the environments required for the bios theoretikos (the life of contemplation).
– To make this point, I start not with humans and our practices, but with spiders and theirs. As I will show in my talk, when we think of philosophy as an instance of extended cognition, we can draw many parallels between our practices and those of nonhuman species, who like us build artifacts to deepen their perception and understanding. Continue reading
The Knowledge Ecology
[Image: Henrique Oliveira]
I’ve been moving towards a description of the role concepts and knowledge play in action and perception. To this end, I’ve worked my way through the contributions that philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus, John McDowell, Barbara Gail Montero, and Alva Noë have made in these areas. In my most recent post, I suggested that Noë’s descriptions of concepts as bodily skills offers a compelling way of mediating between Dreyfus’s nonconceptual account of action, where action is guided by environmental solicitation in an intentional arc that progressively gears the agent into its environment, with McDowell’s view of action as concept-mediated through and through. I concluded that post by suggesting the intentional arc requires for its success some amount of conceptual content in order for it to yield the increasingly rich surplus of detail that it generates in the agent. In other words, I argued that repetition in the intentional arc must be knowledge directed.
In this post, I continue to investigate the role of knowledge in action. To repeat the claim I expressed earlier, the role of judgment in intuition implicates knowledge in the structure of our responses to solicitations. Knowledge on this account must be more than mere trial-and-error repetition because it must also include a decision about what and how to practice and repeat. Knowing what to practice and how to practice correctly goes beyond mere repetition and invokes the knowledge needed to judge the what, when, and why of a situation, all knowledge-derived and goal-oriented decisions. This accumulation of intuitive ability gained through correct practice and judgment means that the iterative pattern of acquiring new intuitions should not be thought of as merely an aggregate of past scenarios (i.e., as contextual memories), but as repetitions that, when practiced correctly, involve judgment and meaningful discrimination exercised throughout the process of training and skill building.
Rethinking the Conceptual: Noë on Skills of Understanding
This is the third post in my exploration of the role of concepts in perception and action. The earlier posts dealt with the work of Hubert Dreyfus, John McDowell, and Barbara Gail Montero. In my last post, I ended on the question of how solicitations and motivations from the environment draw us to act in intuitively immediate (but nonconceptual) ways through a so-called space of motivations (as opposed to a Sellarsian space of reasons), suggesting that some degree of conceptual comportment is required even in unconscious action. To this end, I endorsed the views of McDowell and Montero against those of Dreyfus. In this post, I continue to explore how we ought to talk about concepts in this context.
In order to understand how a space of motivations might work, it seems likely that the conceptual must to some degree be ingredient in the structure of intuition, in the cultivated rationality or second nature of McDowell’s account. But what is a concept on this view? It certainly cannot be the kind of declarative, propositional, and detached representational item that Montero and Dreyfus both agree impede expert action, and even everyday practical comportment, for that matter. Concepts in this sense must be something else, they cannot be, as Dreyfus notes elsewhere, “context-free principles or rules that could be used to guide actions or at least make them intelligible,”[1] simply because the objects and affordances we encounter are not context free either, they are rather singular, relational, and tied to uniquely complex ecologies of materials and processes. How, then, do we talk about concepts without falling back into the Myth of the Mental?
Architecture and Epoché
[Image: Tanja Deman]
In an earlier post, I connected typography and bookmaking to James Gibson’s theory of affordances, the idea that perception is layered less with the properties of individual objects and more with the possibilities for action they enable or afford. The basic idea of this application is that books provide a detailed and intentional set of affordances for a certain kind of understanding, and that typography and bookmaking are from this perspective intricate material practices for the installment of conversions in apprehension, for the reshaping of awareness through the mode of discursive engagement.
As I noted in the original post, on this view books are things we think with and through rather than storehouses we download from. The art of writing and bookmaking, then, is the intentional creation of affordances that make such transformations of experience possible. The book is the environment in which such affordances can endure. It’s in the context of designed affordance environments—settings created with the expressed purpose of enabling certain experiences—that I find interesting Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on architecture and epoché.
Knowledge Ecology 