Scaffolded Minds

Scaffolded Minds
Author: Somogy Varga
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0262353849
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A comprehensive account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. In Scaffolded Minds, Somogy Varga offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. Varga draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind. Varga sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. He introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. He then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits. With Cognitive Scaffolding, Varga aims to establish that shifting attention from mental symptoms to fine-grained sensorimotor aspects can lead to identifying diagnostic subtypes or even specific sensorimotor markers for early diagnosis.

Scaffolded Minds

Scaffolded Minds
Author: Somogy Varga
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0262042622
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A comprehensive account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. In Scaffolded Minds, Somogy Varga offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. Varga draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind. Varga sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. He introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. He then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits. With Cognitive Scaffolding, Varga aims to establish that shifting attention from mental symptoms to fine-grained sensorimotor aspects can lead to identifying diagnostic subtypes or even specific sensorimotor markers for early diagnosis.

Tools of the Mind

Tools of the Mind
Author: Elena Bodrova
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2024-04-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1040005438
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Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children’s learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development.

Radicalizing Enactivism

Radicalizing Enactivism
Author: Daniel D. Hutto
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262018543
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A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality--intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience--are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds--including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful--that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds--basic minds--are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.

Modernist Minds

Modernist Minds
Author: Emma-Louise Silva
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2023-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004681167
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James Joyce’s evocations of his characters’ thoughts are often inserted within a commonplace that regards the mind as an interior space, referred to as the ‘inward turn’ in literary scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Emma-Louise Silva reassesses this vantage point by exploring Joyce’s modernist fiction through the prism of 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive – cognition. By merging the 4E framework with cognitive-genetic narratology, an innovative form of inquiry that brings together the study of the dynamics of writing processes and the study of cognition in relation to narratives, Modernist Minds: Materialities of the Mental in the Works of James Joyce delves into the material stylistic choices through which Joyce’s approaches to mind depiction evolved.

Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition

Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition
Author: Linnda R. Caporael
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0262019558
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Empirical and philosophical perspectives on scaffolding that highlight the role of temporal and temporary resources in development across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. "Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and temporary resources in development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. The book emphasizes reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes as a complement to neo-Darwinism in the developmentalist tradition of conceptualizing evolutionary change. After describing an integration of theoretical perspectives that can accommodate different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies, the book discusses multilevel organization; differences (and reciprocality) between individuals and institutions as units of analysis; and perspectives on development that span brains, careers, corporations, and cultural cycles. Contributors Colin Allen, Linnda R. Caporael, James Evans, Elihu M. Gerson, Simona Ginsburg, James R. Griesemer, Christophe Heintz, Eva Jablonka, Sanjay Joshi, Shu-Chen Li, Pamela Lyon, Sergio F. Martinez, Christopher J. May, Johann Peter Murmann, Stuart A. Newman, Jeffrey C. Schank, Iddo Tavory, Georg Theiner, Barbara Hoeberg Wimsatt, William C. Wimsatt

On the Origins of Cognitive Science

On the Origins of Cognitive Science
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2009-04-17
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262512394
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An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.

Movement Matters

Movement Matters
Author: Sheila L. Macrine
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262368986
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Experts translate the latest findings on embodied cognition from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science to inform teaching and learning pedagogy. Embodied cognition represents a radical shift in conceptualizing cognitive processes, in which cognition develops through mind-body environmental interaction. If this supposition is correct, then the conventional style of instruction—in which students sit at desks, passively receiving information—needs rethinking. Movement Matters considers the educational implications of an embodied account of cognition, describing the latest research applications from neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science and demonstrating their relevance for teaching and learning pedagogy. The contributors cover a range of content areas, explaining how the principles of embodied cognition can be applied in classroom settings. After a discussion of the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of embodied cognition, contributors describe its applications in language, including the areas of handwriting, vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension; STEM areas, emphasizing finger counting and the importance of hand and body gestures in understanding physical forces; and digital learning technologies, including games and augmented reality. Finally, they explore embodied learning in the social-emotional realm, including how emotional granularity, empathy, and mindfulness benefit classroom learning. Movement Matters introduces a new model, translational learning sciences research, for interpreting and disseminating the latest empirical findings in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The book provides an up-to-date, inclusive, and essential resource for those involved in educational planning, design, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors Dor Abrahamson, Martha W. Alibali, Petra A. Arndt, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, Jo Boaler, Christiana Butera, Rachel S. Y. Chen,Charles P. Davis, Andrea Marquardt Donovan, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Virginia J. Flood, Jennifer M. B. Fugate, Arthur M. Glenberg, Ligia E. Gómez, Daniel D. Hutto, Karin H. James, Mina C. Johnson-Glenberg, Michael P. Kaschak, Markus Kiefer, Christina Krause, Sheila L. Macrine, Anne Mangen, Carmen Mayer, Amanda L. McGraw, Colleen Megowan-Romanowicz, Mitchell J. Nathan, Antti Pirhonen, Kelsey E. Schenck, Lawrence Shapiro, Anna Shvarts, Yue-Ting Siu,Sofia Tancredi, Chrystian Vieyra, Rebecca Vieyra, Candace Walkington, Christine Wilson-Mendenhall, Eiling Yee

The Mind-Body Problem

The Mind-Body Problem
Author: Jonathan Westphal
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262529564
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An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one. Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is physical, we cannot see how. If we cannot see how the mind is physical, we cannot see how it can interact with the body. And if the mind is not physical, it cannot interact with the body. Or so it seems. In this book the philosopher Jonathan Westphal examines the mind-body problem in detail, laying out the reasoning behind the solutions that have been offered in the past and presenting his own proposal. The sharp focus on the mind-body problem, a problem that is not about the self, or consciousness, or the soul, or anything other than the mind and the body, helps clarify both problem and solutions. Westphal outlines the history of the mind-body problem, beginning with Descartes. He describes mind-body dualism, which claims that the mind and the body are two different and separate things, nonphysical and physical, and he also examines physicalist theories of mind; antimaterialism, which proposes limits to physicalism and introduces the idea of qualia; and scientific theories of consciousness. Finally, Westphal examines the largely forgotten neutral monist theories of mind and body, held by Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell, which attempt neither to extract mind from matter nor to dissolve matter into mind. Westphal proposes his own version of neutral monism. This version is unique among neutral monist theories in offering an account of mind-body interaction.

Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal
Author: Somogy Varga
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136508309
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Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal that represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in contemporary life. This ideal suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life expressive of what one takes oneself to be. However, many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into a kind of aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In his book, Varga systematically constructs a critical concept of authenticity that takes into account the reciprocal shaping of capitalism and the ideal of authenticity. Drawing on different traditions in critical social theory, moral philosophy and phenomenology, Varga builds a concept of authenticity that can make intelligible various problematic and potentially exhausting practices of the self.