Michele MerrittArkansas State University - Jonesboro | ASU · Philosophy
Michele Merritt
Doctor of Philosophy
About
14
Publications
1,113
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87
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Manuscript, Minding Dogs: Humans, Canines, and a New Philosophy of Cognitive Science, coming out early 2021.
Currently researching adoption ethics, and social emotions and trauma in adoptee narratives.
Publications
Publications (14)
Though studies showing a causal relationship between adoption and trauma are scarce, there is enough cross-disciplinary research to suggest such a connection. Likewise, there are many adult adopted persons, like myself, who see their adoption narratives as traumatic in one way or another. Mental health outcomes for adopted people also indicate adop...
I argue that an enactivist framework has more explanatory power than traditional philosophical theories of cognition when it comes to understanding the mechanisms underlying human-animal relationships. In both intraspecies and interspecies exchanges, what we often find are novel forms of cognition emerging from such transactions, but these “co-cogn...
I argue that the standard paradigm for understanding cognition—namely, that thoughts are representational, internal, and propositional—does not account for a large number of genuinely cognitive processes. Instead, if we adopt a more radical approach, one that treats cognition as a cooperative, dynamic, and interactive process, accounting for shared...
Recently, in cognitive science, the enactivist account of cognition has been gaining ground, due in part to studies of movement in conjunction with thought. The idea, as Noë (2009), has put it, that “cognition is not something happening inside us or to us, but it’s something we do, something we achieve,” is increasingly supported by research on joi...
This chapter examines the phenomenon of “nonsensical gender” — that is, cases of breakdown within the domain of gender identity. First, it is argued that gender is a multifaceted system that shapes and subtends cognitive processing. Next, the chapter examines cases of gender break- down and compares those phenomena with other forms of cognitive bre...
I further the argument for a socially extended mind by examining gender and the role it plays in cognition. My first claim is that gender is a social institution that often if not always subtends our cognitive processes, especially those that are maximally embodied. The social institution of gender often serves to inhibit female embodied cognitive...
The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC), or the claim that cognitive processes are not entirely organism-bound and can extend into the world, has received a barrage of criticism. Likewise, defenders of HEC have responded and even retreated into more moderate positions. In this paper, I trace the debate, rehearsing what I take to be the three str...
In the last forty years, significant developments in neuroscience, psychology, and robotic technology have been cause for major trend changes in the philosophy of mind. One such shift has been the reallocation of focus from entirely brain-centered theories of mind to more embodied, embedded, and even extended answers to the questions, what are cogn...
Whether or not the mind contains innately specified representations is highly contestable, especially in light of neurobiological evidence for the plasticity of the brain. In what follows, I provide an overview of the debate as it now stands and a discussion of the possibility, proposed by Clark (1998) and others, that representations need not be l...
This project provides a detailed examination and critique of current philosophical, linguistic, and cognitive accounts of first language acquisition. In particular, I focus on the concept of "innate" and how it is embraced, marginally utilized, or abandoned altogether in efforts to describe the way that a child comes to be a competent user of a lan...
Projects
Project (1)
To be published in a special issue of Adoption and Culture, 2021. The goal is to provide an argument that collective emotions are generated by online interactions among adoptee communities, thus providing researchers with a new venue to explore the constitution of shared affect, as well as provide more legitimacy to adoptee trauma and the need for adoption reform, better trauma-focused therapy, etc.
