Shaun Gallagher

University of Memphis | U of M · Department of Philosophy

I argue for a pattern theory of self as a useful way to organize an interdisciplinary approach to discussions of what constitutes a self. According to the pattern theory, a self is constituted by a number of characteristic features or aspects that may include minimal embodied, minimal experiential, affective, intersubjective, psychological/cognitiv...

Gesellschaftskritik, or social philosophy that aims to provide firm criticism of pathological social practices, requires normatively grounded evaluative principles. In this article, we assess different possibilities for such principles with focus on a model that takes specific patterns of intersubjective interaction as its point of reference. We ar...

Thinking, or knowledge getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within the cortex.... Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes within the brain. (John Dewey 1916, 13-14). Clark and...

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an...

Introduction: Reduced physical activity (PA) among people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) with low disability is a significant concern. Developing healthcare to promote PA requires a comprehensive understanding of pwMS's perspectives. Purpose: To explore how pwMS with mild disability perceive PA and the impact of individual, professional, social,...

For many centuries, scholars and philosophers from wisdom traditions in different cultures have reported and discussed non-self states of consciousness. These states can be both short-term (state, transitory) and long-term (trait, lasting) conditions. However, in psychology, the importance of a healthy self is usually emphasized, and some theorists...

The stated aim of cryptocurrencies is to free the monetary system from the need to trust financial intermediaries, by relying on incentive design and technology. Many descriptive studies, however, have questioned cryptocurrencies’ delivery on the promise of trustlessness. This paper promotes a normative analysis of trust in cryptocurrencies by disc...

Bibliography of published works.

This chapter focuses on several factors of the self-pattern for purposes of exploring in more detail how those factors are dynamically related, and how they may be affected in various disorders. The chapter outlines a threefold method that allows for an increasingly detailed analysis of how these relations are typically ordered and sometimes differ...

This introductory chapter discusses the tension between biopsychosocial models and neurocentric approaches in psychiatry, motivating a turn to 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and especially enactive) theories. The chapters that follow develop an interdisciplinary approach to integrative conceptions of psychiatry, distinguish between narrow and wi...

In the last 25 years, a new foundational perspective has emerged in the cognitive sciences under the title of embodied cognition. The core of embodied cognition can be expressed by the general hypothesis that cognitive processes are fundamentally rooted in the morphological traits and sensorimotor and affective systems of the human body. Thinking i...

In the last 25 years, a new foundational perspective has emerged in the cognitive sciences under the title of embodied cognition. The core of embodied cognition can be expressed by the general hypothesis that cognitive processes are fundamentally rooted in the morphological traits and sensorimotor and affective systems of the human body. Thinking i...

Embodied cognition and bounded rationality

An introduction to the 4Es -- embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition.

This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decisio...

In this paper, we address core insights from Buddhist psychology about mind-body phenomena and the self, and we relate such insights to the notion of the self-pattern developed in the pattern theory of self. We emphasize the dynamic, temporal and enactive characteristics of the self-pattern, consistent with the core Buddhist notion of non-self. Alt...

Enactivist accounts of communication have focused almost exclusively on honest, cooperative communication. However, much of human life involves deception and lies. Using the generally agreed upon definition of lying, we here develop an enactive account of the dynamics of lying. At face, lying poses a problem for enactive theories of cognition since...

Clinical and neuroscientific evidence indicates that transdiagnostic processes contribute to the generation and maintenance of psychopathological symptoms and disorders. Rigidity (inflexibility) appears a core feature of most transdiagnostic pathological processes. Decreasing rigidity may prove important to restore and maintain mental health. One o...

After a brief review of different definitions and types of loneliness I offer an analysis of the concept of existential loneliness and its philosophical background. In contrast to the interpersonal aspects of other types of loneliness, existential loneliness has been characterized as an intrapersonal default state of incommunicability or profound a...

Neste artigo, reviso as contribuições recentes da fenomenologia para uma variedade de disciplinas, incluindo as ciências cognitivas e a psiquiatria, e exploro (1) as controvérsias sobre os métodos fenomenológicos e a naturalização, (2) a relação entre a fenomenologia e as abordagens enativas e estendidas da mente, e (3) a promessa da fenomenologia...

Neste artigo, reviso as contribuições recentes da fenomenologia para uma variedade de disciplinas, incluindo as ciências cognitivas e a psiquiatria, e exploro (1) as controvérsias sobre os métodos fenomenológicos e a naturalização, (2) a relação entre a fenomenologia e as abordagens enativas e estendidas da mente, e (3) a promessa da fenomenologia...

Can we explain how the various factors of knowledge, skill, habit, environmental constraints and affordances interact or integrate in improvisational performance? In attempting to explain how this integration takes place, I’ll consider two possible approaches: predictive processing (PP) and enactivism. I’ll argue that PP, which, on a neuroscientifi...

In this paper we consider the importance of trust, in the context of economic institutions, and specifically with respect to questions about market mechanisms and the role of social interactions. We review recent advances in institutional economics closely tied to developments in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, involving extended and enac...

Disagreements among phenomenologists about the notions of self and self-consciousness have been present from the very beginning. Some, including Husserl, defend egoic conceptions of consciousness; others like Gurwitsch and Sartre defend non-egoic conceptions. Merleau-Ponty and later phenomenologists provide for a notion of the embodied self. One ge...

Actions involve bodily and experiential processes and more complex processes, including intention formation, that contribute to the formation of a sense of agency and the construction of self-narratives. We can learn a lot about action by looking at the phenomenology of expert performance, which allows us to see the complex meshing of contributing...

Phenomenologists have developed theories of empathy, intersubjective understanding, and communication. Notions of transcendental intersubjectivity (Husserl) and ‘being-with’ (Heidegger) help to explain how human subjects are social in their very being and in ways that impact not only their relations with others but also their experience of the obje...

Phenomenology has always extended into a vast array of questions that are the primary concern of other disciplines, including fields such as psychiatry and medicine, education, literature, architecture and design, theology, and ethics. This chapter focuses on a relatively newly defined area of application: critical hermeneutics, which concerns soci...

What methods are used by phenomenologists? This chapter explains the ‘natural attitude’ and reviews the classic methodological steps involved in doing phenomenology, moving from the natural attitude to a phenomenological and transcendental attitude: the epoché, the phenomenological reduction, and eidetic variation. We can add to these methods other...

Husserl’s analysis of temporality is central to his account of intentionality. Influenced by Brentano, James, and Stern, he proposed an intrinsic temporal structure (retention-primal-impression-protention) for consciousness, one that can account for both our perception of temporal objects, such as melodies, and a unifying, prereflective self-awaren...

Full text available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-11586-8_1 ........................................................................................................................ This chapter addresses this question by reviewing some classic definitions and then by looking briefly at the historical development of phenomen...

What is the relationship between phenomenology, psychology, and natural science? This chapter addresses questions about Husserl’s differentiation between phenomenology understood as a transcendental project and the idea that phenomenology can be ‘naturalized’ in the form of a phenomenological psychology and as a partner to cognitive science. It exp...

A relatively obscure debate in phenomenology turns out to have important implications for thinking about how consciousness relates to the body and the environment. This chapter clarifies Husserl’s notion of hyletic data and the objections to this concept by a number of other phenomenologists. The concept also relates to debates about qualia or the...

What methods are used by phenomenologists? This chapter explains the ‘natural attitude’ and reviews the classic methodological steps involved in doing phenomenology, moving from the natural attitude to a phenomenological and transcendental attitude: the epoché, the phenomenological reduction, and eidetic variation. We can add to these methods other...

In this paper I address what has been called the integration problem in psychiatry. This problem is tied to conceptions of causality and explanatory levels in our understanding of mind. I take an interdisciplinary enactive perspective to develop a 3-fold method for exploring the dynamics of integration, based on a concept of dynamical causation and...

In this paper I examine a set of exceptional aesthetic experiences that remove us from our pragmatic everyday life and involve a specific type of unaffordability. I then extend this notion of unaffordability to experiences of awe and its relation to the sublime. My analysis is guided by considerations of the phenomenologically inspired enactivist a...

We take a wide view of social cognition to include embodied and situated processes of intersubjective interaction, which include, for example, nonverbal cues, joint attention and joint action, social affordances and direct enactive perception of intentions and affective states. In this article we propose a model that can help to capture and organiz...

In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers e...

In this paper we explore the notion of rehearsal as a way to develop an embodied and enactive account of imagining. After reviewing the neuroscience of motor imagery, we argue, in the context of performance studies, that rehearsal includes forms of imagining that involve motor processes. We draw on Sartre’s phenomenology of imagining which also sug...

This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of st...

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In sp...

In this paper I build on the process philosophy of Whitehead and on enactive approachs to hermeneutics, to suggest that if we want to conceive of archaeological practice in terms of a process archaeology, then rather than characterizing it as ‘digging up the past’, it is better to think of it as digging up concrescences. From the perspective of ena...

Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including musical performance, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the model of meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make...

This chapter considers a variety of criticisms and a number of applications in which the usefulness of the body image/body schema distinction is still apparent. The chapter suggests that one can find complexity in this distinction by exploring several theoretical and practical directions, for example, by developing a non-reductive neuroscientific e...

We explore relationships between phenomenology and developmental psychology through an in-depth analysis of a particular problem in social cognition: the most fundamental access to other minds. In the first part of the paper, we examine how developmental science can benefit phenomenology. We explicate the connection between cognitive psychology and...

New thesis on strongly embodied imagination and its epistemic relevance. Peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Synthese topical collection: "Imagination and its Limits"

Full text available at http://rdcu.be/IqxF -- Questions about the nature of self and self-consciousness are closely aligned with questions about the nature of autonomy. These concepts have deep roots in traditional philosophical discussions that concern metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. They also have direct relevance to practical consideration...

It is often argued by educators and researchers that access to the arts leads to increased academic performance. However, it is not clear why such access does so. We here use autopoietic enactive embodied cognition and ecological psychology to explain the relationship between dance training and conceptual problem-solving. We investigate four featur...

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a s...

Despite the fact that rationality is unanimously considered a peculiar trait of the human animal’s ontology, there has never been consensus on the meaning of this term. In cognitive science, it is possible to distinguish between at least two conceptions of rationality: one, which led to the development of the computational accounts of the human min...

En el desarrollo de una fenómenología enactivista, el análisis de la conciencia del tiempo necesita ser conducido hacia un enfoque totalmente enactivista. Así, intento impulsar este análisis hacia una fenomenología enactivista más completa de la conciencia del tiempo. Además, sostengo que el análisis de Varela motiva un examen más detallado de los...

We review 4E (embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) approaches to the analysis of art and aesthetic experience. We argue that extended mind analyses that focus on tool use miss important aspects, and that it requires 4 or more E’s to address the broad spectrum of aesthetic experiences that correlate to the broad variety of artistic genres. We...

This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both c...

I argue that different types of movement—gesture, marking, blocking, dancing, and whole-body engagements—can contribute to (or scaffold, or enable) thinking or can even constitute thinking in various forms of problem solving, memory, and reasoning ability. But I also argue that not all movement is thinking; specifically, resisting the threat of pan...

Studies of depression indicate the existence of temporal abnormalities, particularly as related to the perspectival and agentive aspects of lived experience in persons who undergo depression. With reference to these anomalies, there is a long-standing view in phenomenological psychopathology, reinforced by empirical studies, that depression involve...

The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition, introduces fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. One of the outstanding books in the field, now translated into eight languages, this highly regarded exploration of phenomenology from a topic-driven standpoint examines the following key questions and issues: • what is...

What does it mean for an actor to empathize with the character she is playing? We review different theories of empathy and of acting. We then consider the notion of “twofoldness” (Wollheim), which has been used to characterize the observer or audience perspective on the relation between actor and character (Smith). This same kind of twofoldness or...

In this paper, we engage in a reciprocal analysis of situated cognition and the notion of “meshed architecture” as found in performance studies (Christensen et al., 2016). We start with an account of various conceptions of situated cognition using the distinction between functional integration, which characterizes how an agent dynamically organizes...

Conversation is clearly a form of social interaction and depends on the same kinds of dynamical processes found in interaction more generally. In conversation meaning emerges at the intersection of a set of semiotic resources that include social, cultural, material structures and their dynamical changes in the environment where action and interacti...

Ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that the best explanation for a large share of cognition is non-representational in kind. In both ecological psychology and enactivist philosophy, then, the task is to offer an explanans that does not rely on representations. Different theorists within these camps have contrasting notions of what the b...

Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris (Philosophy and Technology 32:195–214, 2019) have argued that “we are homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.” The emphasis falls on the idea that the things that we create, use, rely on—that is, those things with which we engage—have a recursive effect on human existence. We...

Action and Interaction is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the nature of action, starting with questions about action individuation, context, the notion of ?basic action? and the temporal structure of action. The importance of circumstance for understanding action is stressed. These topics lead to questions about intention and th...

Considerations in the previous chapters led to an acknowledgment of the important role played by social context and intersubjective relations for understanding action. In this and subsequent chapters I explore in more detail, not only how action is related to social interaction, but also the nature of social interaction itself. In this chapter I st...

Concepts of socially extended cognition and cognitive institution have relevance for understanding how social and cultural practices shape not only our cognitive processes, but also our actions and interactions. Cognitive institutions are not only institutions that support cognitive processes, but are also such that without them these specific cogn...

This chapter continues to build the more positive account of our everyday intersubjective abilities by considering the role of communicative and narrative practices. Research in applied linguistics shows that our communicative engagements are complex and detailed practices that draw on a multitude of semiotic resources in the environment and in the...

This chapter explores how we might move from considerations that focus on social-cognitive issues to understanding their implications for concepts that are basic to the development of a critical theory that addresses social and political issues—basic concepts of agency, autonomy, and recognition. Following a brief philosophical history of the conce...

Autonomous action is characterized by intention, a sense of agency, and meaning, all of which go beyond simple bodily movement. In this chapter I present evidence to support the idea that actions initially emerge out of our early interactions with others. Moreover, to the extent that we learn to act in specific ways, and that our actions aim at som...

In this chapter I explore the micro-structures of action and the perceptual aspects that accompany action, in order to show how at a very basic level they self-organize into processes that support the intentional lives of agents. The intrinsic temporality of action is shaped in part by the fact that action is dynamically embodied and situated. Init...

The philosophical analysis of action often leads to abstractions. I argue that we can avoid some of these abstractions by keeping in mind that actions are defined and individuated by their circumstances; they are always situated or contextual. I argue that the most appropriate way to think of actions and circumstances is to think of them as ordered...

In this chapter I further develop interaction theory and the concept of primary intersubjectivity by providing evidence for our ability to directly perceive intentions and emotions. Intentions and emotions can be understood at least in part as composed of perceivable patterns of contextualized embodied behaviors. I argue that perception is “smart”...

In contrast to standard accounts of social cognition I offer an alternative account—interaction theory. According to this approach we understand other people primarily by means of a diverse set of embodied, social, and cultural practices governed by social norms. Our understanding of someone’s action is frequently shaped by shared pragmatic context...

This chapter asks what justice is as it pertains to immediate embodied intersubjective interactions, and how it extends from there to institutionally mediated social interactions. Rather than attempting to work out principles of justice as they might derive from or pertain to the abstractions of original positions or ideal situations of communicati...

This paper introduces the notion of ‘cognitive’ institution and discusses its relevance to institutional economics. Cognitive institutions are conceptually founded on the philosophy of mind notion of extended mind, broadened to also include the distinctly social, institutional, and normative dimensions. Cognitive institutions are defined as institu...

Grief is often described as characterized by a particular emotional response to another person’s death. While this is true of paradigm cases, we argue that a broader notion of grief allows accommodating forms of this emotional experience that deviate from the paradigmatic case. The bulk of the paper explores such a nonparadigmatic form of grief, an...

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology - edited by Kenneth S. Kendler April 2020

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology - edited by Kenneth S. Kendler April 2020

I review an unusual case of ‘anonymous vision’ in which a subject has lost a sense of ownership for his visual perception of objects, but not for other persons. Focusing on this difference between object-perception and person-perception, I argue that one significant difference is the gaze, and more generally the face of the other. I explore the com...