Zuzanna Rucinska

Zuzanna Rucinska
University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy

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38
Publications
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317
Citations
Introduction
Zuzanna Rucińska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research interests include pretend and imaginative play, forms of creativity, and embodied and enactive cognition.

Publications

Publications (38)
Article
Do we perceive or do we imagine virtual entities in virtual reality games? There are, to date, two mainstream answers in the literature to this question: the answer of the fictionalists, which is that we must imagine virtual entities for they are fictional, and the answer of the realists, which is that we directly perceive virtual entities since th...
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Introspection is often intuitively conceptualized as a “purely inner” activity, whereby the introspector temporarily breaks their coupling with the external world to focus on their “inner environment”. In this paper, we put forth a substantially different picture of introspection. Inspired by radically embodied cognitive science, we argue that intr...
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Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recen...
Preprint
Perception in virtual reality is often compared to the perception of pictures. There are, however, important differences. A virtual reality environment, unlike a picture, is interactive and immersive. These properties give rise to novel theoretical challenges. Building on James J. Gibson's analysis of the perception of depictions, we raise three qu...
Chapter
Combining perspectives from both continental and analytic philosophy, this timely volume explores how imagination today both shapes and is shaped by technology, art and ethics. Imagination is one of the most significant and broadly examined concepts in contemporary philosophy and is frequently understood as a basic human faculty that enables comple...
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Abstract: Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in speci�c ways with her environment. This view of cognition is now under signi�cant pressure: in a series of rece...
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In this commentary, I propose a more optimistic take to the role of virtual environments for pedagogical purposes than Simon Penny does in his target article. I consider how they already do involve our embodiment, and propose to rethink their objectives, from simulating our environments and substituting our practices, to enriching our repertoires a...
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In this chapter we focus on embodied engagement in movement-driven practices. In these practices, athletes strive to enhance their performance, and must, on different conditions, "think on the fly" while performing. Sports is a prototypical example of such embodied engagement, however movement-driven practices extend beyond traditional sports. Thro...
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This chapter will illuminate the notion of enactive imagination from the perspective of the Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science. In general, embodied and enactive cognitive science proposes that cognition is grounded in, and constrained and regulated by, extra-neural structures like perceptual and sensorimotor systems, and that dynamic interact...
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Pretense is often taken to be a complex cognitive activity that requires the capacity for symbolic thought, which is usually taken to imply mastery or skillful manipulation of linguistic concepts or semantic representations. Enactive accounts of pretense provide alternative proposals, where pretending is seen as an embodied activity that takes plac...
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In this text, we will introduce the reader to the special issue on Pretense and Imagination from the Perspective of 4E Cognitive Science. To do so, we will introduce the concept of 4E cognition and showcase what the available 4E approaches to pretense and imagination look like, in particular if they are contrasted with current cognitivist accounts....
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In his recent paper “Getting Real About Pretense: A Radical Enactivist Proposal”, Daniel Hutto raises several objections against our so-called praxeological enactivist account of pretense (Weichold & Rucińska 2022). He argues that one should, instead, adopt his radical enactivist explanation of pretend play. In this short reply, we defend our praxe...
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What makes metaphors good therapeutic tools? In this paper, we provide an answer to this question by analyzing how metaphors work in systemic collaborative therapeutic practices. We look at the recent embodied, enactive and ecological proposals to metaphors, and provide our own, dialogical-enactive account, whereby metaphors are tools for enacting...
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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...
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This paper analyzes the skilled performance of rock climbing through the framework of Embodied and Enacted Cognitive Science. It introduces a notion of enactive planning that is part of one mindful activity of ongoing responsiveness to the affordances of the wall. The paper takes two distinct planning activities involved in rock climbing—route-read...
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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...
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Review of psychological data of how children engage in imaginary friend play (IFP) shows that it involves a lot of explicit embodied action and interaction with surrounding people and environments. However, IFP is still seen as principally an individualistic activity, where, in addition to those interactions, the actor has to mentally represent an...
Article
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The project of this paper is to synthesize enactivist cognitive science and practice theory in order to develop a new account of pretend play. Pretend play is usually conceived of as a representationalist phenomenon where a pretender projects a fictional mental representation onto reality. It thus seems that pretense can only be explained in repres...
Preprint
Full-text available
Review of psychological data of how children engage in imaginary friend play (IFP) shows that it involves a lot of explicit embodied action and interaction with the surrounding people and environments. However, IFP is still seen as principally an individualistic activity, where in addition to those interactions, the actor has to mentally represent...
Chapter
Full-text available
In dit artikel verkennen we hoe een belichaamde en enactieve visie op cognitie de systemische hulp-verlener helpt in het werken met metaforen. Na een theoretische introductie in de belangrijkste uit-gangspunten van deze visie, reiken we een praktisch kader aan voor de hulpverlener en tonen we de toe-passing daarvan in een fragment uit een therapeu-...
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New thesis on strongly embodied imagination and its epistemic relevance. Peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Synthese topical collection: "Imagination and its Limits"
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In the United States, there is a heated debate over whether it is acceptable to dress up for Halloween as Moana a Polynesian Disney character. In the Netherlands, dressing up as Santa's little helper Black Peter by painting one's face black has increasingly been considered offensive. People cannot agree: is it wrong to pretend play to be Moana or B...
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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...
Chapter
The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the pe...
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In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives to...
Chapter
Pretending is often conceptualized as an imaginative and symbolic capacity, positing mental representations in its explanation. This paper proposes an alternative way to explain pretending with the use of affordances, instead of mental representations, as explanatory tools. It shows that a specific notion of affordance has to be appropriated for af...
Article
This paper will explore one aspect of the relationship between pretence and narratives. I look at proposals about how scripts play guiding roles in our pretend play practices. I then examine the views that mental representations are needed to guide pretend play, reviewing two importantly different pictures of mental guiders: the Propositional Accou...
Chapter
Make-belief games, such as pretend play games, are typically considered to require mental representations. Mental representations are considered indispensable to explain how one can ‘act as if’ one thing was another. Mental representations, in turn, are features of cognitivist approaches to make-believe, and cognitivists (Leslie 1987; Nichols and S...
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This paper informs therapeutic practices that use play, by providing a non-standard philosophical account of pretense: the enactive account of pretend play (EAPP). The EAPP holds that pretend play activity need not invoke mental representational mechanisms; instead, it focuses on interaction and the role of affordances in shaping pretend play activ...
Article
This paper will explore the relationship between Systemic Therapy, which integrates play with objects in its dialogical repertoire with a philosophical account of an Embodied and Enacted Cognition (EEC) and its understanding of pretend play. We will first describe aspects of systemic dialogical practice, followed by an example from the therapeutic...
Chapter
This paper explores whether the sensorimotor theory of perception (SMTP) might contribute to a de-intellectualized understanding of pretence. It applies SMTP to Currie’s [3], [4] notion of perceptual seeing-in that underlies the capacity to make imaginative transformations (seeing-as). This account bypasses manipulation of representational contents...

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