Emoting the Situated Mind A Taxonomy of Affective Material Scaffolds

Existing accounts of cognitive artefacts are a useful starting point for developing the emerging notion of situated affectivity. Starting from a recent taxonomy of cognitive artefacts, I propose a taxonomy of material affective scaffolds (material objects that we use to support, shape and more generally regulate our affective states). I distinguish representational material affective scaffolds (divided into iconic, indexical and symbolic ones) from nonrepresentational ones (chemical and sensory ones). I conclude by pointing out that the resulting taxonomy is based not only on properties of objects but also on the user’s stance towards objects, which in turn depends on other contextual factors.

Distributed Cognition and the Phenomenology of Modernist Painting and Poetry (Rilke and Cézanne)

Contemporary views of consciousness, long anticipated by phenomenology, suggest that cognition includes a distribution across motoric and perceptual experience and is in important ways interwoven with the surrounding environment. This paper takes up implications for aesthetics, demonstrating how such an understanding of consciousness is expressed in analogous ways in modern poetry and painting, particularly in works that have been the object of phenomenological study. An aesthetics of embodied cognition can illuminate the common resources of vital human intentionality in artworks across different media, including Cézanne’s painting and Rilke’s poetry and poetics, and both can be conceived not only as aesthetic but as cognitive artefacts. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that philosophy, visual art, and poetry share a common aim and the poetic inspiration Rilke took from Cézanne and other visual artists can be better understood by considering art and literature from a cognitive standpoint.

Intersemiotic Translation, Cognitive Artefact, and Creativity

Intersemiotic translation (IT) can be described as a cognitive artefact designed as a predictive, generative, and metasemiotic tool that distributes artistic creativity. Cognitive artefacts have a huge variety of forms and are manipulated in many different ways and domains. As a projective augmented intelligence technique, IT works as a predictive tool, anticipating new, and surprising patterns of semiotic events and processes, keeping under control the emergence of new patterns. At the same time, it works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, surprising data in the target-system,​​ and affording competing results​ ​which allow the system to generate candidate instances. As a metasemiotic tool, IT creates a metalevel semiotic process, a sign-action which stands for the action of a sign. It creates an ‘experimental laboratory’ for performing semiotic experiments. IT submits semiotic systems to unusual conditions and provides a scenario for observing the emergence of new and surprising semiotic behaviour as a result. We explore these ideas taking advantage of two examples of ITs to theatrical dance: (1) from one-point visual perspective to classical ballet and (2) from John Cage’s protocols of music indeterminacy to Merce Cunningham’s choreographic composition.

Niche construction, too, unifies praxis and symbolization

Arbib hypothesizes that evolutionary modern language significantly postdates human speciation. Why should this be so? I propose an account based on niche construction theory, in which Arbib's language-ready brain is primarily a consequence of epigenetically-driven adaptation to the biocultural niche of protolanguage and (subsequently) early language. The evolutionary adaptations grounding language evolution were initially to proto-linguistic socio-communicative and symbolic processes, later capturing and re-canalizing behavioural adaptations (such as serial and hierarchical constructive praxis) initially “targeted” to other developmental and cognitive domains. The intimate link between praxic action and symbolic action is present not only in the human brain, but also in the human biocultural complex. The confluence of praxis and symbolization has, in the time scale of sociogenesis, potentiated the invention of domain-constituting and cognition-altering symbolic cognitive artefacts that continue to transform human socio-cultural ecologies. I cite in support of this account, which differs only in some emphases from Arbib's account, my colleagues' and my research on cultural and linguistic conceptions of time in an indigenous Amazonian community.

Swarming Models for Facilitating Collaborative Decisions

The paper highlights the computational power of swarming models (i.e., stigmergic mechanisms) to build collaborative support systems for complex cognitive tasks such as facilitation of group decision processes (GDP) in e-meetings. Unlike traditional approaches that minimize the cognitive complexity by incorporating the facilitation knowledge into the system, stigmergic coordination mechanisms minimize the complexity by providing the system with emergent functionalities that are shaped by the environment itself through the possibility to structure it in terms of high-level cognitive artefacts. This is illustrated by conducting a socio-simulation experiment for an envisioned collaborative software tool that acts as a stigmergic environment for modelling the GDP. The results show superior results when the users are allowed to increase the representational complexity of a GDP model with cognitive artefacts that support guidance and action in the conceptual problem space.

AGAINST SIMPLICITY AND COGNITIVE INDIVIDUALISM

Neuroeconomics illustrates our deepening descent into the details of individual cognition. This descent is guided by the implicit assumption that “individual human” is the important “agent” of neoclassical economics. I argue here that this assumption is neither obviously correct, nor of primary importance to human economies. In particular I suggest that the main genius of the human species lies with its ability to distribute cognition across individuals, and to incrementally accumulate physical and social cognitive artifacts that largely obviate the innate biological limitations of individuals. If this is largely why our economies grow, then we should be much more interested in distributed cognition in human groups, and correspondingly less interested in individual cognition. We should also be much more interested in the cultural accumulation of cognitive artefacts: computational devices and media, social structures and economic institutions.