Location: Room 219, Building 1.451

Program  

Abstracts

Shaun Gallagher (Visiting Professor, Center for Semiotics):
Empathy, simulation and narrative

Abstract: A number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. I review these theories and show that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy.   

A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two problems: the diversity problem and the starting problem.  A narrative approach to empathy avoids all of these problems and offers a more parsimonious account.

Søren Overgaard (University of Copenhagen, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication) and John Michael (DPU, Gnosis):
What Is the Interactive Turn in Social Cognition Research?

This paper discusses the so-called “interactive turn in social cognition research” (De Jaegher, Di Paolo & Gallagher 2010). We argue that defenders of the interactive turn have failed to offer any proposal that is both plausible in itself and irreducible to one or more of the existing theoretical paradigms

Corrado Sinigaglia (University of Milan):
The Space of Action

(abstract currently not available)

Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen):
Empathy and direct social perception

Quite a number of the philosophical arguments and objections currently being launched against simulation (ST) based and theory-theory (TT) based approaches to mindreading have a phenomenological heritage in that they draw on ideas found in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Stein, Gurwitsch, Scheler and Schutz. Within the last couple of years, a number of ST and TT proponents have started to react and respond to what one for the sake of simplicity might call the phenomenological proposal (PP).

This paper addresses some of these critical responses, and distinguishes -- in the process -- substantive disagreements from terminological issues and other issues that are symptomatic of different research agendas. It does so by focusing specifically upon some criticisms made by Pierre Jacob. These epitomize the kinds of concerns that are being raised about PP at the moment, and thus facilitate a reply on behalf of PP that also applies more generally.

Andreas Roepstorff (University of Aarhus):
Spontaneous coupling and Metamapping of  Interactions
A number of recent joint action studies have identified  forms of couplings between people during on-line interaction. Starting from the neo-classical studies of the mirror neuron system, couplings have also been found at other functional levels, e.g. involving emotion systems or predictive coding. These studies  suggest a wide range of ways that humans may, almost spontaneously, couple, and they indicate that coupling in one domain (e.g. motor resonance) may have implications for other systems as well (e.g. the chameleon effect ).

If we as persons, are open systems that almost spontaneously couple to each other, and if these couplings have implications for perception and action, then there seems a need for detecting whether the coupling is mutual or asymetric. Such 'metamapping of interaction' could be a highly relevant mechanism in higher order social interaction, characterized not only by cooperation and trust  but also by competition and deception.
In my talk, I will describe recent studies of spontaneous coupling, and I will explore a few experiments ,which suggests that the systems allowing for coupling may be embedded in other systems that attempts a  metamapping of the interaction.

Daniel D. Hutto (University of Hertfordshire): 
Elementary Mind Minding, Enactivist Style

This presentation defends the view that the simplest forms of mind minding – those of the sort required for engaging with and keeping track of another’s mental states – are best understood and explained in non-representational, enactivist terms. There is no doubt that in many cases it would not be possible to attend to other minds if we did not bring our full-fledged folk psychological skills to bear. But it is far from obvious that all, or even the most common, forms of mind minding requires this. For example, the ways in which pre-verbal infants initially begin to triangulate and engage with adults around the time of their first birthday arguably do not. This seems equally true of the ways in which adult humans jointly attend to, and engage with, other minds in many cases of on-line, fast and efficient social interaction. An enactivist account of elementary mind minding is shown to be a live conceptual possibility by demonstrating how it can coherently derived by abandoning three representationalist commitments of existing cognitivist models. And it will also be shown why doing so is well motivated if it should turn out that there is (1) no reason to believe that basic forms of mentality are representational (in a semantically contentful way) and (2) if no good theory is likely to explain how they could be so.

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