Ed Baggs

Enactivizing dialectics: from individual to social normativity and back - Topoi This paper examines the relation between embodiment and sociality within the enactive approach, highlighting the continuity between biological autonomy and social normativity. The central claim is tha...

Andrea Gambarotto and Thomas van Es argue that in order to adequately incorporate social processes into its theory, enactivism needs to become more dialectical, and more Hegelian

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Emergence Makes the Science of Radical Embodiment Effective - Topoi Radical embodiment faces two interrelated challenges. The first concerns what it offers metaphysically and epistemically as a comprehensive investigative framework that approaches it criticizes do not...

Luis Favela discusses an important problem for radical embodiment - how to conduct empirical science while insisting that the system under study is non-decomposable. He thinks emergence provides the answer doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Harry Heft argues that radical embodiment can benefit from adopting Mead's social pragmatism, which is, he thinks, compatible with Bourdieu's concept of habitus and with Barker's behavior settings theory

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Snapshot of the preprint of our BBS commentary titled "Ethnographic methods can help psychology overcome its WEIRD problems" containing the abstract, which reads: "We are persuaded by Bard et al.'s argument that cross-cultural work in psychology requires not only a greater diversity of participants but also a greater diversity of theories. We encourage the authors to consider that the solution lies not only in improving experimentally-oriented theories, but also in adopting non-experimental methods, including purely ethnographic methods."

Just submitted a BBS commentary (w/ @edbaggs.bsky.social) on the paper "Let’s go WILD: Increasing Inclusivity in Theories of Developmental Psychology"

To make psychology more inclusive we need to confront the WEIRDness of our methods & metatheoretical commitments!

preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

A ‘Pressing’ Problem for Embodied Cognition: A Mechanistic Proposal - Topoi Embodied cognition maintains that there is a deep and significant relationship between the body and mind. But what exactly is the nature of this relation? According to body-centrism, the relation is o...

Luke Kersten raises an old distinction from Andy Clark between two views of embodied cognition: one view gives the body a privileged role in explanations of mind, the other holds that the body is just one resource among many. Can mechanistic explanation resolve the tension?

doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Western Philosophy Department is hiring!

www.uwo.ca/facultyrelat...

Call for papers: #PhiMiSci is inviting submissions for a Special Issue on Social Perception, understood as the perception of socially relevant properties in others. It is edited by Géraldine Carranante and Joulia Smortchkova.
Estimated publication date: 2nd quarter of 2027
Deadline: July 1st, 2026.

No, the deadline for proposals was in July

Contemporary historians, take note:

Some friends and I submitted a commentary

Preprint here:

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

@guicogsci.bsky.social @segundo-ortin.bsky.social @diovicen.bsky.social @tonychemero.bsky.social

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library This study bridges brain and body through ecological psychology and neuroscience by demonstrating how ecological information—in this case, “time to contact” or tau—constrains brain activity and as mu...

Is ecological neuroscience a feasible enterprise? After some theoretical work on ecological resonance, we've engaged on experimental research to test some of the hypotheses that follow from it. These are the first results of (hopefully) many more to come! It's open access 👇
doi.org/10.1111/psyp...

Mental Coordinative Structures: Situating Mental States within Radically Embodied Approaches to Cognition - Topoi Since its inception more than 15 years ago, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has successfully challenged several of the axioms and research paradigms shared by semantic-representationalist ap...

Radical embodied cognitive science does not have a settled view on what mental states are. Alexander Hölken argues for understanding mental states as components of larger scale coordinative structures doi.org/10.1007/s112...

The Equilibration of Technical Objects: Uncovering Normative Layers of Sensorimotor Engagement - Topoi In this paper we argue that radically embodied approaches to cognition can be expanded to show that: (a) our sensorimotor engagements with technical objects can be normatively shaped in a direct manne...

Marta Pérez-Verdugo and @xabibaran.bsky.social discuss whether Piagetian sensorimotor schemes can be extended beyond the body into artifacts. They argue that conventional use of a teapot is shaped as much by the teapot itself as by our bodily action schemes

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Trajectories of Being: How Affordances Shape Identity and Behavior across Time - Topoi This paper introduces the Dynamic Affordance Trajectory Framework (DATF), a multiscalar approach to understanding human behavior and identity formation. It integrates short-term perception-action cycl...

@melinagastelum.bsky.social‬ proposes the Dynamic Affordance Trajectory Framework, which aims to explain how affordances operate across different time scales: action control, learning, and culture

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Scaling-Up Behavior Settings: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Institutions - Topoi Barker’s notion of “behavior settings” has been fruitfully used in Gibsonian ecological psychology to highlight the importance of place and to account for how perception–action of affordances is socio...

@moritz-bammel.bsky.social and @guicogsci.bsky.social discuss the possibility of extending radical embodiment to human social collectives. They compare two established approaches: behavior settings theory and the extended cognition notion of cognitive institutions

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating - Topoi Recent developments in the study of the hippocampal formation call old ideas of representation into question and are forcing a change in the way we understand the study of memory and navigation, openi...

Andrea Hiott discusses the role of mental representations in cognitive neuroscience studies of memory and navigation, proposing that representations are really a part of the way we talk about brains, not something findable in brains themselves

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Radical Embodied Cognition as Non-ideal Theory - Topoi Philosophy of mind and cognition, radical embodied cognition not excluded, has missed the descriptive mark by abstracting away from race, gender, (dis)ability and similar social realities in understan...

Wouter van Hooydonk worries that radical embodied cognitive science may assume that able white men's bodies are a universal representation of human bodies. He thinks RECS should reject the universalizing attitude and pay more attention to particular cases. doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Exploring Reading as a Social Practice with Gibson and Goodwin - Topoi Drawing on recent developments in ecological theory this paper develops a theoretical account of modern, alphabetic, imaginative reading grounded in ecological psychology and the philosophy of embodie...

Sarah Trasmundi discusses whether reading can be reconciled with Gibson’s account of direct perception, and whether imagination can be thought of as an extension of perception.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Radically Embodied Introspection - Topoi Introspection is often conceptualized as a “purely inner” activity, whereby the introspector temporarily breaks their coupling with the external world to focus on their “inner world”. We offer a subst...

Marco Facchin, Zuzanna Rucińska, and Thomas Fondelli ask whether there is such a thing as radical embodied introspection. They think that there is. Through examples, they argue that introspection routinely involves embodied processes

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Cover of new book.

How does Radical Embodied Cognitive Science relate to Marxism?

In a recent preprint, I discuss this question at length, drawing on work by @tonychemero.bsky.social, @sorenmau.bsky.social, @edbaggs.bsky.social and many others.

David Lee just died.
He formulated tau/time-to-contact, the most famous bit of ecological information.
He is one of the main reasons why ecological psychology is still alive.
We all are indebted to him. I met him once and ended up having dinner at his place. Very cool guy!
RIP

A paper on affordances open for commentaries at BBS.

Cites basically no ecological psychologists.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Hypatia has an upcoming special issue on Feminist Philosophy of Mind. hypatiaphilosophy.org/uncategorize...

Farewell to Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3 at the University of Southern Denmark

Once again, this was a lot of fun!

Some photos here radicalembodiment3.github.io/gallery/

Any volunteers to host DRE4?

Abstract for the paper "Why direct social perception theory needs to be more Gibsonian"

Just published!

Why direct social perception theory needs to be more Gibsonian

Co-authored with Martyna Meyer!

edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni4...

From Life to Higher Cognition: Autonomy, Know-How and the Radical Turn - Topoi This paper defends the partial continuities—that are sometimes called “kinks”—in the evolutionary trajectory from biology to cognition and from basic to higher cognition. Building on Radical Enactivis...

Giovanni Rolla, Manoel Abreu Fernandes & Alexandre Lohmann Oliveira write on the possibility of separating the life sciences from the mind sciences, and separating the study of basic cognition from the study of higher cognition

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our special issue of Topoi on "Progress in radical embodiment" can be found here

I'll post the articles in the thread below as they are published

link.springer.com/collections/...

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

I’m enraged by so many things in this piece that I can’t pick and choose, although I may have to try just to vent

Not extended, I'm afraid. It's open so authors can submit revised versions, I think