Books/Monographs:

Psychology’s WEIRD Problems. (w/ Ed Baggs)
Cambridge University Press, 2023. (Link)

Psychology has a WEIRD problem. It is overly reliant on participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Over the last decade this problem has come to be widely acknowledged. However, psychologists have so far made little progress in making psychology more diverse. We propose that the lack of progress can be explained by the fact that the original WEIRD critique was too narrow in scope. The WEIRD critique was originally framed as a single problem of a lack of diversity among research participants. But in fact there are at least four overlapping problems. Psychological science is WEIRD not only in terms of who makes up its participant pool, but also in terms of its theoretical commitments, methodological assumptions, and institutional structures. Psychological science as currently constituted is a fundamentally WEIRD enterprise. Coming to terms with this is necessary if we wish to make psychology relevant for all humanity.

KEYWORDS: WEIRD psychology; theory and methods; institutional structures and incentives; cross-cultural research; diversity

Sanches de Oliveira, G., and Baggs, E. (2023) Psychology’s WEIRD Problems. Elements in Psychology and Culture series, Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781009303538

Journal Articles, Book Chapters, Conference Proceedings Papers, etc:

Two Species of Realism. (w/ Vicente Raja)
European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2024. (Link)

Abstract: Different species of realism have been proposed in the scientific and philosophical literature. Two of these species are direct realism and causal pattern realism. Direct realism is a form of perceptual realism proposed by ecological psychologists within cognitive science. Causal pattern realism has been proposed within the philosophy of model-based science. Both species are able to accommodate some of the main tenets and motivations of instrumentalism. The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual moves that make both direct realism and causal pattern realism tenable realist positions able to accommodate an instrumentalist stance. Such conceptual moves are (i) the rejection of veritism and (ii) the re-structuring of the phenomena of interest. We will then show that these conceptual moves are instances of the ones of a common realist genus we name pragmatist realism.

KEYWORDS: Philosophy of science, Philosophy of cognitive science, Realism, Instrumentalism, Direct realism, Causal patterns

Raja, V., & Sanches de Oliveira G. (2024). Two Species of Realism. European Journal for Philosophy of Science. http://www.doi.org/10.1007/s13194-024-00596-3

Rewilding psychology. (w/ Ed Baggs)
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2024. (Link)

Abstract: Some commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities and undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based programme of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker’s behaviour settings programme and Edwin Hutchins’s distributed cognition programme. Both programmes prioritize observational work, and both reject the individual as the unit of analysis in favour of a community-scale unit. However, whereas the behaviour settings programme is concerned with structural properties of community life, distributed cognition is concerned more narrowly with the functional analysis of expert team performance. We discuss how these programmes can inform a future community-scale approach to studying psychology in the wild. We conclude that the two programs are proof of concept of the possibility of a scientific psychology that rejects methodological individualism. This article is part of the theme issue ‘People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the 21st century’.

KEYWORDS: behaviour settings, distributed cognition, community psychology, WEIRD, psychological methods, methodological individualism

Baggs E, & Sanches de Oliveira G. (2024). Rewilding psychology. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 379: 20230287. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0287

Human Brain Dynamics Dissociate Early Perceptual and Late Motor-Related Stages of Affordance Processing. (w/ Sheng Wang, ak Djebbara and Klaus Gramann)
European Journal of Neuroscience, 2024. (Link)

Abstract: Affordances, the opportunities for action offered by the environment to an agent, are vital for meaningful behaviour and exist in every interaction with the environment. There is an ongoing debate in the field about whether the perception of affordances is an automated process. Some studies suggest that affordance perception is an automated process that is independent from the visual context and bodily interaction with the environment, whereas others argue that it is modulated by the visual and motor context in which affordances are perceived. The present paper aims to resolve this debate by examining affordance automaticity from the perspective of sensorimotor time windows. To investigate the impact of different forms of bodily interactions with an environment, that is, the movement context (physical vs. joystick movement), we replicated a previous study on affordance perception in which participants actively moved through differently wide doors in an immersive 3D virtual environment. In the present study, we displayed the same environment on a 2D screen with participants moving through doors of different widths using the keys on a standard keyboard. We compared components of the event-related potential (ERP) from the continuously recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) that were previously reported to be related to affordance perception of architectural transitions (passable and impassable doors). Comparing early sensory and later motor-related ERPs, our study replicated ERPs reflecting early affordance perception but found differences in later motor-related components. These results indicate a shift from automated perception of affordances during early sensorimotor time windows to movement context dependence of affordance perception at later stages, suggesting that affordance perception is a dynamic and flexible process that changes over sensorimotor stages.

KEYWORDS: affordances; contextual dependence; EEG; physical walking and joystick movement; sensorimotor time windows; time-varying automaticity

Wang, S., Djebbara, Z., Sanches de Oliveira, G., & Gramann, K. (2024). Human brain dynamics dissociate early perceptual and late motor-related stages of affordance processing. European Journal of Neuroscience, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.16461

The Point is to Change the World: Enactivist Reflexivity Motivates Resisting the Utopian vs. Scientific Distinction.
Constructivist Foundations, 2023. (Link)

Open peer commentary on the article “Enactivism: Utopian & Scientific” by Russell Meyer & Nick Brancazio. Abstract: The distinction Meyer and Brancazio offer between utopian and scientific projects within enactivism is a helpful addition to the more well-established differentiation between enactivist strands. However, I propose that the distinction works well only as an interpretive lens for looking at enactivism from the outside. In contrast, considered “from the inside” or in light of enactivist commitments, enactivism has good reasons to challenge the currently dominant assumptions about science and philosophy that underlie the distinction.

KEYWORDS: enactivism; pragmatism; philosophy; science; reflexivity; theory; practice.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). The point is to change the world: Enactivist reflexivity motivates resisting the utopian vs. scientific distinction. Constructivist Foundations 19(1): 24–27. https://constructivist.info/19/1/024

Doing Without Levels.
Spontaneous Generations, 2023. (Link)

Philosophical discussions about agency at different levels—the subpersonal and the suprapersonal levels, or the micro and the macro levels more generally—are characterized by robust, if sometimes implicit, assumptions about individuality and mind, as much as by assumptions about the leveling in question. This essay takes as its starting point the perspective of radical embodied cognitive science, and explores the implications that an embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective on cognition has for how we think about agency. As I propose, this perspective motivates a fundamental shift: by offering a level-neutral understanding of ‘doing,’ the embodied, ecological and dynamical perspective shows that we can do without levels in philosophically understanding agency.

KEYWORDS: agency; embodied cognition; synergies; individualism; levels-thinking.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). Doing Without Levels. Spontaneous Generations, Volume 11, Issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2023). DOI: 10.4245/spongen.v11i1.1489

Scientific Practice as Ecological-Enactive Co-Construction. (w/ Thomas van Es and Ines Hipolito)
Synthese, 2023. (Link)

Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”

KEYWORDS: scientific practice; theory; naturalism; ecological psychology; enactivism; niche construction; cognition.

Sanches de Oliveira, G., van Es, T. & Hip olito, I. (2023) Scientific practice as ecological-enactive co-construction. Synthese 202, 4. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-023-04215-1

Reading Comprehension as Embodied Action: Exploratory Findings on Nonlinear Eye Movement Dynamics and Comprehension of Scientific Texts. (w/ Moritz Bammel)
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2023. (Link)

Reading comprehension is often conceptualized in terms of the internal processing of linguistic information and construction of accurate mental representations. In contrast, an ecological-enactive approach rejects this internalist focus and instead emphasizes the dynamic process of reader-text coupling in which eye movements play a constitutive role. In this study, we employed recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and eye movement dynamics, based on eye-tracking data from the Potsdam Textbook Corpus recorded from beginners and experts reading scientific texts, followed by comprehension questionnaires. Moreover, we compared the findings from RQA to classical eye movement measures (number of fixations, mean fixation duration, regression fixation proportion). The results indicated that classical eye movement measures did not predict reading comprehension reliably, whereas recurrences in gaze steps were reliably associated with reading comprehension proficiency. Contrary to our original hypothesis, experts showed more irregular, rather than more regular, eye movement dynamics, and these were linked to more proficient reading comprehension. In line with previous research on naturalistic reading using nonlinear methods, the present findings suggest that reading comprehension is best understood as emerging from interaction-dominant coordination processes.

KEYWORDS: reading comprehension; eye movements; naturalistic reading; recurrence quantification analysis; ecological psychology; enactivism.

Bammel, M. and Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). Reading Comprehension as Embodied Action: Exploratory Findings on Nonlinear Eye Movement Dynamics and Comprehension of Scientific Texts. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10n8p5zn

Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity motivates Pluralism .
Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations, Springer, 2023. (Link)

Explanatory diversity is a salient feature of the sciences of the mind, where different projects focus on neural, psychological, cognitive, social or other explanations. The same happens within embodied cognitive science, where ecological, enactive, dynamical, phenomenological and other approaches differ from each other in their explanations of the embodied mind. As traditionally conceived, explanatory diversity is philosophically problematic, fueling debates about whether the different explanations are competing, compatible, or tangential. In contrast, this paper takes the perspective of embodied cognitive science as its starting point and accordingly approaches explanatory diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenomenon to be understood. Recent work has explored how the view of cognition as embodied motivates reflexively viewing science as a situated embodied cognitive practice. Here I argue that this reflexive turn motivates adopting a pluralistic stance when it comes to questions about theoretical and methodological disagreements. In particular, it motivates moving away from thinking in terms of explanations as disembodied entities that compete with one another, and instead thinking in terms of different explanatory styles as embodied practices of explaining, many of which might be legitimate and warranted independently of whether and how the explanations themselves relate to one another.

KEYWORDS: explanatory diversity; embodied cognition; reflexivity; pluralism; explanatory styles.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). Explanatory Diversity and Embodied Cognitive Science: Reflexivity Motivates Pluralism. In: Casper, MO., Artese, G.F. (eds) Situated Cognition Research. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39744-8_4

A Professional Guide to Explanation. Commentary on “A Methodological Problem of Choice for 4E Research” .
Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations, Springer, 2023. (Link)

On the face of it, the perspective that Casper puts forward in his paper (Chap. 2) and the one I offer in mine (Chap. 4)are completely at odds with each other. He sees the current diversity of explanations, theories and methods in embodied cognitive science as problematic and calling for some kind of integration, whereas I defend an extreme pluralist stance and don’t see the diversity as a problem. Not only that, but while he argues for coordination between the disparate approaches, I propose that expecting such coordination is in many cases unrealistic and moreover that, even when it’s possible, it might be counterproductive. The straightforward thing to do now would be for me to double down and use this space to try to show why I’m right and Casper is wrong. But I don’t think he’s wrong. He and I do disagree, but I don’t think it’s that sort of disagreement where only one side can be right and the other must be wrong. In particular, I don’t think that focusing on the different conclusions he and I draw in our respective chapters is a fruitful way to understand the nature of our disagreement. My goal in this commentary will be to explain why. I don’t know if Casper will agree with my assessment or not, but I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t—in fact, as I will suggest, this would make perfect sense given what I propose in my chapter. Still, my hope is that, by clarifying how (from my perspective) our different views relate to each other, I can help some readers better appreciate both his proposal and mine.

KEYWORDS: explanatory diversity; embodied cognition; reflexivity; pluralism; explanatory styles.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2023). A Professional Guide to Explanation. Commentary on “A Methodological Problem of Choice for 4E Research”. In: Casper, MO., Artese, G.F. (eds) Situated Cognition Research. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39744-8_3

Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences, 2022. (Link)

For decades now a research question has firmly established itself as a staple of psychological and neuroscientific investigations on language, namely the question of whether and how bilingualism is cognitively beneficial, detrimental or neutral. As more and more studies appear every year, it seems as though the research question itself is firmly grounded and can be answered if only we use the right experimental manipulations and subject the data to the right analysis methods and interpretive lens. In this paper we propose that, rather than merely improving prior methods in the pursuit of evidence in one direction or another, we would do well to carefully consider whether the research question itself is as firmly grounded as it might appear to be. We identify two bodies of research that suggest the research question to be highly problematic. In particular, drawing from work in sociolinguistics and in embodied cognitive science, we argue that the research question of whether bilingualism is cognitively advantageous or not is based on problematic assumptions about language and cognition. Once these assumptions are addressed head on, a straightforward answer to the question arises, but the question itself comes to seem to be a poor starting point for research. After examining why this is so, we conclude by exploring some implications for future research.

KEYWORDS: bilingualism; multilingualism; language ideologies; sociolinguistics; communities of practice; information processing; embodied cognition; ecological psychology

Sanches de Oliveira, G. and Bullock Oliveira, M. (2022) Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means. Front. Psychol. 13:867166. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867166

Radical Artifactualism.
European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2022. (Link)

A powerful idea put forward in the recent philosophy of science literature is that scientific models are best understood as instruments, tools or, more generally, artifacts. This idea has thus far been developed in combination with the more traditional representational approach: accordingly, current artifactualist accounts treat models as representational tools. But artifactualism and representationalism are independent views, and adopting one does not require acceptance of the other. This paper argues that a leaner version of artifactualism, free of representationalist assumptions, is both desirable and viable. Taking seriously the idea that models are artifacts can help us philosophically to make sense of how and why scientific modeling works even without reference to representation.

KEYWORDS: scientific modeling; representation; tool use; material engagement; pragmatism

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2022) Radical Artifactualism. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 12(2), 1-33. DOI: 10.1007/s13194-022-00462-0

Pragmatism.
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, 2022. (Link)

Pragmatism is a school of thought popularized in the beginning of the twentieth century by American psychologist and philosopher William James. Although most widely known (and criticized) for its theory of truth, pragmatism is a far broader position, connecting to issues in psychology, education, ethics, religion, and politics. This entry gives an overview of pragmatism particularly as developed by James. It begins by describing pragmatism’s historical development and presenting the pragmatist contribution to philosophical debates about truth. From this, the entry moves to discussing pragmatism’s broader significance, and it does so by highlighting how pragmatism’s emphasis on practical effects relates to cognitive and existential possibilities: Our habits both limit and enable the range of behaviors available to us, but they can also be worked on so as to bring us closer to better possibilities, including possibilities for our own personal development and for making life more meaningful, as well as possibilities for how we approach life in society.

KEYWORDS: American pragmatism; William James; Practical effects; Truth; Development; Habit; Cognition; Meaning; Pluralism

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2022) Pragmatism. In V. P. Glăveanu (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_241-1

The Embodiment of Architectural Experience: A Methodological Perspective on Neuro-Architecture.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Cognitive Neuroscience, 2022. (Link)

People spend a large portion of their time inside built environments. Research in neuro-architecture—the neural basis of human perception of and interaction with the surrounding architecture—promises to advance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying this common human experience and also to inspire evidence-based architectural design principles. This paper examines the current state of the field and offers a path for moving closer to fulfilling this promise. The paper is structured in three sections, beginning with an introduction to neuro-architecture, outlining its main objectives and giving an overview of experimental research in the field. Afterward, two methodological limitations attending current brain-imaging architectural research are discussed: the first concerns the limited focus of the research, which is often restricted to the aesthetic dimension of architectural experience; the second concerns practical limitations imposed by the typical experimental tools and methods, which often require participants to remain stationary and prevent naturalistic interaction with architectural surroundings. Next, we propose that the theoretical basis of ecological psychology provides a framework for addressing these limitations and motivates emphasizing the role of embodied exploration in architectural experience, which encompasses but is not limited to aesthetic contemplation. In this section, some basic concepts within ecological psychology and their convergences with architecture are described. Lastly, we introduce Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) as one emerging brain imaging approach with the potential to improve the ecological validity of neuro-architecture research. Accordingly, we suggest that combining theoretical and conceptual resources from ecological psychology with state-of-the-art neuroscience methods (Mobile Brain/Body Imaging) is a promising way to bring neuro-architecture closer to accomplishing its scientific and practical goals.

KEYWORDS: neuro-architecture; ecological psychology; Mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI); methodology; aesthetics & ergonomics; Ecological Validity

Wang, S., Sanches de Oliveira, G., Djebbara, Z., and Gramann, K. (2022) The Embodiment of Architectural Experience: A Methodological Perspective on Neuro-Architecture. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: Cognitive Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.833528

The Strong Program in Embodied Cognitive Science.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2022. (Link)

A popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cognition. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied phenomenon, to be situated. I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity, which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of setting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.

KEYWORDS: embodiment, situation, reflexivity, scientific practice, embodied cognitive science

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2022) The Strong Program in Embodied Cognitive Science. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. DOI: 10.1007/s11097-022-09806-w

From something old to something new: Functionalist lessons for the cognitive science of scientific creativity.
Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition, 2022. (Link)

An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what’s already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it’s hard to imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind scientists so often engage in. The present article offers an entry point to addressing this challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the nature of mind, thought and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the paper claims that the functionalist conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims.

KEYWORDS: creativity, representation, mind, experience, Functionalism, Embodied cognitive science

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2022) From something old to something new: Functionalist lessons for the cognitive science of scientific creativity. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750086

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science and “Real Cognition.” (w/ Vicente Raja and Tony Chemero)
Synthese, 2021. (Link)

A persistent criticism of radical embodied cognitive science is that it will be impossible to explain “real cognition” without invoking mental representations. This paper provides an account of explicit, real-time thinking of the kind we engage in when we imagine counter-factual situations, remember the past, and plan for the future. We first present a very general non-representational account of explicit thinking, based on pragmatist philosophy of science. We then present a more detailed instantiation of this general account drawing on nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology. [online first, 2019]

KEYWORDS: embodied cognition, thinking, representation, artifactualism, resonance, ecological psychology

Sanches de Oliveira, G., Raja, V. & Chemero, A. (2021) Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”. Synthese 198, 115–136. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02475-4

Representationalism is a Dead End
Synthese, 2021. (Link)

Representationalism—the view that scientific modeling is best understood in representational terms—is the received view in contemporary philosophy of science. Contributions to this literature have focused on a number of puzzles concerning the nature of representation and the epistemic role of misrepresentation, without considering whether these puzzles are the product of an inadequate analytical framework. The goal of this paper is to suggest that this possibility should be taken seriously. The argument has two parts, employing the “can’t have” and “don’t need” tactics drawn from philosophy of mind. On the one hand, I propose that representationalism doesn’t work: different ways to flesh out representationalism create a tension between its ontological and epistemological components and thereby undermine the view. On the other hand, I propose that representationalism is not needed in the first place—a position I articulate based on a pragmatic stance on the success of scientific research and on the feasibility of alternative philosophical frameworks. I conclude that representationalism is untenable and unnecessary, a philosophical dead end. A new way of thinking is called for if we are to make progress in our understanding of scientific modeling. [online first, 2018]

KEYWORDS: scientific modeling; representation; epistemology of science; pragmatism

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2021) Radical embodied cognitive science and “Real Cognition”. Synthese 198, 115–136. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-018-01995-9

Experimentation, “models” and the turn to practice.
Metascience, 2020. (Link)

Review of Isabelle F. Peschard and Bas C. Van Fraassen (Eds.): The experimental side of modeling. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 336pp, $40 PB

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2020). Experimentation, “models” and the turn to practice. Metascience 29, 395–398. DOI: 10.1007/s11016-020-00564-6

Patterns in Cognitive Phenomena and Pluralism of Explanatory Styles. (w/ Angela Potochnik).
Topics in Cognitive Science, 2020. (Link)

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high-level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture different, cross-cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. [online first, 2019]

KEYWORDS: levels of explanation, explanatory pluralism, reductionism, mechanism, embodied cognitive science

Potochnick, A., & Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2020). Patterns in Cognitive Phenomena and Pluralism of Explanatory Styles. Top Cogn Sci, 12: 1306-1320. DOI: 10.1111/tops.12481

Bee-ing In the World: Phenomenology, Cognitive Science, and Interactivity in a Novel Insect-Tracking Task. (w/ Chris Riehm and Colin T. Annand)
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019. (Link)

Dotov, Nie and Chemero (2010) conducted a set of experiments to demonstrate how phenomenology, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger, interfaces with experimental research in embodied cognitive science. Specifically, they drew a parallel between Heidegger’s notion of readiness-to-hand and the concept of an extended cognitive system (Clark 2008) by looking for the presence or absence of interaction-dominant dynamics (Holden, van Orden, and Turvey 2009; Ihlen and Vereijken 2010) in a hand/mouse system. We share Dotov, Nie and Chemero’s optimism about the potential for cross-pollination between phenomenology and cognitive science, but we think that it can be better advanced through a shift in focus. First, we argue in favor of using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory as the philosophical foundation for experimental research in embodied cognitive science. Second, we describe an audio-visual tracking task in virtual reality that we designed and used to empirically investigate humanenvironment coupling and interactivity. In addition to providing further support for phenomenologically-inspired empirical cognitive science, our research also offers a more generalizable scientific treatment of the interaction between humans and their environments.

KEYWORDS: phenomenology, embodiment, interactivity, agent-environment systems

Sanches de Oliveira, G., Riehm, C., & Annand, C. (2019). Bee-ing in the World: Phenomenology, Cognitive Science, and Interactivityin a Novel Insect-Tracking Task. A.K. Goel, C.M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1008-1013). ISBN: 0-9911967-7-5. Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

Theory, Practice, and Non-Reductive (Meta)Science.
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2019. (Link)

Are the theoretical frameworks of phenomenology and of science compatible? And, if so, what would a reconciliation entail for science as it is practiced? Shaun Gallagher poses these two questions, answering the first in the affirmative and leaving the second unaddressed. I argue that treating the two as separate questions presupposes an inadequate distinction between theory and practice that Gallagher’s non-reductive framework motivates rejecting. Recognizing the intertwining of theory and practice allows us to answer Gallagher’s two questions about phenomenology and science all at once, but it also motivates a less conciliatory conclusion than the one he offers.

KEYWORDS: phenomenology, embodiment, life-world, Husserl, philosophy of science, theory, practice

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2019). Theory, Practice, and Non-Reductive (Meta)Science. Australasian Philosophical Review, 2:2, 199-203, DOI: 10.1080/24740500.2018.1552097

The Cognition-Perception Distinction Across Paradigms: An Ecological View. (w/ Vicente Raja)
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2018. (Link)

Folk psychology takes perception and cognition to be two distinct processes. It seems that when we perceive the world we are engaged in one kind of activity and when we think about it we are engaged in a different one. This conception underlies various discussions within the cognitive sciences, such as on the architecture and modularity of the mind, and the cognitive penetrability of perception. But is the distinction justified? This paper looks for an answer in two opposing paradigms in the sciences of the mind: traditional cognitivism and ecological psychology. Even though cognitivism is the dominant paradigm, we argue that it has thus far failed to give a definite account of the relation between perception and cognition, and to support or to deny their separation. Ecological psychology, on the other hand, rejects the distinction and integrates cognition with perception. We discuss previous work within the ecological view and sketch directions for future research.

KEYWORDS: cognition; perception; folk psychology; cognitivism; ecological psychology

Sanches de Oliveira, G. & Raja, V. (2018). The Cognition-Perception Distinction Across Paradigms: An Ecological View. T.T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, & C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 2403-2408. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN: 978-0-9911967-8-4

Ecological Psychology and the Environmentalist Promise of Affordances.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2018. (Link)

What is ecological about Gibsonian Ecological Psychology? Well-known senses in which Gibson’s scientific program is ‘ecological’ have to do with its theoretical, ontological and methodological foundations. But, besides these, the Gibsonian framework is ‘ecological’ in an additional sense that has remained understudied and poorly understood—a sense of “ecological” that connects Gibson’s view to the environmentalism of environmental psychology and environmental ethics. This paper focuses on the latter sense of ‘ecological’, and explores the relevance of Gibson’s notion of “affordance” for thinking about environmental issues like deforestation, pollution and climate change. One existing account is criticized and an alternative is proposed.

KEYWORDS: affordances; perception; environmental ethics; environmental psychology; moral psychology; responsibility

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2018) Ecological Psychology and the Environmentalist Promise of Affordances. T.T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, & C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1014-1019. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN: 978-0-9911967-8-4.

Emotion as a Form of Perception: Why William James was not a Jamesian.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2018. (Link)

Two main views have informed the literature on the psychology of emotion in the past few decades. On one side, cognitivists identify emotions with processes such as judgments, evaluations and appraisals. On the other side, advocates of non-cognitive approaches leave the “intellectual” aspects of emotional experience out of the emotion itself, instead identifying emotions with embodied processes involving physiological changes. Virtually everyone on either side of the cognitive/non-cognitive divide identify William James’ view, also known as the James-Lange theory, fully on the noncognitivist side. But this is a mistake. Re-interpreting James’ writings in its scientific context, this paper argues that he actually rejected the cognitive/non-cognitive divide, such that his view of emotions did not fit either side—that is, James was not a “Jamesian” in the sense the term is used in the literature.

KEYWORDS: emotion; cognitivism; James-Lange theory; perception; sensation; physiological changes.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2018) Emotion as a Form of Perception: Why William James was not a Jamesian. T.T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, \& C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1020-1024. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN: 978-0-9911967-8-4

Model-based science: diverse perspectives, little cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Metascience, 2018. (Link)

Review of Lorenzo Magnani and Tommaso Bertolotti (Editors): Springer handbook of model-based science. Dordrecht: Springer, 2017, 1179pp.

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2018) Model-Based Science: Diverse Perspectives, Little Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue. Model-based science: diverse perspectives, little cross-disciplinary dialogue. Metascience 27, 453–456 (2018). DOI: 10.1007/s11016-018-0327-x

Gibson’s Reasons for Realism and Gibsonian Reasons for Anti-Realism: An Ecological Approach to Model-Based Reasoning in Science.
Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2016. (Link)

Representational views of the mind traditionally face a skeptical challenge on perceptual knowledge: if our experience of the world is mediated by representations built upon perceptual inputs, how can we be certain that our representations are accurate and our perceptual apparatus reliable? J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach provides an alternative framework, according to which direct perception of affordances does away with the need to posit internal mental representations as intermediary steps between perceptual input and behavioral output. Gibson accordingly spoke of his framework as providing “reasons for realism.” In this paper I suggest that, granting Gibson his reasons for perceptual realism, the Gibsonian framework motivates antirealism when it comes to scientific theorizing and modeling. If scientists are Gibsonian perceivers, then it makes sense to take their use of models in indirect investigations of real-world phenomena not as representations of the phenomena, but rather as autonomous tools with their own affordances.

KEYWORDS: perception; ecological psychology; affordances; representation; philosophy of science; scientific modeling

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2016) Gibson’s Reasons for Realism and Gibsonian Reasons for Anti-Realism: An Ecological Approach to Model-Based Reasoning in Science. Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., \& Trueswell, J.C. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1373-1378. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN: 978-0-9911967-3-9

Review of A. C. Grayling’s “The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind.”
Metapsychology, 2016. (Link)

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2016) Review of A. C. Grayling’s The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind. *Metapsychology*, Vol. 20, Issue 34. (ISSN 1931-5716)

Approaches to Scientific Modeling, and the (Non)Issue of Representation: A Case Study in Multi-model Research on Thigmotaxis and Group Thermoregulation.
Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology, 2016. (Link)

Recent contributions to the philosophical literature on scientific modeling have tended to follow one of two approaches, on the one hand addressing conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological questions about models, or, on the other hand, emphasizing the cognitive aspects of modeling and accordingly focusing on model-based reasoning. In this paper I explore the relationship between these two approaches through a case study of model-based research on the behavior of infant rats, particularly thigmotaxis (movement based on tactile sensation) and temperature regulation in groups. A common assumption in the philosophical literature is that models represent the target phenomena they simulate. In the modeling project under investigation, however, this assumption was not part of the model-based reasoning process, arising only in a theoretical article as, I suggest, a post hoc rhetorical device. I argue that the otherwise nonexistent concern with the model-target relationship as being representational results from a kind of objectification often at play in philosophical analysis, one that can be avoided if an alternative form of objectification is adopted instead.

KEYWORDS: Scientific modeling; Model-based reasoning; Representation; Thigmotaxis; Thermoregulation; Robotics; Agent-based modeling

Sanches de Oliveira G. (2016). Approaches to Scientific Modeling, and the (Non)Issue of Representation: A Case Study in Multi-model Research on Thigmotaxis and Group Thermoregulation. Magnani L., Casadio C. (eds), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_5

Against Smallism and Localism. (w/ Tony Chemero)
Studies in Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, 2015. (Link)

The question whether cognition ever extends beyond the head is widely considered to be an empirical issue. And yet, all the evidence amassed in recent years has not sufficed to settle the debate. In this paper we suggest that this is because the debate is not really an empirical one, but rather a matter of definition. Traditional cognitive science can be identified as wedded to the ideals of “smallism” and “localism”. We criticize these ideals and articulate a case in favor of extended cognition by highlighting the historical pedigree and conceptual adequacy of related empirical and theoretical work.

KEYWORDS: extended cognition; reductionism; internalism; affordances; dynamical systems; tool-use; social interaction; cognitive institutions

Sanches de Oliveira, G., and Chemero, A. (2015). Against Smalism and Localism. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric vol 41, no 1, pp. 9-23. DOI: 10.1515/slgr-2015-0017

Review of Michael Weisberg’s “Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World.”
Metapsychology, 2013. (Link)

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2013) Review of Michael Weisberg’s Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World. Metapsychology, Vol. 17, Issue 40. ISSN 1931-5716.

Interaction and Mental State Attributions: Social Aspects of Folk Psychology.
Actas del Primer Congreso de la Sociedad Filosofica del Uruguay, 2012. (Link)

Matthew Rattcliffe defends that Folk Psychology is incompatible with ordinary interpersonal understanding, which he says is more fundamentally interactive and interpretative according to the social rules of the shared environment than based on mental state attributions. In this paper I examine Ratcliffe’s position, arguing that his rejection of mindreading is unjustified; although it is right that coordinated action can be a result of mere contextual comprehension, there are cases in which there is no interpersonal understanding exactly because of failed mindreading, thus making clear the importance of mental state attributions. [in Portuguese]

KEYWORDS: folk psychology, mindreading, interpersonal understanding

Sanches de Oliveira, G. (2012) Interaction and Mental State Attributions: Social Aspects of Folk Psychology. C. Caorsi, R. Navia, P. Melogno (Eds.), Actas del Primer Congreso de la Sociedad Filosofica del Uruguay, pp. 510-518. ISSN: 1688-9649.