This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cognition. It does so first by articulating a diachronic constitutive account for how embodied engagement can play a constitutive role in social cognition. It then proceeds to consider an objection; the causal-constitutive fallacy (Adams & Aizawa, 2001, 2008; Block, 2005) against enactive social cognition. The paper proceeds to deflate this objection by establishing that the distinction between constitution and causation is not co-extensive with the distinction between internal constitutive elements and external causal elements. It is then shown that there is a different reason for thinking that an enactive account of social cognition is problematic. We call this objection the ‘poverty of the interactional stimulus argument’. This objection turns on the role and characteristics of anticipation in enactive social cognition. It argues that anticipatory processes are mediated by an internally realised model or tacit theory (Carruthers, 2015; Seth, 2015). The final part of this paper dissolves this objection by arguing that it is possible to cast anticipatory processes as orchestrated as well as maintained by sensorimotor couplings between individuals in face-to-face interaction.

Key words: Social cognition, enactivism, intersubjectivity, diachronic constitution, theory of mind, sensorimotor contingencies, causal-constitutive fallacy

In my answer to Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (2008) question “Who conceives Society?” I proposed a radically social constructivism (Krippendorff, 2008a) that overcomes what I perceive to be an unfortunate cognitivism in von Glasersfeld’s, Heinz von Foerster’s, and Humberto Maturana’s work. Since then, I published two other papers on the subject. One (2008b) moves the notion of human agency into the center of my project, focusing on its role in conceptions of social organizations – a concept less grand than “society” and one (2008c) teases out several reflexive turns that have grown in cybernetics but cannot be subsumed by the epistemology of radical constructivism and second-order cybernetics, which privileges observation and a representational theory of language over participation in conversation and cooperative constructions of reality. In all of these efforts, conversation has become the starting point of my conceptualizations of being human. In this essay, I wish to discuss what conversation entails, how it is maintained, and under which conditions it degenerates into something else.

This special issue is focused on how perceptual learning is understood from a post-cognitivist approach to cognition. The process of perceptual learning is key in our cognitive life and development: we can learn to discriminate environmental aspects and hence adapt ourselves to it, using our resources intelligently. Perceptual learning, according to the classic cognitivist view, is based on the enrichment of passively received stimuli, a linear operation on sensations that results in a representation of the original information. This representation can be useful for other processes that generate an output, like a motor command, for example. On the contrary, alternative approaches to perceptual learning, different from the one depicted in the classic cognitivist theory, share the ideas that perception and action are intrinsically tied and that cognitive processes rely on embodiment and situatedness. These approaches usually claim that mental representations are not useful concepts, at least when portraying a process of perceptual learning. Approaches within post-cognitivism are not a unified theory, but a diversity of perspectives that need to establish a dialogue among their different methodologies. In particular, this special issue is focused on ecological psychology and enactivism as key traditions within the post-cognitivist constellation.

Key words: post-cognitivism, ecological psychology, enactivism, perceptual learning, embodied cognition

The theory of cognitive development from Jean Piaget (1923) is a constructivist perspective of learning that has substantially influenced cognitive science domain. Indeed it seems that constructivism is a possible trail in order to overcome the limitations of classical techniques stemming from cognitivism or connectionism and create autonomous agents, fitted with strong adaptation ability within their environment, modelled on biological organisms. Potential applications concern intelligent agents in interaction with a complex environment, with objectives that cannot be predefined. There are numerous interesting works in developmental robotics going in this direction. In this work we investigate the application of these principles to a close domain: Ambient intelligence, which is extremely challenging but which also presents interesting aspects to exploit, like the participation of human users. From the perspective of a constructivist theory, the learning agent has to build a representation of the world that relies on the learning of sensori-motor patterns starting from its own experience only. This step is difficult to set up for systems evolving in continuous environments, using raw data from sensors without a priori modelling, primarily because they face a bootstrap problem. In this paper we address this particular issue and propose a decentralized approach based on a multi-agent framework, where the system’s representations are constructed through a self-organization process that handles the dynamics between experience discretization and learning.

What is constructivism, and what is its relevance for psychotherapy? Posed in this form, the question is on par with other similarly grand inquiries, such as “What is existentialism (or behaviorism, or cognitivism, or systems theory) and what are its psychological implications? ” In a sense, this entire book represents an extended answer to the former question, with each subsequent chapter exploring one possible response or set of responses to this basic inquiry. Its goal is to make constructivist psychotherapy accessible to newcomers to the approach and to deepen and broaden the understanding and application of constructivist psychotherapy for those who are already familiar with its terrain. The author’s aim in this first, brief chapter is to provide a general working introduction to constructivism and an orienting framework for reading the more detailed chapters that follow.

We propose that typical schizophrenic delusions develop on the background of preexisting anomalies of self-experience. We argue that disorders of the Self represent the experiential core clinical phenomena of schizophrenia, as was already suggested by the founders of the concept of schizophrenia and elaborated in the phenomenological psychiatric tradition. The article provides detailed descriptions of the pre-psychotic or schizotypal anomalies of self-experience, often illustrated through clinical vignettes. We argue that delusional transformation in the evolution of schizophrenic psychosis reflects a global reorganization of consciousness and existential reorientation, both of which radiate from a fundamental alteration of the Self. We critically address the contemporary cognitive approaches to delusion formation, often finding them inconsistent with the clinical features of schizophrenia or implausible from a phenomenological point of view.

Key words: self-awareness, subjective experience, preschizophrenic prodrome, phenomenology, psychosis, cognitivism.

Donald T. Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology is used as a framework for examining five issues facing constructivism: (1) realism, (2) cognitivism, (3) relativism, (4) dualism, and (5) social constructionism. It is suggested that a nuanced application of evolutionary epistemology facilitates fresh ways for constructivists to accommodate these issues.

Context: Constructivist approaches to cognition have mostly been descriptive, and now face the challenge of specifying the mechanisms that may support the acquisition of knowledge. Departing from cognitivism, however, requires the development of a new functional framework that will support causal, powerful and goal-directed behavior in the context of the interaction between the organism and the environment. Problem: The properties affecting the computational power of this interaction are, however, unclear, and may include partial information from the environment, exploration, distributed processing and aggregation of information, emergence of knowledge and directedness towards relevant information. Method: We posit that one path towards such a framework may be grounded in these properties, supported by dynamical systems. To assess this hypothesis, we describe computational models inspired from swarm intelligence, which we use as a metaphor to explore the practical implications of the properties highlighted. Results: Our results demonstrate that these properties may serve as the basis for complex operations, yielding the elaboration of knowledge and goal-directed behavior. Implications: This work highlights aspects of interaction that we believe ought to be taken into account when characterizing the possible mechanisms underlying cognition. The scope of the models we describe cannot go beyond that of a metaphor, however, and future work, theoretical and experimental, is required for further insight into the functional role of interaction with the environment for the elaboration of complex behavior. Constructivist content: Inspiration for this work stems from the constructivist impetus to account for knowledge acquisition based on interaction.

Key words: Stochastic diffusion search, clustering, multi-agent system, cognitivism.

The story is told of a physicist who is invited by a dairy farmers’ association to tell them how to get more milk from cows. The physicist begins: ‘First we start with a spherical cow.’ That is told as a joke! Yet far more strange is what cognitivism has done to what is supposed to be the study of human thought and human life. This chapter is about concepts, the central building blocks of cognitivist theory. I will first show how cognitivism necessarily cannot give an adequate treatment of concepts and will then, more importantly (who pays any attention to criticisms?), outline the foundations for a new nonrepresentational view of concepts which should place the study of concepts on a real (rather than a spherical cow) basis.

Excerpt: In this text, I outline a new framework for the psychological study of the conscious. Essentially, the greater part of contemporary psychology and cognitive science is concerned with the unconscious. Specifically, the view dominating the field today is that the bulk of workings of the mind take place in a province that is not amenable to consciousness. This holds true of all major paradigms in cognitive science: the classical paradigm of symbolic processing (to be referred to here as the representational- computational view of mind, or RCVM, and occasionally referred to as cognitivism or representationalism), the alternative paradigm of connectionism, as well as models entertained in social psychology and in the neurosciences. By all these approaches, both the structures underlying cognitive activity and the processes that produce cognitive performance pertain to a covert level to which the cognitive agent is, in general, not privy. This has been labeled as the “cognitive” unconscious (Kihlstrom 1987), a notion that joins the more famous psychodynamical unconscious (be it Freudian or Jungian) as well as the Chomskian notion of “knowledge of language,” which, in effect, is not known to the speakers who are said to possess it (Chomsky 1972). All told, it can be said that in essence, the psychology of the greater part of the twentieth century is a psychology of the unconscious. This essay comes with a call for a radical paradigm change for the twenty-first century, one shifting the core of psychology to the realm of the conscious.