It has been demonstrated that death certificates do not accurately record the actual cause of death in up to one-fourth of cases, as determined from subsequent autopsy findings. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of natural language autopsy data bases as an automated quality assurance mechanism. We translated the account of the major process leading to death, or the primary diagnosis, from all 45,564 narrative autopsy reports obtained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital between May 28, 1889, (...) and June 30, 1987, into the hierarchical system of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) titles. We obtained a total of 125,772 MeSH title translations, 1,563 of them distinct (average 2.8 per case), ranging in frequency from 6,029 occurrences of LUNG to 1 occurrence apiece of 357 MeSH titles. The natural-language-to-MeSH translations showed expected trends over the past century: fewer infectious diseases; more cardiovascular and neoplastic disease among adults; and more respiratory diseases and congenital malformations in the pediatric age group. The greater availability of autopsy documents in electronic form should increase the value of this resource for quality assurance. (shrink)

While positive information in the context of clinical care can lead to placebo effects, negatively framed information can have negative or nocebo effects. Extant literature documents how doctor–patient encounters are fertile ground for suboptimal interactions leading to negative experiences for ethnoracial minority patients. In their _JME_ paper, Blease presents a critical perspective on the potential for patients’ access to their doctors’ clinical notes, ‘open notes’, to engender nocebo effects. 1 In this commentary, we affirm the central claim that nocebo effects (...) could emerge ‘via negative wording or framing of health information expressed by clinicians in documentation’. The advent of electronic health records (EHR) allowed patients the unprecedented opportunity to access personal clinical documentation, giving them a window into decision making around their health. This shift is undoubtedly complex, and thus warrants a more fulsome rendering of the unique challenges faced by ethnoracial minority patients. Herein, we highlight three... (shrink)

In the past, hypothesis testing in medicine has employed the paradigm of the repeatable experiment. In statistical hypothesis testing, an unbiased sample is drawn from a larger source population, and a calculated statistic is compared to a preassigned critical region, on the assumption that the comparison could be repeated an indefinite number of times. However, repeated experiments often cannot be performed on human beings, due to ethical or economic constraints. We describe a new paradigm for hypothesis testing which uses only (...) rearrangements of data present within the observed data set. The token swap test, based on this new paradigm, is applied to three data sets from cardiovascular pathology, and computational experiments suggest that the token swap test satisfies the Neyman Pearson condition. (shrink)

Portals: Windows, doors, black holes, white holes and worm holes serve as nodes for transport between different systems of organization in the works and writings of Marcel Duchamp, and in Thomas Pynchon's novels _Gravity's Rainbow_ and _Vineland_. These portals enable pivoting between different forms of cognition, in the realm of the social and political with respect to subject positions with reference to chess, and in the realm of the individual with respect to subject formation and human creativity. Drawing on the (...) philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and on the cognitive science of Francisco Varela and Edwin Hutchins, a connection is made between an avant-garde modernist, and a post-modern novelist, in their attention to a war between top-down (control) and bottom-up (emergent) processes in society and self. This investigation becomes a way to rethink the terms modernism and postmodernism. (shrink)

THE fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is another of the projects undertaken by philosophers Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Hutchins chaired the Board of Editors, while Adler served as director of planning. This latest edition has the distinction of being the largest single private publishing venture in history, involving a thirty-two million dollar investment, over fifteen years of effort, and many thousands of consultants and contributors. This essay will attempt to assess philosophy’s share in so massive (...) an undertaking. (shrink)

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_ (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it (...) lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

The author explores to the conditions for implementation of science as a public good and connects these conditions with the problem of epistemic injustice. She proposes the hypothesis that in order to implement science as a public good or actualize it as a source of diversity, it is necessary to focus theoretical attention on the concept of distributed scientific cognition and allow for the possibility of relevant practices. The rules of distributed scientific cognition practices can and should ensure both the (...) epistemic constructiveness of science and its epistemic justice, legitimizing the openness of access to scientific cognition distributed outside the scientific community. The text reveals the main characteristics of the concept of distributed cognition, introduced by E. Hutchins. The author proposes additionally take into account two meanings of distributed scientific cognition – extensive and intensive. The first refers to the possibility of unlimited addition of participants in cognition with a reasonable relevance of their positions. The second opens up the perspective of working on a distribution that has not yet happened and suggests that any epistemic position can be distributed. She also demonstrates the applicability of the concept to relevant scientific practices related to both professional scientific communication and public communication of science. (shrink)

The paper is a comment on distributed cognition treated as an approach to the study of all cognition. This account is presented by E. Hutchins in the article “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition”, as well as in other works.

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_ (MIT Press, 1991), breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it (...) lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

Studies on human–artifact interaction stimulate reflection on the bounds of cognition, agency, and even morality (e.g. Floridi and Sanders, 2004). Richard Heersmink (2017) compares distributed cognition (DCog) and distributed morality theory and claims that some artifacts, depending on their use, have cognitive and moral status but lack cognitive and moral agency. According to him, an extended cognitive system (ECS) has agency when artifact(s) included in the system are fully transparent and densely integrated into the cognitive processes of the user, whereas (...) a distributed cognitive system (DCS) without central control lacks agency. My doubts do not concern Heersmink's main claim. Irrespective of the final assessment of the moral status of distributed systems, I argue that the assumption that the assessment of the degree to which humans and artifacts are cognitively integrated is not always feasible and distorts our understanding of DCog.EXTENSION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE COGNITIVEHeersmink (2017) sums up the well-known concepts of “wide” cognition: cognitive states and processes may go beyond individual minds to involve people and artifacts; human agents and artifacts form integrated systems performing information-processing tasks. Cognitive activity sometimes extends beyond the brain to non-neuronal parts of the body and elements of the environment. Two famous examples are: a navigation team on board of a surface vessel at sea (Hutchins 1995), and a man with Alzheimer’s disease who supports his biological memory by means of a notebook (Clark and Chalmers 1998). As Heersmink writes: “Clark’s extended cognition theory focuses on single agents interacting with artifacts, whereas Hutchins DCog theory typically (though not exclusively) focuses on larger systems with more than one agent interacting with artifacts. In such wider cognitive systems, there are thus one or more individuals interacting and coupling with cognitive artifacts” (2017).Heersmink recognizes the significant difference between the two concepts, relying on Hutchins’s comments (2014): extended cognition is just a special case of DCog opening up a much broader view of the different types of cognition. Among them, „[s]ome systems have a clear center while other systems have multiple centers or no center at all’’ (Hutchins, 2014, p. 37).So far, Heersmink’s summary is not controversial. What is problematic is his view that it “is better to conceive of system membership in terms of the degree of cognitive integration of humans and artifacts” (2017). This integration depends on different dimensions including the kind and intensity of information flow between human and non-human components, accessibility of the scaffold, durability of the coupling, amount of user trust, degree of transparency-in-use, ease of interpretation of the information and the amount of personalization or cognitive transformation (2017; 2015). Hence, cognitive artifacts can be integrated more or less deeply.COGNITIVE SYSTEM AS A MECHANISMLet's go back to the way Hutchins defines DCSs. For him, distribution means interaction (2006, p. 376–377). When we take the DCog perspective, we do not “make any claim about the nature of the world. Rather, it is to choose a way of looking at the world, one that selects scales of investigation such that wholes are seen as emergent from interactions among their parts” (Hutchins, 2014, p. 36). DCog is not a kind of cognition, but a perspective on all of cognition. “[T]he notions of centralized and distributed are always relative to some scale of investigation. (...) The boundaries of the unit of analysis for DCog are not fixed in advance; they depend on the scale of the system under investigation, which can vary (…)” (Hutchins, 2014, p. 36).DCS—to which ECSs belong—doesn’t constitute any more or less integrated agent “casing”. Hutchins shows that DCSs may have different scales (the brain is one example), and the large systems he studied offer something like Gulliver's perspective in the land of giants: an opportunity for direct observation of cognitive processes in the macroscale occurring in an environment (1995, p. 128–129).Therefore, the assumption that it is always possible to grade the cognitive integration between an agent and artifact may fail in the case of some complex DCSs. Artifacts are not “attached” to the “genuinely” cognitive part of the system but are its equally important components. It is only the system as such that can have agency potential or can be the center for something else.DCS should be viewed as a mechanism (e.g. Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 2005; Ylikoski, 2015). A mechanism is a structure that performs a function by means of its organized component parts and operations. It is responsible for one or more phenomena. Mechanisms can occur in nested hierarchies and can work cyclically, but they can also be responsible for one-off events only. Mechanisms can also be computational (Miłkowski, 2013; Piccinini, 2015). Thus, in the DCS it is the interaction of active components and time coordination that is important for its mechanism(s), whilst the components themselves can be physically separated and coordinated only temporarily. At the same time, mechanisms may be more or less durable, and more or less tightly organized. In other words, Heersmink’s claims can be better stated in the mechanistic framework without distorting the original idea of DCog.CONCLUDING REMARKSFor Heersmink, an ECS has agency when an artifact is fully transparent and densely integrated into the cognitive processes of its user; for this reason (according to Heersmink’s criterion for being an agent and having agency), a distributed system without central control lacks agency because it is not a system whose intentions are being realized. My doubts do not concern Heersmink's main claim, but a minor one, although important for understanding DCog. In complex cases, it is meaningless to ask about the degree of cognitive integration of humans and artifacts in DCSs. Demanding such an integration brings to mind the anthropomorphic fallacy. The ECS in which a person can fully control the operation of her/his artificial extensions is only a special simple case of DCog. Wider cognitive systems are not added to “genuine” cognitive systems, but they themselves are “genuine” systems: their components interact in a coordinated manner, as in the case of any mechanism. (shrink)

The paper adopts an inter-theoretical socio-cultural and -material perspective on the relationship between human + machine learning to propose a new way to investigate the human + machine assistive assemblages emerging in professional work (e.g. medicine, architecture, design and engineering). Its starting point is Hutchins’s (1995a) concept of ‘distributed cognition’ and his argument that his concept of ‘cultural ecosystems’ constitutes a unit of analysis to investigate collective human + machine working and learning (Hutchins, Philos Psychol 27:39–49, 2013). It (...) argues that: (i) the former offers a way to reveal the cultural constitution of and enactment of human + machine cognition and, in the process, the limitations of the computational and connectionist assumptions about learning that underpin, respectively, good old-fashioned AI and deep learning; and (2) the latter offers a way to identify, when amplified with insights from Socio-Materialism and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, how ML is further rearranging and reorganising the distributed basis of cognition in assistive assemblages. The paper concludes by outlining a set of conjectures researchers that could use to guide their investigations into the ongoing design and deployment of HL + ML assemblages and challenges associated with the interaction between HL + ML. (shrink)

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units (...) of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science. (shrink)

Everybody knows that humans are cultural animals. Although this fact is universally acknowledged, many opportunities to exploit it are overlooked. In this article, I propose shifting our attention from local examples of extended mind to the cultural-cognitive ecosystems within which human cognition is embedded. I conclude by offering a set of conjectures about the features of cultural-cognitive ecosystems.

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more (...) pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that takes a distributed, socio‐technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. (shrink)

Confirming his moniker as “America’s philosopher of democracy,” John Dewey engaged in a series of public debates over the course of his lifetime, vividly demonstrating how his thought translates into action. These debates made Dewey a household name and a renowned public intellectual during the early to mid-twentieth century, a time when the United States fought two World Wars, struggled through an economic depression, experienced explosive economic growth and spawned a grassroots movement that characterized an entire era: Progressivism. Unfortunately, much (...) recent Dewey scholarship neglects to situate Dewey’s ideas in the broader context of his activities and engagements as a public intellectual. This project charts a path through two of Dewey’s actual debates with his contemporaries, Leon Trotsky and Robert Hutchins, to two reconstructed debates with contemporary intellectuals, E.D. Hirsch and Robert Talisse, both of whom criticized Dewey’s ideas long after the American philosopher’s death and, finally, to two recent debates, one on home schooling and the other on U.S. foreign policy, in which Dewey’s ideas offer a unique and compelling vision of a way forward. (shrink)

Explains the changing of seasons and describes how plants and animals adapt to and prepare for these changes.

I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’ proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular–mechanical explanations in Descartes’ physics, which have been taken to be representative of his treatment of all natural phenomena. However, Descartes’ explanations of the (...) ‘principal parts’ of physiology do not follow the corpuscular–mechanical pattern. Des Chene has identified systems in Descartes’ account of physiology, but takes them ultimately to reduce down to the corpuscle level. I argue that they do not. Rather, Descartes maintains entire systems, with components selected from multiple levels of organization, in order to construct more complete explanations than corpuscular mechanics alone would allow. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes is not a reductionist about life, but dissolves or eliminates the category entirely. This is surprising both because he repeatedly refers to the life of humans, animals, and plants and because he appears to rely on the category of life to construct his physiology and medicine. Various attempts have been made in the scholarship to attribute a principled concept of life to Descartes. Most recently, Detlefsen has argued that Descartes “is a reductionist with respect to explanation (...) of life phenomena but not an eliminativist with respect to life itself”. I show that all these attempts either result in arbitrariness or force Descartes's wider philosophical project into incoherence. I argue that Descartes's ontological commitments make a principled concept of life impossible, that he does not need such a concept, and that his project ends up more coherent without one. (shrink)

Two decades of attempts to model the emergence of language as a collective cognitive activity have demonstrated a number of principles that might have been part of the historical process that led to language. Several models have demonstrated the emergence of structure in a symbolic medium, but none has demonstrated the emergence of the capacity for symbolic representation. The current shift in cognitive science toward theoretical frameworks based on embodiment is already furnishing computational models with additional mechanisms relevant to the (...) emergence of symbolic language. An analysis of embodied interaction among captive, but not human‐enculturated, bonobo chimpanzees reveals a number of additional features of embodiment that are relevant to the emergence of symbolic language, but that have not yet been explored in computational simulation models; for example, complementarity of action in addition to imitation, iconic in addition to indexical gesture, coordination among multiple sensory and perceptual modalities, and the orchestration of intra‐ and inter‐individual motor coordination. The bonobos provide an evolutionarily plausible intermediate stage in the development of symbolic expression that can inform efforts to model the emergence of symbolic language. (shrink)

An introduction to the Great Books of the Western World series.

In this chapter, I argue for an activity-grounded conception of lifeform in Spinoza’s system. On this conception, lifeforms are constituted through agreement in activity—it’s not that human activities agree because they are grounded in a human morphology; rather, it’s that certain activities are human just insofar as they all agree. The activities at stake are multiply realizable through the morphological level, allowing for a notion of lifeform that’s compatible with Spinoza’s gradualism about morphology. Agreement in activity provides Spinoza with a (...) concrete (if, admittedly, underexplained) ground for lifeform, and avoids the issues that come from looking to morphology to do the job. I argue that an activity-grounded reading tracks Spinoza’s use of lifeform-related concepts, and that it results in a treatment of lifeforms as dynamic, mutable, and non-essentialist. (shrink)

Our goal is to analyze the distinction between factual statements and opinions from a philosophical—specifically an epistemological—perspective. Section 1 reviews the most common criteria for drawing the distinction, which while inadequate, as explained in Section 2, still plays an important cultural and political role. In Section 3, we argue that the difference between factual statements and opinions does not involve a single criterion. Instead, the conceptual structure of the terms ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ is analogous to that of natural kinds—terms with (...) multiple dimensions. We expect that improved theory will lead to improvements in pedagogy, decision-making, and public discourse. But these consequences are not our chief focus. (shrink)

At various points in his work on physiology and medicine, Descartes refers to a “principle of life.” The exact term changes—sometimes, it is the “principle of movement and life”, sometimes the “principle underlying all [the] functions” of the body —but the message seems consistent: the phenomena of living bodies are the product of a single, underlying principle. That principle is generally taken to be cardiac heat.1 The literature has, quite reasonably, taken this message at face value. Thus, Shapiro: “Descartes insists (...) again and again that the human body is properly to be described as a machine whose workings are […] driven by the heat in the heart that... (shrink)

The literature treats Descartes’s position on life as either reductionist or eliminativist. Here, I argue instead that Descartes treats life as an irreducible notion. This makes sense of some otherwise incongruous claims: Descartes makes explicit, if weak, metaphysical commitments to the existence both of a category of ‘life’ and of living creatures. He appears to recognize life, but has no way to account for it reductively. This is a problem for him, as long as we take his epistemology to be (...) purely reductionist. However, his treatment of the union of mind and body suggests that he can allow nonreductionist knowledge. If we do take him to have nonreductionist knowledge of life, we can consider him to be a (very weak) kind of vitalist with respect to life itself, while still being an eliminativist about life when it comes to accounting for the operations of living bodies. (shrink)

Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...) Descartes depends on nonreductionist knowledge and on irreducibles in order to maintain his epistemology and metaphysics. That is, there is more in the Cartesian world than mind, matter, and God. (shrink)

Starting from experience of working with Japanese Quality Gurus, and decades of industrial consultancy, this article addresses the fundamental principles of the Quality Movement and suggests ways forward for Quality as empowerment, led from education. Quality Circles, empowering workers, and Students’ Quality Circles, empowering students, provide a starting point for educational, economic and social innovation.

Rationality has long been held to be the hallmark of what it means to be human. Consequently, the act of deductive inference—a central element of human reasoning—may be assumed to be natural. Not surprisingly, the study of formal logic has traditionally been regarded as essential for the philosophy major and recommended for many others. Yet both empirical study and pedagogical experience suggest that we deduce, on the whole, rather poorly. In fact, reasoning within formal systems seems to pose insurmountable difficulties (...) for some students. In this article, I suggest that both classroom experience and psychological research point to the possibility of a logic-related learning disability which I refer to as inference blindness. I further suggest that the dual-mechanism theory proposed by Vinod Goel offers the best way of understanding deductive reasoning and that the application of this theory suggests a preliminary hypothesis regarding inference blindness. (shrink)