THINKING WITH SHAUN GALLAGHER
Workshop on Philosophy of Embodiment, Self and Agency
March 1 - 2, 2012
Entrance to the workshop is free but to register please send email to robertc@sussex.ac.uk
Location: Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (New University of Lisbon), I&D Building - Room M3, 4th Floor
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Day 1
Thursday, March 1st
Morning Session
Public Session 10.30 - 12.30
Short intro by Rob Clowes on Gallagher's work
11.00 to 12.30: Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended mindreading
Shaun Gallagher
In this presentation I'll review some ongoing interdisciplinary debates in social cognition, offer some critiques of the standard and dominant Theory of Mind approaches, and outline an alternative theory framed in terms of recent work on embodied and enactive cognition. The alternative account explains the earliest forms of interaction in infancy and offers a narrative (rather than a folk psychology or simulationist) model of mature social understanding.
Afternoon Session (Chair Dina Mendonça)
14.00 - 14-15: An Introduction to the Cognitive Foundations of the Self Project
Jorge Gonçalves
14:15 - 14:30 - Coffee break
14.30 - 15.30: Some Conjectures on the Evolutionary Origins of Body-Schema and Body-Image
João Fonseca
In a previous work I explored how Shaun Gallagher’s and Bjorn Merker’s proposals for the neural implementation of Core-Self related to each other. My own suggestion was to consider the two proposals (Gallagher’s cortical and Merker sub-cortical one) not as competing with each other but by providing a cortical-sub-cortical unified account of Core-Self. Assuming this background as a working hypothesis my aim in this talk is to show that the technical distinction between Body-Schema and Body-Image proposed by Gallagher gains support from Merker’s more evolutionary considerations regarding the genesis of embodied consciousness and cognition.
15.30 - 16.30: "Sentient Gestures"? Notes on effortless attentional self
Alexander Gerner (CFCUL; member of the Cognitive Foundations of Self project research team)
What can body movements and gestures tell us about the self? Can a gesture be sentient on its own? How far does the movement approach of the embodied self, embodied thinking and mind reach? Up to sentient gestures independent of a "central" organizer of "will" or "control" of the "self"?
I will make notes on these issues from the perspective of an embodied self and the primacy of movement with the help of the phenomenon of attention and in critical relation to pre-motor theory of attention. Hereby I want to outline some consequences that Gallagher´s approach in distinguishing the pre-personal attentional body schema –"(...)a system of motor and postural functions that operate below the level of self-referential intentionality"(Gallagher & Coles 1998, 372)- and the personal reflective and intentional body image – “(...)a complex set of intentional states- perceptions, mental representations, beliefs, and attitudes– in which the intentional object of such states is one’s own body”(ibid.) - has for an adequate embodied account of aisthetic attention.
Finally, I will make the case of an effortless attentional self in non-orthodox self-experience in "flow experience" or "effordless attention" (Bruya 2011), and by that try to understand unwillfull grasping "on its own" (sentient gestures) as well as unorthodox self-experiences when the center of attentional control is localized elsewhere but not in the "material body" as for example in heautoscopic attention in "Out-of Body-experiences" (OBE), "autoscopic hallucinations" or "illusionary own body perceptions"(Blanke/Metzinger 2008).
16.30 - 18.00 An Interview with Shaun Gallagher (chaired by Rob Clowes)
Questions prepared and circulated in advance.
Dinner
Day 2
Friday, March 2nd
Morning Session (Chair Daniel Ramalho)
10.00 - 10.30 - Coffee
10.30 to 12.00: Misidentifying the self in experimental and pathological situations
Shaun Gallagher
In this presentation I'll review a number of pathological and experimental situations in which either the sense of agency or the sense of ownership is disrupted. I'll defend the view that immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is nonetheless sustained in all of these cases to the extent that the first-person perspective is sustained. I'll discuss at least one case, however, in which the first-person perspective in experience seems to be problematic and IEM seems to be clearly challenged.
12.00 - 13.00: Time and Gallagher's explanation of Schizophrenia
Rob Clowes
This talk will discuss possible explanations of some of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. In particular I will look at Gallagher´s response to the motor model of thinking as influentially articulated by Frith (1992) and then augmented by Campbell (1999). I´ll then look at Gallagher´s criticisms of this model and his alternative which focuses on prenoetic construction of thinking and a failure in protension. Referring mainly to Chapter 8 of How the Body Shapes the Mind: Complex Structures and Common Dynamics of Self Awareness (and Chapter 6 Prenoetic Constraints on Perception and Action, I will look at the whether an account of symptoms such as inserted thought and alien voices are better explained by Gallagher´s account. The talk will seek to identify where the main explanatory burden lies.
Frith, C. D. (1992). The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Campbell, J. (1999). Schizophrenia, the space of reasons, and thinking as a motor process. The Monist, 82(4), 609–625.
Gallagher, S. (2004). Neurocognitive Models of Schizophrenia: A Neurophenomenological Critique. Psychopathology, 37(1), 8-19.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind: Clarendon Press. (Chapters 6 & 8)
Lunch
Afternoon Session (Chair Klaus Gärtner)
14.15 - 15.15: Is the sense of self innate?
Jorge Gonçalves
Is the sense of self innate? Currently several authors give a positive answer to this question. Shaun Gallagher, one of them, argues that the senses of self and others are embodied and present from birth. According to him there is a minimal sense of the self, a body schema, and a proprioceptive awareness already present in the nervous system of a newborn. On this account the child did not depend on cognitive learning or language to acquire at least the basic feeling that he is a self distinguished from others and from environment. Empirical evidence supporting this theory include the experiments of child imitation. If a few hour old baby can imitate the movements of an adult then there is a differentiation between self and other. However other experiments were performed which challenge there is true imitation in early stages of life. There are alternative explanations for the apparent imitation in babies. Reflecting on both kinds of evidence I argue that there is no innate feeling of self. What I think is innate is the ability to relate to other human beings but this does not mean there is a sense of self. This sense of self only develops in the interaction between the child and the others that mirror her actions. In this sense you can say that the self is a potentially in the body such as speech is in the tongue.
Some References
Gallagher, S. (2006) How the Body Shapes the Mind Oxford University Press, USA
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The child’s relations with others.
Welsh, T. (2006). Do Neonates Display Innate Self-Awareness? Why Neonatal Imitation Fails to Provide Sufficient Grounds for Innate Self-and Other-Awareness. Philosophical Psychology 19 (2):221-238
15.15 - 15.30 - Coffee break
15.30 - 16.30: Surprise and Self-awareness
Dina Mendonça
The paper is an exploratory reflection on the role of surprise on self-awareness, following Gallagher’s insights on the distinction between body-schema and body-image and the importance of time in experience.
16.30 - 17.30: Closing Discussion on Prospects for Understanding the Self (Chair Rob Clowes)
Download workshop poster here
