[ATHENA] « Extending Cognition Through Gestures and Artefacts », Michael Wheeler et David Kirsh, MSHS Sud-Est, 24 mars 2016

["Alexandre Monnin" (aamonnz AT gmail.com via athena Mailing List) <athena AT services.cnrs.fr>]

Bonsoir, 

J'ai le plaisir de vous signaler la tenue de la quatrième séance du cycle « Artefacts numériques et matérialités », le jeudi 24 Mars prochain, de 10h à 17h (Salle plate, MSHS Sud-Est à Nice). 

Cette séance, intitulée « Extending Cognition Through Gestures and Artefacts », réunira Michael Wheeler et David Kirsh. 

Programme : 

- 10h-12h : Michael Wheeler (Stirling University), 

« The Knowledge Ecology: Epistemic Credit and the Technologically Extended Mind » 

- 14h-16h : David Kirsh (University of California, San Diego), 

« Thinking with Our Body and Other Things »

- 16h-17h: Discussion and perspectives 

Ce séminaire est coorganisé par :

Lise Arena (Sciences de Gestion, GREDEG/MSHS), 

Bernard Conein (Sociologie, GREDEG/MSHS) 

Alexandre Monnin (Philosophie, INRIA-I3S, équipe Wimmics) 

Vous trouverez le programme détaillé ci-dessous. 

Au plaisir de vous y croiser, 

Bien cordialement, 

Alexandre Monnin.

 

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Programme détaillé : 

 

- 10h-12h : Michael Wheeler (Stirling University), 

« The Knowledge Ecology: Epistemic Credit and the Technologically Extended Mind » 

 

Résumé : 

Knowledge is often thought of as residing within the heads of individual 

human beings. This ‘internalist’ account of knowledge has been challenged recently 

by some fans of the hypothesis of the extended cognition (ExC). According to ExC, 

the physical machinery of mind is sometimes distributed over brain, body and world. 

In other words, sometimes, your smartphone really is part of your mental machinery, 

along with your brain. Building on ExC, advocates of extended knowledge hold that 

knowing is, sometimes, a technologically extended cognitive state. In the extended 

knowledge literature, it has been argued that, if ExC is true, then one currently 

popular philosophical view about knowledge – namely that knowledge is believing the 

truth because of the correct application of one’s cognitive abilities – is false. More 

specifically, the claim has been made that, in cases of technologically extended 

cognition, someone can have knowledge, even though she does not deserve 

epistemic credit for truly believing as she does. I shall argue that this claim should be 

rejected. The principal interest of my argument, however, will not be in this rejection 

of a particular philosophical claim, which, in itself, is a result of somewhat limited 

consequence, but rather in what that rejection tells us about what knowledge is, and 

about who has it, in an increasingly wired, wireless, and 

technologically enhanced world. 

Biographie : 

Michael Wheeler is Prof. of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. Prior to joining the Stirling Department in 2004, he held teaching and research posts at the Universities of 

Dundee, Oxford, and Stirling (a previous appointment). His doctoral work was carried out at the University of Sussex. His primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence and artificial life) and philosophy of mind. He also works on Heidegger. His book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step, was published by MIT Press in 2005. His current research is focussed on: (1) the nature and plausibility of the extended mind hypothesis; and (2) the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism, especially in the context of cognitive science. 

 

- 14h-16h : David Kirsh (University of California, San Diego), 

« Thinking with Our Body and Other Things »

Résumé : 

Where does thought, creativity and understanding come from? For the 

past six years I have been studying the creative practice of a super expert 

choreographer. I have also been studying problem solving, design thinking and new approaches to situated cognition. A common element running through these studies 

is that in natural contexts people use resources of all sorts to think with. They use 

their bodies, their gestures, instruments, tools, representations and everyday 

objects. The simple thesis I advance is that people often think their ideas through by 

modeling them. The models they create are partial and personal. Sometimes these 

models are encoded in recognized forms: words, drawings, writing. But often people 

use their body to create a partial model of the thing they are trying to understand. 

For instance, when thinking through the structure of a movement, dancers will usually 

'mark' the movement rather than dance it full out. Marking is a movement reduction 

system like gesturing. This external modeling is itself a form of thinking because it is 

directed, interactive and representational. It should be regarded as much a part of 

thought as other expressive modalities, such as speaking, writing or drawing, all 

usually recognized as enactions or encodings of thought. 

To defend this view I describe how thought often relies on active perception 

enhanced by mental projection. Because interacting with things, including moving our 

bodies, can improve projection it forms part of an interactive strategy for thinking. 

This explains how we can harness the analog computation performed by moving 

objects to share the computational effort of thought, and so keep thought moving 

forward. 

Biographie : 

Dr. David Kirsh, Professor/past chair of the Dept. of Cognitive Science/UCSD, received a D. Phil.(Oxford), did post-doctoral work at MIT (AI Lab), held research positions at 

MIT and Stanford, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He has written on situated and embodied cognition, 

how environments can be shaped to simplify/extend cognition, and how space, 

external representations, our bodies and even manipulable objects become 

interactive tools for thought. He is co-Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for 

Human Imagination and on the Board of Directors for the Academy of Neuroscience 

for Architecture. 

 

- 16h-17h, Discussions et perspectives