General Information

Event details

Dates: From April 24 to 26, 2024. Sessions will extend for 110 minutes including Q&A.  You can review the speakers and schedule.

Location: Online, by Zoom. 

Organization: This event is  organized by the Seminar of Cognitive Diversity at UNAM and coordinated by Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado. 

The workshop is free and open to attend upon registration. 

An introductory session for students will be held in Spanish, April 19, 16:00 CST

Context

Within the domain of Ecological Psychology, the concept of affordances –opportunities for action offered by the environment to an individual– emerged as a significant framework, particularly in its application to perception and related cognitive processes. A recent development in Philosophy is the exploration of cognitive affordances, which pertain to cognitive capacities such as memory, attention, inference, and numerosity. This extension has found application across various disciplines including social cognition, anthropology, education, neurodiversity studies, disability studies, and aesthetics. As members of the Seminar of Cognitive Diversity at UNAM, we are excited by the possibilities offered by these applications. 

However, despite its utility, there remains a lack of consensus regarding the conceptualization of affordances within a cognitive context. Consequently, scholarly efforts have been dedicated to either proposing theoretical frameworks for understanding cognitive affordances or raising objections to its validity. Given the considerable theoretical groundwork yet to be laid, a workshop has been organized with the aim of advancing discourse and understanding in this area.

With this in mind, we have invited our speakers, to address the following questions: 

• What is the definition of  “cognitive affordance”? How is it related to other notions in the literature (e.g. perceptual affordances, affordance landscape, metacognitive feelings, mental institutions,)?

• How is the notion of “cognitive affordance” theoretically fruitful? What is the work performed by the notion? How well do the different proposed specifications in the literature capture the relevant phenomena? 

• Is there a core concept of "affordance" shared by ecological theories of perception and cognitive affordances?

• How is the concept of cognitive affordance related (or depends upon) different ways of understanding embodied cognition?

• Does talk about cognitive affordances “trivialize” the notion, as claimed by recent criticism? 

• What is the empirical evidence for cognitive affordances? In what ways can this notion be useful to interpret results and/or design future experimental settings?

We believe that the collaborative efforts spurred by our workshop will catalyze advancements in our understanding of cognitive affordances, leading to fruitful interdisciplinary exchanges and innovative research endeavors. By addressing key questions and fostering dialogue among scholars from diverse fields, we anticipate that this endeavor will not only deepen our comprehension of cognitive processes but also pave the way for practical applications

Suggested reading

• Arango-Muñoz, S., & Bermúdez, J. P. (2018). Remembering as a mental action. In New directions in the philosophy of memory (75-96). Routledge.

• Bruineberg, J., Chemero, A., & Rietveld, E. (2019). General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’cognition. Synthese, 196, 5231-5251.

• Bruineberg, J. P., & Van den Herik, J. C. (2021). Embodying mental affordances. Inquiry, 1-21.

• Gallagher, S., & Crisafi, A. (2009). Mental institutions. Topoi, 28, 45-51.

• Gallagher, S., Martínez, S. F., & Gastélum, M. (2017). Action-space and time: Towards an enactive hermeneutics. Place, space and hermeneutics, 83-96.

• Jones, M. (2018). Seeing numbers as affordances. In Naturalizing Logico-Mathematical Knowledge (148-163). Routledge.

• Jorba, M. (2020). Husserlian horizons, cognitive affordances and motivating reasons for action. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(5), 847-868.

• McClelland, T. (2020). The mental affordance hypothesis. Mind, 129(514), 401-427.

• McClelland, T., & Jones, M. (2024). Mental Action and the Scope of Affordance Perception. In The Modern Legacy of Gibson's Affordances for the Sciences of Organisms (71-82). Routledge. 

• Metzinger, T. (2017). The problem of mental action: predictive control without sensory sheets. In Philosophy and Predictive Processing, eds T. Metzinger and W. Wiese (Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group), 1–26.

• Proust, J. (2023). Affordances from a control viewpoint. Philosophical Psychology, 1-25.

• Segundo-Ortin, M., & Heras-Escribano, M. (2023). The risk of trivializing affordances: mental and cognitive affordances examined. Philosophical Psychology, 1-17.